If these effects were so convincing, why hasn't there been massive investment in them?
You would need to read a lot more about the political and economic context to understand the answer to that question.
Public funding of investigations into LENR?
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There is no connection between input and output power in Pd-D cold fusion. The two are independent. Input is governed by electrochemistry and output by the McKubre equation. You often have one without the other (input with no output or vice versa). They are not proportional. Input does not trigger or modulate output. A cold fusion device is nothing like an amplifier. Input power is only needed to form the material and to keep it from degassing. Other methods have been used. Also, it is easy to lower the input power, for example by bringing the anode and cathode closer together.
Jed wrote : "There is no connection....."
Might I suggest: No apparent connection.....
So, we are studying something of a black box. The box does exhibit some behaviors. Good anti-analogy: "it is nothing like an amplifier". It is not a switch. It requires substantial inputs (until Storms recently, it seemed to nearly always require a specific high level of D loading). I have read of other "inputs" that might be more switchable. For example quite low power laser stimulation (Letts, Cravens and Hagelstein, 2009) in the style of surface plasmon resonance, but nominally two laser (difference frequency) phonon generation.
Jed wrote: 'Also, it is easy to lower the input power, for example by bringing the anode and cathode closer together." Is that surprising? It seems that current or potential per unit of electrode area might be a parameter. Am I reading that right? Lower distance allows one to sustain say areal current density at lower voltage? And then with lower input power and closer electrodes, one gets the same anomalous heat per unit area?
Perhaps some of these anomalies of "acausality" are actually the consequences of inadequate funding. Vastly too few graduate students and post-docs. Too much shaming and ostracizing of senior scientists. Frankly a ridiculously tragic failure of science.
Are there unifying CF / LENR positives in there? I look for those. Some show up in my posts over the years. But, I don't pretend to do anything substantial other than ask questions at my age, and quite a ways from my expertise, such as it might have been.
In any case thanks for these observations Jed, which I take to be one sort of a summary of some your wide reading and experience.
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If these effects were so convincing, why hasn't there been massive investment in them? Why haven't they been scaled up to the level of a power plant?
lenrisnotreal:
Your argument is a form of circular reasoning, which of course is illogical and produces wrong conclusions.
Skepticism is why there has not been massive investment. You cite the lack of investment as reason for skepticism! Hence, the reasoning is circular. Your argument here is based on an unstated and false assumption: that allocation of research funding always efficient, i.e. that it identifies the best research questions, and is never wasted on wrong ideas.A corollary of your argument is this: "If LENR was real, then a majority would already believe it. Since only a minority believe it, it cannot be real." This reasoning is erroneous because it assumes that there can never (at any time) be truths believed/known by a minority of people. This reasoning is obviously wrong, because it precludes the possibility of true knowledge starting in a minority and growing over time to become consensus. For some true discoveries (especially controversial ones based on equivocal evidence), it takes lots of time for consensus to form.
Do you really think that all truths are instantly accepted by a majority? That belief in new, true discoveries cannot start small (as minority opinion) and grow over time?Your argument is equivalent to an assertion that the majority is always right. Its not logical and there are many invalidating counter-examples in the history of science.
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Debarium. let me improve on your corollary:
"If LENR was real, then it would emit a lot of ionizing radiation and everybody would already believe it. Since it doesn't, it cannot be real."
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Debarium. let me improve on your corollary:
"If LENR was real, then it would emit a lot of ionizing radiation and everybody would already believe it. Since it doesn't, it cannot be real."
That statement is not supported by empirical evidence. I agree its reasonable to expect LENR to produce the same ionizing radiation as fusion occurring in other situations. But this is an ASSUMPTION. There is not empirical evidence for the assumption.
There is no empirical evidence showing that fusion in LENR conditions (high electron density within metal, very low deuteron impact energy/momentum, and electron charge screening of coulomb barrier) produces the same ionizing radiation produced from fusion in different (e..g plasma) conditions. There is some ionizing radiation in LENR, but not as much as from nuclear reactions in plasmas or particle beams. For example, the branching ratios for the D+D fusion reaction might not be the same as in a hot plasma. He4 appears to be favored in LENR.
