Jed Rothwell on an Unpublished E-Cat Test Report that “Looks Like it Worked”

Quote from Eric Walker

cam wrote:
A fraction of the gammas may be converted into monocinetic electrons. Internal conversion is not a problem, is it. You can see it as an internal photoelectric effect concerning a fraction of the gammas. Does it matter?

Quote from Eric Walker

Hermes and I were exploring one possibility, where excited levels de-excite by transferring the energy to nearby electrons. You may not share the initial assumption about nuclear levels of energy production, which is fine.

This should be handled in atechnical thread!

My first thoughts how the energy output of LENR is transported was similar. But we are talking of MeV up to 10 MeV per Alpha. With Alphas we must not guess. They bang the lattice and destroy everything, leaving a big crater behind.
If energy levels of MeV's must be dissipated by electrons, then they must be massively coupled. Single electron energy transfers would result in gammas and X-rays. If one could show that a plane in a lattice is reacting coordinated, then the energy/electron (1000-10000 taking part) would be much lower, but it still would be way to high.
My current best guess how the LENR energy is transferred is pure single pulse EMF, like in a collapsing star. The question is, how the field is shaped. Radial isotropic, planar, or like in a black hole polar?

Quote from Wyttenbach

This should be handled in atechnical thread!

I don't have an issue when different topics are discussed in the context of a thread. This is a hangup that other people have. It is an unhelpful preoccupation in my opinion. These threads are like conversations around a dinner table. They are mostly unstructured, and they are best left that way.

Quote from Wyttenbach

My first thoughts how the energy output of LENR is transported was similar. But we are talking of MeV up to 10 MeV per Alpha. With Alphas we must not guess. They bang the lattice and destroy everything, leaving a big crater behind.
If energy levels of MeV's must be dissipated by electrons, then they must be massively coupled. Single electron energy transfers would result in gammas and X-rays. If one could show that a plane in a lattice is reacting coordinated, then the energy/electron (1000-10000 taking part) would be much lower, but it still would be way to high.
My current best guess how the LENR energy is transferred is pure single pulse EMF, like in a collapsing star. The question is, how the field is shaped. Radial isotropic, planar, or like in a black hole polar?

Two cases are relevant to the preceding discussion — fragmentation and alpha decay. Consider alpha decay. The typical range of energies is between 4 and 9 MeV. But since we're considering the possibility of induced decay, the energies can go even lower, down to 2 MeV or lower, say. At these energies, the alphas will tear apart the local lattice. The lattice will then go on to partially repair itself. A surface with all kinds of pits and deformities is often what has been seen when LENR researchers have taken a microscope to cathodes and materials they believe to have been undergoing LENR.

Now consider fragmentation (e.g., induced fission). A typical energy for something like this might be ~ 16 MeV, for example, if 104Pd could fission into 46Ca and 58Fe. That's 16 MeV that is split between two moderately massive nuclei, and the velocity of the fragments will be correspondingly lower. These fragments will also do great damage to the surrounding lattice, but they will not be moving all that fast, compared, e.g., to an alpha traveling with 23 MeV.

When alpha decay or fission occurs, the daughters can be expected to be populated in excited levels. I recall typical levels for this kind of thing are 0-2 MeV; presumably this is a function of how much energy is available from the Q value of the reaction. If an electron carried away this kind of energy, there would be Bremsstrahlung and so on. But much would depend upon the distribution of levels that end up being populated in the daughters. If the levels are usually less than 1 MeV, it might be hard to detect Bremsstrahlung shielded by a pressurized stainless steel vessel or passing through layers of substrate.

Now have the fragments travel outwards, away from the lattice, at the surface or only a few layers into it. There will be less damage and less interaction with lattice sites.

Another interesting possibility to contemplate is some kind of EMP pulse, as you mention. This is the idea behind several electrons participating; instead of several, perhaps many electrons participate. Quantum mechanics has something to say about the likelihood of a particular transition as more participants are added.

