User talk:Objectivist

 Hello Objectivist, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may


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Electron catalysis
. If this is your original theory, I'd prefer that you acknowledge this, and that it be moved to a subpage. Okay?

If it is synthesis from sources, fine for the moment. But I hope that everything on a page at as high a level as the theory page be verifiable from sources. All the theories should be attributed. Attribution to yourself is okay, as long as it is not made too prominent, unless, perhaps, you are a prominent researcher!

I've written lots of stuff on those pages that may be moved elsewhere later. The whole structure should be considered a draft. Welcome, and thanks for participating in the development of this learning resource! --Abd 22:23, 28 October 2010 (UTC)


 * You can use the WikiSource link on the main Cold Fusion page ("Hypotheses" section) as a reference (I have yet to get a reference posted correctly in a WikiMedia page). Almost everything I put on the Theory page is in that WikiSource article (but mostly worded differently, since the article is a lot longer, and written for a less-informed audience).  The main thing that's not in the article is the part about X-rays.  You might call that "original research" on my part, heh, except it should be logically obvious to anyone who understands the rest of the explanation.  I'm still interested in knowing what you think of the "sensibility" of that proposed explanati

 Hello Objectivist, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may


 * Take a guided tour and learn to edit.
 * Visit a (kind of) random project.
 * Browse Wikiversity, or visit a portal corresponding to your educational level: pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, non-formal education.
 * Find out about research activities on Wikiversity.


 * Read an introduction for teachers and find out how to write an educational resource for Wikiversity.
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 * Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en.

And don't forget to explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage, and see you around Wikiversity! If you're a twitter user, please follow http://twitter.com/Wikiversity. --JWSchmidt 16:14, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Electron catalysis
. If this is your original theory, I'd prefer that you acknowledge this, and that it be moved to a subpage. Okay?

If it is synthesis from sources, fine for the moment. But I hope that everything on a page at as high a level as the theory page be verifiable from sources. All the theories should be attributed. Attribution to yourself is okay, as long as it is not made too prominent, unless, perhaps, you are a prominent researcher!

I've written lots of stuff on those pages that may be moved elsewhere later. The whole structure should be considered a draft. Welcome, and thanks for participating in the development of this learning resource! --Abd 22:23, 28 October 2010 (UTC)


 * You can use the WikiSource link on the main Cold Fusion page ("Hypotheses" section) as a reference (I have yet to get a reference posted correctly in a WikiMedia page). Almost everything I put on the Theory page is in that WikiSource article (but mostly worded differently, since the article is a lot longer, and written for a less-informed audience).  The main thing that's not in the article is the part about X-rays.  You might call that "original research" on my part, heh, except it should be logically obvious to anyone who understands the rest of the explanation.  I'm still interested in knowing what you think of the "sensibility" of that proposed explanation for cold fusion.  Finally, I'm quite sure the author of the article did not know, at the time it was written, that X-rays had been detected in CF experiments. :)  V 06:01, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, mind reading, eh? :-) Just noticed this. However, that lacuna in your knowledge betrayed a lack of knowledge of the experimental evidence in the field. Have you read Storms (2007)? He's got pages of evidence on X-rays.... No problem with lack of knowledge, in itself. We are here to learn as well as to share what we know and think. Properly placed in resources. --Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I've moved your proposed theory to a subpage, and I'll comment there. But right off, X-rays are a huge red herring. While X-rays are detected in CF experiments, they have not been correlated with excess heat, which means that whatever is producing them is not a common part of whatever is producing the excess heat. It's similar to the situation with neutrons: they are not produced by the main reaction. Hagelstein, as you know, is aware of the X-rays, but he uses the fact that they are found a quite low levels to set an upper limit on the normal production of charged particles to those under about 20 KeV, which is a severe problem for most theories. In particular, any theory which involves simple two-deuteron fusion through electron catalysis is going to have to deal with this difficulty. MCF and electron catalysis: why would they produce radically different branching ratios? Even if you can get around the charged particle absence, by some kind of transfer to the lattice, how the lattice would influence, so strongly, the branching ratio and thus the emission of neutrons and the production of tritium, which, while found, are found at levels drastically lower than would be expected. My own conclusion is that it is highly unlikely that the reaction is simple d+d fusion, Occam's Razor. It is another reaction, almost certainly some kind of cluster fusion. TSC theory is just one possibility, there are others.
 * The Cold fusion resource here should be, overall, presented in a neutral way. It's fine, to start, to simply assert stuff, but if what you assert cannot, at least in your mind, be established from sources (with attribution, sourcing requirements here would be looser than that of wikipedia, just don't make it appear that a source is stronger than it is), it should be set off as a proposal or personal opinion. Given that there is plenty of theory that can be well-established (as having been published and mentioned in reliable secondary sources), personally proposed theories should go on subpages. Eventually, all the theories will have their own subpages, I assume. Wikiversity allows the use of hypertext that shows notability and importance by what level the text appears on. It's radically inclusionist. The top level Cold fusion resource should be roughly, ultimately, what the Wikipedia article should be if not for biased maintenance, though by consensus we can include a bit more than I'd be comfortable trying to include on Wikipedia.
 * We can also develop, here, a proposed Wikipedia article, attempting to follow Wikipedia standards, i.e., no OR, everything verifiable in reliable source, etc. At some point someone can propose changing the WP article to that one, and, if the improvement is clear enough -- that shouldn't be terribly difficult@ -- that can be taken to RfC and even to ArbComm if necessary (ArbComm won't make content decisions, but it can judge how guidelines and policies are being applied, and it has done so in the past with Cold fusion). --Abd 16:29, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd forgotten that the theory was published in Infinite Energy. That gives it slightly more notability, but Infinite Energy is a questionable magazine, though it does publish lots of good stuff. I still think this belongs on a subpage, but ref to Infinite Energy should go with the link to the subpage on the Theory page. I'll eventually get to it. Is there any secondary source review? --Abd 16:40, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Wait until the extreme skeptics show up! The better prepared the resource here, the easier it will be to find consensus with them. I'd love to see them put up reliable source for the skeptical position! As you may be aware, there is a severe shortage of it, particularly in recent years, it's all low-reliability compared to peer-reviewed secondary sources!
 * The nature of Wikiversity, hopefully, makes it easier to find consensus, because there are many more options, there is not just one page with one section on each aspect to struggle over. And it is much more difficult to block a user here, it has to get pretty bad, see Special:Contributions/Krunchlolee and if that user had been at all some kind of reasonable contributor to the project, the block would be being promptly contested. "POV-pushing," in itself, is not any kind of offense here, just as universities are generally loath to fire professors because of their point of view, it has to get pretty bad, often with severe outside political pressure, to get that done. Academic freedom means nothing on Wikipedia, but it means a great deal here. --Abd 16:48, 10 November 2010 (UTC)


