The Playground

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

No, I'm merely pointing out that tritium is a very minor product, that if we want to look at the main show, we won't look at tritium, we will look at heat and helium and then we might start to look for signs of how the energy is being transferred from fusion to heat. This is one of the great mysteries of cold fusion, and it is still a mystery.

I guess there is a very simple explanation for the low Tritium level. Just measure the H/D ratio of Your input Deuterium. There is also good reason why DD works that fine!

Quote from randombit0

Paradigmoia ANY camera has been calibrated using a Black Body and comes with it's own calibration files.
Each Optris camera come with specific calibration files associated to serial number of the camera sensor and optics. The system would not work without that.
This procedure guarantee that you can measure temperature and also radiated heat if the total emissivity is known.

Yes.

But why does one need to know the total emissivity (beforehand)? If, as you have previously asserted, can use the total emissivity figure as the user emissivity function for the camera, then the reverse should be true. Simply measure the emissivity of the object using the Optris IR camera and a thermocouple to plot the total emissivity vs temperature curve.

Of course, this actually does not work properly with selective emitters like alumina, although it may work pretty well with an acid etched steel tube painted with special high emissivity paint. Try this experiment with an un-fuelled alumina tube with a heater element in it. Then paint it with the high emissivity paint and do it again. You do not need to get the temperature up to 1400 °C. Whatever the temperature limit of the paint is should be good enough (maybe 800°C ?). You will need to keep good track of the electrical power input. I recommend using the same power, in steps, in both tests.
Edit: Do both temperature and power steps. It will be more informative.

Ask yourself: why does it now do something different?

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

[quote='Wyttenbach','https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/3261-The-Playground/?postID=23267#post23267']

PdD Cold fusion is the conversion of deuterium to helium and heat, with the mechanism being a mystery.

NiH? I have no clue. Something, maybe. The evidence is all far, far weaker.

LENR is atomic disintegration resulting in the production of mesons and strange matter. A resultant secondary reaction might be muon fusion.

Muon-catalyzed fusion (μCF) is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at temperatures significantly lower than the temperatures required for thermonuclear fusion, even at room temperature or lower. It is one of the few known ways of catalyzing nuclear fusion reactions.

See:

THE WAR ON COLD FUSION

THE WAR ON COLD FUSION

Lomax wrote:

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... it came from what I'd call a Rossi fan base, which sometimes is loosely interested in real LENR, but mostly is ignorant and outside of that conversation.

The Rossi fan base at one point in 2011 included you, when you said "I'm willing to bet a significant chunk of my net worth on Rossi being real..." I take that as an indictment of your judgement.

Lomax wrote:

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It is mostly pseudoskepticism. They could not get published in any serious journal under peer review.

Especially not if they don't try, which for the most part, they don't. Just as no one tries to publish skeptical papers on phlogiston.

But this criticism also applies to one of your favorite experiments -- the correlation of heat and helium in palladium deuteride experiments. Since Miles (more than 20 years ago), no replication has been published in any serious journal under peer review. And it's not that refereed publication represents definitive proof, but if there were any merit, it should at least be able to clear that modest hurdle.

Lomax wrote:

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... not phony ones or irrelevancies like Krivit's oft-repeated "convicted felon." Krivit also called the founder of Energetics Technologies a "quack doctor," which is, ah, a gross misrepresentation of Irving Dardik. Pseudoskeptics and yellow journalists like Krivit reduce complex stories to sound bites.

Dardik's wikipedia page (that you referenced) doesn't mention that "In 1995, New York State medical licensing authorities found him guilty of fraud, exercising undue influence, guaranteeing satisfaction or a cure, and failing to maintain adequate records. Case records indicate that he had charged four MS patients from $30,000 to $100,000 for their treatment. His New York medical license was revoked, he was fined $40,000, and his New Jersey license was subsequently relinquished." (see www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/Dardik/index.html for links to official documents)

So, "quack doctor" is a pretty accurate representation of the man.

