At 10:27 AM 10/2/2012, Moab Moab wrote:
mainstream scientists reading LENR papers and replying to them ?
What happened, did LENR become noticeable overnight ?
No, it took something like fifteen years of steady decay of the
totally skeptical position, with accumulation of evidence and
understanding of the possibility -- and reality -- of cold fusion.
Many physicists are now recognizing the anomaly: excess heat in PdD,
and a few recognize this as a fact, not mere "unidentified artifact,"
but the mystery of what is actually happening remains, and physicists
are starting to recognise that this is naturally *their problem*, not
the obligation of the chemists who discovered cold fusion.
It was the chemists' job to find and characterize the heat, to
identify the ash, which could all be done with the tools of chemistry.
Figuring out how fusion takes place is a task for quantum field
theory, most likely. Chemists are not trained in this, generally.
Some physicists are. And they are starting to recognize the challenge.
The long-standing problem is that those who believed in "some
unidentified artifact" never actually faced *that challenge,* i.e.,
identifying it and demonstrating it through controlled experiment.
That was where the whole skeptical community fell on its face. The
artifact was demonstrated with N-rays and polywater, which physicists
often compared to cold fusion, but they didn't follow the precedent.
Too difficult. They wanted the chemists to present them with a
single, simple, reliable experiment, which wasn't available. In fact,
by the mid-1990s, the experiment existed, but it still required some
serious chemistry. (Measure heat/helium with PdD experiments, at
least some of which are showing excess heat.) Kits could have been
designed and made by chemists, but ... they weren't. (I think there
was one kit, but I'm not sure what happened with it. It may be that
it wasn't sufficiently reliable. A kit would have to work, ideally,
at least, I'd say, 30% of the time. (The higher the number, the fewer
kits would need to be run to be reasonably sure of seeing the effect
that then could be demonstrated as real or as artifact through controls.)
(A kit would be made to be run with a very clear protocol, and would
be designed to be relatively idiot-proof. Lots of replication efforts
were torpedoed because people made up, themselves, what they thought
should work "better." And which didn't. Included in a kit protocol
would be how long it was necessary to run the thing to see results;
again, not waiting long enough was a problem with many replications.
Some object to this type of replication, because it is not "fully
independent." I.e., the kit designers and builders supply all the
materials, everything, for a turnkey demonstration. However, it is
still independent because experimenters are free to modify the
protocol to create controlled experiments that, if there are some kit
shenanigans, identify them. They have full control over the operation
of the kit. Until they have seen some substantial success, in their
own lab, they would wisely not alter the protocol at all. They would
basically plug the thing in as instructed, and watch what happens.
Then they have, in their hands, a demonstration of the effect, which
they can then investigate in a traditional manner.)
(How kit construction would be financed is a separate issue. It could
have been done, I'm sure, if the cold fusion community had recognized
the need and had organized to handle it. There would be, indeed, many
issues to be faced, but ... it could have been done. It could still
be done, though I'm not totally convinced that it is now necessary.)
(My SPAWAR neutron replication, which has been run once now, is not
designed for definitive results, if results are negative, because it
has no independent measure of verifying *any* reaction, it just looks
for neutron evidence.)
(At this point, looking at the LR-115 detectors themselves, in
isolation, from a single experimental run, I see no apparent evidence
for neutron production, with a gold wire cathode and what should
theoretically be the same as the Galileo protocol, as to
electrochemistry. However, the experiment was designed with LR-115 in
layers, and detector analysis is proceeding, to see if evidence for
proton tracks crossing LR-115 layers can be seen. I will also need,
especially if results remain negative, to see control exposure of
LR-115 to known neutron radiation. There are *many* ways to get this wrong.)
