At 06:00 PM 3/13/2010, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
2. Oxygen is being evolved at the cathode. There is no stirring mechanism in these cells. How an oxygen bubble would get from the anode, where oxygen gas is being evolved, to the cathode is unstated.
Mitchell Swartz kindly pointed out my error. Of course, I contradicted "cathode" in the next sentence, but....
As Mr. Swartz pointed out, the concentration of oxygen at the cathode is zero. So we have to imagine an oxygen bubble somehow making it from the anode to the cathode, contrary to two flows, the flow of deuterium gas is away from the cathode, but the flow could carry oxygen from below the cathode to the cathode -- how would it get down there? -- and then somehow penetrating the palladium matrix to mix with the deuterium so that it can burn rapidly enough to generate enough heat to melt palladium. Quite a trick.
Now, I sympathize with Rich. He spent quite a bit of time presenting the skeptical position a decade ago. It's hard to switch gears. But there comes a point where one realizes that there isn't even room to stand on one's head any more.
Certainly it is possible to think up some different explanation for anything. But at some point it's appropriate for resistance to collapse and say, okay, maybe it is possible. Maybe there might be something new here, that we didn't realize was possible, maybe the mechanism is something that we didn't even dream of. What *are* the established experimental facts?
Yes, there are errors. Fleischmann made a huge one with his neutron reports. Texas A&M got egg all over their face. But ... does that mean that every neutron report is therefore error?
Returning with a fresh perspective, we can look at all that so-called negative result from some prominent groups as part of the experimental evidence. Those negative reports showed that if the loading ratio (D/Pd atom ratio) isn't high enough, you don't see much, if any, reaction. They showed that if you don't get a reaction as shown by calorimetry, you don't get radiation or other products. They showed that palladium structure was critical, that not just any solid palladium would work.
And they showed how ready the physics community was to jump to conclusions that were politically convenient. That's a valuable lesson too!
The 1989 DoE report concluded that cold fusion was not proven. Somehow that got translated into "shown to be pathological science." When you have huge numbers of people investigating a new phenomenon, with very little solidly known, and with exciting possibilities, you will indeed see a lot of poor experimental technique, wild speculation, exaggeration of the significance of results, all that. But it can happen on both sides, positive and negative. The problem of publication bias is real, i.e., negative results tend to be set aside as uninteresting. That is just as harmful, in my opinion, as publication of negative results as proof against positive results. In real science, all the evidence accumulates. The process is never complete, though reality can become so obvious that not much more happens.
N-rays were rejected properly because the reason to suspect that they existed was shown, conclusively, to have a simple, ordinary explanation. Did that disprove N-rays? Not exactly. It meant that the rug was pulled out from under the evidence. Polywater collapsed because spectroscopic analysis showed the origin, very well. Could some new form of water exist? Can't rule it out, it's merely unlikely. The polywater evidence was misleading, an error that simply took more than a few months to find and correct. Was the rug pulled out from under cold fusion? When? The evidence that caused Flesichmann to even look for neutrons was heat. Maybe what sealed it was that meltdown, an event like that can tend to get one's attention, when you have to repair the floor and replace the lab bench and you wonder what might have happened if it had been a little stronger.
From the very beginning, the only reason to seriously doubt that this was a nuclear reaction was theory, and the theory involved was an informal one, not explicitly tested thoroughly, that the calculations of two-body quantum mechanics would accurately predict nuclear behavior in the condensed matter environment, where the math is horrific but the idea was that nuclear distances are such that the influence of third bodies would be negligible. Fleischmann and Pons agreed to test this, Fleischmann later claimed that he expected to find nothing. My guess is that they didn't put a lot of money into the earliest work, it was only when they started to see heat that they then set to try to regularize and characterize the effect, and they weren't ready for publication, he claims.
In other words, the theory that was contradicted by cold fusion was one which had never been experimentally proven, and, indeed, such a proof would probably be impossible, because no matter how many negative results you get, perhaps you didn't find the right conditions to see the exception. It's obvious that the theory is *generally* more-or-less true. Negative proofs are, in fact, almost impossible. The question is always, instead, is there any reason to think that something different is possible?