Dardik found a more hospitable home within the cold fusion community, where by some miracle the same superwaves he used to treat multiple sclerosis also triggered nuclear reactions. And the community ate it up, awarding him with some kind of cold fusion award. He seems to have exited the field (presumably with a handsome profit) after Energetics was absorbed by Missouri University.

Lomax wrote:

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Cold fusion was never shown, through the process of science, to be artifact.

The onus is on those who claim the phenomenon to deliver the evidence, and cold fusion was never shown, through the "process of science", to be real. That's why the MFMP formed -- to show that it's real.

Proving a negative is much more difficult, and also unnecessary. The extraordinary nature of cold fusion has been established "through the process of science", with copious, consistent, and reproducible experimental evidence. When reported observations are more plausibly attributed to artifact, experimental error, and confirmation bias, than to unprecedented and unidentified nuclear reactions, then it is reasonable to remain skeptical of the claim of such reactions.

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The rejection was really a rumor that took off and became "fact" without having an actual foundation.

It was neither rumor, nor is it considered fact. The rejection was simply based on a century of nuclear and condensed matter physics, and the lack of good evidence for the the phenomenon. "Rumors" of non-existence don't take off when the evidence for existence is good. No "rumor" could have thwarted the advance of HTSC or flight or BECs.

Lomax wrote:

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The 2004 U.S. DoE review, 18 neutral scientists, given a brief survey of the field, came surprisingly close to accepting cold fusion as nuclear in nature,

I would agree that it's surprising that 1 out of 18 would consider evidence for nuclear reactions to be conclusive. But it's probably because they put one token cold fusion believer on the panel.

Even so, the panel was unanimously opposed to allocating funds for the field, and this really says it all. It is completely inconceivable to me that a rational scientist would reject special funding for cold fusion if they thought it had a reasonable chance of being real (nuclear). And for that reason, it is safe to ignore the judgement of the one panel member who considered the evidence for nuclear reactions to be conclusive; he must be irrational to consider the evidence conclusive and yet oppose special funding for the field.

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1. "Cold fusion" is undefined, the actual claim by Pons and Fleischmann was of an "unknown nuclear reaction."

Not that it makes much difference, but for the sake of accuracy, the press release of March 23, 1989 claims in its first sentence "Two scientists have successfully created a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature...."

In the same release, Fleischmann is quoted as saying "We realize we are singularly fortunate in having the combination of knowledge that allowed us to accomplish a fusion reaction in this new way."

Moreover, the title of their first paper is "Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium".

Now, that paper does mention "unknown nuclear process or processes", and presumably you downplay DD fusion because the signature radiation is not observed. But then, no other more plausible nuclear process has been proposed in 27 years, so no matter how you slice it, the claim involves unprecedented and inconceivable, and therefore highly implausible nuclear processes. And nothing in 27 years has made them more plausible, or even constrained the possibilities in any credible way. Indeed, the evidence represented in the refereed literature has only become weaker as the experiments improved.

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But substantial neutrons were never claimed. Low levels were, and the Pons and Fleischmann neutron claims were artifact, from rushed work to see if they could detect neutrons as Jones had claimed.

The entire paper was rushed and sloppy, considering the list of errata was a quarter as long as the paper itself. When McKubre improved on the calorimetry several years later, the size of the claim (absolute and COP) where reduced to typical levels of artifacts in calorimetry. And several years later, he admitted that even those much more modest claims were optimistic: "with hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature, and that this has limited the progress achieved…”

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2. These physicists are not familiar with the experimental evidence, and the methods of cold fusion are generally outside of what physicists do.

Physicists are familiar with calorimetry, electrolysis, and mass spectrometry. Certainly if someone like you, without even an undergraduate degree in physics or chemistry, considers himself competent enough to pass judgement, someone with a PhD in physics and years of experience in research, and who studies the best evidence for 6 months (like Huizenga), or for many years (like Morrison), they are also qualified to be skeptical.

Moreover, some of the more celebrated skeptics (Nathan Lewis and Glenn Seaborg) were chemists.

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The classic rare branch of d-d fusion that produces helium must have a gamma ray, it's required by conservation of momentum. So is this finding impossible?