 * At this writing I did not see any commentary outside of this page, so I'm replying here.
 * I think it would be better if the name of the author was part of the text you wrote, on the theory page and the electron catalysis subpage, instead of "user:objectivist". I don't know of any reason why a real name shouldn't be used, especially when the real name was attached to the publication of the hypothesis.
 * Next, you may be misinterpreting something about the explanation for X-rays. If low levels of X-rays are detected, then this means not a lot of energy hypothetically being produced by cold fusion is leaving the system as X-rays.  (Any hypothesis must still be able to explain the observation, however.)  The electron catalysis hypothesis describes how lots of electrons can acquire fairly significant energy.  If they lose energy by friction (think "electrical resistance heating"), or if they lose energy by radiating X-rays, the net effect is the same, if most X-rays don't escape the metal and are absorbed inside the body of the metal --the metal is heated.  If there is any correlation between X-rays and a particular experiment, the correlation should be between the amount of X-rays detected and the surface area of the metal.  Because the more volumous the metal, the more heat can be generated by internally-absorbed X-rays, while only a relatively constant percentage of X-rays produced inside the metal near the surface of the metal could escape to be detected.
 * Finally, with respect to any issue of "undue weight", remember that a mere hypothesis need not be assigned a lot of weight. The mere fact that something is called a "hypothesis" and not "theory" is important!  By definition, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has made predictions that were experimentally verified.  I therefore reiterate prior statements I made that ALL the cold fusion "theories" need to be called "hypotheses", since so far as I know, none of them have made predictions that were experimentally verified. V 07:09, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I hope you don't mind a long comment here! part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I hope you don't mind an interspersed reply! V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, real name would be better. You can fix it or I will. The net result is the same, but X-rays are relatively penetrating. part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The penetrability of X-rays depends on their energy and the material being penetrated. The normal method for making medical X-rays (relatively low energy; just enough to penetrate flesh but not bone) involves a vacuum tube where electrons are accelerated until they hit a target--the impact yields X-rays.  The vacuum tube has a beryllium "window" to let the X-rays out; beryllium is less than twice a dense as water (and about half as dense as glass, also, implying that main body of a glass vacuum tube is impermeable by medical X-rays).  Meanwhile, palladium is 12x density of water.  I'm quite sure that medical X-rays would be completely blocked by a fairly thin layer of palladium.  On the other hand, I haven't seen any data about the energy of the X-rays that are associated with CF experiments; they might be more energetic and thus more penetrating. V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * First of all, let me note, I'm not an expert in physics or chemistry, I have, rather, a casual knowledge of these, from undergraduate study many years ago and years of reading sources like Scientific American, plus what I've picked up in extensive reading in cold fusion over the last 21 months or so. On the other hand, that undergrad study was with Feynman and Pauling, which might count for something! Feynman, in particular, imparted to me a healthy skepticism about claims to knowledge that are sometimes flimsy. I also have a habit of asserting as fact what I think might be true, depending on my friends to correct me when I err. From this point of view, "enemies" can be my best friends! If they are knowledgeable, and I should always start with an assumption that they are. Even if they are "wrong" about something. It can take some serious knowledge to be spectacularly wrong!
 * No problem; I'm not formally an expert, either. V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * /The X-rays that would be produced are of two kinds: Bremmstrahlung and characteristic. Characteristic X-rays are produced by electronic transitions. The frequency of these depends on the element causing the braking of the electrons. Bremmstrahlung X-rays are caused by deflection of energetic electrons, and they will be found distributed across a curve, with a wide range of energies.. Characteristic K-series X-rays from palladium (Atomic # 46) are at 21.02 and 21,18 KeV. Also relevant: for oxygen and deuterium, this energy would be very low. Notice that Hagelstein is limiting the energy of charged particle radiation to about 20 KeV maximum. Bremmstrahlung radiation would predominate, and could not exceed the energy of the particles.
 * Note the characteristic X-rays of palladium can only be produced if a fast charged particle invades a palladium atom deeply enough to knock one of its innermost-shell electrons out. Since I'm proposing fast electrons, I can note they don't have significantly more mass than the 40-odd other electrons that are orbiting the palladium nucleus, shielding the innermost shell.  I can therefore suspect that those fast electrons will only rarely be able to penetrate a palladium atom that deeply, meaning that just about all the X-rays produced will be from Bremsstrahlung.  And, of course, I can reiterate the idea that the more electrons are involved in catalyzing a fusion reaction, the less energy each of them can carry away. V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Mass attenuation coefficient for palladium and the Mass attenuation coefficient for Hydrogen (should be the same for deuterium), and the Mass attenuation coefficient for water. The mass attenuation coefficient, μ/ρ, is used to calculate the actual attenuation ratio
 * I/Io = (exp)[(-μ/ρ)x], where x is the thickness of the material. I don't have time to do the calculations today....
 * However, the thinness of the beryllium window that is used, combined with the low electronic density (that's the factor that, when it increases, increases absorption), explains why it is so low-absorption. The absorption by glass will be proportional, as with all materials, to thickness. A thin palladium layer will absorb more than beryllium, for sure, but if it is thin enough, absorption might not be significant. So the key here is, in part, where the X-rays originate, and whether or not they have a preferential orientation. The X-rays themselves would be generated by energetic electrons.
 * How, a clue to site of origin is in the general observation that roughly half of the helium generated is found in the effluent gases. While hydrogen and deuterium penetrate Palladium with ease, helium does not. It will tend to stay put where generated. That half of it does readily escape indicates a site of origin near the surface. This is also born out by elemental analysis of CF solid palladium cathodes: the helium is generally found within 25 microns of the surface.--Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * An excellent clue; thank you! Note this means that a scaled-up CF reactor needs as much surface area as possible, of thinly plated palladium.... V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * We are far from understanding the phenomenon well enough for practical scale-up. Srinavasan may think differently, I suppose, see the article I link to below. Nanoparticle palladium accomplishes the same goal, increased surface area. Problem is, from what I can see, the reaction uses up the available sites and nanoparticle palladium work doesn't continue to sustain heat beyond a few days. The reports are irritatingly shallow on how long it goes on. Arata's published work stops at 3000 minutes; at that point, the heat is not visibly declining. But with 7 grams of palladium involved, and a 4 degree temperature rise in an insulated cell, after the heat of deuteride formation settles, consider how much palladium would be involved in a cold fusion hot water heater. I did a very rough calculation and came up with the estimate that for a mere $100,000 worth of palladium, one could have a home cold fusion hot water heater. What is wrong with this picture?
 * It is my understanding that some CF experiments used titanium with some success. And that Google-Knol "proposed CF experiment" implies that a number of metals might work, if there was a way to keep their surfaces from oxidizing.  Somebody really needs to try some metal like lead that has a very very thin anti-corrosion layer on it.  If the layer is, say 3 microns thick, and if CF can happen 25 microns inside metal, then we would KNOW that we would not need a lot of palladium. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * What is needed at this point is basic science, leading to better understanding both of the parameter space -- for which one does not necessarily need to understand the reaction -- and of the mechanism. If the mechanism is understood, then entirely new design approaches may become conceivable.
 * In other words, "an accurate hypothesis", heh! V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It is not impossible that a practical design would involve codeposition; i.e., each cell could go through a cycle where palladium is deposited and the reaction runs, then the palladium is dissolved by reversing the cell, then it is deposited again to repeat the cycle. The gas-loaded nanoparticle approaches result in altered material that is no longer reactive, apparently. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I will guess that the cause of that problem is helium filling the "cells" where we need to have two deuterons. In chemical nomenclature, we might say that the catalyst (palladium) has been poisoned by the reaction product that it helped catalyze into existence. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

arbitrary section break 1

 * Cold fusion theories need, in general, to explain a host of experimental phenomena. While it is possible that there is more than one "main reaction," under differing circumstances, we are look at a single reaction, almost certainly, that explains the bulk of the effects in an F-P experiment. Speaking only about F-P, from the helium production, which substantially explains the heat, the main reaction produces helium, and it produces it within not many microns from the surface, I think the figure of 25 microns is given sometimes. part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know that such a claim is true, especially given the ability of hydrogen to permeate palladium, and the degree of "loading" required before anything unusual starts to happen. I could possibly accept this notion due to those images of "eruptions/meltings" of spots in some palladium electrodes; the depth of the source of those eruptions might be what you say --or they might be deeper.  Anyway, if we assume that the initial loading of deuterium into a piece of palladium has the effect of getting one deuteron into every "cell" that can be defined by a grouping of palladium atoms, then when more deuterium starts to get added, it is logical that two-deuterons-per-cell will happen close to the surface instead of deep inside the metal.  What are the "official" arguments about CF happening close to the surface of the metal?  (We now return to need-to-know regarding the actual energy of the detected X-rays.) V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I mention it above. This was unexpected, by the way, for the reasons you seem to think. Complicating this vastly is that the reaction does not seem to take place with pure, perfect palladium, i.e., regular crystalline structure, no defects. The surface of an electrolytic cathode in CF experiments is an extraordinarily complex mixture of stuff, various elements from the cell wall, platinum, say, from the anode, all that stuff is found there. Notice that if the reaction requires molecular deuterium -- where the electron screening effect might be strong from local electrons -- we would expect it to take place only at or very near the surface. If the helium is born with a little energy, it might penetrate to some depth before stopping. If we assume anisotropic generation energy, which seems likely at these temperatures, half the helium will have a vertor that is inward, half outward. The same would be true of electrons that somehow incorporate energy from the fusion.--Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm in favor of the gas-pressurization experiments over the electrolysis experiments, because pressurization means we don't have to wait for enough deuterium to get into just the right spots (related to composition/structure) inside palladium. We can force so much deuterium into it that if CF is possible at all (even in 100% pure and perfectly crystalline palladium), then we will see the results of that.  And, so far as I'm aware, all the pressurization experiments found anomalous heat.  V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That's a big statement. I'll ask Storms, he's working with gas-loading. To my knowledge, the best results from these experiments are not with pure palladium, they are with alloys. A lot of work is being done on finding optimal alloys or structures. The future of cold fusion is in materials science. However, codeposition can, under the right conditions, create fully loaded PdD right from the start. It is far easier a technique than gas pressurization, I could, when the kits are complete, set up up to run a co-dep experiment for probably about $100, which includes a reasonable profit. (This would be a SPAWAR neutron generation demonstration, including SSNTDs). I've also thought of designing a gas pressurization demonstration, but I doubt I could keep the cost that low. Maybe. We'll see what Storms says, I'm visiting him next month. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, the "angle" I was coming from, when I wrote that last remark, was the replication problem. If gas-loading is always replicable in producing anomalous energy, then the CF proponents need to push it until the detractors have no choice but to admit something abnormal is going on, and might really be "cold fusion".  But if codeposition experiments are equally replicable (I have less data about that), then that also should be pushed.  The most important thing is to have an experiment that anyone can do (like the early days of the high-temperature superconducting ceramics; nobody could deny the phenomenon was real).  I understand that that is exactly what you are attempting to offer, but I don't know that anyone who buys one of your kits is guaranteed some anomalous energy production. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