LENR conditions are very different from hot plasmas or particle beams. Hence it cannot be assumed that the reaction products must be the same.There are plausible theoretical arguments for why ionizing radiation would not be emitted in LENR conditions.
For example, Mossbauer spectroscopy demonstrates that immobilization within a lattice affects photon interactions with nuclear energy levels. Nuclear reactions can be affected by chemistry, neighboring atoms and nearby electrons. -
I've read or reviewed dozens of papers on LENR. None of them were persuasive.
Which papers did you read? Please list three of them. Did they include anything by Fleischmann, McKubre or Miles?
All of the experts I know who have reviewed these papers disagree with you. See, for example, the comments by Gerischer.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GerischerHiscoldfusi.pdf
I felt this way mostly because the effects were too small but also because very few had multiple independent replications.
That is factually incorrect.
"Too small" is somewhat nebulous. Mary Yugo defines it as any power level that she has heard of in any experiment. A more scientific definition would be a signal so small that noise from the calorimeter is a significant fraction of the total measurement. As you see in graphs from the major studies, the noise level is low enough that it cannot be confused with the signal, so the power is not "too small" in any technical sense. See, for example, the error bars and blank H2O data here:
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You would need to read a lot more about the political and economic context to understand the answer to that question.
Yes. Start with Beaudette and Mallove. Then read books about other discoveries, such as "How the Laser Happened." Then read a bunch of books about the history of commerce, such as the history of the Transcontinental Railroad.
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But, now that the issue is on my mind, a few speculative points: The heat pump issue is not completely null for me in that a refrigerative phase could be temporally separated rather than spatially separated from the heat output.
That would show up as an endothermic storage phase followed by an exothermic release phase. That always happens with Pd liquid electrolysis. You see a deficit as it loads, and excess as it deloads (degasses). There is usually a slight deficit overall because the Pd does not fully degas.
When there is anomalous cold fusion heat, the endothermic phase never stores enough heat to account for the excess heat that follows. The exothermic phase produces far more heat than the storage phase, or than any chemical storage with any material. When I say "far more" I mean anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 times more per gram of material, during continuously positive, exothermic reactions lasting days or weeks.
When there is no anomalous excess heat, with a very sensitive calorimeter, the exothermic phase balances the endothermic phase closely. As I said, the heat balance is close to zero except for the gas remaining in the Pd. You see the same thing when you charge and then discharge a rechargable battery inside a calorimeter. That is a good way to calibrate.
The exothermic degassing phase usually lasts longer than the endothermic load phase, so the (negative) magnitude of the heat is smaller, so with most calorimeters you cannot detect the latter. It looks like the Pd swallows up heat and never gives it back, like a cake in the oven.
Particularly in view of a plethora "heat after death" reports, which would either be increased or decreased in magnitude by that change of sign for loading energy. That would in turn add or subtract from the magnitude of excess energy produced by CF / LENR / CANR.
Exothermic degassing with a typical cathode can produce at most ~5 mW over 29 days, for a total of about 650 J. This cannot be detected with most calorimeters. Heat after death, in contrast, produced 1.1 MJ in the first several examples, at power levels exceeding 100 W, and a lot more energy in hundreds of subsequent tests. So, it far exceeds the limits of hydrogen storage in Pd. See p. 11:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
The 19th century Pd cigarette lighters that Morrison refers to in this document produced much more heat because they weigh far more Pd than a typical cathode. I have only seen a photo of one, but I estimate it was at least 100 g (3 oz). Most cathodes weigh a few grams.
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Debarium, you wrote:
"There is no empirical evidence showing that fusion in LENR conditions (high electron density within metal, very low deuteron impact energy/momentum, and electron charge screening of coulomb barrier) produces the same ionizing radiation produced from fusion in different (e..g plasma) conditions. There is some ionizing radiation in LENR, but not as much as from nuclear reactions in plasmas or particle beams. For example, the branching ratios for the D+D fusion reaction might not be the same as in a hot plasma. He4 appears to be favored in LENR."