No. There may be other possible ways to convert deuterium to helium, and any process that does it, if there is no major energy leakage through radiation, will have the observed heat/helium ratio, by the laws of thermodynamics.

One can always say there may be other ways, but that doesn't mean they are plausible, and in particular, more plausible than artifacts or errors significant enough to explain the erratic, marginal, and noisy results. There may be ways to make an anti-gravity vest, but if someone claims it, he still has to produce evidence, and it better not be a vest tied to a hot air balloon.

The point is that an energy density a million times higher than chemical, with power at the level of watts, and at ordinary laboratory conditions could be made unequivocal, but in 27 years of protracted efforts, no one has been able to do it. Indeed, better experiments invariably produce weaker evidence.

Lomax wrote:

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I urge those who think that "mainstream science" rejects cold fusion to look at some sources. Start with ... Mckubre's excellent article on the state of evidence for LENR.

Now, why would you consult the paper of a long-time LENR advocate to get a sense of the *mainstream* view? Everyone knows how important cold fusion would be if it were real, so it would appear in the premier journals, like Science, Nature, PRL, JACS. Even papers on polywater and N-rays appeared in those journals. So, check with them to determine if the field is accepted by the mainstream.

Or if you must consult cold fusion researchers, then consider the recent paper by Pam Boss in which she complains about rejections from prestigious journals. Or look at the slides Hagelstein opens his talks with that say publishing is difficult and working on cold fusion threatens your career. That suggests mainstream largely rejects cold fusion.

Or look no further than Lomax's post, in which he admits "how vehement is popular opinion among, especially, "nuclear physicists" would would believe that it is impossible."

Or consider the fact that the journal that published many of the key papers in the field in the 90s (J. Electroanal. Chem.) stopped publishing in the field around the year 2000.

Or look up the scientometric analyses of the publication pattern in cold fusion, that show it fits the pattern of pathological sciences, and is very different from that of accepted fields. Just consider the current rate of publication in refereed journal. In the 90s it was in the dozens per year, but in the last decade it averages more like a half dozen, and the number of new claims of excess power in the last decade is much less than one per year.

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Then look at a Wikversity page I put together some years back: [...]

That is a page with sources from 2005 and more recently. Peer-reviewed reviews are bolded. I count 20 of them through 2010.

That's about 10 times more reviews than experimental claims of excess power. And infinitely more than claims of heat vs helium. A good sign of a moribund field.

But they're not all peer-reviewed reviews anyway. If you look at the list, you find that:

• Five of them are from the same person you referred to (in the same post) as phony, a pseudoskeptic, and a yellow journalist, and only two of those 5 are in (very low impact) journals. It's funny how a pseudo skeptical yellow journalist will do just fine when it suits your purposes.

• Only 9 are in mainstream refereed journals, including some decidedly 3rd rate journals. The others are in books, encyclopedia, or the LENR Sourcebook -- a special publication connected to the LENR symposia held at some ACS meetings.

• Only 9 are listed in Britz's database, referred to in your list, and only 6 are classified as reviews. One is very clearly a theory paper by Hagelstein, one is a "comment", and one (in the Sourcebook) is confined to one groups early work in the 90s.

So, you misrepresent the situation by claiming there are 20 peer-reviewed reviews between 2005 and 2010.

Lomax wrote:

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There are extremely few extremely skeptical articles on cold fusion appearing in journals over the last ten years, and, in fact, beyond the Letter of Kirk Shanahan to the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, which was a critique of a review, not a primary review, I don't know of any.

An Italian group published a rebuttal to neutron emission claims, and offered some plausible CR-39 artifacts that may have caused spurious effects (Faccini et al., Eur Phys J. C 74 (2014) 1).

Tennfors (Eur Phys J Plus 128 (2013) 1 ) and Ciuchi et al. (Euro Phys J C 72 (2012)1) published rebuttals to the WL theory.

Dmitriyeva et al. (Thermochim. Acta 543 (2012) 260) debunked the Arata gas-loading claims, which are just about the only excess heat claims in the last decade in refereed literature.

