Well, we're through our first week here at Hunt Utilities Group, and as one can see by the totally not staged pictures above, we're yet to get sick of reading papers. Since we are such newbies to MFMP and to CF/LENR in general, when reading through these papers, quite a few questions have arisen, and we are hoping that you, the community of experts, can help answer some of these questions. (These questions come from one of us separately, or both of us together at different points, so please excuse the slight disagreement with pronouns). Here it goes...
Edmund Storms' A Student's Guide to Cold Fusion
The paper that both of us started out on was Edmund Storms' Student's Guide to Cold Fusion. The paper gives an excellent introduction into the field that seemed to us to be relatively unbiased, and it really got our heads thinking the right way. Our first question is with regards to the section on electrolytic reactions. In the section, Storms says error can occur when the current is not maintained. Is it possible for errors to result from letting the reaction run for too long? If so, what kind of errors? Will the reaction simply slow down because of buildup on the cathode?
Another question arises in the section where Storms describes his theory of what he believes to be the nuclear active environment (NAE) for LENR to occur. When Storms is outlining his proposed theory of a NAE in which hydrogen or deuterium atoms gather in a crack or nanotube on the surface of the material, he frequently states that in these localized regions, hydrogen or deuterium atoms accumulate and “resonate” to gain a ton of energy and essentially force themselves into the nuclei gathered at the mouths of these cracks. My question is how do these atoms just spontaneously resonate in a crack? While I admit that my knowledge of physics is that of a student, it seems to me that atoms won’t resonate and generate energy unless some external agent forces them to do so. Am I totally wrong in that understanding? Or is it just assumed that whatever external force is being applied in the experiment is exactly the right force to initiate resonance?
Our final question concerning the Student's Guide comes as a result of a critique that we found. http://lenr-canr.org/ShanahanKacritiqueo.pdf. In this critique, a Dr. Shanahan mentions something called a "calibration constant shift" that is not accounted for in any cold fusion experiments. He states that at different temperatures, the calibration constant used in the calorimeter will change, and thus, if not accounted for, results will be skewed. He claims that this shift accounts for a lot of the excess heat claims out there. As students of the field, we are desperately trying to remain objective and not jump on either the skeptics' or the believers' emotional bandwagon, so we just want to know if Shanahan's argument holds any validity.
Alpha Particle Production as a Result of Electrolytic Loading of D onto a Pd Cathode (Oriani)
In Oriani's research, a cathodic charging of deuterium onto a Pd cathode generates alpha particles that are detected with a CR-39. In response to this research, Mastromatteo and Aina made a change to look at a possible error in the research. (http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/AinaRinvestigat.pdf) After placing a thin layer of mylar between the cathode and the CR39 plastic no variation in distribution of depth was found contradicting the thought that the closer to the rod the deeper the etches from the radiation would be. Could someone further explain the choice to use mylar, and does this research discredit Oriani’s observations?
Underwater Arcing Between Carbon Rods (Sunerasan and Backris)
I just read the paper by Sunderasan and Backris (Anamolous Reactions During Arcing Between Carbon Rods in Water) [Also Singh et. al. (Verification of the George Ohsawa experiment for anomalous production of iron from carbon arc in water)] on arcing electricity between two carbon electrodes in water where they saw an anomalous amount of iron formation and predicted a large generation in heat of ~135W based on the proposed reaction mechanism. To me, this seems like a very positive result achieved with what the paper seems to show as relative reproducibility. Yet, this paper was published in 1994 and there doesn’t seem to much buzz around it, why has this method not been attempted more often? Was it disproven somewhere? Am I missing something? It doesn’t seem like a horrifically expensive test to perform... Maybe just because the of the fact that it’s rather ambiguous as to where the iron is really coming from? Although it seems that with improved effort further isolation of the system is not impossible. I also found another more recent paper (2008) on the same phenomenon by Edward Esko (Production of Metals from Non-Metallic Graphite), again with positive results. This seems to be a fairly reproducible experiment, but maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here...
Cavitation and Sonofusion (Stringham)
I recently dove deeply into Stringham’s “When Bubble Cavitation Becomes Sonofusion,” and I was wondering what the community’s opinion is of this paper. His theory seems a little far-fetched in the formation of a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) in the lattice of the target foil, seemingly just as a mechanism to absorb the high-energy wave created in the fusion event. Again, I am a mere student of physics, but every time a BEC has appeared in my studies, it has done so at extremely low temperatures (I believe He becomes a BEC around 2K), but Stringham proposes that this condensate occurs in sonofusion at 4000K. Now I realize that if the atoms are closer enough together, a BEC can be achieved at higher temps (as long as the de Broglie wavelength is longer than the separation between particles), but I believe I am understandably skeptical. I just want to know if there’s any validity to this theory, because it seems quite novel. Also, what role the BEC actually plays in the sonofusion itself is a bit of a mystery to me, apparently the event occurs at the surface of the deuteron cluster that is the BEC as a result of an implosive electromagnetic spherical shock wave, allowing DD fusion because of how intensely close the particles are to each other, but again, I am quite skeptical as to the validity of this theory.
