At 09:50 AM 9/26/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> keeps saying thing
like this, which I find a little tiresome:
Okay, an anomaly. Very important point: anomaly does not equal cold
fusion. It means something unexplained.
If the level of heat is high, it may indicate a nuclear effect. I
don't think that is the case here. The heat is simply unexplained.
Fleischmann and I disagree, for reasons I believe Lomax is familiar with.
Please don't recruit Fleischmann to your own personal cause. I'm not
disagreeing with Fleischmann, he's acknowledged his error in the
original announcement.
After I wrote the commentary below, I came to see clearly how my
expression confused Jed. I was not saying that the effect was not
nuclear. I was saying that the heat was not "high." That's based on
an assumption that this is the Arata effect, which generally shows
low heat. If the heat were high, calorimetry could strongly indicate
nuclear from the sheer level of it. This would be *circumstantial
evidence.* If low, though, that's not so strong. There might still be
some chemistry going on. And there is chemistry involved in these
experiments, that's what kept Kidwell from just jumping for "nuclear."
This point, taken from legitimate skepticism, should be noted: a heat
effect is not clearly nuclear unless there is clearly nuclear
evidence for it. Examples of nuclear evidence would be transmuted
elements or radiation, correlated with the effect.
They are:
1. Heat beyond the limits of chemistry in a cell with no chemical
transformations can only be explained as a nuclear effect. No other
heat effect is known to science. Perhaps it is shrinking hydrogen or
some other exotic new thing, but I doubt it.
Anomaly means an unknown effect. An unknown effect must be due to
space aliens. No, Zero Point Energy. No, hydrinos. No, systematic
experimental error. No, damn it! nuclear reactions.
2. We assume that Kidwell observed the same phenomenon as other
people have seen with hydrides. It is unreasonable to assume there
are many different, unrelated, heretofore undiscovered anomalous
heat generating phenomena in hydrides. (McKubre's conservation of miracles.)
Conservation of miracles is not a scientific law, it is a heuristic,
sometimes useful. I assume the same thing, though, about Kidwell's work.
3. In other experiments, the heat has been correlated with helium.
Again, it is reasonable to assume that it correlates in this
experiment as well, even thought that has not been measured.
Since this was a deuterium experiment, like Arata, I indeed assume
that heat will be correlated with helium. Therefore, if there is some
doubt about the effect being nuclear, it becomes highly advisable to
test for helium. If there is correlated helium, the effect is
nuclear. If not, it is very likely, in this case, something else.
*But I don't expect that outcome. Helium is very likely to be
correlated with the heat, that is my very point.*
Jed, you completely missed the point.
You do not need to start from scratch and prove every single aspect
of cold fusion in every single experiment. The helium means this is fusion.
Yes. That's not totally conclusive, for helium can be produced by
fission or nuclear decay. But with a PdD experiment, as Kidwell was,
and if the heat/helium ratio can be nailed to within experimental
error of 23.8 MeV, the evidence becomes extremely strong that the
reaction is some kind of deuterium fusion. That is all the more
reason to make the measurements, because every experiment that
confirms heat/helium nails another nail in the pseudoskeptical
criticism that this has not been confirmed widely enough. It serves,
then, two purposes, confirming the calorimetry and generally
confirming (or disconfirming, we need to remember that this is at
least theoretically possible) the heat/helium ratio, our strongest
clue that the reaction is, indeed, deuterium fusion and not some
other nuclear reaction.
Whatever else it may be, it is also fusion. The WL theory is
pretty much the same as fusion as far as I can see. Those who
disagree are quibbling, like people who say that Shakespeare did
not write his plays; it was another man of the same name.
I'll be specific about the "quibble." Widom and Larsen attempt to
explain helium through a series of reactions that essentially take
deuterium, convert it to neutrons, which can then enter nuclei and
form transmuted products, with this ending up as helium. (There are
tons of problems with this theory, but I won't go there now). I've
made the point that this is, indeed, fusion, as to what it
accomplishes. The *result* is fusion. The mechanism is different. And
that's why I say "deuterium fusion through an unknown mechanism."
