At 04:07 PM 12/6/2012, Alain Sepeda wrote:
this is why they ask for a tea kettle. Me I call that a shoebox...
put on a table a shoebox with a device that clearly can convince a
kid of 5, my mother and a 9/11 denialist, and you win.
everything that ask for a PhD, or some honesty, or some intelligence
is useless.
While I understand the sentiment, I'll point out that there is no
shoebox device that demonstrates hot fusion, and there is yet to be
any reproducible or reproduced practical demonstration, but it's
funded with vast gobs of cash.
That's because the basic theory is understood. However, the
*engineering* is not yet to the point that hot fusion is a practical
power source. Yet somehow skeptics expect cold fusion to already have
reached the point of practical engineering, in spite of their efforts
to kill funding and suppress publication of results. And anyone who
thinks that is "conspiracy theory" simply has not researched what
actually happened since 1989.
That emotionally-5-year-old physicists exist is not something we can
do anything about. We can, however, encourage and support research to
extend the body of knowledge about LENR, to resolve open research
questions, to provide a basis for further funding. It may be a long
time before LENR is well-understood, but the kind of modest research
I'm suggesting could create a basis strong enough to gain serious
funding for further exploration.
Or, we must always keep in mind, the "phantom artifact," the chimera
that the 5-year olds firmly believe in, without ever having actually
seen it, might be identified. If, for example, we do work to more
accurately measure the heat/helium ratio in FP Heat Effect
experiments, and this work is done thoroughly and carefully, surely
the existence of artifact would be uncovered with this, and we could
then stop wasting so much time on the "cold fusion myth."
Don't hold your breath, skeptics. The evidence for the heat/helium
ratio being at least close to the deuterium fusion value is quite
strong. Steve Krivit has attempted to bash this research as
supposedly being motivated by a "belief" in d-d fusion, but even
W-L's Larsen acknowledges the Q as being quite close to the deuterium
fusion value, he merely attempts to explain it differently, as some
mix of neutron reactions that happens to come up with roughly the same figure.
If helium is actually correlated with heat, as a dozen research
groups have confirmed -- see Storms' "Status of cold fusion (2010)"
in Naturwissenschaften, preprint at lenr-canr.org -- a nuclear
reaction is taking place, there is very little other possibility.
This is not a shoebox experiment to convince a five-year-old. It's
serious science, and it works even if the reaction fails to appear
much of the time. We can do serious science with unreliable effects.
That's the power of correlation.
