The comments yesterday of Tampe and Storms - dissing QM while trying hard not to sound too much like luddites - are not just regrettable and silly - almost unforgiveable in the pursuit of a solid scientific foundation for LENR ... especially since Storms is so widely known and respected.
Storms: I have great respect for QM but I have great disappointment with how it is frequently applied. Modern physics is so dominated by mathematical constructs, they ignore what is real, and then excuse this by saying that this approach is ok because the quantum world is so strange. He then goes on to propose his own theory for LENR based on an equally "unreal" reaction, perhaps more improbably. Go figure. Tampe: I couldn't agree more, it's very frustrating to learn QM. You tend to get a lot of powerful mathematical constructs but really no good mental model how it all works. Oh my. This is nonsensical to the max. No one is asking you to learn the deepest secrets of QM. An adequate mental model is available with zero math - but - it is not the same logic as one finds in "common sense". How can one NOT have a mental model for quantum tunneling after all these years? In fact QM is more a process of ridding oneself of the wrong mental model than learning a new one. One can mentally accept time reversal, for instance, without leaning the intricacies of CPT symmetry and Kramer's theorem. "No good mental model" and "ignoring what is real" are both complete cop-outs. I think Kalman has hit the nail on the heat with a version of neutron exchange which is applicable to LENR, but to be honest my mental model of the tunneling dynamics may not yet be what he is proposing. I hope that my understanding will be refined soon - since an attempt to contact Kalman has been made. My LENR-transposed model suggests that the two isotopes (Ni61and Ni58, and the other combinations) which are in the active nickel alloy, are adjoining at a few angstrom distance when an electron of modest energy (or more likely in LENR - a polariton) screens the two isotopes in such a way that a neutron tunnels from the Ni61 to the N58, leaving Ni60 and Ni59 - but otherwise the electron does not react. What we have in the end is the common isotope of Ni60 and also Ni59, but since the Ni59 goes to cobalt by EC with no gamma, that fact makes this proposal FALSIFIABLE. The half-life is long but in fact small amounts of cobalt have been reported in LENR. Tampe says he cannot get his mind around the Kalman model of quantum tunneling, due to the mathematics - even though he is sitting in front of a computer which is doing billions of QM tunneling reactions per second to put his words into cyberspace - and that CPU can do the mathematics for him. One type of tunneling in nuclear and the other is electromagnetic but they are part of the same QM phenomena - where a particle tunnels through a barrier that it "classically" could not surmount. In fact, the nuclear version came before the semiconductor version and yet the later verifies the former. Is this a case of "not seeing the forest for the trees?" I hope that it is not an indication of a new type of circle-the-wagons mentality - or a reactionary response to the failure of the early experimenters to come up with an adequate theory after 23 years. The field is complicated and strange - but it cannot be defined in overly simplified platitudes. When all is said and done LENR is quantum mechanical to its core, and it behooves us all to try hard to accommodate that fact, with or without the mathematics. Kalman may have provided one huge clue for an M.O. that opens up everything. It is too early to say but it is waaaaay too early to dismiss this paper as being too strange or too mathematical.
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