Merged Cold Fusion Claims

[pteridine]

What makes you think that there are nuclear-energy-releasing pathways that don't include high-energy radiation? Since Levi knows that there is no radiation from his device, why did he stuff it with lead?
QUOTE]

Rossi is the inventor, not Levi or Focardi. It is possible that he tried it without lead and then decided to use lead for some reason or another.

If the thermal data are accurate, there is too much energy to be any known chemical reaction and copper is forming from nickel. This sort of eliminates chemical reactions. If there is little or no high energy radiation released, what is left?
1.] A nuclear reaction that produces only a few high energy particles lost in the background noise.
2.] A nuclear reaction of unknown mechanism that produces particles that are thermalized.
3.] A combination of 1 and 2.

You seem unable to accept any of these possibilities, so you must conclude that it is a hoax and all data are false.

 

[ben m]

If the thermal data are accurate, there is too much energy to be any known chemical reaction and copper is forming from nickel. This sort of eliminates chemical reactions. If there is little or no high energy radiation released, what is left?

"If the thermal data are accurate?" I don't see any thermal data that could possibly be accurate. We have a report of water dripping out of a pipe. The pipe had no useful instrumentation whatsoever. Am I supposed to multiply that quantity of water by 2200 J/g and pretend that it is "thermal data" whose accuracy I should take seriously? Why would I do that? That wouldn't be sufficient evidence for the efficiency of my home teakettle, much less for the overturning of nuclear physics.

If I took all data that seriously, I would have to assume that my university's Junior Lab is in a magical room where the speed of light varies by a factor of 10,000,000 from one table to the next.

 

[Hindmost]

Nuclear reactions like what? No one knows what they are. There are reaction pathways that Sergio Focardi proposed but one cannot assume that they are correct. You can say that based on known physics, the proposed pathways would produce ca. 500 KEV gamma and that serious shielding would be needed to reduce these to background levels. You cannot say that because such gamma rays are not seen that the reaction cannot be nuclear in nature.
As I have said previously, you are assuming a pathway that is one of many possibilities but not seeing evidence of that pathway does not preclude the other possibilities.
Look up your list of logical fallacies and see where your argument fits.

ben m already answered about the nuclear reaction part of this. As to the logical fallacies you claim I am using...the rule on the forum here is: you provide the evidence for your claim.

What makes you think that there are nuclear-energy-releasing pathways that don't include high-energy radiation? Since Levi knows that there is no radiation from his device, why did he stuff it with lead?
QUOTE]

Rossi is the inventor, not Levi or Focardi. It is possible that he tried it without lead and then decided to use lead for some reason or another.

If the thermal data are accurate, there is too much energy to be any known chemical reaction and copper is forming from nickel. This sort of eliminates chemical reactions. If there is little or no high energy radiation released, what is left?
1.] A nuclear reaction that produces only a few high energy particles lost in the background noise.
2.] A nuclear reaction of unknown mechanism that produces particles that are thermalized.
3.] A combination of 1 and 2.

You seem unable to accept any of these possibilities, so you must conclude that it is a hoax and all data are false.

Nuclear reactions produce lots of high energy stuff...there is too much evidence over the decades for that. Take a look at this link to see what happens as a minimum when charged particles are bounced around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

It is concluded as a hoax or a bad mistake by Rossi et al as it goes against basic physics principles. The unknown mechanism would have to cancel EM repulsion for fusion of nickel and a proton. Normal x-ray/gamma radiation that is a product of such reactions doesn't exist in the data. Doesn't that give you a bit of a pause to consider there is no evidence of any nuclear reaction.

glenn

 

[pteridine]

Thank you for your comments, although you avoid the issue of copper formation and focus on gamma radiation. The heat output and copper production say something nuclear is happening.
Do you feel so comfortable with 'basic physics' that you can assume that existing knowledge is reason to reject the possibility of a nuclear reaction? Can you explain why one specific nucleus of a radiosotope undergoes fission while adjacent nuclei of the same material do not? If nuclear reactions are well understood, then it should be possible to predict which nucleus will react.
My position is that the reaction will be shown to be real or not over the next year or so. If it is, physics will have to allow for it. Physics dogma has had to change in the past and will likely have to change again in the future, regardless of the outcome of Rossi's work.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” ~ Max Planck

 

[ben m]

The heat output and copper production say something nuclear is happening.

For the sake of argument, let's pretend I agree. I have already objected to any interpretation of the crappy measurements and their sloppy and unreliable interpretation as "heat output". I have no data on the measurements that have been interpreted as copper production.

Do you feel so comfortable with 'basic physics' that you can assume that existing knowledge is reason to reject the possibility of a nuclear reaction?

