It is a little unclear to me who is saying what to whom in this
message. In future, Murray should please mark sections with a dotted
line or QUOTE (what I do) or something else two show the divisions
between his comments and the material he quotes from.
I gather this part is Murray's:
As a thoroughly unqualified, but careful, layman critic of cold
fusion papers since December, 1996, I have to apply tedious
examination of every detail in order to feret out simple facts
that so far are always available to seriously question the
research.
My working hypothesis is that there is no evidence for
anomalies that imply the reality of low energy nuclear
reactions, except for muon catalyzed fusion.
That's Murray's content. Right?
I disagree, obviously. An effect that produces 50 to 300 MJ from a
few grams of metal cannot be anything other than a nuclear reaction,
or some unknown reaction even more powerful.
Therefore the hundreds of published, peer-reviewed papers
since 1989 are straining at gnats, forcing preconceived
interpretations onto complex and chaotic test systems that in
fact are generating random results.
The results do not seem random to me. McKubre, Miles and others have
demonstrated clear correlations to materials, loading, current
density and other conditions. See, for example, McKubre's graph on
the front page of LENR-CANR:
"Simultaneous Series Operation of Light & Heavy Water Cells;Excess
Power vs. Current Density."
This not at all chaotic or random.
The factors that give rise to this particular correlation may not
have an deep significance that directly indicates the mechanism. They
may be more an indication of chemical or the mechanical conditions
needed to give rise to cold fusion. In other words, they may be
something analogous to the need for tightly controlled simultaneous
chemical explosions to trigger an implosion fission bomb. But the
explosion of a fission bomb is manifestly a nuclear event, and the
requirements and characteristics of the chemical explosion triggering
it does tell you a lot about the nuclear event. A cold fusion
reaction is also manifestly a nuclear event, and even if loading and
current density are chemical parameters, at some level they tell us a
lot about the nuclear event. Or they would tell us, if we understood
the reaction. They will after a theory emerges, when it may be too
late for the information to be much use. (Along similar lines, after
the Wright brothers figured out most of the engineering physics of
flight, they were able to analyze the flight characteristics of sea
birds at Kitty Hawk. I recall one of them wrote it was fun to do
this, but the information came too late to be useful. It was kind of
like figuring out how a magician does a particular trick after you
already know how magicians work.)
To extend the analogy, what we are doing now is akin to knocking
masses of plutonium together without a general theory of how fission
reactions work, and without an effective method such as implosion.
This produces various confusing reactions at times but no big bang.
(This is only an analogy; I realize that fooling around blindly with
plutonium would be far more dangerous than making trial and error
observations of super-saturated bulk palladium.)
- Jed
