The church of SM physics

I have already mentioned several major concerns I have with the Wyttenbach's ResearchGate manuscript. Here is another, separate, concern. This one is less clear cut in my mind than the others because it is more along the line of a specialized issue in spectroscopy and I am not a spectroscopist.

Figure 1 of the manuscript shows 2 background-subtracted spectra. The idea of the background subtraction is to remove an additive signal that is present even in the absence of fuel - which is fine with me. But my issue here is it seems to me that the residual, background-subtracted, portion of the spectrum that is left should contain not only new peaks due to the fuel, but also a continuum signal due to scattering of the radiation coming from the fuel.

The implication of this is that even after background subtraction, each energy bin in the residual signal should have not just a contribution from any spectral line at that energy, but also many nonspecific contributions from all sorts of other lines at other energies. I think that the nonspecific component could be large compared to the actual line being sought for.

I don't see any consideration or compensation for this sort of thing in Wyttenbach's procedures. As far as I can see, lines are just recognized by seeing a certain bin having event counts sufficiently above background. But if much of that above-background signal is due to nonspecific contributions from gamma photons at other energy levels, then I think the quality of the procedure is called into question.

All this only occurred to me several days ago. It partly answers a question I posed in one of my first posts about Wyttenbach's data (here) --- 'Why is the shape of the background-subracted spectra so similar to that of the background itself?' I now realize that even after background subtraction, the spectrum is still very much shaped by the scattering of gamma radiation that is only present when the active fuel is present (and so cannot be background subtracted). This also makes sense of a comment from Paradigmnoia (here) who said that he used to subtract not just the background signal, but 2 to 3 times that background signal in order to isolate spectral lines of interest.

Quote from Bruce__H

and I am not a spectroscopist.

???????? deconvolutionist?

"deconvolution is a computational method that treats the image as an estimate of the true specimen intensity and using an expression for the point spread function performs the mathematical inverse of the imaging process to obtain an improved estimate of the image intensity."

Quote from Wyttenbach

Of course I mentioned this potential scattering contribution... But scattering is random and as said only very high energies produce high energy scattering signals. So overall the contribution can be neglected. All signals I mention are identified with a margin that accounts for this random fluctuation. So good signals have at least delta of 5 counts.

Estimating from your Figure 1, it looks a though 2/3 of the counts in the background-subtracted spectra may be nonspecific (i.e., due to scattering and so on). In the region between 40 and 90 keV this would correspond to 9 counts or more. So I would think that bins could end up being significantly above background, according to your criteria, simply on this basis.

Quote from Bruce__H

Estimating from your Figure 1,

You cannot estimate anything from Fig 1. Fig 1 is just to point out.

that analysis of 1000's of Fig 1 data is required. to get " the histogram"

this point has been made several times before on this thread..

perhaps you are not a spectroscopist?

"

Bruce... a bit repetitive.?

You can;t get much detail from a screenshot....which is Fig 1.

in contrast the 'histogram file' is effectively thousands of screenshots

and its the ' delta' that counts for "active"....vs BG

.one needs..

the histogram-results to pick out lines,frequencies.

.not one screenshot of a spectrum with poor resolution

as stated here in the text

"here more than 300 lines are active....so only an inspection of the histogram file can finally tell the truth"

again here

"You cannot conclude anything from a printed spectrum. Usually you show about 5..10 lines but here we have > 300! You cannot print 1500 lines (buckets) on a sheet of paper... For normal fuels we just check the magnetic lines and follow up lines. This is enough for seeing what happens. As said, I hope you know what signal noise 3:1 means...."

Quote from Wyttenbach

The gold standard is looking for cascades. I hope you grasp this. If single line is missing the the rest is void...

I understand that under the right circumstances, detecting cascades could be persuasive. However, the way you have written this manuscript, I have little feel for how probable it is that random, non-LENR cascades would end up being confirmed as present in your spectra. Have you tried? Try 100 such cascades and see what you get.

Bruce__H

I don't understand. What is it you don't like, the descriptions or the science?

Quote from Alan Smith

I don't understand. What is it you don't like, the descriptions or the science?

A bit of both. In many cases the procedures are not well described so in those cases it is difficult to know what to make of the science. And there are fundamental flaws in the descriptions. Features that are are mentioned in the text are not present in the figures. The figures themselves are terrible, blurry affairs that I am told do not show crucial parts of the data that are being analyzed in the text. Sometimes, for some analyses, there are obvious hazards to be avoided but no obvious steps have been taken to assure the reader that they have, indeed, been avoided.

