On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>wrote:
You can play with ideas all you want. The information in the subject > article from Defkalion is primitive, it's hard to tell what it means. Not > just in terms of implication, but in terms of what they actually did to > collect it. Read the article and see how ambiguous it all is. Now, of > course, maybe I missed something. That happens. > I agree -- the Defkalion article is really a set of notes and shouldn't be considered a confirmation. I'm thinking of the ten or so experiments summarized in section 4.5 of Ed Storms's book in which transmutations were seen in a nickel substrate under hydrogen. This seems like enough evidence to adopt as a working assumption that Ni/H is bona fide LENR; this might be correct or it might not, but one cannot avoid making assumptions, and that seems like sufficient evidence for adopting the assumption that Ni/H is LENR until there is further evidence to call such an assumption into doubt. If the confirmation one seeks is correlation with heat, I agree, this is important, and I have not seen it a report of it yet, aside from anecdotal evidence. But that level of evidence isn't needed for exploration. Storms is talking about low levels of transmutation, not about major levels. I think I've heard him say this as well. But I also understand that the characterization of transmutations has not been carefully pursued until more recently, so it would be premature to conclude that the levels are known to be low. > "The ash" does not cover all possible products of rare branches or > secondary reactions, it refers to the main reaction. We agree on this point. > The helium seen in Pd/D systems seems compatible with catalyzed D or p >> capture, if there is some kind of subsequent alpha decay occurring within >> a palladium substrate; it is possible that this is not energetically >> favorable in Ni/H systems, though, in which case you would not expect to >> see 4He as an ash in Ni/H.  It is common in the experiments to see reports >> of fast protons and alpha particles in the palladium experiments. >> > > Actually, it isn't common. There are reports of CR-39 tracks, but the work > is problematic, confirmation rare. SPAWAR's non-neutron results are > difficult to distinguish from chemical damage. I personally think they > might be produced by massive low-energy alphas, under 20 KeV, but that's > not a strong belief at all. Referring to the main reaction, there isn't > anything above 20 KeV, the "Hagelstein limit." > I looked further into the question of alpha decay in palladium, and it does not appear to be energetically favorable -- that was just speculation on my part and not intended to be a summary of any experimental evidence. I've seen a lot of reports of hot alphas and protons; i.e., the CR-39 tracks -- are this the results you were questioning, or am I misreading the paragraph above? I believe there are studies from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre using this approach as well showing similar results, although it's been a little while since I've reviewed them, so I might be mistaken. It is this kind of evidence, in which there are 11MeV alpha particles and 2MeV protons, that leads me to question the proposed 20KeV limit; that seems to me to be simply being selective about the experimental record. I appreciate that the CR-39 experiments may be problematic, and I know almost nothing about how they are carried out or what goes into them. But they will continue to cast doubt in my mind about the proposed limit until they are completely discredited. It's fine to adopt such a limit as a working hypothesis, however. :) > I would compare what's in the "before and after" Defkalion charts, but > basic details are missing: > I didn't have the Defkalion charts in mind, although I think they're interesting. > Only very primitive science is done with anecdotal evidence. > Unfortunately, a lot of cold fusion work has been like this. "We did X and > Y, and we saw this amazing result, Z." > I hope I haven't been understood to suggest that this is the main thrust of science. > While it's interesting, and the kind of stuff that people share at > conferences or informally, it's far more interesting, scientifically, if we > have "We did X and Y, 50 times, and this is the range of results we saw. We > altered Y to Z, and this is the range of results we saw." And then when > someone else independently confirms this, we have real science. If someone > tries to confirm it and fails, we have not necessarily lost anything, > because confirmations can fail for lots of reasons; what we then have is > more work to do.... Agreed. These are the results that form the basis of journal articles. But there is a large amount of exploratory work that must precede the level of rigor that goes into the articles, and this exploratory work is just as much the business of science as the subsequent activity of drawing measured conclusions that takes place towards the end of an investigation. Eric