The association between nuclear reactions and gamma rays is extremely basic physics. The reason there's energy available at all in (e.g. 62Ni+p = 63Ni) is that the protons/neutrons in 63Ni have a special low-energy arrangement whose mass is lower than any other arrangement of 28 protons and 35 neutrons. The statement "the energy is released" means the protons and neutrons have to get to the special arrangement, and on the way they have to get rid of the excess energy that distinguishes one state from the next.

This list of states is unique; it's discrete; it's determined by quantum mechanics. The spacing between the steps is of order ~200 keV. The last step is 669.9 keV. There is no way to get to the 63Ni ground state, from any higher state, without emitting a "packet" of 669.9 keV (or more) in the discrete leap from a higher state to the ground state. Anything less---"I'll take a 669,900 steps of 1 eV each"---violates quantum mechanics.

Why a 669.9 keV gamma ray, you might ask? Why not something less detectable? Sorry, there is nothing less detectable. There is no such thing as a 669.9 keV phonon. If it's neutrinos or something you have undone the "generate heat" part of the business. Low-energy photons, etc., would have to violate quantum mechanics as I have said.

Can you explain why one specific nucleus of a radiosotope undergoes fission while adjacent nuclei of the same material do not? If nuclear reactions are well understood, then it should be possible to predict which nucleus will react.

Yes, nuclear physics is very well understood. Some details of shell structure are hard to compute accurately, but the principles are basically perfectly secure. Fusion thressholds are not merely "well understood", they're directly observed. You can shoot a p beam, of any energy you like, at a 62Ni target. At energies below the Coulomb barrier, nothing happens. At energies above the Coulomb barrier, you start seeing fusion, including these excited-state gamma rays.

My position is that the reaction will be shown to be real or not over the next year or so.

Not if the only way they study it is by wrapping a brick in lead, plugging in nonfunctional instrumentation into it, and giving a press conference about it.

 

[ben m]

Physics dogma has had to change in the past and will likely have to change again in the future, regardless of the outcome of Rossi's work.

My reply is what I already said:

If I took all data that seriously, I would have to assume that my university's Junior Lab is in a magical room where the speed of light varies by a factor of 10,000,000 from one table to the next.

Sure, our understanding of physics will change over time. It is changing even now. It does not change every time a sloppy experimenter gets a "revolutionary" result. Why do you get excited about Rossi's result, but you're not doing anything at all about the equally-exciting speed-of-light experiments going on in student labs?

 

[pteridine]

My question to you was about fissile nuclei not fusion of nickel nuclei with protons. If the physics is understood, one should be able to predict which individual nucleus will decay. Is this a problem?

Rossi's claims are different from previous LENR claims in that he can control the effect. He also says that a 1MW unit will be working in Greece before 2012. This is interesting because in all of the hot fusion work that has occurred since the 1950's no one has ever said when they will have a power plant working -- other than "it's just around the corner; send more money."

I leave you to complete the measurements in your Junior physics lab. Let me know how the speed of light turns out.

 

[Cuddles]

The heat output and copper production say something nuclear is happening.

No they don't. As has been pointed out many times now, the heat output was not even measured. A dripping pipe with no instrumentation is not a measurement, it's a joke. You can't overthrow well established science with such a pathetic setup that would fail a high school science class.

Can you explain why one specific nucleus of a radiosotope undergoes fission while adjacent nuclei of the same material do not? If nuclear reactions are well understood, then it should be possible to predict which nucleus will react.

All this proves is that you don't understand nuclear reactions. Quantum physics is probabilistic. Even if you understand it perfectly, you still can't make specific predictions about random events.

My position is that the reaction will be shown to be real or not over the next year or so.

Unlikely. They clearly have no intention of actually giving out any real data, or even conducting any real experiments, since it would have been trivially easy to do this already.

This is interesting because in all of the hot fusion work that has occurred since the 1950's no one has ever said when they will have a power plant working -- other than "it's just around the corner; send more money."

It's not interesting at all. Scam artists and crackpots are always making promises like this. Real scientists working on real fusion aren't claiming they're about to produce a power plant because, for the most part at least, they aren't a bunch of scam artists (given the number involved obviously I can't claim that none of them are, look at Hwang Woo-suk after all).

I leave you to complete the measurements in your Junior physics lab.

Hate to disappoint you, but several of us here are physicists who actually understand the subject. It's a shame you prefer to just throw around crackpottery and fallacies rather than choosing to learn more about something you don't understand yourself.

 

[ben m]

My question to you was about fissile nuclei not fusion of nickel nuclei with protons. If the physics is understood, one should be able to predict which individual nucleus will decay. Is this a problem?

You mean why is U235 fissile and U236 is not? Sure, that is generally well understood; the odd-neutron-number nuclei have an unpaired nucleon, which means that a low-energy neutron capture leads to a particularly high excited state, and for sufficiently-large nuclei the excited states are football-shaped in a way that promotes fission.

Or do you mean, given U235 nucleus #1 and U235 nucleus #2, can we predict whether #1 or #2 will decay first? No, each of them has a fundamentally random (as opposed to merely "hard to predict") decay time. This is not a problem in any way.