And, in some cases, I do wonder about the science itself. The Poisson noise is an example. Wyttenbach has a completely different understanding of radioactive decay that I do. I think that the timing of decay events should be random (thus creating Poisson noise). That is pretty standard. But Wyttenbach then asks me how, if this is the case, I think a radioactive half-life can be defined. That is an extraordinary question to ask. It makes me doubt his grasp of some elementary aspects of his data.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Simply none. Same a lotto. You have 600 buckets. So basically the chance for a short chain is 1/600⁵ multiplied by repetitions (5!)... Even side paths with one two steps that look fine suddenly end. Sometimes its a temperature issue.

Yes, but try it an see. Publish an empirical p-value for matching a cascade to a spectrum under the null hypothesis that the lines in the spectrum are random.

I think also think that you are missing figure in your manuscript. Show a background-subtracted spectrum with arrows pointing at the peaks that have been matched to a cascade.

Quote from Bruce__H

Wyttenbach has a completely different understanding of radioactive decay that I do.

nucleosynthesis of Sm151 Ag106 Ag108 Ag 110 etc etc is not in the textbooks

Quote from Wyttenbach

We here talk of stimulated decay not of radioactive decay...

I am glad that we circled back to this because the first time it came up I didn't understand its relevance. So I have a question.

Suppose you set up your apparatus and find, after much experimentation, that in a certain bin of the multichannel analyzer you are getting 1 count per minute. Now, let's say that you are watching the Therimino screen and have noticed that another count has just been acquired in that bin. Given stimulated decay, when will you see the next count arrive?

Quote from Wyttenbach

... I leave it to you to find out what you miss here...

And you leave it to everyone to wonder why you won't answer.

Quote from Bruce__H

And you leave it to everyone to wonder why you won't answer.

It needs expertise in deconvolution

Quote from Bruce__H

... I have a question.

Suppose you set up your apparatus and find, after much experimentation, that in a certain bin of the multichannel analyzer you are getting 1 count per minute. Now, let's say that you are watching the Therimino screen and have noticed that another count has just been acquired in that bin. Given stimulated decay, when will you see the next count arrive?

Here is why I asked Wyttenbach this question.

If photons are generated at random times then you can't predict when the next one will arrive in a detector. It is true that you can state a probability for the next arrival time ... but you can't say exactly when it will happen. This is how regular radioactive decay works. And because you can't predict exactly when a photon will arrive you also can't say exactly how many photons will arrive over a set amount of time. Once again, you can only state a probability. A Poisson probability. This is the genesis of the Poisson noise that Wyttenbach says he doesn't see.

If there is no Poisson noise then the arrival of photons must be nonrandom. Wyttenbach says there is no Poisson noise in his data, hence he must be able to predict when the next photon will arrive.

Personally, I think that when Wyttenbach (or Alan Smith or anyone else in the lab at the time) sat in front of the Theremino screen while an acquisition was underway, he probably saw that the counts were randomly accumulating in the bins. Maybe he just thought there was nonrandom arrival ... it is easy to imagine pattern in noise even when it isn't there. But this is easy to check. Just look at the intervals between photon acquisitions. Plot out the intervals. They should follow an exponential distribution (which is the one that underlies random behaviour). If the distribution of intercount intervals is not exponential then something extraordinary is going on here.

Measuring and plotting out the intervals between detector acquisitions is technically straightforward. A non-exponential distribution for the intervals should be clear and quite distinctly different from the exponential distribution for from the background (which would involve traditional radioactive decay). A non-exponential distribution of intervals would also be persuasive evidence of novel physics. The intervals don't need to be gathered just within a single energy channel, summed acquisitions over all energy channels will work. You can even use output from a pancake Gieger detector for this. Quite possibly there are existing records from past experiments that can be used for this.

Quote from Bruce__H

Personally, I think that when Wyttenbach (or Alan Smith or anyone else in the lab at the time) sat in front of the Theremino screen while an acquisition was underway, he probably saw that the counts were randomly accumulating in the bins. Maybe he just thought there was nonrandom arrival ... it is easy to imagine pattern in noise even when it isn't there. But this is easy to check. Just look at the intervals between photon acquisitions.

I am not that stupid. And neither is anybody else I have worked with.

Alan Smith

To be clear, I mean accumulating into the bins at random times. I don't mean random with respect to different energies.

Are you saying that if one were to hold a geiger counter close to this fuel that you would hear not the usual random forest of clicks but something with a time pattern?