Let us assume that a LENR scheme succeeds in fusing two atomic nucleuses. What we then get is another nucleus. We have chosen the two fusing nucleuses in such a way that the produced nucleus will possess a lot of surplus energy. This we did because we want to harvest its surplus energy. We already know how to harvest chemical energy but whereas a typical chemical reaction yields 1 eV a nuclear reaction may yield 1 Mev, a million times more, just what we crave. So how do we harvest this surplus energy? No problem, the excited nucleus is very anxious to get rid of is surplus energy. This it does by emitting various energetic particles e.g. gamma photons.
Our excited nucleus is also called a "nuclid":
"A nuclide (from nucleus) is an atomic species characterized by the specific constitution of its nucleus, i.e., by its number of protons Z, its number of neutrons N, and its nuclear energy state."
There are thousands of nuclids and their modes of decay have been thoroughly investigated. It does not matter how an excited nuclid was created, be it cold or warm fusion, it will meet the same fate: sudden death with a small number of pieces flying off in various directions.
You may seach the chart of nuclids from left to right, from top to bottom and you will never find a nuclid that disposes of 1 MeV suplus energy in 1 M cosy 1 eV packages. This is why a LENR reaction must produce easily detectable ionizing radiation.
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You may seach the chart of nuclids from left to right, from top to bottom and you will never find a nuclid that disposes of 1 MeV suplus energy in 1 M cosy 1 eV packages. This is why a LENR reaction must produce easily detectable ionizing radiation.
@H-G Branzell : This is lack of physical understanding. Radiation is always generated by potential energy, because in all physic laws with a central energy = potential must be compensated by a tangential moving energy.
Before a LENR reaction any nucleus is in a stable state with only a small potential that can be freed/added. Thus if the result of LENR is fusion only you will never see significant (direct - nuclear level) radiation above some few keV.
Even worse: In D-D fusion at rest (not kinetic) classic theory completely fails to explain how the released 4He (alpha) energy is distributed.
In fact there isn't any central “potential like” nuclear force as Yukawa once postulated. All nuclear energy is stored in rotations. In Deuterium the potential - radial Energy is about 2% of the totally released energy (compared to n + p).
There is radiation in LENR, if the follow up state is generated by fission, like in 7Li +p. Also Beta+- followup reactions may happen, even neutrons may be emitted. Gammas can only be seen as Bremsstrahlung.
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You may seach the chart of nuclids from left to right, from top to bottom and you will never find a nuclid that disposes of 1 MeV suplus energy in 1 M cosy 1 eV packages.
When a several-MeV daughter alpha from alpha decay is stopped in air or in a metal, it will mostly slow down as it excites nearby bound electrons, thereby gradually depositing its energy in the surrounding medium. There is the occasional Coulomb excitation in other nuclei, but this depends upon the other nuclei and their cross section for Coulomb excitation as well as the initial energy of the alpha particle. Please correct me if you know otherwise, but my understanding is that in general there will not be much secondary photon radiation above the noise floor. By such a route several MeV can be thermalized in cozy eV and keV packets. Here I am drawing upon a known example. Perhaps there are unknown pathways as well.
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This is why a LENR reaction must produce easily detectable ionizing radiation.
As you likely know, this has been discussed since the beginning of the CF era (1989). What I like to call "collisional physics" is at the base, and is the source of all of those nuclide tables whether the old and very handy wall charts from GE in the 50s and 60s, or the Norman E. Holden of Brookhaven's National Lab's high flux beam reactor "Table of the Isotopes" occupying well over 100 pages in my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (e.g. 1993-94 74th ed.), or the Table of Isotopes, 2 volume encyclopedia of Firestone and Shirley 1996 etc:
https://books.google.com/books…e=gbs_book_other_versions
or the likely even more compendious IAEA online database.
The branching ratios seen may be considerably artifacts of the form of activation of such nuclear reactions.
How one excites or activates a reaction can have an influence on its products. In other words how one travels over, or through, a reaction coordinate surface can determine what final products are seen, and also how rapidly, or in what form photonically or subatomically, the energy component appears. So in addition to all the efforts that have gone into finding ways to explain how MeV energies might be doled out piecemeal, there is also the possibility that the energy never gets out as a multi MeV photon, because that particular path was an artifact of high energy activation (such as a subatomic collision).... rather than some catalytic activation where an activation barrier such as coulomb was somehow simply undermined. Let me suggest that, unlike in collisional systems, in condensed matter and especially in metals, Fermi's "electron sea" may easily accommodate and disperse very large energies without creating a commensurate MeV photon.