Quote from IH Fanboy

Agreed. I'm pretty sure Penon doesn't need a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning engineer (aka technician) directing him.

Oh yes he does! Either he made many dumb mistakes which no trained HVAC technician would make, or he deliberately set the thing up to give the wrong answer and exaggerate the heat by a huge margin.

@Eric Walker

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In 1989, one of the reasons that scientists rejected the possibility of LENR ("cold fusion" back then) was that there were none of the expected gammas.

For the F&P reaction neutrons are the hallmark. No neutrons, no reaction. Looking for a few neutrons is easier than looking for millijoules. If you can measure heat easily in a F&P reactor, then you will be killed by neutrons soon.

Ascoli wrote:

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I followed your advice, and I found this:

thesaurus.com/misspelling?term=whacky

whacky

no thesaurus results

But checking another dictionary I found this:

urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whacky

Whacky

Similar to wacky, except to emphasis "whack". (the sound you hear when something is struck with a long flat board), Meaning that something is stupid and should be struck with a long flat board or something else worthy of inflicting damage.

So, the extra "h" provides to the word a particular taste, the usual that you have habit to use with anyone disagrees with you.

Display More

Either you feign ignorance when it suits you, or you need some help in using the internet.

I also suggested looking whacky up in a dictionary, and every bona fide dictionary I checked (OED, American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam-Webster (on-line), Dictionary.com (a tab on your thesaurus.com site), the Apple dictionary (which uses the New Oxford American Dictionary) lists whacky as an alternative or variant spelling of wacky. The OED gives quotations of whacky used in this sense from the Economist, and David Lodges novel Changing Places. The American Heritage Dictionary says wacky is a variant of whacky, probably from the phrase "out of whack".

And even the site you went to -- Thesaurus.com -- asks if you meant "wacky", which upon clicking it, tells you that it is a variant of whacky.

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Your scope is only to polemize and in order to do that you started quoting my old comments on ecn, giving them your own interpretations,

No, I quoted them to show that you have frequently hinted that Rothwell and all these scientists, technicians and academicians conspired together to lie to the public for some unspoken purpose, because, as I argued, that is far far less plausible than the scientists either having (had) sympathy for the claims (the most plausible) or being complicit in a scam.

Ascoli reproducing ECN stuff:

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TC:

I don’t know which rational answer he gave. I am very sorry for him, but I cannot dialogue with someone which polemicizes on each single phrase, and considers ridicule or idiot any opinion different from his truth. If you let me know in a proper way the rational answers you are referring to, I will respond.

Please don't feel sorry for me. I much prefer that you let my rebuttals stand for whatever audience we have.

But no, I don't consider every opinion different from mine idiotic. But some are whacky.

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[...] Suppose for a moment that one entity hired Rossi. What better complementary wage than giving him the opportunity to appear as the savior of the world. The same for the professors which cooperated with him, promising them the Nobel prize. To me it seems a more logical explanation, than supposing Rossi going around for finding people willing to praise him and his friends.

This, for example, is in my opinion a whacky idea. An American entity cannot promise Nobel prizes, nor is there any chance those professors will get a Nobel prize for a phenomenon that doesn't work. Or do you think the Nobel committee can be persuaded to become part of the conspiracy?

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TC:

Yes, I see. People who are aware of the ecat story are divided into two parties: those who believe that Rossi has the solution for solving the major problems of the world, and those who say that he is a scammer. But, please, suppose again that Rossi has been effectively hired by someone, don’t you think that this is the best scenario for such an hypothetical entity? Featuring a safe “exit strategy” which fits well with the Rossi’s history?

Of course, such a division would suit their alleged purpose, but such a division would be impossible in your scenario. All those academics (Swedish and Italian) and the journalists at VOA and elsewhere, and the scientists at NASA and the military, who you have argued are too smart to believe in the ecat, must therefore be pretending to believe in it for the purpose of your theory, and are therefore not in one of the two camps you named. And if it is so obvious that they couldn't be believers, how can their endorsement be effective? How does one ensure that none of them would expose the sham? How would you even approach an academic to suggest he help promote a scientific farce to the world, without taking a risk of exposure?

