At 12:39 AM 9/17/2012, Eric Walker wrote:
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Abd ul-Rahman
Lomax <<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â But that level of evidence isn't needed for exploration.
There is easily enough evidence for NiH LENR to justify exploration.
However, there is a skeptical position that
deserves recognition. A lot of people, after
1989, started looking for LENR in various places.
There is probably as much work done and not
published as there has been published. People
tend to publish what they consider interesting.
In transmutation work, there are ready and knotty
contamination problems. EarthTech attempted to
replicate some of Miley's work, as I recall, and
was able to track down some unexpected
contamination sources. A certain level of report,
then, may not mean as much as we might think.
Rather, a report is a report, and deserves
respect. The general assumption in science is
that reports are to be trusted as reflections of
what the observer found. That does not mean that
we assume the observer's interpretations were correct. Data <> intepretation.
So when some unusual report is of interest, what
we hope for is replication or other confirmation.
A general "something unusual" report can be quite
misleading. This is what undisciplined
investigation of a field will commonly produce.
Rather, for different researchers to find the
same transmutations would be of interest, and if
this is correlated with other experimental
conditions, across variations, it would be major
confirmation. I don't think we have seen that
with NiH. We have with PdD, which is why I
consider PdD heat -- and even "fusion" -- to be established science.
Established science can be overturned. All
someone would have to do is disconfirm
heat/helium, to throw it into doubt, and this
were done with conclusive identification of the
responsible artifact(s), "fusion" would be dead as an explanation for the FPHE.
We'd then have an enormous mystery again: what's
the source of the heat? Because it's highly
unlikely that all that calorimetry is wrong. The
reaction is unreliable, but it does correlate
with H/D ratio and with current density and other
variables, even if we could somehow shoot down
the helium results. Unlikely, I'd say.
Storms is talking about low levels of transmutation, not about major levels.
I think I've heard him say this as well. Â 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 levels are known to be low. Remember, I'm
talking about PdD. I'm not sure about the levels
for NiH, but if there were high levels, I'd think
we'd have been hearing a lot more about it.
Â
"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.
Great.
The helium seen in Pd/D systems seemsÃ
compatibleà with catalyzed D or p capture, if
there is some kind of subsequent alpha decayÃ
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. Ã 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. Â 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? Â
First of all, the identification of tracks in
CR-39 can be difficult. The Galileo project
attempted to confirm SPAWAR CR-39 results, the
"front side" results that were published for some
years. The project did not produce clear
confirmation. One of the problems with CR-39 is
also its strength: it is an accumulating
detector. So failry low levels of radiation can
still produce significant tracks. SPAWAR accumulates tracks for weeks.
However, if you look at SPAWAR papers, you will
see something that has been called "hamburger."
One possible explanation for hamburger is massive
tracks; the material is heavily damaged. However,
if this were massive CP radiation with high
energy, we'd expect to see fuzzy edges, whereas
the hamburger generally has a fairly crisp edge.
Rather, Earthtech, in their own Galileo effort,
called the hamburger "SPAWAR tracks" -- which may
have been unfair -- and associated it with
chemical damage, and they found that the CR-39
detectors were actually thinned in the areas of exposure.
This was a "wet" experiment. The CR-39 was wet,
in close contact with the cathode. So it could
indeed be exposed to some kind of chemical
attack, from reactive species close to the
cathode. However, there may be another
explanation: massive low-energy alphas. These
would have very short range, and hence the
"crisp" edge. Work remains to be done to
investigate this. It's some of the low-lying fruit....
I found a different SPAWAR result to be more
convincing. The back-side tracks. They did not
reveal this until the Galileo protocol was set,
but it looks like Pam did try to set it up so
that some would use a gold wire cathode
(substrate for deposition of Pd). She couldn't
reveal this or give that instruction because of
military secrecy. The back side tracks could only
be caused by neutrons, basically. And a gold
cathode, from their work, produces a lot more
neutrons. The back sides show copious tracks,
probably from protons produced by neutron
collisions with H in the plastic. And it shows a
few triple-tracks, from neutron-induced fission of C into triple alphas.
But this tells us very little about the primary
reaction, and this work is single-result, which
is undesirable. That is, we either see tracks or
no tracks. We don't have *any* other sign of the
reaction. And, in fact, the way the experiment is
designed, we only get a single result. We have no
idea when during the experiment any tracks were
produced. From control detectors, we do have a
way of distinguishing experimental results from background.
Still, there is a certain appeal to finding a few neutrons....
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.
That limit applies to substantial radiation, not
to lower levels that might be found. I think it
also applies to prompt radiation, not to possible
radioactive isotopes. Tritium, by the way, is
known to be produced, and it's unfortunate that
correlations with heat or helium have not been
reported. They were almost certainly there, unless the tritium is artifact.
 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. Â But they will continue to cast doubt in
my mind about the proposed limit until they are
completely discredited. Â It's fine to adopt
such a limit as a working hypothesis, however. Â :)
You need to understand that the limit is not
absolute. Hagelstein is not saying that the
radiation doesn't exist, but that it's not
significant, compared to whatever is happening
with the main reaction. CR-39 is an accumultating
detector and can show stuff that you'd never see
with an electronic detector. The SPAWAR neutrons
may represent a neutron per minute being emitted,
or maybe a few. Very difficult to distinguish
this from background. You can do it with CR-39
close to the source. (Or LR-115, I'm hoping, it's what we used.)
 Â
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.
Â
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.
Please don't take anything I say personally.
Z is a reasonable basis for investigation. It may
trigger some speculation. The real process of
science is in confirming or disconfirming prior
results, and the predictions of theory. People
sometimes mistake theory for 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. Â These are the results that form the
basis of journal articles. Â 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.
Exploratory work is indeed part of the business
of science, it's a very important part. However,
it doesn't generate "scientific knowledge" all by
itself. It provides the raw material for the
progress of science, and it's a serious problem
when experimental results are discarded merely
because they appear to conflict with some theory,
no matter how established the theory is. There
might actually be no conflict at all, rather some
new process is occurring that had simply never been imagined.