In such a system one would very well expect to see for example "craters" of molten metal. Such craters have been repeatedly reported.
See for example EM images in SPAWAR data presented at March 2009 American Chemical Society: https://www.google.com/search?…zAF#imgrc=TNNS-zF-85HdxM:
Of course I mention these because they have been documented in considerable detail and analyzed for the likely energy released in creating such "melts" in a metallic Pd (mp 1555 C, specific heat of Pd: 0.24 J/K; latent heat of fusion of Pd: 17.6 kJ/mol.) and aqueous milieu (water heat of vaporization 40.65 kJ/mol, 5 times the energy needed to get from 0 to 100 C). Needless to say the energies are huge, and they are often, if not always, apparently completely thermal from the "get-go" so to speak.
So while CF / LENR / CANR / LANR may sometimes produce ionizing radiation, it is not a necessity, and in fact often is not nearly commensurate with the thermal energies observed.
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This is why a LENR reaction must produce easily detectable ionizing radiation.
It must according to some theories, but experiments prove that it does not. Yet it produces helium in the same ratio to the heat as D+D fusion does. Therefore it is fusion, and therefore the theory is wrong.
How can this be? As Schwinger put it, "The circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion."
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf
Schwinger also said, "Have we forgotten that physics are empirical?"
"Empirical" is defined as "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." It seems you have, indeed, forgotten this.
This is how science works. You don't dictate to nature. You cannot say what "must" happen. There is only one "must:" whatever the experiments show is true, you must accept as true. When replicated experiments conflict with theory, the experiments always win, theory always loses. No exceptions are granted.
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My only say in this is nature is a whore, she will not make nice straight lines, she tears them apart, most of the "Mother Nature created" anomalies coined as the simplest explanation usually have little science attached to them. once you decide this as truth and look around again at artifact listed on the net as natural anomalies and accept this answer without other plausibiitys we get all the imformation from the debunk class. simple example are these cherry blossom stones. What other way can the contaminants be removed after being carefully assembled, amost all the same size and patterns and needed to be grounded. This sounds like a good place to look for a cold fusion association. If the cherry blossom stones were found miles under the ground I might buy into it. Or look for :how hematite turns into crystal will bring up endless pages of jewelry and some Powers of healing BS.
It all sounds like stonewalling of the evidence of cold fusion. And there is a lot of it.
They seem more like spent cathodes.
back to my cave..
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Gentlemen, thank you for your polite responses to my somewhat heretic proposition.
Longview, you seem to have understood the gist of my proposition, namely that an exited atomic nucleus will decay according to well researched rules.
Contrary to this you propose that it is possible that all nuclids are not created equal:
"So in addition to all the efforts that have gone into finding ways to explain how MeV energies might be doled out piecemeal, there is also the possibility that the energy never gets out as a multi MeV photon, because that particular path was an artifact of high energy activation (such as a subatomic collision).... rather than some catalytic activation where an activation barrier such as coulomb was somehow simply undermined."
So if you use brute force to overcome the Coulomb barrier you would create a nuclid that decays by emittig a a 1 Mev gamma photon?
And if you sneak past the Coulumb barrier when it is on a coffee break you would create a nuclid that emits sunshine instead?
Actually, the brute force is not so brute. Compare to high jump. The higher the bar the higher is the energy that the jumper must provide in order to lift himself high enough to soar over the bar. But if you take a closeup picture of the jumper at the peak of his trajectory it will look pretty much the same for a jump of 1.55 meters as for on of 2.46 meters. (The main difference being that in the latter case the spectators will be overjoyed by the new world record.)
And the Coulomb barrier is never on a coffee break. But it may be squeezed to a degree that allows a proton with relatively low kinetic energy to tunnel through it and fuse with e.g. a deuterium nucleus. This is muon catalyzed fusion, the original "cold fusion". To the best of my knowledge the decay products from this reaction are the same as those from the corresponding hot fusion. Apart from that, all talk about catalyzing nuclear reactions is Rossi talk.