Also in Stringham’s paper, he states that the density inside of these cavitation bubbles at the moment of plasma ejection is that of a neutron star... This seems absolutely absurd to me. I don’t want to be a mindless skeptic, and am certainly open to this possibility, but it seems a bit out-there to me. Does anybody have some kind of experimental reference to the actual determination of this density? I’m having a tough time blindly believing such an outrageously impressive figure.
Transmutation as a Result of D2 Permeation Through a Pd-CaO complex (Iwamura)
I am just curious about the community’s thoughts on Iwamura’s few papers on transmutations as a result of D2 gas being diffused through a Pd-CaO complex. I believe he and his team are extremely thorough in their measurement and spectroscopy, and seem to show beyond reasonable doubt that there are transmutations occurring in the deposited materials on the Pd film. They seem to be very careful in their spectroscopy, even performing the measurement in the same vacuum chamber as the experiment, downplaying the role of contamination. I find this study really interesting, especially because it seems so reproducible, Iwamura claims it has been reproduced more than 60 times... Which is a ton in this field. I’m just wondering what everyone else thinks of the experiment, is it too impractical to perform? Is it a useless experiment? Or is it something to pursue?
Vocabulary
I am working on putting together a collection of vocab words relating to LENR (deuterium, LENR, calorimetry etc.) to help get myself accustomed to the new terminology and help future students of LENR. If you guys have any suggestions for additions to the list, it would be valuable as we move forward!
Any help you all can offer is immensely appreciated, and we thank you in advance for dealing with us rookies!
Comments
Finally I have found something which helped me. Thanks!
Unfortunately, in my first comment, I was rather taken aback by many of the claims that were being made, and I perhaps commented prematurely, before I had a chance to really process your theory. Now that I have mulled it all over, I have a few concerns, or maybe just misunderstandin gs, that I hope you can take the time to address so that I'll have a better grasp on the LeClair Effect.
Quoting Mark L. LeClair:
First, I feel that we might be on different pages as far as the physical implications of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle are concerned. When the electrons in the bow shock are strongly confined in position, there will indeed be a relatively large uncertainty in momentum. This uncertainty doesn't mean that the reciprocal force will disappear, it means that there will be a marked uncertainty in the electrons' response. So the net effect will still be that bow shock gets pulled toward the positively charged head, however, there will be error bars on exactly to what degree this occurs.
Second, you state in your theory that the force that attracts the water crystal and bow shock is the Casimir force. However, the Casimir effect occurs in a vacuum between two uncharged, conducting surfaces. What is being dealt with in the case of the water crystal and the bow shock is a positively charged head and a negatively charged bow shock, isn't then the attractive force of an electrical nature, and not the Casimir force that you suggest?
My last issue is concerning millimeter scale supernova causing transmutation in the reactor. What do you propose causes supernova on such a small scale? It certainly can't be the traditional cause of a supernova (a white dwarf star exceeding the Chandresekhar limit of mass and collapsing in on itself). Also, in supernova, it's the free neutrons that cause nucleosynthesis , and this can't exactly happen on such a small scale either, as the neutrons wouldn't be trapped in a mm sized pit, since they're neutral and can travel through most things, resulting in relatively long mean free paths.
I hope you don't take any of these concerns as an insult, I feel they are genuine questions about the LeClair Effect, and I hope you can take the time to address them to help me gain a better understanding of your theory. And I do want to emphasize that I am not against believing any facet of your theory, I just want to be sure that I understand and accept the evidence supporting it before I do. Also, keep in mind that I by no means claim to be an expert on any of these topics, and feel free to call me out on being wrong, I am simply commenting based on my understanding.
Holy crap... Have you read the fusion link on the nanospire page? As a physics guy, a lot of what is being claimed there is almost sacrilege. A breakdown of Newton's First Law? Formation of basically supernovas (he even calls them microsupernovas ) on Al in water? Harvesting of zero-point energy? Formation of DIAMOND on the reactor surface? Challenging the validity of the first and second law of thermodynamics? It just goes on and on. Call me a cynic but doesn't this all seem a touch ridiculous? Where's the evidence for any of this? Does LeClair have an academic paper published somewhere that is scientific and thorough and doesn't just throw out claim after claim?
Please forgive me for being an angry cynic, but this really got to me.
Ahh, definitely a valid point, I probably jumped a little too quickly on that experiment, I wasn't thinking about the cost of performing a spectroscopy test. But as you said, if the ash from these experiments can be analyzed via some method other than an expensive mass spectrometer, they could become quite significant. But, that seems to be rather wishful thinking at this point.