A little further back, Kowalski published a negative article about CR-39 (Eur Phys J Appl Phys 44 (2008) 287).

And there are at least two analyses of the publication record, which show that the cold fusion publication record is distinctly different from real fields, and closely resembles that of other pathological sciences: Bettencourt et al, Journal of Informetrics 3 (2009) 210–221, and Ackermann, Scientometrics 66 (2006) 451.

And there's a comparison of cold fusion with phlogiston in an essay about trying to prove a negative (Labinger & Weininger, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 44 (2005) 1916.

And all these are in spite of the fact that most skeptics simply ignore the field. It hardly seems worth the trouble to refute claims that no one of any stature takes seriously anyway.

Scientific literature reflects the view of scientists. Any subject that is not fringe science appears in refereed journals. A subject like cold fusion would appear thousands of times a year if it were viewed as anything but pseudoscience.

And yet, not counting the special issue, there have been *zero* claims of excess heat in the literature in the last 6 years (according to the Britz bibliography 2010 - 2015), and *zero* papers on the helium correlation in more than 15 years. Even if you include the special issue, it mainly represents reviews of work from before 2010.

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The tables have been turned. If there is difficulty accessing journals now, it is is more on the skeptical side.

You should inform Hagelstein and Pam Boss about this, because they still complain about rejections.

Lomax wrote:

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Basically, the ash is helium and nothing else, from PdD experiments. The heat generated is consistent with the conversion of deuterium to helium and heat, with no major energy leakage (as with neutrinos). The correlation between heat and helium was established, first, by Miles with a significant experimental series, announced in 1991. That work continued and the correlation has been confirmed by about a dozen independent groups.

This is not accurate. Miles claimed a very weak correlation, in which results changed by an order of magnitude between interpretations, in which 4 control flasks also had helium, in which most of the controls were performed after the fact in a different experiment, when maybe their exclusion of helium had improved, and in which one experiment that produced substantial excess heat but no helium was simply ignored. And if the quantitative correlation with the amount of heat was weak when the glass flasks were used, it was essentially absent when the experiment improved and metal flasks were used.

Miles himself admitted the weakness of the results: "The production of helium-4 in these experiments is a very difficult concept to prove since there is always the possibility of atmospheric helium contamination. More studies reporting helium-4 production will likely be required before our helium results become convincing to most scientists."

Miles' results were challenged in the refereed literature, and after that no quantitative correlation met the modest standard of peer review.

Of the dozen "confirmations" Lomax refers to here,

1) One of the few refereed papers on helium after Miles (Gozzi) admits the helium levels are not definitive.

2) Aoki and Takahashi report results that suggest an anti-correlation of heat and helium

3) Luch has continued experiments until recently, but stopped reporting helium

4) Arata's helium levels seem orders of magnitude too low

5) DeNinno's helium levels are 10 times too high

6)The claimed values provided by Bush and Lagowski were not to Storms' liking, "so the values in Table 3 are based on detailed information communicated to Storms by Bush in 1998 (Storms 1998)." None of this information is communicated to the reader to give confidence to this re-analysis.

7) And even McKubre admits at first that "it has not been possible to address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation"

8.) A large fraction of the results used in Storms' 2010 review come from McKubre's gas-loading experiment, reported sketchily in a conference proceeding in 2000. But using the data from one cell out of 16, and treating the observations as 13 independent measurements is grossly misleading for the following reasons:

(i) What is observed (or claimed) is a steady increase of the helium over a period of 20 days, and a constant excess power of less than 100 mW. Both of these could be caused by artifact -- helium infusion (a leak) to produce the steady increase in helium, and an error in interpreting isolated temperatures to give a small excess power. The result of these two phenomena are that both the total energy and the helium increase together, even if they're caused by two completely independent errors. So the claimed correlation here is meaningless. But more importantly, it's really only one result. The graph (Fig. 3) actually only shows 10 data points, so it's not clear where the 13 came from, but it could have been measured 100 times. That wouldn't make the results more significant, but would have made for a much sharper histogram, which is to say that once the observation of a steady increase is established, the number of measurements is arbitrary.

