Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
The new elements they got, are much more interesting. The problem is that:
* Cooper and Zinc that are the parts of brass.
* Iron, Chrome and Manganese that are common in stainless steel.
So the most simple explanation is contamination from the surrounding vessel and plumbing.
It is also very strange that they didn't get Cadmium and Indium that are the direct product of fusion of Palladium and Silver with Hydrogen, Deuterium and Helium. It is like if there was a fusion and then the new atom split into smaller atoms like all the ones I listed before. It is strange.
Detecting elements can be done for incredibly small amounts, but instead the problem is avoiding contamination.
"Lattice assisted nuclear reactions" is just another name for "cold fusion" (or perhaps a branch of "cold fusion"). All the papers published about this have been unconvincing.
> They just don't generate usable amounts of power.
All the papers I remember report an small excess of heat. The problem is that heat is very difficult to measure accurately (the different parts of the equipment have different temperatures, estimating the heat transported in convection is a mess, some chemical parts may react, ...)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01685...
Unfortunately no practical mechanism for creating a self sustaining reaction has been proposed. Although the theoretical benefit has been demonstrated by heating the fuel via hot neutron bombardment.
https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.0...
I think that "cold fusion" is not theoretically impossible. For comparison, "high temperature superconductivity" is also weird, and in 1985 any result about it would have been received with a big dose od skepticism. The problem is that "cold fusion" has a very bad track record in the last years.
I guess maybe it does seeing as how I got downvoted? Presumably by amazing scientists who have developed cold fusion technology? Or at least have a theory of how it could happen in our universe?
Edit: So in that case, what would it mean to add an axiom that P=NP? See https://mathoverflow.net/questions/50023/independence-of-p-n... especially the answer by Andreas Blass. Basically, you could add axioms that change the meaning of 'Turing machine' (ie 'computation') by changing the meaning of 'natural number' resulting in an algorithm witnessing P=NP that maybe can't be run on physical computers.
Way off topic...
Without considering many facts specific to P=NP, it could be feasible for it to neither true nor false in ZFC (i.e., some model of ZFC has P=NP, and some other has P!=NP), in which case you could take P=NP as another axiom. Other statements that work this way include the continuum hypothesis.
If I'm not mistaken (and misstatements regarding P=NP are common, so don't take this blindly), P=NP has a substantial amount of additional structure to it due to it being a low-complexity arithmetical statement. In particular, I believe you're correct that in ZFC it is actually either true or false in all models, but not necessarily provably so from within ZFC. In this case you could try to take it as an axiom (e.g. ZFC+PNP), but you'd either wind up with ZFC itself or an inconsistent axiom set.
As a related (maybe equivalent?) statement, P=NP has the property that if A is an axiom independent from ZF and P=NP (resp P!=NP) is provable in ZF+A then P=NP (resp P!=NP) is provable in ZF, again due to its nature as a low-complexity arithmetical statement, so either P=NP is unprovable in any meaningful extension of ZF, or it's provable in all of them.
https://thenewfire.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/nasa_transmut...
Heat is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, especially when small amounts are being produced or if the experiment runs over a long time.
Heat can also have many sources, some of which aren't expected by even highly experienced experimenters.
For example, hydrogen has spin isomers, and the conversion of orthohydrogen into parahydrogen releases energy.
Metals like palladium can also release surprising amounts of energy due to lattice or adsorption effects.
Graphite absorbs neutrons in reactors and can store sufficient energy in the lattice structure defects that it's a hazard if released too quickly.
Electrical interference can produce currents that are absorbed in the metal. Residual magnetic fields release energy if the metal is demagnetised. Etc...
Meanwhile, measuring the production of new elements is trivial, even in tiny amounts, and cannot possibly occur via only chemical processes. Crystal structure, phase transitions, external fields, etc... have no effect on this measurement. It is a simple, reliable, accurate measurement.
If you see a scientist insisting that you pay attention to the unreliable metric and waves his hands to explain why you should ignore the reliable metric then it's a safe bet that he's either fooling you, or he fooled himself.
Demanding extraordinary evidence is just defending turf, and not science.
This is less often harmful in cases where the current consensus is based more on actual evidence than on groupthink and conformity. So, in physics, there is actual evidence for most things observable.
But there are plenty of fields where fashion prevails. Without citing current problem children, geology until quite recently forbade mention of catastrophic events like bolide strikes, and psychology filtered all hypotheses through behaviorism.
This could be close to unobtainable, for sufficiently outrageous claims. The argument I am making goes all the way back to Hume's "Of Miracles".
In the specific case of Cold Fusion and the like, the evidence is further impeached by the lack of progress. What's happening looks just like a pseudoscientific study of nothing that spits out bad results that never goes anywhere.
The current consensus model does not deserve any privilege over any other model that also accounts for the same body of evidence. The degree of privilege afforded to it is exactly the inertia that prevents progress.
Science does not need for there to be a consensus model. Nature doesn't have one. Insistance on a single model when more than one meets requirements is purely human pigheadedness, and a primary impediment to progress.
None of this means that low-energy fusion happens, or doesn't. But the vociferous attacks on reports of what looks like it are the absolute antithesis of science. Science says only, "Try it again, more carefully."