You also say:
"Let me suggest that, unlike in collisional systems, in condensed matter and especially in metals, Fermi's "electron sea" may easily accommodate and disperse very large energies without creating a commensurate MeV photon."
Please explain, how does this large energy manifest itself? (Yes, we all know that lead stops gammas, you can't mean that.)
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This is muon catalyzed fusion, the original "cold fusion". To the best of my knowledge the decay products from this reaction are the same as those from the corresponding hot fusion.
This part is key. This suggests that the decay branching fractions do not depend on the kinetic energy of the nuclei. Unfortunately several LENR theories of D-D fusion don't take this fact into account.
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But if you take a closeup picture of the jumper at the peak of his trajectory it will look pretty much the same for a jump of 1.55 meters as for on of 2.46 meters. (The main difference being that in the latter case the spectators will be overjoyed by the new world record.)
I suggest you familiarize yourself with catalysis and with reaction coordinate diagrams, which are a common way to visualize catalyzed reactions.
Actually the barrier is far higher than your high jump analogy. In the case of the Lipinskis (UGC patent), it is likely 30 to 300 times higher than an an ordinary chemical reaction "activation energy". In the case of the many examples of Fleischman & Pons type electrolytic fusion it may be thousands of times higher.
I do not expect there is any way to surmount such a barrier with conventional chemistry. However I do expect that the "high jumper" in some manner simply walks under the bar, as happens experimentally, industrially and biologically on a continuous basis in ordinary chemistry.
As you must know, the muon is able to more easily enter a nucleus for the simple reason that it has 207 times the mass of an electron, hence "orbits" at 1/207 the distance from a candidate nucleus (otherwise it has the same one electron charge).
There are too many theories of how coulomb can be surmounted or "tricked". But let me remind you that a proton carries exactly one positron's worth of charge, and it is almost exactly 1836 times the mass of a positron or electron. Based on the muon analogy, guess how close it (or for charge balance an antiproton) might "orbit" a candidate nucleus?
I will have much more to write on this subject, but this is enough to get you started.
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H-G, "fusion" (e.g., fusion of deuterium) is a high-level conclusion derived from circumstantial evidence and a long chain of (in my view suspect) reasoning. "Supra-chemical/nuclear" is a conclusion that is closer to the experimental details. When considering LENR reports and claims, it is important to keep tabs on low-level details and distinguish them from high-level conclusions.
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This is muon catalyzed fusion, the original "cold fusion". To the best of my knowledge the decay products from this reaction are the same as those from the corresponding hot fusion.
Julian Bianchi above also points to this as a key piece of data. I don't see conclusive evidence yet in casual browsing. Perhaps the question has been examined and answered empirically.
If there is little or no difference in branching ratios, that would admittedly be a strong piece of evidence against a whole category of cold fusion theories.
We are by no means first to ask this question. Here at SJ Byrnes' blog: http://sjbyrnes.com/cf/muons/
"Experimentally, there are tons of muon-catalyzed fusion experiments, but in my (cursory) search I have not found any papers that took the appropriate data to figure out whether or not this branch actually happens."
Unfortunately Byrnes is not even addressing a change in the usual branching ratios, that is:
- D+D → neutron + helium-3 (~50% of the time),
- D+D → proton + tritium (~50% of the time),
- D+D → helium-4 + a gamma-ray (0.0001% of the time)
But instead is concerned with what Byrnes calls the "spectator" branch, which might enable practical muon catalyzed fusion:
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D+D+muon → helium-4 + muon
So, in spite of the interesting discussion at the Byrnes blog, I will continue to browse.
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I have also heard that muon-catalyzed dd fusion exhibits the same branching ratios as seen in regular fusion. Assuming this is true (has the claim been vetted, and what are the assumptions involved in the interpretation of the muon experiments?), this for me rules out a potential analogy between muon-catalyzed fusion and LENR.
The attractiveness of muon-catalyzed fusion in exploring LENR models, of course, is that muons are one way to bring deuterons closer together, overcoming Coulomb repulsion. But if the normal branching ratios apply, this suggests that merely dealing with the Coulomb repulsion problem does not do a whole lot for understanding LENR.