(ii) In Fig 2, it is shown that the helium measurements for that cell actually continue for another 15 days, and the concentration peaks and then decreases, even while the total energy presumably continues to increase. Why were these additional points not used?

(iii) The fact that the level saturates suggests helium infusion. The level (as measured) does exceed the putative background value by something less than a factor of 2, but the problem is *measurement* of the background value is not reported, nor is any calibration of the concentration measurement presented. So, it's possible the levels are off a little, or that the background is elevated. Miles reported earlier that the helium background in their lab was twice the normal background, which is not surprising given the usual presence of helium cryogenics and helium glove-boxes in physics labs.

(iv) The estimate of excess power was not made using any kind of reliable *calorimetry*, but by the measurement of isolated temperatures, and by methods that are not described in any detail. This kind of determination of excess power was shown to be seriously flawed in CERN's replication of the Piantelli work, where CERN attributed the apparent excess power to changes in the thermal properties of the nickel caused by hydrogen absorption. And they were claiming tens of watts. Here, only about 90 mW is claimed, so that result has little credibility. Furthermore, determinations of excess power were not reported for any of the other cells, and in particular the cells that showed no helium.

(v) A general comment. Only one of the 3 references Storms gives for this work is easily accessible (ICCF8, 2000), but that document is woefully inadequate as a scientific report. Much is left out, and many questions are unanswered. If that's the best McKubre can do, or if he doesn't have good answers to those questions, it's not surprising that the work was never published in a proper journal, and for the same reason, it is completely unjustified to use the data from a single dubious cell to comprise more than half of the data points contributing to Storms helium ratio in the 2010 review.

After Miles disputed paper, none of the data Storms considered good enough to calculate a ratio were published in refereed journals.

That's what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion.

Many thanks to Joshua Cude for detailing the extensive He results part of the anti-heat-He correlation argument. I fully agree that while one can cite Miles’ claims to heat-He correlations, detailed examination leads to what Joshu outlined. Reproducibility is required in science and it hasn’t been obtained to date. However, there is another part of the argument against that Joshu didn’t cover, namely the anti-heat argument, and this is primarily what I referred to in my prior post.

Since Abd has so much trouble understanding this I would like to do a little ‘change of venue’ to clarify. Let’s suppose a researcher published/posted/whatevered a claim that he got excess heat in a classic F&P Pd-D experiment. (No big deal, lots of claims like that.) Further, let’s suppose he reported a correlation of the excess heat magnitude to the number of times a leprechaun ran through his backyard during the experimental run (he lives in Ireland of course, and has built a highly sensitive leprechaun detector, using well known principles that are centuries old).

Now, most reasonable people would immediately dismiss this claim because they know leprechauns don’t exist. Technically that would be incorrect, because you can’t prove a negative. You could prove leprechauns exist if you could catch one somehow, but not catching one proves nothing except you’re no good at catching leprechauns. But generically speaking, most people would think our hypothetical claimant was a bit off. His claim would be ignored because he is trying to correlate to a clearly fictitious value, which is a true principle (i.e., you correlating to a fictitious number gives a fictitious result).

Now back to our case, my 2002 paper shows how a ‘fake’ excess heat signal can arise in a classic F&P type cell, and thereby establishes some publication criteria for excess heat claims. Specifically, one needs to describe the calibration method used, which includes the equation form with actual constants *and* a report on the variability on those constants over time and different runs. To date this has never been done, with the exception of Dr. Storms’ original ICCF8 presentation of the data I reanalyzed in my 2002 paper. There, he reports the method, the equation, and the constants obtained from two different calibration methods (Joule heater and electrolysis heat). And guess what, the constants were different. This means that for the same experimental conditions, he would get two different excess heat values depending on which equation he used to interpret his data. So, the limited data we have on hand suggests that CCS problem can be present in excess heat data, yet no one ever addresses this.