Fleischmann found one. By nature, this was a fragile and difficult-to-find effect, it took very special conditions, and how special wasn't understood until later. When Fleischmann ran out of his original batch of palladium, he couldn't get the effect to show up with new palladium, supposedly the same. It wasn't the same. Details of fabrication created different microstructure creating different response to deuterium loading. All this was later worked out, and Fleischmann cells are still not paragons of precise quantitative reproducibility, but some groups are reporting 100% "success," i.e., significant heat with every cell. And other techniques have been developed that are apparently more reliable, codeposition and gas-loading. Gas-loading is highly dependent on source material, however, so the independent replications are a bit problematic.
Thus for a reproducible protocol, at this point, I look to codeposition, which creates 100% loaded palladium deuteride, it seems, immediately. It's been replicated, but certain questions remain, hence my own work, to design and fabricate and market cells, to researchers and students, to demonstrate a supposedly simple but highly significant effect: the generation of neutrons by an electrolytic cell. For that purpose I don't need to scale up the effect at all. I can scale it down, making the cell cheaper. Cheaper means more replications, more runs, and more controls. While it's theoretically possible that my work could end up debunking a major error, i.e., the more than a decade of work on codep by SPAWAR, I consider this highly unlikely. It's a little more possible that some unindentified or unanticipated variation could make my cells not perform, and the lack of a clean and clear and known correlating factor would make it hardeer to interpret, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Having some cells that look like SPAWAR cells, that walk like SPAWAR cells, but that don't quack, could be useful! What's the difference? At that point, I will definitely not be working alone!
I'm avoiding calorimetry because of the complexity and because to get a better heat signal, one needs more reaction surface, thus higher costs. Calorimetry is half of the real proof for cold fusion (helium is the other half), but neutron radiation is a clear evidence that something nuclear is happening. If I see neutrons, i.e., tracks appearing on SSNTDs associated with the cathode, not in other positions, and thus clearly above background, and where other forms of radiation could not reach, I'd say that I'm seeing conclusive evidence, other explanations start to become (have become, because of the SPAWAR work) way too complicated and unlikely.
There is other work going on with a shared protocol. Kowalski et al are working with the Oriani approach. But the radiation found is quite low-level without such a clear association with the cathode. It's valuable work, but not as clean a demonstration as the SPAWAR approach, and its not neutrons. So contamination becomes much more of a possible issue.
My own work should be considered an extension of the Galileo protocol. I'm making certain modifications to allow the inexpensive Galileo cell to become even more inexpensive, and I want to make sure that the cells are completely and accurately reproducible. That means covering every detail, which wasn't quite done with Galileo (though Galileo is a lot more thorough than what's been in the literature before).
Krivit, reporting on his Galileo experience, compared the group process with herding cats, as I recall. I understand and sympathize. However, it needn't be that way. I did not create a committee process requiring group agreement to proceed. I'm doing my work independently, but also in connection with anyone interested. I'm advised, and I listen to and weigh advice, from anyone. As a result, my initial ideas were modified and may continue to be modified. Currently, I'm offering materials only, as described at the initial on-line store, http://lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion, because I haven't proven the protocol. But anyone who wants to try this right away can get all the materials from me, at about what they would cost elsewhere (for the small quantities), and conveniently and the same as I'll be working with. Be the first on your block. Or city. Or planet, for that matter. All Galileo materials, in short. Except for Landauer CR-39 detectors, I have only some old ones, kindly donated, but age is important. I have fresh LR-115 detectors. Get 'em while they (aren't) hot!
Well, I wandered a bit. This is now not about proving that cold fusion is real, to those who know the research. That already happened. It's about education and setting up conditions for broader investigation, including by amateurs and students.
(Krivit may burble about it not being "fusion." I really don't care if it's fusion or not, and much of that debate is purely semantic (what's "fusion," mommy?). I care if it's nuclear, and determining mechanism is probably going to take a lot more work; but it's no longer true that there are no reasonable theories. That's just one more misconception that was clearly time-bound but that mysterioously became a permanent idea. Takahashi's Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate theory requires, apparently, no new physics, just the more careful analysis of a rare physical configuration that just might occasionally pop up in highly loaded palladium deuteride. Literally. Takahashi calculates that the configuration will collapse and fuse within a femtosecond to form excited Be-8, which emits photons and decays promptly to form two helium nuclei. If his math is right, the only question then would be how often we can get two deuterium *molecules* in double confinement, which is obviously a transient condition if it can exist at all. But that's a materials science question, not a nuclear physics question.)
