Lugano performance recalculated - the baseline for replications

Quote from Wyttenbach

To make it clear for every body: Physics has never had any exact theory of any phenomen happing at distances below 1 fm!All physics has so far is a loosely coupled best guess approach linking phenomenas by a set of obviously noisy ( as chemist use them) rules.Just remember: Newton, Maxwell, ART are "exact" theories of the first order which allow to make exact (very very low deviations ) predictions.All nuclear theories have chemists level. They can make (noisy) predictions for a very narrow and restricted space if there is a gauge, based on many exact measured experiments.W-L: Theory has just entry level chemist level not more. ( compareable to the many theories for the Kennedy assassination...)

I was not referring to calculation from theory. many-body quark stuff is computationally pretty difficult!

I was referring to experimental data which any new theory must be compatible with.

Quote from Eric W

Nuclear reactions have been well characterized in four or so settings that I am aware of: plasmas, ion bombardment of thin foils, ion beam collisions, and the observation of radioactive decay. They have also been studied in other contexts, and we are aware of such trivia as the fact that some electron screening will increase reaction rates in ion bombardment. To my mind, as an observer and hobbyist, we have not sufficiently characterized nuclear reactions in the solid state or in electron-rich environments

Solid-state and electron-rish are not, at a nuclear level, very interesting. The only things that can affect nuclear reactions are electric or magnetic fields and those, for the given environments, are pretty low. Also we have experimental evidence on how nuclear reactions chnage with electric and magnetic fields.

One way to think about this is that what makes these environments different at chemical level - orbitals, crystal geometry, etc, is all much too large scale to affect nuclear-level stuff. As far as nuclei are concerned there is an awful lot of hard vacuum between nuclei with electron clouds only relevant inasfar as they alter potential close to the nucleus - they do that, but not a lot for the obvious reasons that nuclear charge is localised and electrons cannot so be.

Where are the papers describing what happens to the decay rates of thorium or uranium when electrical current is run through them? Is this an experimental condition that is well-characterized?

That would make no significant change to either electric or magnetic field experienced by the nucleus - so I can't see the relevance? much higher electric and magnetic fields (by a factor of 1000000) can be got in other (no electrical current through sample) ways.

Quote

The Gamow theory of alpha decay says that alpha decay rates change by many orders of magnitude in response to minute changes in net electrostatic charge. Are you of the opinion that the changes in electron density in a solid arising from dI/dt are too small to have any effect here?

Yes. You could plug numbers into the WKB approx solution to Gamow to validate this:

http://www.physicspages.com/20…ng-the-wkb-approximation/

As you say, the postlude is unprofessional - but only in response to extraordinarily unprofessional behaviour from the authors. I was indignant - and perhaps therefore not as proper as I should have been. Remember this was not done for "real" publication because the report I comment on was not "real" published.

I post here without making any specific claims about my CV (which is mostly irrelevant to the matters here). I'm on record as saying that I have a decent maths and physics education, but am not an expert on any of these matters. I think with that paper I've done a decent job than because I'm a good generalist and capable of doing a literature survey and put in the effort. If you have a specific reason to want to know more you could PM me? If held to it now I would add a small section giving some better analytical insight into the "acceleration" issues, and at one point replace:

"This approximate analysis shows that compared with [5] the exponent of T will be approximately 1, rather than 4"
by
"This approximate analysis shows that compared with [5] the exponent of T will be approximately 2, rather than 4"

That does not in any way alter the conclusions. Basically, I can now do a better job of providing precise quantitative analytic insight than was possible when I wrote the paper. The paper's quantitative numerical results stand, so though I feel it is not as good as it could be, equally I'm not that much motivated to rewrite it. The translucency errors (noted under the "caveats" section) are potentially large and difficult to quantify.

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Please stop any discussion about LENR not confirmed/allowed by theory. Otherwise I will ask You for a mathematical prove .. ! (Hopefully more compelling than in the silly try (in the paper) Thomas linked in his last post.)

I'm not saying it is not allowed by theory. Jusdt that it is very difficult to find a theory that fits it, for general reasons that apply to all theories I know, and also that none so far do.

To quarrel with that statement you need to provide me, in detail, with such a fitting experiment theory.

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As I said before: In jcf14 p. 168 ff. Kozima has written a good overview article about LENR and transmutation. Increasing the decay rate of Uranium, also for Ti, with LENR is known now for about 20 years.

OK I'll look at that, and specifically the measurements for U decay. Do you mean Th not Ti?

http://jcfrs.org/file/jcf14-proceedings.pdf pp168

This is all I'll do today.

Looking at the Ti table we compare for different isotopes:

(1) nat abundance
(2) measured ratio before exp wrt Ti50
(3) measured ratio after exp wrt Ti50

The measured values differ from the natural value by roughly 3% positive before the experiment, and roughly 1% negative after the experiment. There is a fair correlation between these values which of course represents mainly the error in the Ti50 measurements.

These errors of +3%, -1% in Ti50 abundance must be viewed in context. Ti is only 5% of total so the actual errors are of order 0.6% and 0.2% of the total Ti.

I have no idea what is the accuracy of these SIMS measurements - anmazingly the paper gives no indication of this. I could if highly motivated (money? fame? a rare and exquisite work of art?) perhaps do a more thorough statistical analysis which would start off by expressing all results as ratios with total measured Ti, not 50Ti, to remove the obvious artifact.

Now, the paper claims this artifact-dominated data is modelled by a theory. The problem is that this is a post-hoc theory. So can be in any case partly modelled from the data. The paper claims, without evidence, that the fit is very good between Ti(theory) and Ti(after measured) abundance. I don't see this but maybe I'm not getting it because there is a lot of mis-labelling of the columns in the experiment - from the legend on Table 5.2 and I'm not quite sure what the theory column is meant to be.

It is not kind of the authors to so obscure a key and extraordinary result in the paper so as to make it difficult to decode. Perhaps somone else could help me by deciding what they think each of the columns in Table 5.2 actually means in terms of the various measured abundances.

If anyone thinks highly enough of these results to do that the next step would be a statistical significance test, and a (dumbed down) Baysian test to see whetehr the theory has enough arbitrary parameters to fit the data as well as it does without having any merit.

I do however feel that anyone who views this evidence as something serious needs to do the statistical analysis themselves - since the authors of the papers have for some reason not done it?

Best wishes, Tom

Enough for me - I get cross reading this stuff. Maybe I've missed something on quick inspection, in which case you can tell me what it is. Obviously I've only looked at the Ti data which was the first I came to that was mentioned above.

Wyttenbach - I'm off this now. But you will see that I'm talking about the measured 50Ti abundance being different - which will of course be true if there are measurement errors as there always are. This one figure goes into the whole column and causes a correlation in the errors for the whole column.

It would be both interesting and helpful if you could do your own careful analysis of exactly what these figures mean and how they are statistically significant (a rough sense of this might be enough). They don't look it by eye to me, so I guess you are seeing some correlation I'm not.

Not unless he can answer my last post. But - I'm not spending time on this now except I'll happily critique other people's analysis showing something unusual here. I can't myself see anything unusual. Why do you think these Ti figures indicate transmutation?

Rends:
I don't wish to post here under my work credentials, for many reasons. My instinct is to dislike anonymity - hence my not so anonymous id - but I consider my work irrelevant to what I post here.

I am very happy if you would like therefore to consider me to be a layabout with no specific qualifications. I myself evaluate what others say here on the basis of their coherence, not their CV, and I'd like the same to be done with me. I mean that.