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TC:

Sorry, but I said more than one time that the word “conspiracy” does not fit my view.

Well, "conspiracy theory" is a pejorative for a reason, and you want to avoid that. But you have argued that many people are faking their belief in the ecat for some purpose, possibly at the behest of some entity or organization. You have called it a machination or an operation. That is, they are conspiring to fool the public. It doesn't matter how many times you say it's not a conspiracy theory, it *is* a conspiracy theory. It's obvious the reason you are so reluctant to describe it in any detail is because the more you say about it, the more conspiratorial it appears.

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About the facts: if Rossi is a scammer, what about Melich?

Melich? He's a long-time cold fusion believer. So, in the scam scenario, he also believes (or believed) Rossi's claims. What else?

Ascoli wrote:

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As for the "oil prices" issue, mentioned in a your own quote, you know that it is not a conjecture of mine, but I always referred to these two mails of JR on Vortex:[...]

So, I let the author of these 2 mail, who already liked your comment, to explain you their real meaning.

You have missed the point. Maybe it is your poor command of English.

If I remember, Rothwell simply said that widespread belief in cold fusion would affect oil prices. That is self-evident. My point was that was that you cited that idea as a possible motivation for some entity like the American military (which burns a lot of oil) to hire Rossi to be an "actor" and lie to the public about the functioning of the ecat.

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The same for the aphorism of Stan Szpak that I found on this comment of him:

Again, you miss the point. It was the context of your citation of these comments that hinted at the conspiracy theory that I claim is extremely implausible.

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And finally, on this last point, I would like not to be misunderstood:

me:

No, you didn't understand, maybe due to my English...

I'm afraid your subsequent ramblings about Churchill do not improve the clarity of your ideas. Maybe it is your English.

Churchill's speculative prediction about fusion from 1931 was wrong. Hmmm. How does that inform the debate?

And if Leonardo da Vinci had predicted in 1500 that man would succeed at flight in 50 years, would the failure have made a difference one way or the other?

Quote from cam

Do you mean fission? Fission products are always beta/gamma emitters.

Always? Think of p+11B or p+15N reactions. There are many other counter examples where fragmentation produces non radio-active daughters. In fact I suggest that the eventual theoretical explanation for LENR will be along these lines.

Quote from cam

Luckily the Forum puts the calorimetry aside and deals with nuclear matter. Enough with pipes, probes, dry or wet vapour. We are not plumbers but physicists and chemists.

I agree. After 27 years we must move beyond calorimetry and excess heat and make nuclear measurements to elucidate the nuclear reactions taking place (if any). It's alll very well inventing a way to make hot water but it will never be licensed (and will have no commercial future) unless the underlying science is completely understood. Which industrial nation will license an unknown nuclear technology?

Quote from Eric Walker

With Alphas we must not guess. They bang the lattice and destroy everything, leaving a big crater behind.

I think you are guessing. Alphas weigh 8000 times more than an electron and when interacting with electrons they can only accelerate them to their own speed (conservation of momentum). It follows that the maximum kinetic energy gain is 1/8000. So it doesn't leave a big crater behind exactly. (More of a long narrow furrow!). In the case of heavy elements, some X-radiation may occur. But in lighter palladium say, such radiation is absorbed by the apparatus and not observed.

Quote from Eric Walker

104Pd could fission into 46Ca and 58Fe.

Alas the Gamow factor suppresses this fission by 136 orders of magnitude. It has never occured in the history of the universe. But this is a good example that both daughters are stable isotopes!

Quote from Eric Walker

When alpha decay or fission occurs, the daughters can be expected to be populated in excited levels.

