Do we have consensus, then, that the sparkles in the IR thermography might go back to hot spots and possibly micro-explosions, even if we are predisposed to different explanations for the source?
If you are in touch with Sandström, I would be interested in his impression of the cauliflower photo. If you do reach out to him, point out the 70 um diameter. You might or might not want to go to the effort, which is fine.
QuoteI said Shanahan Obviously had not read much of use of CR39 in CF research, since he easily throws out arguments like possible chemical artifacts as an "obvious possibility", when this has been avoided with mylar films on CR39 by LENR researchers.
This is the same class of error as the ones a highlighted above. It is correct for Shanahan to note possibilities. Just because some LENR experiments avoid this error, if you did not note it as a possibility you would miss the ones for which it was possible. I'd guess you are not claiming that all LENR experiments are protected.
Further you should note that Shanahan has suggested Mylar film maybe does not protect CR-39 from mechanically generated artifacts.
More generally, these possible errors remain and must all be specifically excluded in an experiment which wants to be taken seriously. I think you will find that there is no CR-39 experiment that does this. But as always I'm happy to be contradicted by such a specific experiment. The ones you have posted so far have very poorly quantified evidence with subjective binary judgements reported.
Thomas,
Mechanical generated artifacts where investigated in the Referrence above.
" Scratches and other mechanical insults to the detector chips can also produce ambiguities. This problem was examined by a series of experiments in which various mechanical forces were applied to chips,
followed by etching and examination. "
But Shanahan didn't bother to read the paper, since it in any case provided him an explanation and no further investigations needed.
Eric you insist:
QuoteDo we have consensus, then, that the sparkles in the IR thermography might go back to hot spots and possibly micro-explosions, even if we are predisposed to different explanations for the source?
No we do not. I think that the presentation of the white dots has been (perhaps advertently) misleading. To be given any meaning to the presentation the false color temperature scale should not have stopped short of the unknown temperature that is represented by the white spots. Their true temperature could be 0.1, 1, 10 °C or anything you like above end of scale.
You can see the scale limit line yourself i Figure 5b. Some of the dots are over the line, this means that they are white in Figure 5a. And they are very close to the limit, not far above.
It would have been easy to make a recording from an ordinary piece of hot metal without all the complications to se what it looked like. I am pretty sure it would have had "micro-explosions" as well. Why didn't they do that?
I was asking a non-rhetorical question, which is the opposite of insisting on something. Just to make sure I understand your position, is it something like this?
It is true that there is relatively little variance in the temperatures shown in Fig. 5b. But Fig. 2 (same post) shows that there is sometimes a significant variance. Do we rule out hot spots in the case of Fig. 2? If not, do we allow hot spots as an explanation for the variance in Fig. 2 and rule out hot spots for the pixelation in Fig. 5a?
QuoteMechanical generated artifacts where investigated in the Referrence above. " Scratches and other mechanical insults to the detector chips can also produce ambiguities. This problem was examined by a series of experiments in which various mechanical forces were applied to chips,followed by etching and examination. "
There is no investigation except micro-explosions of an identical type that can determine whether micro-explosions could result in insults that etch in this case. So while such investigation is interesting it does not help.
