Posts by Eric Walker

Quote from rb0

On my opinion you are clearly trying to diffuse false information in order to influence the trial.

I presume that this is against law.

Because this forum is moderated I presume that eventually also the moderators of the forum could be responsible.

Paradigmnoia is not the first person I would guess would be here in order to diffuse false information. He is one of the last. Others, by contrast, do make me wonder as to their motivations. Thankfully logical argument wins, when people are able to engage in it, and motivations do not matter so much.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Such an objection smells with pluralistic ignorance, which is red herring behind one century long dismissal of cold fusion as such with mainstream physics.

I asked you for the names of groups that are using NANOR's kit to gradually characterize LENR. This is a specific question: there are such groups, or there are no such groups yet. In the first case, we have a bona fide lab rat. In the second case we do not yet have a bona fide lab rate, despite Swartz's claim. This is entirely independent of whether the NANOR kit can eventually be shown to be such a lab rat.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The proponents of this physics claim, that cold fusion doesn't exist, because nobody did succeed with it. ...?!? Well, OK - maybe he succeeded, but it was long time ago and no one has replicated it yet. Well, maybe he already replicated it, but he hasn't published it in serious scientific journal! Well, shit - maybe some journals about it still exist, but they're not peer-reviewed...!! ..Jeez, some of them are possibly reviewed - but they're of low impact and they didn't pass the scrutiny yet - that's it!!!

This discussion is not relevant to anything I was talking about, but it's setting up a strawman through insinuation. The topic we were addressing: is there a "lab rat" experiment that can be used to gradually characterize LENR? My response, and probably the opinion of most serious workers in the field, is that there is not such a lab rat experiment yet. In order for an experiment to be a genuine lab rat, it would have to be something that independent labs are able to pick up and run with. You won't know that until independent labs actually do pick it up and run with it.

This discussion is entirely apart from the question of whether LENR is real.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The copious evidence of cold fusion is exactly the opposite: not only the Coulomb barrier gets broken, but also symmetric process happens: the resulting energy gets miraculously dissolved within atom lattice.

Cold fusion has many possible explanations, only some of which involve fusion. Your reply to my points is general and glosses over the specific objections with vague possibilities. We must move beyond hand waving and rigorously consider specific details.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

This is misinformation - such an experiments are already there: for example prof. Hagelstein and Swartz from MIT sell NANOR® kit, which enables to start the cold fusion experiments with 100% reliability.

Claims of having a lab rat experiment are very different than actually having one. Can you refer us to various groups that have made use of NANOR's kit to gradually characterize LENR? (Preview of your answer, should you answer directly: you can't.)

What other simple systems would you consider "lab rats"? Claims by the originators are not sufficient to bestow this label upon an experiment. Note also the important requirement, mentioned by me above, that the phenomenon exhibited by the lab rat be well above the noise floor.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

And there are another simple systems, which already provide very good reproducibility (codeposition of palladium for example).

This is an example of a promising set of experiments in which the original team had placed a lot of hope for it being a lab rat, but whose unambiguous replication has nonetheless not been forthcoming. I would not call it a lab rat at this point.

On the experimental argument, I largely agree with THH. It is a shortcoming that must be addressed that there is no "lab rat" experiment that can be easily replicated, with results well above the noise floor. Hopes have occasionally been raised over the years that such an experiment might have been found, but such hopes have not yet come to fruition.

On the theoretical side, I am largely persuaded that unexamined assumptions and misinterpretations of what expetiments there are abound, both among CF'ers and among mainstream physicists reviewing the body of work from afar, and that through polemics these bad assumptions have been partly codified into a CF dogma, a situation that has helped to lead theory building astray. It does not matter what an intelligent mind such as Peter Hagelstein comes up with if important starting assumptions are incorrect or are experimentally untested. If CF is eventually accepted into mainstream science, I assume that all that will be needed will be some minor adjustments to and elaboration of existing physics and one or two happy coincidences in areas of experimental physics that were up to now poorly explored. There are surely tantalizing possibilities that students of nuclear physics will have stumbled upon in their studies generation after generation, only to be told by their professors with a little too much confidence that while the idea is an interesting one the experiments do not support it. It is in such possibilities that I find the most promising avenues for an explanation for LENR.

The possibility that radioactive decay rates might be modulated is one such possibility. The idea will have occurred to any physics student after learning about the Gamow theory. The fact that the possibility is raised as a question from time to time on physics.stackexchange.com is an indication that the suggestion is not a radical departure from existing physics. There is even a page at MIT that documents a number of (non-CF) studies that have been done on variability in decay rates. If radioactive decay could be accelerated, many CF experimental findings could be explained. There may be one or two other such possibilities.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The same people oppose the hydrino subquantum level the most - what actually prohibits the electrons to get closer to atom nuclei? They could only gain energy with it.