The vast majority of alpha decays by even-even isotopes produce no gammas at all and the daughters are created in their ground states just as theory predicts. This is because alpha decay rates are extremely sensitive to the alpha energy available to penetrate the Coulomb barrier. Production of excited daughters is inhibited by orders of magnitude. In the case of actinide fission this effect is less pronounced because the fission energy is hundreds of MeV and the excitation energies much lower.

The thermal conductivity of metals is such that a single nuclear reaction cannot cause visible melting. Observed hot spots must be the result of tens-hundreds of thousands of reactions all occurring in the vicinity. I conclude that the nuclear active site, whatever this name may mean, is not a chemical structure as it clearly survives some very violent treatment. Very few LENR models explain this key observation.

BTW Eric, I'm quite willing to start a new thread for this discussion.

Quote from Hermes

Eric Walker wrote:
With Alphas we must not guess. They bang the lattice and destroy everything, leaving a big crater behind.

I think you are guessing. Alphas weigh 8000 times more than an electron and when interacting with electrons they can only accelerate them to their own speed (conservation of momentum). It follows that the maximum kinetic energy gain is 1/8000. So it doesn't leave a big crater behind exactly. (More of a long narrow furrow!). In the case of heavy elements, some X-radiation may occur. But in lighter palladium say, such radiation is absorbed by the apparatus and not observed.

The quoting system is being whacky, as the quote you're responding to above was by Wyttenbach. The point that Wyttenbach made was that if an electron carries away the energy of an excited level (2 MeV, say), you'd see Bremsstrahlung from the energetic electron. The supposition isn't that the electron would have been accelerated by the movement of the alpha. It would be that the non-alpha daughter would be left in an excited state, which then decayed by transferring energy to an electron (i.e., something IC-like). But definitely, this is guessing.

Quote from Hermes

Alas the Gamow factor suppresses this fission by 136 orders of magnitude. It has never occured in the history of the universe. But this is a good example that both daughters are stable isotopes!

Indeed. 104Pd is pretty stable. Now crank up the electron density by 1000 or 1 million for a brief moment. (Or perhaps the reverse: momentarily decrease the electron density by some large factor.)

Quote from Hermes

The vast majority of alpha decays by even-even isotopes produce no gammas at all and the daughters are created in their ground states just as theory predicts. This is because alpha decay rates are extremely sensitive to the alpha energy available to penetrate the Coulomb barrier.

This is very convenient in general. Now consider it in light of the point above, about 104Pd.

Quote from Hermes

I conclude that the nuclear active site, whatever this name may mean, is not a chemical structure as it clearly survives some very violent treatment.

My conclusion (but don't tell Ed Storms) is that the "NAE," such as it exists, could be platinum that has been deposited on the surface of a cathode through electrolysis. Platinum has isotopes that are alpha emitters, and being considerably heavier than palladium, it is more likely to fragment than palladium if the suppositions above are true. But one presumes that it's certainly not the only place that LENR takes place.

I'm open to a new thread.

Hi Eric. How do you start a new thread? For now let's continue.

If you could permanently place 11 electrons inside the Pd104 nucleus, I calculate that the fission reaction you propose woulld be enhanced by 103 orders of magnitude which is still not enough to make any measurable heat.

I like your idea about platinum being involved. Does the experimental evidence suggest that the palladium cathode is the sole site of heat production? It's interesting that platinum (as a heater or temperature sensor) is also used in the Ni/H system ...

Quote from IH Fanboy

I will disclose to you that I have no conflicts of interest, no financial gain, and no financial loss, in this whole affair

I was talking about the possible conflict of interest affecting the academic world and other public research institute, not the individuals (you and me included) or the private sector. These last ones are free to use their own time and risk their own money at will, they have just to respect the laws.

On the contrary, the public academic and research institutes have some more obligations, which are well described by these words of professor Stephan Pons (1):
”Let me start with stating that I think I have an obligation to take part in the E-Cat discussion. I am employed by Uppsala University – and thereby in a sense by the Swedish tax-payers – as professor in applied nuclear physics and as such I teach nuclear physics on various levels. In addition, I also give lectures on the topic of “Science and Pseudoscience” in schools, to students, and on the PhD student level.