arbitrary section break 2

 * If high-energy charged particles are produced near the surface, roughly 50% of the X-rays will escape the metal. part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You are making at least two unwarranted assumptions there. First, if a CF reaction dumps 24Mev into a bunch of electrons, it is important to know how many electrons received it.  On the average, the more particles, the less energetic each one will be (so if there were a thousand electrons involved, the average energy would be 24Kev; the X-ray article indicates that they need to have at least 12Kev of energy to be called "penetrating").  Second, you assume that the X-rays being produced must be highly penetrating, and especially able to penetrate palladium.  What is the data?  We can work backward from that to estimate how many electrons were involved in a CF reaction, if the electron catalysis hypothesis is valid, and we can also estimate the maximum depth inside the palladium they originated.  I ask again if you have actually read the proposal; it hints that there could be far more than a mere thousand electrons involved..., so, the less energy per X-ray, the closer to the surface of the metal it had to originate. V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Cluster fusion, where the cluster includes electrons, does provide a mechanism for electronic energy sharing, the cluster is functioning as a single quantum-mechanical unit, with a single wave equation. Energy will be shared. However, you are looking at d-d fusion. The conduction-band concept you are using to assume high electron density between the deuterium nuclei does not allow that density, if I'm correct. However, certainly, there will be a certain "presence" of electrons between the nuclei. You have not explained how that presence becomes as intense enough to screen the repulsion, which is what's necessary. Yes, there may be many electrons "involved," but they are, as you note, not individual entities as such, and they will not be equally affected. Those which are "located" close to the reaction may participate in the energy, I suspect you are correct on that; however, I think that, absent a Bose Einstein Condensate, there is no way for the local electron density to reach a high enough value to screen the very considerable Coulomb repulsion. Further, if fusion occurs, outside of a condensate, I don't see a mechanism for the electrons to share in the energy. Or, at least, for more than a very few, in effect. You are postulating an intense localization of conduction band electrons, and that is energetically unfavored, greatly. That is, it would require high energy to come from somewhere to produce that localization of electron density. part of comment added by Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I did indeed explain how electrons can be present with enough intensity to screen two deuterons. Remember that only one negative charge suffices to shield the deuterons from each other (proved by muon catalysis), and two charged deuterons can attract two loose electrons in-between them, from the conduction band.  The Uncertainty Principle affects all nearby conduction-band electrons, and all of them will have an Uncertain probability-of-location exactly in-between the two deuterons.  So, any electron that exits the spot exactly in-between the two deuterons can be virtually instantly replaced by some other nearby conduction-band electron --which means the deuterons get shielded continuously. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The next relevant fact is something that can be related to the Van der Waals force. One way of describing that force is to note that an electron orbiting an atom is not always everywhere around that atom, so, often, and even for a completely electrically neutral atom, the positive charge of the nucleus can be attracted to an electron of a neighboring atom, through the "holes" in its own electron shell.  What this means is that while two bare deuterons should most obviously strongly attract just two electrons from the conduction band, in actuality they can attract quite a large number of electrons to their vicinity.  Thus each of many electrons spends part of its Uncertainty-of-location closer to the deuterons than they otherwise might.  I cannot say with authority that a thousand or more electrons must be within the range allowed by Uncertainty, but I can also note that if any electron leaves the scene at high speed, then that means the local scene now has a surplus positive charge that can attract more electrons from farther away in the conduction band.  And the coolest thing about Uncertain leaps of electrons is that, so far as we can tell, distances are crossed in exactly zero time.  That means any electron leaving the scene at high speed can be literally instantly replaced...even if thousands of them get involved. V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You are mistaking the slight increase of probability of presence of an electron due to conduction band electrons with the actual presence of each of these. Now, I'm no expert in quantum mechanics, as mentioned, so I could easily stick my foot in my mouth. How I'd visualize this situation, however, is that every electron has a probability of being located in a particular location. There is one (?) conduction band electron for each palladium nucleus, and one for each deuteron. The probability function for each electron in the atom is a complex structure, having to do with the orbitals; that function, within the Bohr orbit, declines with proximity to the nucleus. Deuterons in palladium behave, apparently, as bare nuclei, single positive charge, and the "forbidden zone" for electrons is too far out from the nucleus to allow electron catalysis of fusion. The conditions in palladium, as I'd see it, do not increase the probability of finding an electron close to the nucleus, and your argument about the double positive charge being more attractive seems incorrect to me. Normally, in each cell, there is at most one deuteron, and if another enters, they might possibly form a pair bound by valence electrons. Conduction band electrons, though, have a lower probability of existing at any particular point, and I suspect that there is no electronic energy available for valence bonding, normally, hence D2 would not form except in crystal defects with a larger cell size. You have a mixed concept: of electrons as wave functions, with a probability of being at any location, with a concept of electrons as individual entities. The probability function cannot exceed a probability of one, the Pauli exclusion principle.
 * Um, the whole point of talking about an electron that is not in orbit around a deuteron is that there is no such thing as a "forbidden zone" for the electron. It is very much allowed to move next to or even right through the deuteron --but it is not allowed to stay there, due to ordinary quantum uncertainty.  Not to mention, here is a recent article ( www.nature.com/news/2010/100707/full/news.2010.337.html ) that indicates that even an orbiting electron is sometimes allowed to pass through a nucleus.  So, I have no doubt that one electron can temporarily shield two deuterons from each other.  I also have no doubt that the point of strongest electrical attraction, between two deuterons and an electon, is the midpoint between the deuterons.  Finally, the published article has this statement in it: "QM can give us the impression that sometimes the electron should be considered as existing simultaneously at every single point within that cloud" (of uncertain locations).  No objection to that statement was raised.  To the extent the statement is accurate, then it logically follows that any conduction-band electron that has a small probability of being located midway between two deuterons can be thought of as actually/instantly being there, at some moment when some other electron is not already there --such as when that other electron just left the scene because of quantum uncertainty.  I greatly doubt that this description violates the exclusion principle.  The net effect would be continuous-enough shielding of the deuterons.  However!  There is nothing here to encourage the two deuterons to approach even closer.  If one is simply passing by the other, outside of fusion range ("interaction cross section"), then the first will continue on its way with its course practically unaltered.  The electrons merely shield the deuterons from modifying their courses.  So a lot of "loading" is needed to increase the probability that two deuterons will randomly be on a close-enough collision course, for fusion to happen. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Regarding valence bonding, remember that hydrogen and palladium have the same electronegativity. By definition, no valence bonds should form. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Now, fusion process. If I'm correct, with muon-catalyzed fusion, the muon has an orbital much closer to the nucleus because of its increased mass. This is close enough to shield the Coulomb repulsion between the nuclei. But as the nuclei approach, and the nuclear force starts to take over, my sense is that the activity will drive away the muon, and this is pre-fusion, there is no fusion energy available to the muon, there is only some possibility of acceleration due to effects from the attractive force between the nuclei at that distance. The muon is like a chaperone who brings the two nuclei close enough for the strong nuclear force to take over, then he discreetly leaves them! Really, they push him away! (But he would not be in between them but for a moment, anyway, because of the muon's orbital velocity. Or do I have that right?) An electron, I presume, would behave the same. There is no "room" for the electron between the approaching nuclei. Remember the Bohr radius! The electron wave function won't fill that space.... There is nearly zero probability for *any* electron to be much closer than the Bohr orbital distance to the nucleus. That is a space that is effectively empty of electrons, and that includes "conduction band electrons," which are not any different from other electrons except they are mobile. If they approach a nucleus, which they could only do with the deuterons, they would go into orbit. The attractive force does not draw them closer than the Bohr limit.
 * Here's a link you might find of interest: ( www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-05/958417267.Ch.r.html ); it describes the motion of electrons in a covalent bond. Regarding a muon, the simple fact is that since it is 206 times as massive as an electron, it orbits 206 times as close as an electron.  So (after you read the link!), if we imagine a kind of covalent bond of one muon between two deuterons, we can envision a very tight circle, such that this is why the muon can shield the two deuterons.  It is not actually orbiting one deuteron in a way that frequently leads to this arrangement: μ D D such that the dueterons can repel each other --we almost always instead have the arrangement D μ D (except the distance between the muon and one of the deuterons is a lot greater, as the muonic atom begins to approach the second deuteron.  Next, there is indeed room inside a nucleus for a muon; when a muon invades an atom like lead, it replaces one of that atom's innermost electrons, and then orbits 206 times closer than that innermost electron.  Its orbital distance is actually inside the periphery of the lead nucleus!  The muon can do it, not interacting with quarks inside nucleons, because it does not respond to the strong nuclear force.  Electrons can also pass through nuclei with very little in the way of interaction, see Parton (particle physics).  Note that a lot of electrons have to be shot through a nucleus, to get some bounce-backs from quarks!  (And so just one muon can indeed not run into a quark inside a lead nucleon, before the muon's 2-microsecond lifespan ends.)  Regarding the muon escaping those two fusing deuterons, I'll get back to that farther down, in the text about pions. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The lightweight electron orbits in too big a circle to shield two deuterons from each other. This is why it is critical to focus on non-orbiting electrons.  The Bohr radius does not apply to an electron that is not in orbit (else it would have been almost impossible to detect partons using electron beams, see?).  Next, remember that if it is normal for a deuterium molecule to disintegrate into deuterons and loose electrons inside palladium, then no, a deuterium atom will not re-form just because a loose electron happens to pass by.  Next, while the wave/particle duality lets an electron sort-of occupy a fair volume of space ("cloudiness"), the thing still has particle-like properties such that as best we can measure, it has the size of a mathematical point (at least it is smaller than our finest instrumental resolution of 10-to-the-minus-17 meters, if I recall right).  This obviously means that in terms of particle-like properties, there is plenty of room between two deuterons for a non-orbiting electron!  But because it also has wave-like properties, it is simply not allowed to stay in-between the two deuterons.  Which is why the hypothesis needs lots of loose electrons.  Which the conduction band most conveniently makes available.... V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Something very different happens with a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The individual atoms no longer maintain their individuality, they become one wave function, with the individual atoms being interchangeable. Such a condensate occupies far less volume, so the effective interatomic distance is far lower. As to details, I'd not be the person to ask! But I'll note that Arata proposes pyncodeuterium as "lumps" within the octrahedral lattice-spaces, of 2 to 4 deuterium atoms. The latter source has some nice illustrations, and he does report helium results there. It's too bad he doesn't report the correlation between helium and excess heat! Arata does not mention BECs, but a BEC might be part of the process. Something very odd is going on in the field; if I'm correct, Kim, in his Naturwissenschaften paper on BECs and fusion, doesn't mention Takahashi, but Takahashi is looking at a simple possible BEC; he shows that if the BEC forms, it will collapse and fuse, period. In other words, the fusion problem is reduced to inducing two deuterium molecules to form a BEC (as one of many possibilities, Takahashi is simply, if I'm correct, the first to calculate a fusion cross section of 100%, within a femtosecond of the BEC collapse. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * A BEC requires extremely low particle-energies. I'm not convinced that the probability is high enough, for two (to say nothing of four!) deuterons to have that little energy and also to run into each other, such that the measured magnitude of CF reactions in the more-extreme experiments (the ones that melted palladium) can be explained. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Lots of people have worked on the concept of electron screening. I'd suggest becoming familiar, if you are not, with prior work in this area, I've seen lots of sources. Document your research in the resource here!. As you learn, you will blaze a path that will help others learn.--Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty confident that the plethora of electrons available in the conduction band of a metal can sufficiently screen two deuterons. And I'm also confident that if the two deuterons start to fuse, electrons can carry off some of the reaction energy, because the mediating particles of fusion, pions, can be electrically charged.  I'm less confident about how many can be affected --but if the hypothesis is valid, then the answer is, "however-many are needed to carry away so much energy that the He-4 nucleus stays in one piece", heh! V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * They are "available," but at very low density, and I don't see a mechanism to transfer the fusion energy to them, even if they did catalyze fusion. You've proposed the pions that are the carriers of the strong nuclear force are the intermediaries, but what I expect these pions would do is to simply drive away any electron presence between the deuterons as they approach and the strong force takes over. That presence is very, very low, anyway, already, being in a region within the Bohr orbit. This is the basic problem with electron catalysis per se, electrons just don't approach closely enough, and adding the extra contributions of many conduction band electrons makes almost no difference (only the eight or nine electrons that would be within an octahedral site would be contributing significant presence, which is eight or nine times a tiny probability, still negligible). Electron catalysis within a BEC, maybe, indeed likely. Takahashi's TSC BEC includes three or four electrons. Look, cold fusion theory isn't for amateurs who don't do the math. I can talk about the theories, but quantum mechanics and especially quantum field theory are *tough.* I just was reading Feynman in his little book on Quantum Electrodynamics ("QED"), and he says that calculation of the observed magnetic moment of the proton yields 2.7 +/- 0.3, compared to the experimental value of 2.79275 "if you're sufficiently optimistic," and he's less than thrilled by that, given that the predictions of QED in less complex situations (than one proton!) are highly accurate -- which is basically quantum mechanics of the kind used to predict ridiculously low fusion cross-section at room temperature, even with highly dense deuterium, through an attempt to approximate this by assuming plasma conditions. Feynman then says that "You can guess what I'm working on and I'm not getting anywhere." Basically, the skeptics never really did the math, they used an approximation that was known to be inaccurate; but what was not known was how inaccurate. Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That argument cuts both ways; the inaccuracy is what Pons & Fleischmann postulated allowed weird multi-body effects to have unusual consequences, like cold fusion, The mechanism for transferring nuclear energy to a muon or an electron is very simple.  The virtual pions are moving at nearly the speed of light between the two deuterons and have about 250 times the mass of an electron.  If an electrically charged fast-moving pion bumps into an electron while it is momentarily located in-between the deuterons, then that electron will be severely "kicked".  Ditto for a muon, during muon catalyzed fusion (except not so severely, since a pion is only about 25% more massive than a muon).  The electron leaves the scene at pretty high speed (while a muon can at least leave the scene enough to start another scene, heh).  This means that the CF-relevant "scene", that octahedral palladium cell, is now short one negative charge.  IF it was possible for multiple electrons to take turns shielding the two deuterons during their initial approach, then it logically follows that the same mechanism that allowed one electron to replace another, in-between the deuterons, will continue to operate after an electron is kicked out of the cell.  The cell can attract a replacement electron from the general conduction band even as one of those eight "cell" electrons you mentioned (plus one of the other two "belonged" electrons that I mentioned elsewhere, that naturally should have been near the deuterons) now takes its turn in-between the deuterons.  Well, obviously, it can get kicked out, too!  And the cycle repeats.  All that matters is how quickly electrons from the conduction band can quantum-jump into the cell, replacing kicked-out electrons.  The more that are kicked out faster than they can be replaced, the greater the positive charge inside the cell will be, attracting replacement electrons.... V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Takahashi's work is remarkable because he uses the techniques of quantum field theory -- which is the same as QED, if I'm correct -- to predict fusion. Problem is that the precursor physical condition is not known to occur, and, quite possibly, the only observable sign of its existence would be fusion. I don't think a femtosecond is a long enough lifetime to make it detectable through any kind of spectroscopy. However, if 4D occurs in the lattice positions, then 3D and 2D would also occur, and their lifetimes might be measured through some kind of spectroscopy, and the 4D incidence under certain conditions predicted, and thus a fusion cross-section predicted. This is very complex and difficult work.
 * What you have done is to create a proposed theory, which is similar in some respect to theories already proposed. As Storms points out, there is no shortage of theories! The problem is that none of them, in his opinion, account for all the observed phenomena. TSC theory, as an example, is incomplete at both ends, as I've described. I can speculate on how the energy is dissipated, just as you have with ECF. It's pretty useless, because these explanations involves mechanisms never observed. We need much more experimental data. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * One reason the proposal was made, regarding pure metallic deuterium, was to take palladium out of the equation, but still have a conduction band of loose electrons. Either it will explode (or some of it will explode) --or it won't.  If it does, would that not qualify as extra evidence in favor of electron catalysis? V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

