On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 8:58 AM, Ruby <r...@hush.com> wrote:
Yes, data is missing, but there is also ALOT of data available, too.
> Unfortunately, it is difficult to even agree on what the facts are!
>
Like you mention, it's difficult even to agree on what the facts are.
Certainly on this list. The situation creates a breeding ground for
endless speculation. Here are some of the questions I've had trying to
read the primary source material as well as commentaries on it:
- Is the quality of the article or report any good? Sometimes there are
potential sources of error in plain view (e.g., the initial heat spike in a
gas loading experiment being counted as excess heat, or a long period of
endotherm that is ignored). There are rarely error bars, and in some cases
little evidence that the author is aware of error bars.
- Is the article saying something new? Sometimes a researcher seems to
recycle the same material over and over for years.
- Has the author's own bias as to what is going on resulted in
inadvertent self-censorship on what he or she reports?
- Is a review turning a few, ambiguous or inchoate patterns into basic
principles too quickly? (E.g., the importance of cracks.)
- Has a pet experiment for idiosyncratic reasons been cast as one of
fundamental importance?
- What is going on with the NiH/NiD systems, anyway? For nickel we
basically have Rossi, Piantelli, Mizuno, and, if you like, Thermacore, to
look to, and for Rossi we don't have much of substance beyond the Elforsk
report. Presumably the nickel people are doing much better than the
palladium people right now; at least, this is what we're given to believe,
without much to back up this impression. Hopefully Mizuno will help us out
here, since I hear he's been seeing some promising things.
Concerning the theorizing, both off and on this list:
- What does a near-zero K temperature phenomenon have to do with LENR or
the price of wheat?
- How can you have something as delicate as a molecule both serve as a
guide for the strong interaction and keep from breaking apart in a hot
metal lattice, while keeping electrons and protons evenly spaced along it?
- By what train of careful experimentation was it shown that magnetism
has a huge effect on the fusion or fission cross sections in the kinds of
contexts we're looking at?
- How can one in humility put forward a theory to explain excess heat
that simultaneously implies that the last 80 years of physics be wrong?
Even Einstein was just tying together some loose ends that were already
being discussed by others before he came along.
- Why does such-and-such theory seem to ignore about 80 percent of the
LENR research that has been done and focus on a possible mechanism
involving neutrons?
What we need are predictions from these theories, predictions that can be
> tested. Please make a post on each of the theories and what their
> predictions are. That would be helpful.
A series of summaries is an excellent idea, perhaps sent to this list,
perhaps compiled into a book. There could be two sections -- a summary
written in such a way that the primary author or authors of the theory
could agree with the wording, and a second section that highlights some of
the non-tendentious implications of the theory (e.g., things that would
make it falsifiable). The second section would pay little heed to the
theorist's sensibilities and would just state things as the author of the
summaries sees things. But it would also be written in with a certain
minimalism and not involve complex and questionable trains of logic of the
kind found in earlier efforts to do this type of thing. Rather than
presenting claims about physics and chemistry in dogmatic, black and white
terms -- "this theory cannot be right because if this were happening you
would see all kinds of gamma activity" -- the second section for a theory
being highlighted would say things like, "in order to have 4He result from
dd fusion, the theory has the burden of showing that there's a way for the
energy of the gamma to thermalized somehow."
I can think of few people already involved in LENR who have the background
knowledge to get the concepts right and offer a rigorous description
together with the detachment to describe the various theories in a neutral
way.
Eric
