Huw Price: Icebergs In The Room? Cold Fusion At Thirty

    Quote from oystla

    As the nobel prize winner Julian Schwinger said it: "Has the knowledge that physics is an experimental science been totally lost?"


    Yes! Where exactly did he write that? Do you have the complete document? Is it on line? . . . Ah, ha! It is at Infinite Energy:


    https://www.infinite-energy.co…ine/issue1/colfusthe.html


    Schwinger also told Gene Mallove and Mike Melich the version I quoted above: "physics are empirical." As you see, he was not able to give this paper himself, so Gene read it.



    Ah ha again. I do have this at LENR-CANR.org, as published in the ICCF-4 proceedings.

    H. Price wrote:


    Quote

    The three years is now up, so how am I faring? About Rossi, I am happy to concede that he hasn’t made it to the finishing line, even at a modest 50% credence. I think there is still some reason to think that that he may have something, based in part on claimed replications by far less colourful figures. But there is also evidence of dishonesty, especially in his dealings with his US backer, Industrial Heat.

    Dr. Price is not a very critical thinker. He was very gullible about Rossi. He is still gullible about Rossi. There is not the slightest convincing evidence that Rossi has or ever had anything other than scammy junk.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    Because experimentally proven facts, demonstrated with calorimeters and tritium detectors, overrule all probabilities, reckonings, considerations, memes, Bayesian probability


    Schwinger also quotes Joseph Priestley, the 'discoverer' of oxygen


    "In this business, more is owed to what we call chance—that is, to the observation of events arising from unknown causes-than to any preconceived theory."


    Priestley 's observation of anomalous events such as flames /rats dying in glass jars led to mercuric oxide tests and thence to oxygen.

    Priestley knew the phlogiston theory but did not know Bayes theorem... neither of these helped with his discovery of oxygen.

    https://www.acs.org/content/ac…osephpriestleyoxygen.html


    The anomalous heat and the anomalous transmutation evidences in LENR

    were too numerous to discard as faulty measurement twenty five years ago


    anyone who maintains this faulty measurement position in 2019

    is operating from a position of extreme bias...

    not from a position of skeptical neutrality.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Why does heating a small amount of LENR powder

    What is the cooling time interval btw the end of "holding 700" ten minute period

    and the beginning of " 385C" ten minute period?


    One hour?


    The release of energy after one hour or so cannot be due to a crystalline phase change,


    Phase changes release energy in the infrared region.. not way up in the 200 -400 keV region.


    Who has a theory as to how the anomalous energy is stored/released?

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Here what LENR experiments tell.


    Why does heating a small amount of LENR powder produce different delta background spectra at different temperatures with different total counts/s? With up to 5x background at selected regions?



    LENR is generated by a topological condition that has a resonance relationship with the wavelength of the applied energetic stimulation.

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Outstandingly profound comment.

    Alan you need to issue an irony warning. Americans are not as familiar with this genre as you Brits. SoT probably believes that he/she/it has been complimented.

    While their comment is critical it is not at all intelligent. The Bertrand Russell Professor at Trinity College Cambridge is not a "not a very critical thinker"??? :S

    This sounds like a continuation of the campaign to undermine authoritative opinion. I would ask why but suspect I know.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Here what LENR experiments tell.


    Why does heating a small amount of LENR powder produce different delta background spectra at different temperatures with different total counts/s? With up to 5x background at selected regions?



    Those look pretty neat.

    A couple quick questions/comments, if I may:

    1) You say in a lower post (#28) that these are delta spectra. By this are you are saying that the background is subtracted in these plots?

    2) The upper plot doesn't look to have had the background subtracted, but the lower ones do. Can you confirm the status of the subtraction (if any) for the upper image?

    3) What does a ~ 20 C plot look like for the same period?

    4) Considering that natural background counts are a bit erratic , have you tried comparing a standard number of pulses (ie: 8500), rather than time in seconds?

    5) When working with the MFMP gamma spectrometer data, and also in some previous work, I noticed that background subtraction doesn't always remove the background very cleanly. To find strong peaks that were unusual, it was necessary often to do multiple background subtractions. Then only truly anomalous peaks would remain. This might be worth a try, if you haven't already.

    Quote

    Why does heating a small amount of LENR powder produce different delta background spectra at different temperatures with different total counts/s?


