At 01:52 AM 11/4/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
I find it concerning that the sound track on the film sounds very much like an electrospark experiment. It sounds like cavitation. The noise shows up when the cathode heats up, just like electrospark. I eventually started heating up my cells to boiling before starting (I was running a boiloff protocol) just to get more uniform and faster data. I think the cathode white dots may in part be steam bubbles.
The temperature of the electrolyte you can see in the display. We are looking at near-room temperature. The white spots exceed, what is it? 20 degrees elevated temperature? Steam would be *way* above that. The cathode temperature, except for the spots, isn't anywhere near boiling.
There is so much missing from these reports. Someone attempting replication will run into hosts of problems, perhaps. That's why the Galileo protocol was important, it all got reduced to a *very* specific set of instructions, very little left out. Hopefully, nothing important!
My initial experiments will, hopefully, answer the question: if the Galileo protocol is followed exactly, will evidence of radiation be produced? The reports that came out indicated yes, but ... there are some legitimate questions about the significance of those results, hence I'm following a different approach with the CR-39. It should not affect the actual phenomena at the cathode. Just as in Galileo, I'll have CR-39 in direct contact with the cathode, but, as I've mentioned, it's not the contact area that I consider important. It's the rest of it. Galileo was also a silver cathode. I'm modifying that to gold, which was suggested as a possibility, and there are several results from SPAWAR showing dramatic increase in back-side tracks for a gold cathode. We should know soon.
Off the bat, the variations: different source for the PdCl2 and LiCl2 (but there were variations between SPAWAR and the two alpha replicators anyway), larger volume and surface area of CR-39 in the cell, different source for CR-39. Gold wire for cathode. Cathode assembly as with the recent SPAWAR report with the mylar window. It may be just one gold wire, not gold and platinum to start. I'm considering reducing the cathode length and would probably want to reduce the PdCl2 proportionately so that the ultimate deposit is the same thickness. (Reducing the cathode length will give me a smaller source, but I would expect the intensity of the radiation would not decrease, as neutrons per unit area in the CR-39 in contact with the cathode.)
