At 12:26 PM 9/15/2012, Jones Beene wrote:
Terry,
The caveat of this is that it is mundane: all electrical discharges produce
transmutation over time. That is the nature of QM tunneling.
You can take any old triode from an old TV set - and apply the same type of
XRF testing to the plates, and find boron plus a Cornucopia of transmuted
elements. Dozens! And in every single tube! Roy Hammack and others have done
this. It is mundane.
There is another example of the Gee Whiz, This Proves It, way of
thinking. There are claims of radiation from light water
electrolysis, see the work of Oriani and the attempted confirmation
by Kowalski et al.
So you stick some radiation detectors in a cell and you see some
tracks on them.
However, how often do we take plastic accumulating radiation
detectors and hang them somewhere and develop them and see the range
of what we get?
To really confirm that an anomaly is taking place that is due to
elecrolysis, one needs to run matched controls. For starters, we'd
expect to see a correlation between electrolytic current (for
constant-current experiments) and the radiation. Yet Oriani
apparently saw no such correlation. Maybe there was an effect from
electrolysis and maybe not. Kowalski reported replication failure,
but he did see some unusual tracks. Maybe this was something and maybe not.
This is why we really want to see correlated effects. All kinds of
correlations can be tested, some demonstrate something about the
nature of the effect, itself (such as heat/helium with PdD), some
provide clues as to mechanism or necessary conditions (perhaps, with
Pd/D, H/D ratio, current density, loading factor -- D/Pd ratio --,
cathode prep and history, and, given Storms' theory, how about
cathode deformation, bending stress?)
Oriani reported the effect as replicable, supposedly, because he saw
*something unusual* with every cell. However, cell protocol was all
over the map. Kowalski basically picked one protocol and several
people ran it. So Kowalski only tested one of Oriani's protocols.
Entirely possible, then, that all the others worked and Kowalski
happened to pick one that was punk.
I must say, to me, it's more likely that the whole thing was
artifact. Oriani's work did *not* show what was claimed, a
reproducible experiment, because Oriani did not show a series of
*reproduced* experiments.
Oriani was doing investigational work, which is great, and
commendable. The only problem was when reproducibility was claimed,
without a showing of it.
And, by the way, Kowalski is also to be commended, for attempting
replication. That's too rare in this field, where so many have been
scrambling to be the first to find the magic protocol.