You will notice that those who denounce the "fusion" in cold fusion,
but who support LENR, consistently interpret "fusion" as meaning "d-d
fusion," the specific isolated reaction. That fusion might proceed
through different pathways seems to be beyond them. This is really
the same mistake as was made by the early skeptics, who thought that,
for example, cold fusion was disproven by the findings that there
were very few neutrons, if any, coming off these cells. After all, if
it was fusion, there must be neutrons! (And I've seen that exact
argument.) It's a non sequitur. If it's the known d-d reaction, the
argument is at least somewhat sound. Storms disagrees, but that's
another matter. But what if it is something else? (And, my opinion,
it quite likely is.)
These are not laws of physics. They are reasonable assumptions. We
assume the unity of nature.
Yes. However, we also know that nature is incredible diverse. Every
living thing is a collection of miracles.
We assume that a phenomenon seen in one experiment is probably the
same one seen in similar experiments under similar conditions.
Right. But "similar" is made up, typically arbitrary. Some of the
*rejection* of cold fusion was based on the dissimilarity of results.
Once the thought-barrier was down, people started looking at all
kinds of possibly related things, and there was some level of
assumption that this must be the same reaction. It's a Procrustean bed.
There *may* be a single mechanism, or there might be two, or many. It
is possible that there is more than one mechanism operating in even a
single experiment. Yes, we make the simplifying assumptions that Jed
refers to, but we must always remember that they *are* assumptions,
and if they don't fit the data, we don't toss the data. Instead, we
look at whether or not a different set of assumptions predicts the data better.
The mechanism behind NiH might be the same or different than the
mechanism behind PdD. It's certainly different in *some way*! And
biological transmutation, per Vysotskii, might be yet another
mechanism. Now, the mechanisms might have *some similarity." I'd say
that's somewhat likely. But the way forward is to elucidate *any one
of them* If the mechanism for that single reaction is then found to
predict the other behaviors, great! This is where Occam's Razor
applies. But if it does not, Occam's Razor actually suggests that a
different mechanism is involved.
Again, here, we were talking about the possibility of confirming the
heat results of Kidwell by measuring helium. That's simple sense.
Jed, I think, misinterpreted it to mean that I was questioning
whether or not helium would be found matching the heat. My
*expectation* is that it would be found. However, we don't do
experimental science holding expecations in mind, and as much as
possible we set them aside. It's a philosophy of science thing.
Expectations can influence results, in too many ways. That's why
Miles had the helium analyses done blind. He knew the possible problem.
Heavy expectations can heavily influence how one treats the data. If
there is a result that does not conform to expectations, there is a
strong tendency to want to toss it as being due to some error, and
sometimes there is an excuse. That is why we attempt to define the
protocol and the interpretation *in advance.* Later, one might
speculate on results with data selection, but that is only done,
legitimately, to set up proposals for further testing. Otherwise it's
way too dangerous. I have seen way too many people go seriously astry
by post hoc analysis.
("If we were to set aside the results from experiment 797 as the
result of some error, we see that we have a very close match to 23.8
MeV, the theoretical value for any form of deuterium fusion, for
without that single outlier, the results are 24 +/- 0.5 MeV. We
intend to run another series to confirm this ratio, if possible." Or
something like that.)
That is true even when we cannot explain the phenomenon. We assume
that conventional explanations are more likely than radically new hypotheses.
Yes. The point?
I assume, for example, and for simplicity, that the FPHE reaction is
not "d-d fusion." That's rebuttable, because there might be some d-d
reaction that proceeds very differently from hot fusion and
muon-catalyzed fusion, both of which have the same branching ratio,
i.e., we'd be seeing the "dead graduate student" effect.
More likely, though, it's something different. I'm personally betting
on condensates that are on the lines of what Takahashi has studied
through the application of quantum field theory. But that theory is
not fully developed. No theory is.
*We don't know.*