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 * What happens to the other 50% depends on the energy of the X-rays, the thickness of the metal, etc. This would still leave a strong correlation between the excess heat and the X-rays. part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Only if what you say about "50%" is valid. For example, if the X-rays actually originate only 1 micron from the surface (would be true if they can't penetrate more metal than that), then while considerable amounts of CF could happen at depths of 2-25 microns, no X-rays from those reactions would escape (we'd be seeing maybe 4%, not 50%).  So again we need the actual data about the detected X-rays.  I see you mention Bremsstrahlung below (misspelled).  This is electromagnetic radiation and could be anything from visible light to very hard X-rays.  It depends on the energy of the charged particle.  Are you somehow missing the point that the X-rays we are discussing here are Bremsstrahlung radiation??? V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Data on X-ray energies is, I think, thin, but I also think it does exist. Look it up! Storms (2007) has a lot of references to the work, and I think Hagelstein (2010) may also. Yes, I know that the X-rays would probably be Bremsstrahlung, and I misspell the word about half the time, in spite of knowing how to spell it. "I T", right? You should look especially carefully at Hagelstein, his result was not particularly expected, if I'm correct. But his result doesn't rule out higher energies, just that such energies would be rare. --Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I don't have sufficient spare time to do that search. Not to mention that the most likely places to look, on-line journals, are out of my budget to access. V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Just look at Hagelstein!. Many of the sources that he cites will be available at http://lenr-canr.org.
 * Thanks. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Reading Hagelstein again, I do suggest that you study this paper thoroughly. He doesn't mention electrons as a possible energy carrier, and I do think you should consider why. I'll ask him if I get the chance, which eventually I will. But I think I already know, it's because of the arguments I give above, and I suspect that it is only an incomplete understanding of how electrons behave, and would behave if they mediated fusion, that leads you to propose what you have proposed. By the way, as to a theory being proposed that has problems with experimental data, see Kim's paper, this is his own self-published version, I think the Naturwissenschaften paper is hosted by New Energy Times as well. He predicts enhanced fusion at lower temperatures. The experimental data is the opposite. Cold fusion increases with temperature. However, no theory is completely ruled out by a factor like this, because the theory may be incorrectly elaborated or applied. My own idea about this matter of the effect of temperature is that it takes a certain minimum energy to bring four or more deuterons into the physical alignment necessary for the BEC to form. The BEC itself is at very low "temperature," which merely means that the components are effectively stationary with respect to each other, for a short period of time. The minimum energy is supplied by the normal distribution of thermal energy, which allows more energy as the temperature increases. Storms seems to think that the energy available isn't enough. I don't know that it's been calculated. It would be related to the dissociation energy of deuterium gas, it could probably be calculated, at least roughly. But it's beyond me to do that. The energy is what it would take for a deuterium molecule, approaching another deuterium molecule in an orientation such that they are crossed in their axes, to reach, assuming that the "stationary" deuterium molecule is confined in some way so that it cannot dissociate, the symmetric position, with the idea that it would come to a stop if the velocity and orientation were the right value. It is that point of stopping that could lead to BE collapse. And this could be a completely stupid idea! I just have some intuition that, in confinement, and since a cubic lattice would cause, I'd think, a preference for the crossed orientation of two confined deuterium molecules, this might be in range that it would very rarely happen, the percentage of deuterium that fuses in these experiments is incredibly low. As to how the energy is dissipated, there are several possibilities. One is that the energy would be shared among, in this case, 8 particles. However, that's not enough. The next is that the excited Be-8 nucleus is expected, before it fissions, to radiate energy with photons at frequencies which would not escape to be detected. If the energy goes low enough before fission, then the remaining ground state energy of 180 KeV, I think it is, is approaching the Hagelstein limit if energy is equally distributed. Bottom line: Gee, I dunno. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It is possible that some piece of data will come along that makes it obvious that electron catalysis can't work as the hypothesis proposes. So far, though, the things you've posted above do not seem to me to be adequate.  Regarding CF increasing with temperature, this is the kind of data that some would say could be used to rule that some hypotheses must be weeded out, such as any hypothesis that needs some extremely cold nuclei --any energy that brings nuclei near each other must also be removed from those nuclei, for them to qualify as "cold".  And, so far as I've seen, no mechanism has been offered to do that (especially not a mechanism that works better, the hotter is the palladium!).  I notice the electron-catalysis hypothesis does not have a problem there; a higher temperature would naturally increase the rate of close encounters of two deuterons, so, if some fixed percentage of the time they get close enough to fuse (regardless of the mechanism that shields them), then the rate of fusion would go up with temperature. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * "Extremely cold" refers only to the relative velocity of reactants. That can occur under some conditions where the overall environment is at much higher temperature. In fact, it seems possible that to attain those cold temperatures for a small number of reactant molecules or atoms, the overall temperature might need to be relatively high, thus the increased reaction rate. I'm suspecting that this is under conditions of high confinement. To get high confinement requires energy. But high confinement might statistically produce a certain incidence of low relative temperature, in a single confinement site. Apparently for this to cause fusion, the condition need only exist for no more than a few femtoseconds.
 * This is speculation, and I haven't done the math. Nor will I. I'll say, though, that I've never seen math showing that this is impossible, and there are peer-reviewed articles that do propose local, transient Bose-Einstein condensates. I suspect it is not entirely preposterous.... Sure, if you can get close with electron catalysis, you'd see, then, a higher rate with higher temperature, I'd expect. The problem is twofold: getting close, apparently ECF can't get close enough unless there is an entirely new process operating, and, second, the branching ratio problem. How ECF would so radically alter the branching, compared to MCF, is unexplained, as far as I can see. And then there is the Hagelstein limit to deal with (that's quite new as an understanding). --Abd 22:23, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