*Therefore*, there is no compelling reason to believe the reported excess heat values are real, and as in the leprechaun case, no reason to believe any ‘correlation’ to this fictitious value. Until the apparent excess heat signals are confirmed as real, any discussion of a heat-He correlation is just like talking about a heat-leprechaun correlation. If that’s of value to you, go for it. But I’m ignoring it.

I also note that ‘Planet Abd’ is a bit unusual. There, if your 4-yr. old child asks you “Daddy (or Mommy), where does the stuff go when you flush the toilet?” your explanation is just you ‘sputtering’. Likewise, “Daddy, why does the sun always rise in the same place?” you sputter more when you answer your darling child. I’m glad I live on Planet Earth…

Oh, one other thing…

On Planet Abd, the word ‘rebut’ has a different meaning than here on Earth. Here we use the following definition (thefreedictionary.com)

rebut, refute - To rebut a statement is to offer clear evidence or a reasoned argument against it; to refute a statement is to prove it wrong (neither means "contradict" or "deny").

On Planet Abd, the words “clear evidence” and “reasoned argument” and “prove it wrong” are missing. I can’t access Planet Abd’s dictionary, but their definition of ‘rebut’ is obviously “to reply to”. So, on Planet Abd, I *have* been rebutted, but not on Planet Earth.

Readers, take care when you read things from Planet Abd….you could be impacted by similar difficulties.

Correlation in hinsight is weak. That's why found correlation needs to have a follow up much probably with a sound statistical treatment in order
to verify the claim. Why on earth does not the CF folks team up with a good math-stat department and make sure that no statistical blunders are done. It is
true that problem of reproducing a finding is not fatal to do science. Ask any medical doctor that have taken a phd about it. But it is also true that when
randomness come into play whishfull thinking becomes you worst enemy. I am very suspicious to CF just because I don't find that statistical issues is carefully
enough contemplated and discussed. Well done experiments using randomization and statistics can produce amazingly robust proofs. As an example. Consider
the claim that heavy water is a strong enabler for an effect. Then do a blind test where you randomize 10 tests with ordinary water and 10 tests with heavy water.
Then meassure the effect and order them and use a nonparametric test to see if there is an influence of heavy water onto the result. A positive outcome of that test
would be amazing and I'm sure funnel quite a lot of effort into the field.

@stefan

The problem with the normal/heavy water experiments is that there is a very strong iostope effect in general, and specifically for Pd. The conditions to achieve the same H isotope concentration in Pd are different for H and D (and T). Therefore you can use the same parametric settings on your power supplies and gas flows, etc., but you will have different conc. of H or D in the Pd. If you adjust for the isotope effect, you now have different experimental voltages, pressures, etc. What people have to do is just find a reproducible method, meaning one that can be translated easily from lab to lab and from one piece of Pd to another. That isn't going to happen though, in my opinion at least, until they recognize that non-nuclear explanations might be valid and they then go about exploring parameters related to that paradigm.

@kirkshanahan,

I agree that searching for reproducable results are the ultimate goal. But how to reach it. You need funding and support. And yes if the physics is different the blindness fails and
also the assumption of the isotope effect would indicate a nuclear origin. But the idea remains try design an experiment so that either the effect is there or not in a blind way, in a
sense you calibrate the experiment quite nicely and by randomizing you can factor away a lot of possible environmental effects that could influence the result and increase the
sensitivity and strongness of the result.

Also when the effect is spurious it would be good to try to read up about the field of design of experiments. There one discuss methodology on how to optimize parameters
in order to improve the effect under uncertainty.

Quote from stefan

@kirkshanahan,

I agree that searching for reproducable results are the ultimate goal.

The focus in LENR experimentation must move away from excess heat, to the measurement of excess electrons, sub atomic particles, and light. These new metrics are not subject to the wet/dry steam canards. They are highly reactive to the activity of the LENR reaction. A subatomic particle production rate of 10^^13 particles might result in just 10 milliwatts of excess heat production. Particle production rate at that high rate is easy to measure and science would be blind not to recognize such a result.