I certainly can't think of any reason to dissuade you from carefully considering how such an experiment would be structured, and then following through with it. Do consider, though, that the kind of analytic equipment needed to formally evaluate ash products necessarily sets the bar rather high for organizations to be able to conduct such experiments. I have heard of experiments which produce ash products that can be analyzed using very simple means; I'm not clear on whether these methods would be sufficient as proof or not.
His company is NanoSpire, Inc..
nanospireinc.com/Home_Page.php
This is a very valid point, and I certainly understand that politically and commercially, excess heat makes more sense. I just feel that at this point, getting the skeptics in academia on board would advance the field immensely, and should be a top priority for LENR research. This would mean all kinds of students and professors working on LENR globally (no longer a problem of limited resources), and with so many different minds working on it, I personally believe progress would be exponentially faster, leading us down the road to a new energy source that much quicker.
But I also realize that convincing the entire world of skeptics that something is going on with a single experiment is not as easy as I would make it sound. So maybe I'm just romanticizing the field and not grasping the reality of how this all works.
Yes, you have a good point; a simple experiment such as this would indeed prove useful in persuading skeptics that something nuclear is occurring here. However, given our current organization's limited resources, I think the choice was made to demonstrate the anomalous heat effects, since that seems the most commercially relevant, which is important to policymakers.
For academics, a simple experiment showing transmutations would probably speak much louder than possibly-incorr ect excess heat effects. I expect to see a divergence in future research efforts along this divide, in fact.
For me, I feel a need to enable clean energy from LENR, so that's where I'm focusing.
There will be ample room in the future for a diverse array of LENR proof experiments to be developed. This could be one.
But isn't a large obstacle that the LENR community is trying to overcome the fact that a very large portion of the scientific community still views the field as almost a pseudoscience? I know when I told some of my physics professors that I was taking this intern position they almost scoffed at the idea of cold fusion research.
So if there is a relatively cheap, reproducible experiment that, in a perfect world, a manufacturer could distribute all over, wouldn't that be a huge step in the validation of the field? Especially the arcing between carbon rods experiment. Carbon is fairly cheap, and water is water, it seems to me that if this experiment really is as reproducible as it claims, it, at the very least, warrants further examination, even if it has no real practical application. In my eyes, if you can get the scientific community (or at least most of it) to accept the idea of LENR, more people, especially reputable people who have been afraid to ruin their reputations by association with the field, will do research on the topic, leading to a much higher chance of something useful being produced.
Please forgive me as I am still a starry-eyed, naive student of the field, but I just think any reproducible experimental proof of any kind of LENR is an invaluable asset.
There might also be entropy arguments that this type of technique will never be effient enough to be useful, but those arguments alwayws seemed weak to me. What you normally get is a coloumb barrier argument, which is obviously not bullet proof.
N.B. Traditional radioactive materials are a much more inexpensive source of neutrons.
For people who are still seeking to accept that LENR is possible at all, I think the various transmutation results provide the strongest arguments for stepping "through the looking glass" and seeing all the strange new phenomena swirling around in various LENR experiments.
Do not be afraid to contribute anything, even brain dumps or "down the rabbit hole" thought experiments.
We hope that anyone can feel they can take part in what we are trying to do.
Even those claiming commercial products now, openly claim their kickoff was the very documents that Angie and Jordon are starting to review now.
Also atoms as waveforms is not something extraordinary. It is something I remember from my introductory course in microphysics.
Sorry if I'm the last to point out the obvious.
coldfusionnow.org/an-explanation-of-low-energy-nuclear-reactions-cold-fusion-by-edmund-storms/
Link: tinyurl.com/oew5yum
Thanks for your response! Hopefully we can get some helpful dialogue moving around these posts to help us further our understanding.
I do understand that matter is essentially a wave, the problem for me is that at macro scales, the wavelengths of these waves are extremely small, (WL=h/p, where h is Planck's constant [10^-34] and p is momentum of the particle), so if momentum is an appreciable value at all (which it is for massive particles at normal temps), the wavelength will be tiny, which is why we see most things act as particles. This tiny wavelength then corresponds to an extremely high "frequency" of the matter wave.
So my understanding here, if the particle-wave duality is the mechanism being utilized, is that something would have to force that wave (H/D atom) at its resonant frequency in order to see its oscillations be greatly amplified, which is proposed by Storms. Yet such a high frequency applied force appears to be absent in all of the papers I have read.
I don't mean to be close minded, so please correct me where my understanding fails, which I'm sure it does.
Thanks!
Jordan
welcome on board !!!
Let me pick up your question about Ed Storms NAE.
"My question is how do these atoms just spontaneously resonate in a crack?"
To answer this question, I think you should alter your understanding of matter in general.
In thinking of atoms as small "balls" of matter laying around you cannot understand this concept of ED Storms by 100%.
But matter is more than this, you can think about matter also as an expression of electromagnetic waves which form that what we recognize as matter in our three dimensional universe.
These waves can interfere and also resonate with each other.
Try to think this way round and you will find another view onto these concepts.
en.wikipedia.org/.../...
Br Dieter
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