The argument against Hydrinos is not based on the possibility of the electron existing part of the time in the nucleus. Indeed, in Mills's telling, the electron orbits in a two-dimensional plane, with the implication that it would never transit the nucleus. The QM argument against Hydrinos goes back to other difficulties.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Only if these photons scatter off electrons from outside the atoms, i.e. during excitation from surface to bottom. The energy density is low there or the individual electrons will get ejected to high orbital paths. But how the situation would differ during excitation of electrons from bottom up? The excitation of single electron would require the collective excitation of many others. And as I illustrated above, these bottom electrons can be tough chaps. It's like to draw out a single branch from bottom of pile of brushwood.

You seem to be arguing that MeV energy photons will somehow be channeled and thermalized by scattering off of electrons in condensed matter, despite the copious evidence that the opposite of this is what generally happens, namely that even heavy metals are largely transparent to photons in this range of energy. You posit a highly dense phase of matter to pull this trick off, and now suggest that it might be possible to cause collective excitations of electrons. It seems to me that the unsupported assumptions must continue to accumulate in order to go further down this path.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

This is a difference: You should guide the gamma rays only to absorb them more effectively.

If we're talking about efficient absorption of the MeV photons and not simply the guiding of them, e.g., in a linear trajectory out of the host lattice, our difficulties multiply. Each time one of those photons scatters off a nucleus or electron, it will either lose very little energy, or it will put the system in a state that will result in the further emission of energetic photons in arbitrary directions.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The quantum mechanics prohibits the electrons to get very close to atom nuclei.

There's nothing in QM to prohibit electrons from spending time in atomic nuclei; in fact, in the case of s-wave electron orbitals the assumption is that this is happening part of the time, and electron capture requires that it happen.

Alan, I assume that even if MFMP had the right paint (which would be nice), the outcome of their emissivity test will nonetheless depend upon the thickness of the layer of paint, which is an unknown quantity?

Quote from Zephir_AWT

OK, this is written there - but do you understand its mechanism? If the physicists don't understand something, they always promote a new particle.

I do not understand the putative mechanism in the present context. Suggesting that an atomic lattice can be used to guide 0.5 - 24 MeV photos is like suggesting that a small block of aerogel can be used to guide 50 caliber bullets. But let's assume for the sake of argument that the jet quenching has a cross section for photons of this energy range. The cross section will still be finite. If you have 1 W power, that will be in the neighborhood of 1e12 reactions taking place per second. If even a small fraction of those reactions resulted in photons that escape that are not somehow guided by the presumed jet quenching, the number of detectable photons escaping the apparatus would be large.

But there are yet other difficulties: the dd → 4He + γ pathway is normally inhibited.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

But the gammas aren't channeled with ordinary condensed matter during cold fusion - but with highly packed atom nuclei.

I'm going to wager that you'd need matter with the density neutronium to make a difference. But let us assume that there are such highly packed nuclei and then enumerate the assumptions we've got so far:

• During an event, there is something that happens to pack the nuclei tight enough to guide MeV photons
• The atoms are able to produce jet quenching in the photons in a phenomenon that is otherwise known only to occur at energies associated with hadronization
• The process of jet quenching in this context is efficient to many decimal places, and as a consequence any stray photons are at the noise threshold
• Somehow the d(d,γ)4He branch is favored enough not to see large numbers of neutrons
• A lattice that has a binding energy in the eV is somehow able to bring together deuterons over a potential barrier in the MeV

Quote from THHuxleynew

If the excess heat is high enough it would not matter taking an upper limit.

I think this is an important point. Any experiment that is in or barely above the noise is not going to be very persuasive. By contrast, if an experiment can be found that is consistently well above the noise when carried out by independent labs, that will be a very positive development.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The high energy physics knows phenomena like the jet quenching: during particle collisions the resulting beams of gamma ray and energetic particle fragments get suppressed. This happens when the particles collide in collinear way, so that the quark-gluon condensate gets formed - but at much higher energies above 200 GeV, At the opposite side of energy spectrum inside the boson condensates so-called the Anderson localization applies - but the cold fusion is boycotted research and the thermalization mechanism is studied even less, than the mechanism of Coulomb barrier suppression.

Jet quenching pertains to partons. In the range of energies we're talking about, e.g., 500 keV to 24 MeV, there will be nary a cross section for hadronization and related phenomena. Instead what can be expected to happen will be what usually happens: the crystal will be mostly transparent to the photons and will allow them to pass through in any arbitrary direction, rather than serving as a waveguide. Or do you have any reference in the literature for photons in the 500 keV to 24 MeV being channeled by ordinary condensed matter?

zeus46, if you had any self-doubt, I can confirm that you are not a troll. At least not here, anyway.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

Whereas during cold fusion the gamma rays are conducted along entangled atom nuclei, which serve like the waveguides. The internal reflection mechanism applies in this case.

Your contention appears to be that a linear array of atoms will serve as a waveguide for MeV-energy or even 500 keV photons, rather the usual behavior, which is to be mostly transparent to these photons. Is there anything in the mainstream literature that supports this contention at the energies we're talking about?