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 * If I'm correct, the Bremmstrahlung radiation from deaccelerated charged particles, electrons in the case you propose, would carry away only a small portion of the excess heat, but if the production of highly energetic electrons were a major part of the process, the correlation of X-rays with heat would remain strong. X-rays and other products (energetic protons, energetic neutrons, tritium, and 3He) from d-d fusion are effectively missing, as to sufficient quantity to be associated with the excess heat. I highly recommend, at this point, giving up on electron catalysis. I see no reason to think that electron catalysis, if we are only talking about d-d reactions, would behave differently as to branching ratio than muon-catalyzed fusion, which matches, I believe, ordinary d-d hot fusion as to branching, and the branching ratio for "warm" fusion remains the same as the temperature is lowered; the reaction simply becomes rarer. part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That is evidence you haven't studied the hypothesis. The main reason the branching ratio is basically the same for muon catalysis as for hot fusion is because the muon is just one particle.  It is difficult for just one particle to carry away 24Mev from a D+D fusion reaction (therefore a gamma ray is rare!).  The main reason the branching ratio could be different for electron catalysis is because lots of electrons can be involved, each carrying away some energy. V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is just one particle, but I don't think it carries away much, if any, of the fusion energy. That's something you seem to be missing. There it is, one muon, but it doesn't affect the branching ratio. As the nuclei approach each other, there is a point where the nuclear force takes over, much as with Oppenheimer-Phillips process. Unlike the OP process, though, the muon is not repelled by the nuclei, it remains attracted to what becomes a composite nucleus. The distances are such, however, that the muon doesn't participate in the actual fusion. It merely brings the nuclei close enough. If it got high energy, it might escape the deuterium. By the way, they do this with metallic mixtures of deuterium and tritium. Lots of fusion experiments are done with metallic deuterium, obviously at very low temperatures. One of the experimental phenomena to be explained is the increase in reaction rate with temperature that is noted in cold fusion experiments.... --Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It is quite certain that a muon can and often does carry away some of the reaction energy of the fusion it catalyzes. That's because despite orbiting one deuteron quite closely, and being attracted as well by the proton in the other deuteron, the muon can escape the combined electrical attraction of the two protons, and go off to catalyze more fusion reactions. The muon could not do this if there was no mechanism for it to acquire some of the reaction energy. And since muons can do it, so can electrons do it, because the two are closely-related particles.... Regarding what you wrote about metallic mixtures of deuterium and tritium, I think you are wildly wrong. They use mixtures of frozen gas. It is very very difficult to cause Metallic hydrogen to exist, outside of alloys like with palladium. V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The comment about metallic hydrogen was added after my comment below was written, I have not yet responded to that. --Abd 21:35, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I was in a hurry and didn't notice you had replied, when I inserted the extra text in two or three places. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Uh, the muon is in orbit. Around an unstable nucleus made from two deuterons, it's 4He, but excited with 23.8 MeV. The muon is not sucked into the nucleus. The 4He decays rapidly, 50% He-3/n, 50% H-3,p. Now, what happens to an electron which is orbiting around a nucleus which decays? The decay products leave the scene very quickly. Practically no momentum is transferred to the electron, there is no mechanism for it. I don't think we see beta emissions from decaying nuclei due to the orbiting electrons at time of fission. The Coulomb attraction simply doesn't have time to apply more than a minimal amount of acceleration to the electron. It has its orbital velocity, that's all. I'd expect minor excitation over orbital velocity in the first reaction, because the charge flies off in only one direction, sometimes it would reduce the velocity, sometimes it would increase it. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You appear to be confusing types of "decay". For example, in beta-decay, the electron that leaves the scene originated from a neutron (one that suffered a weak-nuclear-force event); it is not one of the orbiting electrons that leaves the scene.  On another hand, it is possible that the muon is simply "left behind".  That is, if a just-formed He-4 nucleus breaks apart, the two pieces share 3 or 4 Mev between them, and both pieces go shooting off in opposite directions, making it easy for the muon to be left behind.  It would now be interesting to get some data about how far apart are the multiple fusions that a muon can catalyze.  The reactions should all be very close to each other if the muon does not acquire any significant energy from the fusion reaction; the reactions could be fairly-well-spaced if the muon does acquire significant energy.  I'm not sure where to hunt such data down, alas.... --but I do know that when I first read about muon catalysis, a phrase like "shoots out" was used to describe the muon, so that has been my perspective on the subject, ever since. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * No, I did not confuse those modes of decay. I was not referring to beta decay at all, I did not mention it. Yes, the muon would be "left behind" if the decay is to p,3H, because the forces from the proton and tritium nucleus would be roughly balanced. (There would still be some moment toward the previous direction of the nucleus, average.) If the decay is to n,3He, there would be an increased effect. But not much. The force on the muon could not much exceed the centrifugal force from the muon's inertia, and that force declines rapidly as the positive nucleus departs. "Shoots out" might be a description that could still mean that no significant energy was gained by the muon from the fusion itself. Essentially, if the nucleus were to somehow disappear, which for the muon it basically does, the muon will "shoot out" from its orbital velocity. It need not gain any energy. But it might gain some, or it might lose some, as it would if the positive force vector were such that it opposed the orbital vector. The muonic energy would be smeared by some value. I suspect almost no bleeding off of the fusion energy. Which is the point! --Abd 22:13, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Again, the actual energy of the muon can be determined by how far apart are the multiple fusions that it can catalyze inside liquid deuterium. We just need to find out if anyone has collected such data. V 23:06, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

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 * "Weight," when applied to Wikiversity, refers to volume of coverage at a level. There are highly notable theories, marginally notable theories, and local theories that are simply proposed by participants here with no outside participate. Your theory is somewhere in the range of marginal to local. Because of the Infinite Energy publication, it's got a little more weight. However, as to substance, and between you and me, it's thin, very thin. It does not predict the major experimental phenomena, and it would seem to predict other than that, to me. That does not completely rule it out, because there may be unrealized aspects that are explanations. part of comment added by Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Please be more specific about "does not predict the major experimental phenomena". So far as I know, the electron catalysis hypothesis can successfully explain all the data.  True, it was devised as an explanation and not as a predictor of CF (the phrase "ad hoc" might apply).  However, I might mention that the published article includes a prediction/test, for "metallic deuterium" (the stuff should explode nuclearly, via a lot of fusions catalyzed by the metal's conduction-band electrons).  I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to make some?  Regarding "weight", please understand the reason the electron catalysis description is lengthy (a different sort of "weightiness" :) is because it is complicated-in-detail; all the pieces needed to be mentioned/included.  (I don't see anything else below to which I need to reply.) V 09:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That problem with weight can and should be handled by subpaging it. There is no problem at Wikipedia with taking whatever space it takes to explain something. If it brings a page at some level out of balance, simply sub-page it and describe it simply at a higher level. Length and weight are connected, because length implies importance, and importance is, here, connected with what Wikipedia calls notability.
 * Okay, I don't see that your theory explains the branching ratio. I don't see how it avoids the gamma ray if helium is produced, not really. That's a very local nuclear phenomenon, with helium being very, vary rare as a product. Apparently there isn't time for the electrons -- or muon -- to take part in the nuclear phenomenon. The distances are too great. At least this is the explanation I've seen. Similar arguments were advanced about Mossbauer-like effects explaining the momentum transfer to the lattice. The Mossbauer effect occurs at far, far lower energies. I don't see that your theory explains "surface effect." I don't see that it explains the level of nuclear transmutation that takes place. Especially, I don't see that it could so strongly affect the nuclear process that tritium would be present only at very low levels, and neutrons at levels way below that.
 * Since gamma rays are basically not detected in CF experiments, it logically follows that if D+D->He4, the reaction energy is appearing as something other than a gamma ray. The electron catalysis hypothesis proposes that the energy gets absorbed by a lot of electrons.  Regarding "distances are too great" --that statement is talking about orbiting electrons; it is not talking about loose conduction band electrons, which are able to approach a bare deuteron closely enough to pass through it.  Obviously the distance is not too great if electrons can (temporarily!) get right next to protons and neutrons!  I reiterate that since a muon is a single particle, it can only rarely-if-ever carry away enough energy to prevent a D+D fusion reaction from producing T+p or He3+n.  But there are lots of electrons available in the conduction band (except when the metal is extremely thin, like in a codeposition experiment), so the net effect is that most of the time there is no need for the branching ratio of hot fusion to be applicable to electron-catalyzed cold fusion. V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Basically, all the normal marks of d-d fusion are missing. So, I'd say, you'd need some kind of evidence that electron screening at the level you propose actually can take place. There is data on electron screening. It does occur at higher than expected levels, there is experimental data on that. I don't recall if you cover that. The problem is, however, that a vast gap remains. Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I've not seen any data on electron screening; the hypothesis was built from basic facts/concepts and fairly simple logic (like the thing mentioned above about why a muon must be able to acquire some of the reaction energy). The logic must be at least partly OK, else I think it would not have been published, even in "Infinite Energy". :) V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It's sufficient to convince a non-expert. That muon argument is preposterous. The muon is present in the material at orbital velocity, which is by definition insufficient energy to escape. If the nucleus decays, it's gone, very quickly. Presto! Free muon. Did you think that it would fly off with, say, the nucleus? There simply is not nearly enough attractive force to cause that. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, here you are saying what I wrote a little ways above, as part of this current batch of comments, about the muon being left behind. I'll simply repeat that we may be able to get some relevant data, about whether or not the muon gets any energy from the fusion reaction. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * If I'm correct, the force on the muon is the force of attraction, which is equally balanced, in orbit, by the inertia. The fusion process might apply some kick, I can imagine, but it's hard to imagine it being greater than the orbital forces. The normal fission of the fused nucleus (p,3H) or (n,3He) would, in the second case, provide an imbalance attractive force for a short time. Again, I can't see it being a major accelerator of the muon. --Abd 22:04, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

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 * Have you read, do you have Storms (2007)? You can find snippets on the web. He does cover electron screening, a little. He doesn't address the possible sharing of energy by the screening electrons, probably because it would not be expected to happen with d-d fusion, it only becomes reasonably plausible with cluster fusion. You have conflated two concepts: conduction band electrons are, as it were, distributed. You then propose that this distribution adds to a high local presence of many electrons, each contributing some small probability of location in a screening position. That is what Storms criticizes as a high localization of energy. Unexplained. If we model the electrons as being individual electrons, then each one has a certain probability of being present in the region between the deuterons. You propose that the high electrostatic attractive force attracts the electrons. However, the electrons are also attracted by every nucleus in the metal. In any case, if there is energy sharing, the sharing would presumably be proportionate to the probability for every electron to be present, and the total energy shared would be that which would be imparted to, say, a muon at that position. Which apparently is not much! Those muons stick around to catalyze more reactions. You postulate pions electrostatically accelerating the electrons. Any evidence for such a phenomenon? It's tricky trying to explain a new, unexpected phenomenon by proposing a series of other new phenomena. Yeah, but that hasn't solved the problem, it has, at most, shifted it to a new problem or set of problems. This is the problem with Widom-Larsen theory, it depends on a series of phenomena for which there is no experimental evidence.