Given the additional fact that the E-Cat-story, since it began to come to public attention in January 2011, involves people from Uppsala University, it is clear that it would be wrong for me not to honor a university teacher’s duty within the so-called 3rd task. This 3rd task means that I should not only teach and do research within the walls of the university, but also actively spread scientific knowledge to society. The latter very much includes to take part in discussions about science and scientific reasoning in general and to defend science.”

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and in fact my country of origin (U.S.) would likely be placed at a short-term disadvantage given its new-found prominence on the world energy stage with its oil fracking.

All the countries are in serious danger given the unwise politics of the last half century. These politics have been mostly based on the presumption that an energy breakthrough, usually a form of nuclear fusion, would have been available in order to replace abundantly the fossils.

A significative example of this miope way of thinking is provided by an old number of Fusion (2), a magazine edited in the '80 by the Fusion Energy Foundation. All the 88 pages of this special report dedicated to agricolture are worth to be seen, but a good short summary is given in the counter-cover (the last of the linked pdf): "[...] With a full-scale commitment to agricultural research and high-tech, capital-intensive methods, U.S. agriculture will lead the world into the fusion age. [...] The message is clear: With American agricultural methods, there's no limit to the number of mouths the world can feed."

In 1980, when the above magazine was issued (nearly at the expiring date of the symbolic Churchill time limit), the number of mouths to be feed were 4.4 billions. Now they are more than 7.4 millions, and the politics are proposing the same refrain.

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Would your country of origin be placed at a short-term disadvantage if LENR+ proves to be commercially viable?

My country has very little natural resources, and would have been one of the most advantaged by a technology like that, if it were real. I fear that our energetic situation will become increasingly difficult with time, but if we have to hope in LENR+, it means that it is desperate since now.

(1) http://stephanpomp.blogspot.it…cold-fusion-reply-to.html
(2) http://wlym.com/archive/fusion/fusion/19801111-fusion.pdf

Quote from sifferkoll

That is the reason you are here, isn't it? To protect IH value for your friends and maybe cash in a nice FUD fee?

Yeah? Well, we all know that Rossi is paying you. He promised you a cool $1 million when he wins the lawsuit, and he already paid you $100,000. Don't deny it! We know that for a fact. That's your FUD fee. That's the reason you are here, isn't it? You know as well as I do he paid you. So stop playing games and confess.

(Okay, okay, I made that stuff up. But heck, why not? Sifferkoll makes up stuff about me and others and posts it here, so from now on when he does that, I think we should throw this unfounded nonsense at him.)

Quote from Eric Walker

My conclusion (but don't tell Ed Storms) is that the "NAE," such as it exists, could be platinum that has been deposited on the surface of a cathode through electrolysis.

Actually, Ed suggested that hypothesis. One of his experiments indicated that might be the case.

Mary

Quote from Mary Yugo

Hopefully, it would get them to think, ask for proper testing and really do their due diligence but, as we can see, all the skeptical writings did nothing for IH or Woodford.

And you know that for a fact do you Mary, can you provide a link where Woodford suggests this or anything remotely suggesting this?

Best regards
Frank

@Mary Yugo

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most successful scientists, apart maybe from the most exotic cosmology and pure mathematics, are quite conversant with "pipes, probes... and vapor" as well as scientific method, controls and calibrations, theory of science and knowledge, principles of instrumentation, and much more.

Nuclear measurements are much more sensitive than calorimetry. You must consider that producing one joule of energy needs 6,24 exp 12 beta or alpha 1 MeV events. A nuclear measurement expert can detect very few particles in a second. Cold fusionists must face reproducibility problems and still insist on using calorimetric measurements. Detecting neutrons or gamma rays is very easy and doesn't require pipes, probes, wet or dry vapour. This is old, good, classical Technical Physics, very interesting and very useful, but not in cold fusion, where sensitivity matters and nuclear events are claimed.