Quote from Zephir_AWT

I also explained it: the mean free path applies to metal lattice, which is actually very sparse environment due to large spaces between atoms. ... But once the X-rays impact the metal lattice under low angle ...

Forgive me if I have not read an earlier contribution where you addressed this point; I rarely even skim your posts, as I find little redeeming in them. But to your point: at even one or two orders of magnitude less than 24 MeV, our photons are too energetic to participate in the kind of x-ray mirror you're describing. Some cutting-edge efforts at hard x-ray optics, for example, are focused on a 80 keV upper limit. In order to have your mirror, you will need to have already broken up that 24 MeV quantum into small pieces.

With photons with an energy of anything within an order of magnitude of 24 MeV, you will not get much scattering. Those photons will have a very long mean free path.

Quote from AlainCo

Strong force can be opposing...

Yes — at less than 0.7 fm between the nuclear centers, the nuclear interaction becomes repulsive. But the fusing nuclei must first drop off that cliff and land at the bottom before this opposing part of the strong force kicks in, at which point a lot of kinetic energy has been added to the system and resulted in an excited compound nucleus. That excited nucleus will now rapidly decay to the ground state through one or more (often gamma-producing) transitions, or it will break apart into two fragments as in the case of dd fusion. So I don't think the repulsive part of the potential curve you're talking about will help us out here.

Imagine holding the two large magnets from the video in your hand and trying to bring them gradually closer together until they touch, without letting them snap together violently.

Quote from AlainCo

I propose the barrier fall slowly, like a chinese torture...

Think of nucleons as extremely strong neodymium magnets that both repel one another at large distances and attract one another at very close distances. Protons and deuterons repel one another in the manner of magnets with the same pole facing one another, but once you press a deuteron close enough to a nucleus (e.g., another deuteron), the two will snap together with a loud "snap"! Even if you could arrange sufficient screening to somehow bring the deuteron very close to the nucleus, they will still snap together at the end. The potential curve is not a linear one. It increases dramatically and then all of a sudden drops off (going from right to left):

One implication of Ed Storms's gradual fusion suggestion, and yours as well, in borrowing his, is that somehow this potential curve can be ironed out so that there are no sharp drop-offs that would cause the two nuclei to snap together at the end and thereby release a large quantum of energy as a result. I'm highly skeptical that any amount of screening will accomplish this, in just the right amounts needed at each step of the approach. This is partly because the tunneling is a quantum phenomenon: at point A in time, you have a separate deuteron and nucleus approaching one another; and then at point B, they are a single composite daughter nucleus left in an excited state, with an apparently discontinuous transition between the two states of the world, before and after.

This video gives a sense of the force acting on the magnets right at the end; it is an analogous but much stronger nuclear force which must somehow, implausibly, be held back to prevent the deuteron from tunneling into the nucleus as they approach one another.

Quote from interested observer

Like I said, I am just trying to understand why anyone still thinks that the e-cat is something real, regardless of their opinions about CF. There is not a single aspect of the e-cat story that stands up to any critical analysis and yet it appears that most people here still think that there is a pony under that barnful of... well, pony stuff. One just has to wonder why.

Three thoughts here.

(1) The Internet is a big place, and unlike in the 1980's, when there were the superconductivity false starts you describe, the hangers-on nowadays have access to the same forums as everyone else. With some people, hope springs eternal, and an important difference between the 1980's and now is that the E-Cat hangers-on are more visible and accessible than the people who hung onto false claims of superconductivity in an earlier decade.

(2) Observers of this field have by and large refrained from requiring certain proof in order to entertain various possibilities, in contrast to the mode that many scientists are in, of requiring for example that a paper make it through peer review and possibly stand up to subsequent verification before even considering a claim. Hobbyists in this field are happy if some CF claim is vaguely plausible and is slightly consistent with earlier claims, and the more reasonable observers will factor in the low likelihood of a claim in considering it. This is more the mode of thought of a police detective who is entertaining different possible explanations for a crime, which range from implausible to vaguely plausible but still half-baked. It is very different from the mode of thought of a physicist or mathematician, who might want near certainty at each step, or at a least crossing over a high bar, before continuing on to the next step.

(3) The E-Cat has a lineage that runs from Rossi to Focardi to Piantelli, the latter two of whom are/were respected LENR researchers. By (2), above, if one takes Piantelli seriously, there's a remote question of whether Rossi ever had anything in the early days. People's motives change, and for some observers it is sufficient to shake one's head and say, "I don't know. Beats me if he ever had anything. It's bit of a conundrum, although he very well might have been acting in bad faith all along," and leave the judgement as to the earlier stuff at that.

I would have initially guessed a gamma emitting check source, but experts will know whether such a thing would plausibly pass through whatever building materials there were. How about a coincidental cosmic ray burst?

UK government sites are infinitely more pleasant than US sites, in my experience. So there's something else to the story of our depressing websites.