 * I do not have Storms' book, and a less-complete version of the electron-catalysis hypothesis was posted on the Internet in 2000, long before Storms' book came out. I'm aware that electrons would not normally be thought to get involved in a nuclear reaction and carry off some energy, because they cannot interact via the strong force. What you wrote about electrostatic attraction is missing one small point, that if a deuterium molecule disintegrates inside palladium, then there are two extra negative charges added to the conduction band, balancing the positive charges of the two deuterons. That means we can expect at least two electrons to always be nearby (but not orbiting) the deuterons, even if they are not always the same two electrons (I'll call them "belonged" electrons). The attraction by palladium atoms, of those electrons, is insufficient to prevent two of them from being near the deuterons. Now, obviously, this means that we cannot seriously expect the deuterons to be closely accompanied by dozens or hundreds or more electrons, but we can still expect them to be moderately nearby, since as you stated, the conduction band is diffuse/distributed. Also, it is very important to keep in mind that the conduction-band electrons have a lot of freedom-of-motion; remember that a mere 1-Ampere electric current means that something like 10-to-the-18th electrons per second are moving past a fixed point. Compared to that, thinking that a mere thousand conduction-band electrons could be "near enough" to a couple of deuterons is not so far-fetched. And so I wrote above about how if one of those two "belonged" electrons leaves the scene suddenly/at-high-speed, then another can virtually instantly take its place. The electric charges that attract those two "belonged" electrons are still there, and all the other electrons in the conduction band are mobile! Next, please note that in codeposition experiments, there is evidence of a more-ordinary branching ratio occurring. Why? What is the main difference between bulk palladium and super-thin palladium? How about the numbers of nearby electrons in the conduction band? The super-thin metal has enough to initiate fusion, but not enough to carry away enough energy to prevent fusion from yielding T+p or He3+n. The "cluster fusion" hypothesis may have a problem there. Regarding comparison with a muon, I also noted that a muon can acquire some energy from the fusion reaction--just not enough to affect the normal hot-fusion outcome. Regarding pions, do you not know that for 30-odd years pions were the mediating particles in our description of the strong force? Although pions have now been superceded by quarks and gluons, the role of pions in ordinary nuclear fusion is not affected in the least by the existence of quarks and gluons (kind of like the way Newtonian Mechanics is still applicable for a lot of things, in spite us of having Relativity equations available). So, virtual pions will be shooting at nearly light-speed back-and-forth between two deuterons that have just started the process of fusing. And a lot of those pions will be electrically charged. These are facts that all particle physicists will acknowledge, although they might wonder why such ancient history is being dredged up. :) Not "new phenomena" at all! V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Part of the comment above was added after my comment below was written, I may not yet responded to all of it. --Abd 21:35, 14 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It's getting worse, V. The electron density in a conductor doesn't change at all due to current flowing in the conductor. A thousand conduction band electrons would be spread over a wide space, i.e., if the contribution of palladium is one electron, this would be spread over, at 100% loading, 500 cells. The concentration would be 2 per cell. That is, add up all the probabilities, you'd have a probable two per cell. The contribution of most of these electrons, if it's meaningful at all to think of them as individuals, would be very low. Think about it. An electron is, say, 10 cells away. If there is some energy transfer mechanism, would it get as much energy as an electron located in the cell? Indeed, the fusion event, if it transfers energy, could be the "observation" that fixes the location of a particular electron as being in the cell. So one might get a kick, or two might get half the kick. In fact, though, that fusion energy isn't available as the deuterons are approaching, just some approach energy from the strong nuclear force kicking in. Some fraction of that force would accelerate the electrons *away*. The electrons are no longer intimately associated with the nucleus, assuming that they got that close in the first place. What you've done is to conflate two ideas: the uncertainty principle, where there are no particles, as such, but rather a probability distribution for detecting a particle at a position, and a particle-based conception of reactions. In that conception, you can imagine that if a thousand electrons have some probability of being at a certain position, then surely there is a probability that two or more are at that position. You are assuming, in fact, that a thousand could be at the position. No. Pauli exclusion principle. Only one can be there. That means that the probability distribution cannot exceed 1, total. That is, maximum, only one electron can be at a certain position. You could have a 50% probability that one electron is there, and a 50% probability that another is there. But even this concept is flawed. That assumes certainty that an electron is at a location. The location we are talking about is well within the Bohr orbit, so the sum of all probabilities integrated over every electron in the universe is still very low. The electron density required simply does not exist. There is, however, this phenomenon called the "heavy electron." It's part of Widom-Larsen theory, and it is proposed that it can cause deuterons to be converted to dineutrons, which can then be absorbed by nuclei causing transmutations. The heavy electron, though, is asserted to be a calculational device, evidence that they actually exist seems to be missing. And, again, this field is hazardous even for experts! I'd recommend, if you want to explore the field further, that you become familiar with all the other theoretical work. As to your own theory, I'd say that you should propose it on the Vortex list. You'll get some criticism there that is probably much more knowledgeable than my own. Usually, anyway. You will also get some ignorant criticism, as perhaps you are getting from me. Or not. The goal here is increase of knowledge, and one of the most efficient ways to increase one's knowledge is to express one's ignorance. The key is what happens when you are lucky enough to get some good criticism! But even ignorant criticism can help, because it forces one to become more specific and clear.
 * Actually, I'm pretty sure the conduction-band electrons of a metal are also the valence electrons. For palladium there could be as many as ten electrons per palladium atom, added to the conduction band --there should be at least four electrons per atom contributed, since palladium is willing to chemically bond (sometimes, anyway) with an "oxidation state" of +4.  This significantly shrinks the region from which, say, a thousand electrons could be drawn.  I need not repeat all of what I wrote above, in this batch of comments, about how any electron that leaves the scene at high speed means that the "scene" thereby becomes positively charged and can attract a replacement electron from the generic conduction band, not just from the locality of the scene.  Next, no, what I'm assuming is that for a thousand electrons (or however-many are actually within Uncertainty range of the midpoint of two deuterons), they are each partly occupying that region (part of each individual electron's "cloudiness"), to the effect that one or two full electron-equivalents can be described as existing there (two because there are two positive charges attracting electrons toward the midpoint, and I never stated that if two electrons were at the midpoint, they were exactly in the same place in violation of the exclusion principle; I fully expect them to be separated because they electrically repel each other!).  That's my wave-like interpretation.  The particle-like interpretation is strictly one-or-two-at-a-time, but the rate-of-replacement is essentially instantaneous, simply because QM allows some transitions to be instantaneous, and the relevant transition here might be described as a momentary collapse of an electron's wave function, from a cloud of locations to a single-point location, at the midpoint between the deuterons.  In the next moment, of course, the electon becomes cloudily located again, while some different electron momentarily collapses to the midpoint....  I must continue to state that your remarks about Bohr orbits are irrelevant to non-orbiting conduction-band electrons. V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Good luck. We have a lot of work to do to develop the Cold fusion resource here, it's only a pale shadow of what it could and should be. Thanks for your support. I'd love to have some real skeptics participating. I'm going to try to represent the skeptical positions, as much as I can. --Abd 21:29, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree that even the electron catalysis hypothesis needs more mathematical support. I greatly doubt that pure-text article would have been published if it had called itself a "theory"! V 09:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

arbitrary section break 7

 * I'm only truly happy with one theory: cold fusion is a reaction that, in substance, converts deuterium to helium, mechanism unknown. That is, as far as I'm concerned, proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The effect is fusion. But if someone can come up with something better, if someone could, for example, find a plausible explanation for the experimental data that is not, itself, mere speculation, I'd be all ears. --Abd 20:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I've sort-of said something similar, when I stated that these Wikiversity CF pages need to only use the word "hypothesis" and not "theory" in presenting all those ideas to the reader. Perhaps you now see why I said that? V 11:12, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * However, I see a lot of black swans here. Not just one or two. Takahashi's TSC theory does explain a great deal, the problems are two, and they are excluded from the theory, i.e., the theory is obviously incomplete: the formation of the TSC configuration is a hypothesis. There is no experimental verification of this, and energetically, it's problematic. Storms and I argue over this. He believes that the energy barrier to the formation of this configuration is too high, but I've seen no quantitative analysis that would allow estimation of this. Takahashi hasn't dealt with this at all, AFAIK. What I see is that the configuration is not far from what I could imagine being readily possible at low rate. D2 is present at the surface, there is no doubt about that. How does D2 concentration vary with depth? What happens in defects in the crystal lattice (which could allow deeper penetration, and some incidence of "slightly larger" confinement positions)? I can imagine that thermal energy might be enough to create a low occurrence of the configuration with the right relative velocities, and that's all it takes. This is where TSC theory differs from every other theory that I've seen. It is *quantitative* once the TSC configuration exists, it's math from there. It predicts 100% fusion within a femtosecond of collapse, I think the collapse takes a few femtoseconds, so the TSC configuration need not persist for long, and the only sign that it even existed would be fusion. It uses deuterium as fuel and produces helium. There is no gamma ray because two helium nuclei are simultaneously produced by the decay of the Be-8 formed by fusion. Any process that produces Be-8 would do this. Other decay products are not produced in sufficient quantities to be an explanation of the excess heat.
 * The other problem is the lack of energetic charged particle radiation. Takahashi, in one paper I found with some difficulty, addresses this only a little, he gives the radiative modes of the excited nucleus, a series of photon emissions that would take place to dump the excitation energy of the Be-8 nucleus. These would be, I believe, absorbed by the lattice. They are not gammas or X-rays, they may be EUV. But I'm not sure. The ground state of Be-8, however, would still yield alpha particles of well over the 20 KeV limit Hagelstein sets from the lack of Bremmstrahlung radiation. So something else must be happening. An obvious clue is that we have little or no experimental data on the behavior of a BEC if there is fusion within it. How is that energy distributed? If it's only Be-8 and the electrons, but with the four electrons, if all the particles share the energy upon emergence, we might be down close to the Hagelstein limit. But if the BEC is larger, it gets easier. Thus "cluster fusion" is what Storms thinks it probably is, details unknown.


 * This is very very important: we don't know enough, probably, to formulate a decent theory of what is happening. People want theory, because they think it is important to understand what's happening, and the lack of a theory has been a frequent reason giving for rejecting research. That's a bankrupt approach and it always has been. The unexpected character of cold fusion certainly justified a lot of skepticism, but there is utterly no requirement that experimental evidence, repeatable and widely repeated, match any theory at all. Not in science, anyway! Cold fusion arises under quite unusual, difficult to set up, and previously unexamined -- in this way and with this detail -- conditions.


 * Attachment to theory is the foundation of Bad Science. It leads to attempts to confirm that then interpret all the evidence according to the theory. As to the statement that no cold fusion theory has been predictive, that's not quite true. Preparata predicted that helium would be the ash. That was a very unpopular idea at the time, because it was believed that this would intrinsically produce gamma rays. One of the little research projects for our resource here should be an examination of the history of this. What, exactly, was Preparata's theory? My impression is that it wasn't far from the cluster fusion ideas that currently seem the most popular among researchers.