    This is just the feature of cold fusion similar to many heavily catalyzed reactions. Only outcome of fully reversible reactions in chemistry are fully predictable - these catalyzed ones behave often anomalously, because presence of catalyst deforms temperature dependence of activation energy due to various resonance and kinetic effects.


    In particular, my theory of cold fusion is based on undirectional collisions of multiple atoms along a single line. Once such a line forms, they it sends resulting energy and particles along its axis like directional antenna. And not only this - it also absorbs resulting particles (neutrons and gamma) like very effective antenna. This is because - as Feynmann have said - there is "lotta free space at the bottom". Atom nuclei are tiny, the atoms are relatively large. The nucleus has a diameter of 10-14 m, so it is about 10,000 times smaller than the volume of the atom as a whole. One analogy is to imagine the atom is the size of a football stadium. In that gigantic stadium the nucleus would only be the size of a small marble sitting on the 50-yard line! So that neutrons and short wavelength gammas can pass through atom lattice freely. When ten atoms collide along a single line and the neutron is released in their direction, it makes absorber of neutrons as effective as 10,000 x 10 = 100,000 thicker plate. When these atoms reside on the line with the another atoms of atom lattice (as it's common within metal crystals), then the resulting absorption coefficient gets even higher.


    But this all applies only, until all atoms remain strictly collinear. Once the atom nuclei move just a bit because of thermal vibrations, then the neutrons or gammas will not get absorbed anymore and they leave the lattice. This is also why the cold fusion often runs at low temperatures only. The thermal motion of atoms breaks the low-dimensional character of cold fusion and makes it close to hot fusion. Which runs at high temperatures only and it also produces lotta neutrons instead of just alpha particles and another symmetrical products of fusion. Therefore the character of cold fusion changes with increasing temperature radically.


    As Andrea Rossi noted, during thermal runaways his reactor released some neutrons. This is also one of reasons why I believe, that he has really working cold fusion in his hands, because what describes is not so easy to bring up ad hoc without previous experimental experience and this remark apparently follows my own theory about all of it.

    The extreme case of temperature dependence of nuclear reaction is the Lipinski fusion of Unified Gravity. Once the lithium melts, whole the reaction stops, because its atoms aren't arranged anymore. Here not only thermal vibrations - but also phase transform - ads to the resulting effect. For me the evolution of heat and/or formation of particles doesn't serve as the main evidence of cold fusion, because everyone could invent it - but just the occurrence of similar anomalies, which no one could bring it down if he wouldn't observe them by its own eyes.


    Note that Lipinski even doesn't say that nuclear reaction stops, when the lithium melts - it would be still too easy to invent. What he exactly says is, the nuclear reaction stops, once the temperature raises by few dozens of degrees above melting point of lithium. Only few people on the world know, that beneath molten surface of metals arranged crystalline layer of atoms exists even above melting point. If you don't know about it, you cannot invent it and you have to observe it - and thus your story must be real.


    For me just these anecdotal circumstances serve as the reality check and signature of cold fusion.

    Phase transform of lithium, of course - i.e. melting. Cold fusion requires to have atoms arranged in metal lattice. The probability of spontanous fusion within random system of particles is extraordinarily low, but the proponents of thermodynamic arguments often forget, that the probability that these particles will spontaneously arrange into regular lattice is extremely low as well. Two extreme improbabilities will here beat each other.

    Quote from Paradigmnoia

    A couple quick questions/comments, if I may:

    1) You say in a lower post (#28) that these are delta spectra. By this are you are saying that the background is subtracted in these plots?

    2) The upper plot doesn't look to have had the background subtracted, but the lower ones do. Can you confirm the status of the subtraction (if any) for the upper image?


    Background is tricky as it can vary +-10% within 600s. But not +-50% as we see from total counts.

    What I can confirm is that the lines we expect to see are between 10 an 1000% above background where I prefer at least to have 100%.


    Every fuel has a different signature. As you can see if it has been heated to high (700C) for getting radiation, then it looks similar like background just a bit elevated.


    As said, we can predict the lines we want to measure, what makes it easy to find them even if we have only a few counts above background.


    If you once got the understanding of dense matter physics (NPP2.0 https://www.researchgate.net/p…r-and-particle-physics-20 ) it is "easy" to understand LENR.

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