At 03:21 PM 10/29/2009, Michel Jullian wrote:
2009/10/29 Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>:
...
> Heat is the principal signature of the reaction
> ...Do not look for other signatures until you have confirmed
> the principal signature.
Why? Nuclear track counts in a _dry_ SSNTD as in the 2009 SPAWAR
paper http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBosscharacteri.pdf , and
as Abd is planning now following Horace's advice, are much easier to
measure, much more sensitive, and much less disputable proofs of LENRs
than calorimetry aren't they?
I got a phone call from a researcher today claimng that SSNTDs could
be easily fooled by other particles. I.e., maybe some unknown kind of
radiation. Sure. Anything is possible, and there are some signs of
some very weird stuff coming out of those cells. But .... I replied
that I don't really care. I'm not trying to prove that this is
nuclear, I'm just trying to demonstrate the effect, at least one. To
my mind, if I have a SSNTD i in the middle of a stack, dry, and it's
got tracks on it that aren't on controls, that's either radiation or
one very mysterious anomaly.
I'm looking for neutrons, and if I find neutrons, in any clear way
(and the appearance of tracks after a hydrogen-rich material and
where lower energy-charged particle radiation could not reach means
neutrons to me, good enough for folk music), I'm not going to
complain that I didn't see any heat. But, I expect, I'll see a little.
Jed's point was to not interpret failure to see radiation as evidence
that the radiation findings of others were bogus, unless you have
reason to believe that your conditions were actually the same. The
most thoroughly established evidence of nuclear reactions in "cold
fusion" experiments is excess heat.
The heat, though, isn't going to tell us what is happening in there,
except that the Q value makes it highly likely that deuterium is a
fuel and helium is the major ash. If we can get better estimates of
the energy at the source of the alphas that are apparently being
emitted, we may be able to rule out some theories and encourage some
others. I'll play with theory, but, while I'm not intimidated by
claims that I'd have to be a professional electrochemist to run a
codep cell, I'd be silly to pretend any kind of detailed authority
about theory. Quite simply, I don't have enough background, and few
people do. Remember, Fleischmann was pushing the edge into an unknown
territory, and I have enough trouble when it comes to what's known.