 * But this much I consider accepted as theory: the fuel for the main reaction in a P-F palladium/deuterium experiment is deuterium, and the ash is helium. This predicts that heat and helium will be correlated at 23.8 MeV. That's been confirmed by many groups, at least roughly. It's extremely difficult to explain away with "artifact," "leakage," "calorimetry error," and the usual objections. In spite of what has on occasion been claimed, there are no disconfirmations. This is why I no longer mince words and refer to "low energy nuclear reactions." It's fusion, we just don't know by what mechanism. Krivit and Widom0-Larsen pretend that a reaction that makes neutrons out of deuterium through capture of heavy electrons, and which then runs these neutrons through a series of reactions ending up with Be-8 which decays into the helium isn't "fusion." That's preposterous, a word trick. Fusion is a result, not a mechanism, per se. If we could take some deuterium and break it down into a pile of quarks, and reassemble them as a helium nucleus, this would be fusion. And would release 23.8 MeV/He-4 (plus or minus any energy input or consumption, the latter would require different products).


 * Personally, I care little about theory, I'm interested in what happens. What can be known? How can the experiments be varied to explore the parameter space? Can existing theories be tested? There are people working on this, I know that there is, for example, interest in exploring the incidence of D2 in palladium deuteride. It's difficult.


 * I'm also interested in the scientific politics. This is an astounding story, a clear example, as has actually been documented in many sources, of what the hell happened to cause a massive "scientific consensus" to appear that was in blatant contradiction to the experimental evidence. I know, personally, only of one other example like it, the "lipid hypothesis" of heart disease, created politically in the 1970s or so, based on very poor research, and that resisted all disconfirmation for years, and researchers who attempted to report disconfirming research lost their funding and professional positions. It was a deadly error, my guess is that it caused millions of premature deaths and enormous suffering. And it's not over, in spite of the cat being out of the bag, so to speak.


 * It's remarkable: expert opinion on cold fusion has actually shifted. In a huge way. The problem is the persistence of groups that consider themselves "expert," i.e., as an example, particle physicists who believe that it's "impossible," but who do not actually know the experimental evidence, since, after all, why should they bother to become familiar with what must be bogus research. And that opinion persists in spite of every sign that perhaps this is worth looking at. As scientists who start out skeptical or neutral do investigate and "convert," it's all explained away. The original myths are repeated even though, even if they were reasonable twenty years ago, they became obviously false long ago. I saw this recently in comments on reporting on the Energetics Techologies new facility at the U. of Missouri, facilitated by Robert Duncan. Someone whom I strongly suspect of being a certain Wikipedia editor showed up and repeated all the skeptical arguments, including one very obscure one that I'd only seen with that particular editor. Whoever this was, was familiar with the Wikipedia debate. Completely bogus argument. If the editor were to stop and think, it shows the shift that has taken place; instead, he puts a negative construction on it to attempt to prove that the Naturwissenschaften review was simply a result of self-approval by Storms, or, when it was pointed out how very unlikely that was, of back-slapping, the editors helping out their friends.


 * Basically, this Wikipedia editor noticed (because I'd disclosed it! -- he presented it, though, as if he'd made this major discovery) that Storms had been appointed LENR editor at Naturwissenschaften in December 2009. He reported this as if it made it obvious that there was something awry with the publication. It wasn't "independent." It was, though. Storms wrote me directly about this. He certainly did not approve the paper himself, it was a solicited paper (the same editor has claimed that CF material is published occasionally because the authors submit it to hundreds of journals, and so occasionally a journal makes a mistake), and I know some of this because I was involved. I helped write a prior version that focused entirely on heat/helium, because I'd urged Storms to write it, because this is the number one crucial evidence of fusion, and it's been neglected, I haven't been able to figure out why. It's the magic "reproducible experiment." Storms then told me that he'd been asked to, instead, write a comprehensive review, and he did, and asked me to comment on it, which I did, and he used a little of my language.


 * What the editor does not notice, apparently doesn't realize the import of, is that Storms was appointed to that position! This is Naturwissenschaften, the "flagship multidisciplinary journal" of Springer-Verlag, which was started some time back in the 19th century. This is the second largest academic publisher in the world, and mainstream as hell. Also completely missed is that the largest academic publisher in the world is Elsevier, which engaged Steve Krivit to write articles for its recent Enclyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources, on cold fusion. Also completely missed is that the American Chemical Society is actively promoting its LENR seminars, and that it published, with Oxford University Press, the LENR Sourcebook series.


 * Also missed is that, amidst all this activity, the skeptical position has entirely disappeared from peer-reviewed journals, while positive publication has increased from the nadir at around 2004-2005. By about a factor of four. Why did Naturwissenschaften need a LENR editor? It's obvious, and I already knew it, because I know much of the activity in the field. They are getting lots of submissions, and they are publishing many of them.


 * It's not completely over. There will still be some shouting. But Dr. Shanahan's experience with the Journal of Environmental Monitoring is diagnostic. He was used for CYA by the editors, it seems fairly obvious. His paper would never have been published as a review. It was published as a letter, criticizing the Marwan/Krivit review they'd printed in 2009. My guess is that they got lots of flak over that review, from the residual, entrenched skepticism. So they need to answer it. Shanahan is the best the skeptics have! At least he knows some of the research! Then the editors had the scientists whose work had been covered by Marwan and Krivit respond, which they did. Devastatingly. And then the editors shut it down. Shanahan was not allowed to have a rebuttal published. Unfair? Perhaps. But that is precisely how a fringe position is treated. It's lucky to get mentioned in a letter to the editor.


 * We will, I'm sure, look at all this in our Cold fusion resource here. Wikiveristy has far better policies for examining a subject in depth. It doesn't have to satisfy the single-article model of Wikipedia, we achieve neutrality through inclusion and neutral classification of text. We do need to be careful about this. I'm just one writer, and I certainly have my opinions. I tried to get the other Wikipedia editors to help out here, they declined it. And then proclaimed that the WV resource could not be linked from the WP article because it's "self-published," which is preposterous. It's a wiki. It is not a "reliable source." It's a place to learn about cold fusion, just as it would be a place to learn about any subject through interaction with people familiar with the subject, through collaborative study.


 * Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, someone has added a section on piezoelectric fusion to the cold fusion article. It's totally out of place there, it is certainly not cold fusion, it's classic hot fusion, and is already covered in the article on nuclear fusion. I explained this on w:User talk:Enric Naval, but he has not responded. I'm not sure why. It's blatantly obvious. Weird. --Abd 20:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Some news.
. This is a reliable media source, by the way. Notice the reference to multibody fusion. He doesn't mention the helium ash. It's been a continual mystery to me why people in the field frequently don't mention it, it is the most solid and clear evidence of fusion that exists, the correlation between excess heat and helium nails it. I think part of it may come from long habit of defending the calorimetry, and a huge amount of effort went into developing more and more accurate calorimetry. BARC, also, did a lot of tritium work, and they are experts on tritium in general. Tritium, though, like neutrons, is simply an evidence that some kind of nuclear reaction is taking place, there shouldn't be any being produced. --Abd 17:48, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Some craziness
This notion is a result of thinking about "palladium poisoning" that I wrote about 'way up there somewhere. It would be nice if any CF-produced helium could get out of the metal, allowing more CF to happen. One possibility involves liquid metal; obviously any helium produced could automatically bubble out. This also poses a problem, because why should hydrogen, the lightest gas, dissolve into a liquid metal --it most certainly does not with respect to mercury, for example! On the other hand, has anyone ever tried using pressurized hydrogen with mercury? And of course, since we are interested in CF experiments, we would want to try pressurizing deuterium into liquid mercury. One presupposition being made here is that electron catalysis could explain CF; if so, then it doesn't matter if the conduction band exists in solid metal or liquid metal --all that matters is that a conduction band exists, period. So, IF deuterium can be pressurized into liquid mercury, AND IF the molecules can break apart the way they apparently do inside palladium, AND IF electron catalysis can explain CF, then.... Well, it's fun to think about, anyway! V 05:49, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
 * (later) It occurs to me that it will be necessary to remove oxygen from the pressure chamber, perhaps with a "getter". Mercury doesn't oxidize at room temperature, but it does at an elevated temperature --and an elevated temperature is what we would be hoping for, if CF could happen inside mercury. V 16:50, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

At the surface, the helium can relatively easily escape, and much of it may escape. The helium, if it remains in the lattice, may prevent deuterium from entering a small confinement site. However, apparently deuterium movement in the lattice does move helium with it, i.e., it apparently gets "pushed." This might push it deeper into the lattice, depending on the flow at the time. In the case of the formation of hydrides and deuterides, this may be better seen as a kind of chemical compound rather than as simple dissolution, though the difference isn't completely clear to me. There is substantial heat of formation of hydrides, it's energetically favorable. See the strong heat initially produced when nanoparticle palladium or palladium alloy is exposed to pressurized hydrogen or deuterium in an Arata-style experiment. It happens with both gases, though it appears that the initial heat evolved is greater with deuterium, that difference might be related to immediate fusion at some level. However, the clear difference in long-term behavior of an Arata cell is in the steady heat released evenly over 3000 minutes (Arata), whereas the hydrogen control settles to ambient. Eventually, I'm told, the heat slows, but I have seen no data on that. The slowing might well be due to site poisoning, as you propose, by helium, but I think structural changes are more likely, and structural changes do occur, it's visible in microphotographs of the particles.
 * Yes, I've known for a long time that hydrogen permeation into palladium is exothermic. This is a major reason why, if deuterium molecules break apart into bare deuterons with the electrons joining the conduction band, while that exothermic energy is released, then I would never expect an atom of deuterium to reform inside the metal, just because an electron passes near a deuteron. V 23:21, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

What is going to be interesting is when someone develops a nanoparticle matrix that is more efficient at creating NAE. I expect it to happen. There is a lot of work going on in this area, and I expect to visit a lab doing this very soon. It is a truly exciting field to be involved with, and the "chip on the shoulder" need to prove that CF is real seems to have gone, for the most part. It's being accepted, decent papers are being written and published, and the real work has begun. For now, the best summary of the field is the abstract of the Storms 2010 review, which is a peer-reviewed secondary source of the highest quality. By golly, it looks like someone may have paid Springer the $3000 or so that it takes to make the paper public, because I could read the thing there. (The preprint, which Springer allows, was already available at lenr-canr.org, since I asked Storms to set it up.) It wasn't like that the last time I looked. It's not surprising. There are people with some deep pockets who have been quietly supporting this field for years. this comment by Abd continued below interlude below
 * Thanks for the info! By the way, what does "NAE" stand for? V 23:21, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Nuclear Active Environment. It's Storms' term. --Abd 02:13, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The phenomenon called cold fusion has been studied for the last 21 years since its discovery by Profs. Fleischmann and Pons in 1989. The discovery was met with considerable skepticism, but supporting evidence has accumulated, plausible theories have been suggested, and research is continuing in at least eight countries. This paper provides a brief overview of the major discoveries and some of the attempts at an explanation. The evidence supports the claim that a nuclear reaction between deuterons to produce helium can occur in special materials without application of high energy. This reaction is found to produce clean energy at potentially useful levels without the harmful byproducts normally associated with a nuclear process. Various requirements of a model are examined.

