At 02:54 AM 12/6/2012, you wrote:
Push noise down or raise the signal a high up- this is the basic option.
The first choice is passive, the second active.
Which one will one lead to useful Cold Fusion?
Cart before the horse, Peter. The first issues are scientific, and
exploring the parameter space is *more difficult* if, at the same
time, high "signal" is required. "Pushing noise down" by careful
experimental design can save a lot of money and time.
This is the reality, Peter: we know that the FPHE (Fleischmann-Pons
Heat Effect) is real. We don't need massive results for that, the
best work and most conclusive work has been with modest heat, but
then correlated with helium production. We can definitely use more
accuracy in this, but the limits have been on helium
capture/collection/measurement, not on heat measurement, the accuracy
with heat is generally already adequate.
Sure, some people are going to work on increasing heat production,
but increasing *absolute heat production*, we know, can easily be
done with a reaction with known characteristics, simply by scaling
up. However, there is a serious problem here.
If the exact conditions for heat production are not known, if they
depend on very difficult-to-control conditions, such as the exact
size and number of cracks in palladium deuteride, as appears to be
the case with the FPHE, then your scaled-up experiment might
unexpectedly produce a lot more heat than you expected. It's
dangerous. Pons and Fleischmann scaled *down* for exactly this reason.
And running experiments by remote control behind blast barriers
raises costs even further.
No, first things first. We need much more exploration of the
parameter space. Once we know what conditions are effective for
setting up the reactions, we can then start to scale up, but that's
really the last step.
The main trend today is silent implicit desperation.
No. It's realism: until we know the *mechanism* for the FPHE, we need
basic research, and that can be -- and should be -- small-scale. If
it's small scale, it makes it possible to run many more variations on
an experiment, simultaneously, making the discovery of optimal
operating conditions come sooner, most likely. Rossi allegedly ran a
thousand experiments before he found his "secret sauce." While I have
no idea if he really found a secret sauce, that part of his story is
plausible, at least.
As far as I can tell, we don't know and have very little clue as to
what the ash might be from NiH reactions.
What we need for heat is enough heat to be satisfied that the
reaction is real and the heat is not artifact. Sure, eventually, we
will want much more than that. We want enough heat that the reaction
leaves behind enough ash to be detected. If the ash is deuterium,
this isn't going to be easy, but running experiments longer is about
as useful as running them hotter.
First things first.
In a similar way, "reliability" is certainly desirable. However, if
we don't have "reliability," if, say, half our experiments shown
nothing while the other half, seemingly the same, show significant
heat, we are not stopped and we need not -- and should not -- demand
reliability before proceeding. Heat/helium was conclusively
demonstrated with not-reliable experiments, that is the power of
correlation. The "dead cells" serve as controls, such that the hidden
variable is all that is varying, plus, of course, the output.