Ordinary evidence.
Cold Fusion requires not just one "miracle", but a stack of multiple miracles, all in contravention of existing knowledge. It requires that fusion can occur when QM calculations show it can't. It requires that excited nuclei not emit gamma radiation. It requires that energy go not into energetic charged particles (which would produce detectable secondary radiation) but somehow immediately go into the lattice of a solid, spread over large numbers of atoms.
Stack on top of that another coincidence: that despite P&F's initial results being shown to be shit, that somehow there was a pony in there somewhere anyway.
The simplest and cleanest explanation for all this LENR work is that it's nonsense driven by some combination of almost pathologic wishful thinking, incompetence, and even outright fraud.
It took much longer than it should have to converge on the unit charge, just because everyone after Millikan was afraid to report a result too far from his.
What is nihilistic is your ignoring all the previous evidence, the evidence that, as I told you, gets encoded into known physical laws. That's the problem with radical changes: they require repudiation of all that evidence, in favor of the comparatively razor thin evidence that has caught your fancy.
The unambiguous result is the presence of fusion by-products, but unfortunately they're not seen here.
In particular, there should be detectable amounts of He-3, lithium, beryllium, etc, none of which seem to have been found.
All the listed elements are common cross-metal contaminants and should be present in far lower ratio than He, Li, Be et al.
You make a decent measurement -- my former speciality. That's not waving a Geiger counter surrounded by concrete or granite. (It just wouldn't have been worth the effort at the time of the original cold fusion nonsense.) Sure, about atomic reaction products if you can analyse their appearance as well as neutrons and gamma rays.
I really wish they hadn’t been discounted as erroneous without attempts to replicate by the larger scientific community. We’d be much farther along by now, in capturing this extremely interesting result!
Sure. But what if LENR is real? They may be opening pandoras box.
From the article:
"Examining the exposed Pd25Ag tube reveals a scattering of anomalies on the surface of the tube. Large areas of Cu were observed as well as an area of Zn separate from the Cu, which may indicate that no CueZn alloy is present, removing the possibility of brass contamination. "
TL;DR: They compared the metallurgy of two different samples, which IMHO totally invalidates the result.
The setup revolves primarily around "Johnson-Matthey purifiers", which are made by a manufacturer for industrial hydrogen gas purification. It isn't designed to have calibrated or consistent metallurgy for this kind of scientific experiment.
They're essentially a long Pd-Ag tube sealed in a stainless steel pressure vessel and also the tubes have supporting stainless steel springs inside them.
The experimenters had only two(!) of these filters, both sealed in the factory. They had to cut them open to access the Pd-Ag tubes inside for analysis.
A) This is a destructive test, so they had no way to run the experiment on one tube for longer and longer periods to demonstrate a steady increase in the contaminants.
B) They didn't take a control measurement of either tube before commencing the experiment.
c) They have no reason to assume that the metal purity of the tubes is anywhere near consistent enough to compare two different tubes, which are likely to have been manufactured on different dates from different metal sources and hence would not be consistent enough for this kind of experiment.
D) Individual tubes could also have had point-to-point variations, which they claim is the result, not the error! That's insane.
E) This is a long-running experiment (months) with many actions taken on the filters. Connections and disconnections of gas sources, high temperature cycling, flushing with various gases, etc... It's entirely conceivable that a contaminant got into the tubes.
Essentially, the only scientific way to run an experiment like this is to manufacture a tube yourself, using either very high purity metals or a very well characterised and homogeneous alloy. Then you'd have to take samples at multiple points along the tube and at several different times during the experiment. You'd also want to make sure that the entire experiment is housed in a metal that is similarly well characterised. At least a dozen such setups would need to be run in parallel, using the exact same setup except for gases used.
They did none of this. They simply noticed a filter got hot, cut it open, and assumed that what they measured was an increase relative to a different unused filter they had lying around.
This is garbage science.
Probably just contamination.
I don't understand why experts cannot accept the challenge. There is something happening that is unexpected (modulo some reproducibility issues)? Investigate, jeez
At some point, this will all go the same way as the Victorian fad of photographs of faeries.
Interesting trivia: AuPd alloys are used for coating insulating surfaces with ~10 nm thick layer to make the surface conductive with small metallic grains to do high resolution scanning electron microscopy.
https://ravescientific.com/education/37-proper-target-materi...
This particular % is not typically used (60/40 or 80/20 is), but it is close.
But cold fusion "field" seems to be trying to go from nothing to everything in one step? Is there anyone who has been successful lowering the temperature required by even a single degree Celsius? And to make it even easier, let's include fusion that does not produce net energy.
Maybe the universe is trying to balance out the cosmic 2020 scale.
Warm superconductors, cold fusion, next up would be EM drive.
So a combination of a material and pressure that shows superconductivity at room temperature is new, but not unexpected.
(A material that is a superconductor at room temperature and atmospheric pressure would be a more interesting and surprising. I'd wait until it is reproduced before throwing a party. )
Anyway, first thing you do when you see a new paper is check what's journal it's in. If the journal has a crap reputation you skip it. This paper does nothing to improve the journal's standing, so the papers in there must be the usual "nothing new to see here, let's all move on" junk.