 

[pteridine]

(Hate to disappoint you, but several of us here are physicists who actually understand the subject. It's a shame you prefer to just throw around crackpottery and fallacies rather than choosing to learn more about something you don't understand yourself.

You do not disappoint me. I realize that there are card carrying physicists on this site. Your responses and those of Ben M, Hindmost, and others make that evident.

Sergio Focardi put forward a proposed mechanism in his paper with Rossi.

How would you analyze that mechanism?

 

[ben m]

Sergio Focardi put forward a proposed mechanism in his paper with Rossi.

Please cite the paper and I'll take a look.

 

[Dancing David]

Nuclear reactions like what? No one knows what they are.

Un you do knwo who Gell-Mann is? You do know how he spent his life?

This is an imaginary god of the gaps argument.

Might as well say 'angelic forces'.

 

[Dancing David]

You do not disappoint me. I realize that there are card carrying physicists on this site. Your responses and those of Ben M, Hindmost, and others make that evident.

Sergio Focardi put forward a proposed mechanism in his paper with Rossi.

How would you analyze that mechanism?

And that paper is where?

 

[Dancing David]

My question to you was about fissile nuclei not fusion of nickel nuclei with protons. If the physics is understood, one should be able to predict which individual nucleus will decay. Is this a problem?

Hi, lets see in

1896 Becquerel finds this thing that leads to him and the Curies to win a Nobel prize.

1927 Heisenberg proposed the Uncertainty Principle

Hundreds of people Schroedinger, Planck, DeBroglie, Bohr included develop this thing called Quantum mechanics^WP. in which it turns out that the best way to describe the world of little bits of energy called partciles, is gues what? A causal and random.

So you are almost a hundred years out of data. It has led to some of the most precisely tested and verified predictions in science.

No you can not predict the decay of a single atom, and no you can not drive a god through the gaps.

 

[Dancing David]

Not if the only way they study it is by wrapping a brick in lead, plugging in nonfunctional instrumentation into it, and giving a press conference about it.

Truly amazing! A definite critique.

"But the brick gets warm!"

 

[Cuddles]

No you can not predict the decay of a single atom, and no you can not drive a god through the gaps.

To go back to this, maybe it would help to take the quantum out of it. Let's instead look at classical Newtonian mechanics. Anyone want to argue we don't understand Newton's laws? I hope not. So, take three massive bodies in an otherwise empty universe and use Newton's laws of gravity and motion to predict how they will move.

The problem being that you can't. There simply isn't a general analytic solution for the motion of three (or more) bodies. You can set up a few highly specific, and rather contrived, situations where a solution is possible. You can predict the motion numerically step by step, and if you use small enough steps and a fast enough computer you can get pretty close. But it's just not possible to know exactly how they will move given arbitrary initial conditions.

It's exactly the same with quantum physics. Even knowing all the laws governing the behaviour of particles, it's simply not possible to predict exactly what will happen in every situation. It's not a limitation of our knowledge of those laws*, it's a direct consequence of the laws themselves.


* It is of course possible that we do have the physics wrong and there will turn out to be a fundamental layer even deeper that brings the whole thing back to being deterministic. Many people, including quantum physicists, actually hope that is the case because all this probabilistic stuff just looks messy. But that's all beside the point, which is that if we are correct, even a perfect understanding of quantum mechanics would not help us predict the decay of a specific nucleus.

 

[pteridine]

The paper and others are available at http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com The right hand column menu has the papers of interest; the Rossi-Focardi paper, and evaluations of some proposed mechanisms, including "Nuclear signatures to be expected from Rossi energy amplifier" by Jaques Dufour, which says that there should be serious amounts of 4-8 MeV gamma; a few cm of lead would not do anything to attenuate these photons. In this paper, the mass of the Ni in the reactor is overestimated by several orders of magnitude but the conclusions would not change. Another paper by Dufour "Is the Rossi energy amplifier the first pico-chemical reactor?" brings up interesting possibilities that may require re-examination of some physics that smack of Randall Mills 'hydrino' explanations.
I would be interested in your opinions and those of others on this board who have been patient with my previous posts.

 

[ben m]

The paper and others are available at http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com The right hand column menu has the papers of interest; the Rossi-Focardi paper,

etc.

I'm not going to click through everything. Please give a link to the specific paper containing a nuclear theory you want me to comment on.

Oh, wait, there's a link to "Rossi-Focardi Paper", I was looking at the wrong box. I'll take a look.

 

[pteridine]

The Rossi-Focardi paper provides some basis. The Dufour paper "Is the Rossi energy amplifier the first pico-chemical reactor?" postulates an alternative mechanism that you may find unconventional but that I would like opinions on.
thank you.

 

[BenBurch]

Ahem; http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?page_id=2