Destruction of useable lattice sites seems more likely to be taking place from heat. Those holes blown into the palladium, with what certainly looks like flow of molten palladium at the surface....

Note that an important consideration here is what percentage of lattice sites create NAE. It must be very small! It's unlikely that the standard cell of pure palladium crystalline works to form NAE.

There are a million possible things to try. Or more. A general concept of electron catalysis very likely is connected with the real mechanism, it certainly is involved in, say, Takahashi's cluster fusion hypothesis. I.e., the inclusion of the electrons is important. I think collapse cannot happen with just the nuclei. But, alone, the electrons are not enough. --Abd 19:24, 17 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, I know of a couple of ways to put the electron catalysis notion to the test, and both are mentioned on this page (pure metallic deuterium and pressurizing deuterium into mercury). Special sites might or might not be necessary; certainly those or similar experiments (does hydrogen permeate liquid palladium? --rather hot, though! --have you ever heard of a mercury substitute called galinstan, liquid at room temperature but an "alloy" of gallium, indium, and tin?) might reveal some useful answers. V 23:21, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

another section break 1

 * V, you seem to have an idea that when deuterium enters the lattice, the probability of an electron being present well within the Bohr orbit increases. If anything, I'd expect it to decrease. Do you have any evidence or source for this idea that it would increase?


 * (In other words, in ordinary liquid D2, for example, the electrons are only shared between two atoms. They will have a peak probability of presence, if the electrons are not excited, at the minimum Bohr orbit. The probability of presence within the orbit will decline with decreasing distance from the nucleus, if I understand this correctly. Now, let this D2 be absorbed by palladium. The absorption process involves the D2 dissociating and entering the lattice, and the electrons are shared with the lattice. Instead of being shared with one other deuterium atom, the electrons are now spread out through the lattice, shared among all the other conduction band electrons from other deuterium and other palladium.)
 * The deuterons still have positive charges which will attract electrons to their vicinity. Since we are talking about loose particles (both deuterons and electrons), then there is no reason to think that electrons and deuterons can't sometimes move in collision-course paths, exactly like two deuterons can be expected to sometimes move in collision-course paths.  The main difference is that, barring any sort of interference, two deuterons will repel each other and then their courses will diverge, while an electron could be expected to follow a hyperbolic path around (or even through!) the deuteron.  This is pretty simple logic-of-particles.  Bohr orbits are Not Applicable here, because they are about orbits, which is not the way loose particles move!  Bohr orbits are about particles-as-waves, where one wave-length equals the minimum orbital circumference --but when a particle is not in orbit, it can wave all over the place, including right through a bare deuteron.  None will wave through the interior of palladium atoms, since all those atoms have multiple layers of orbiting electrons that will electrostatically repel loose electrons.  Only a hydrogen isotope can at room temperature do what I'm describing, should circumstances peacefully loosen its sole electron from its nucleus. V 17:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)


 * You seem to have the idea that conduction band electrons have an even distribution within the metal, I don't think this is correct. I think that the peak, instead of being at the Bohr orbit for the vicinity of the deuterium nuclei, would be spread out, but would not increase within the orbit, and, indeed, would decline there, as it has at the Bohr radius itself.
 * On the average, the conduction band must be evenly distributed. Up-close-and-personal, though, I'd expect the immediate vicinity of every palladium atom to hold more loose electrons than the space in-between palladium atoms, simply because of electrostatic attraction.  But that same space-between-Pd-atoms is where the deuterons will be found, each one attracting a loose electron, also.  More, because the deuterons are surrounded by palladium atoms more closely than an individual Pd is surrounded by other Pd atoms, the deuterons have easier access to all those loose electrons associated with the surrounding palldiums, than one palladium has access to a similar quantity of the elctrons of its neighbors.  I may have to explain "more closely" in detail.  Here's a page portraying the crystal structure of palladium: www.webelements.com/palladium/crystal_structure.html  If we imagine a deuteron located in the middle of any 4 arranged-in-a-square Pd atoms (or even 8 arranged as a cube), then the distance from the D ion to any of those Pd atoms will be less than the distance between the Pd atoms.  If you read what I wrote before about each Pd contributing at least 4 and perhaps as many as 10 electrons per atom, to the conduction band, then it is logically obvious that the D ion has easy access to quite a few loose electrons, even without talking about those loosely associated with more-distant Pd atoms --and also not counting the electron that entered the lattice as part of a D atom, which should always be not-too-far from the nucleus, even if it isn't in orbit. V 17:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Then, because there are many conduction band electrons, each with some probability of being present within the Bohr orbit, you imagine that they sum to a higher probability than that of one single electron in a normal atom. But the sum of many decreased values is not necessarily greater than the individual greater value, it could be less. If we think of conduction band electrons as having any location at all, ones further from a particular nucleus will have a vastly decreased probability of being present. Only electrons that we think of as being quite close to the nucleus, certainly within the lattice cell or thereabouts, could contribute to "presence" within the Bohr orbit.
 * That's your imagining, not mine, since you continue to focus on "orbits" while I don't. The exclusion principle applies to particles that are sort-of "locked" with respect to various properties (location, energy, spin), but completely loose electrons could be taking lots of different hyperbolic paths at slightly different thermal energies around a bare deuteron. Why is this not plainly obvious??? V 17:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm assuming a unified electron, unified and indistinguishable from all other electrons. Consider that there is a "universal electron field," which is the probability of finding an electron at any point, over all space. The maximum value of this field is 1. This is, then, the Pauli exclusion principle, roughly expressed, as I understand it. (A more complete field function would include other details, and "point" would not be used, but "specified volume.")
 * "Loose electrons" are no different than "bound" electrons. However, relatively speaking, a "loose electron" is one not influenced significantly by a particular nucleus, which requires that its position is relatively distant. Thus a "loose electron" does not take a "hyperbolic path," because it is not close enough to a particular nucleus to be affected by the charge. If it is close enough to be affected by the charge, it can only assume an orbit.
 * The exclusion principle applies across all space.
 * "Path" within the lattice is not the same as free-space path. A free-space electron can be conceived of as a solitary peak in the wave function which is in motion. That peak approaches a probability of one at the "position" of the electron, but, by the uncertainty principle, never reaches a value of one. No assemblage of electrons can cause the wave function, however, to reach a value of one, unless the momentum is infinite. I.e., it was right there at the time of measurement, but where it is at next measurement is limited only by the velocity of light.
 * When a deuterium atom enters the lattice, the electron is, loosely speaking, "stripped." Rather, it's more accurate to say that the electron enters the "conduction band," which is a more uniform probability distribution over the whole lattice. It joins other electrons in the conduction band, coming from other absorbed deuterium atoms and conduction band electrons from the palladium. The wave function spreads such that the peaks at the Bohr orbit and the excited orbits are lowered. An electron cannot have less energy than represented by the Bohr orbit (hydrinos, if they exist, would violate this). There are, because of the quantization of energy, "forbidden zones" where the electron density is very low. These zones do not disappear, ever, as to low-energy electrons. Stripping the electron does not increase the electron density (probability of finding an electron in a small volume) anywhere close to the nucleus, it only lowers it. This density shifts elsewhere, is spread out over the conduction volume (respecting the exlusion zones of all the nuclei in the lattice, though, just the same).
 * Remember, I'm far from an expert on any of this. I could be completely wet. All I've got is two years sitting with Feynman -- most of the lectures, anyway, I was getting a bit ragged the last term, interested in Other Stuff -- and reading randomly since then. Just read Feynman's little explanation of Quantum Electrodynamics. As to Cold fusion, I'm interested primarily in what evicence there is from experiment, which really has very little to do with theory. There is no theory that accurately predicts the phenomenon, not yet, according to Storms. He does call certain theories "plausible," but that's a different judgment, no theory, at this point, has the right to be called proven, not even close. Storms' conclusion, "fusion," is only very general, i.e., the evidence is strong that deuterium is fusing to form helium, but that conclusion does not at all depend on or indicate the mechanism.
 * However, there are limits to possible mechanisms, as Storms notes in a paper to be delivered in Chennai, India, in February. The problem with your electron catalysis theory, besides the theoretical difficulties, is that it would predict fusion similar to muon-catalyzed fusion, and MCF has a similar branching ratio; further, even if the helium branch were drastically increased in probability, there would be a gamma ray. Muons, in MCF, do not carry off the bulk of the energy, I believe. And Hagelstein argues for a limit of roughly 20 KeV for any charged particle products. This is very difficult for a d-d fusion theory to explain. Arguing for a questionable theory simply confirms the position of skeptics who can see the flaws in the theory. What is necessary, what was necessary in 1989, is to emphasize that the experimental evidence for fusion as a result, rather than as a specific process, is overwhelming. It became overwhelming sometime before around 1995. Demand for an explanatory theory was part of the obstacle to acceptance of this. The default theory, prior theory, enjoyed a peculiar immunity to falsification; for the P-F results were, indeed falsification of that prior theory of fusion impossibility, and those experiments were done in an attempt to test the existing theory. The pseudoskeptics successfully framed them, contrary to the reality, as a search for "free energy," and dismissed what became a massive body of experimental evidence, as due to confirmation bias. From the point of view of the history of science, this is fascinating. There is plenty of reliable source on it, excluded from the Wikipedia article because it conflicts with the assumptions of the pseudoskeptics. The current flap there is blatant violation of RfAr/Fringe science, yet because nobody remains allowed to challenge it under discretionary sanctions, who knows the system and how to proceed, even though it would be easy, nothing happens. I may, at some time, challenge my current topic ban. It can only be done, procedurally, through appeal to ArbComm, and that takes more time than I care to expend, merely to improve a Wikipedia article. Given that I'm editing work that is being published, and credited for it, given that I'm working on expanding the available experimental evidence, directly and through facilitating the work of others, I'm not highly motivated! I prefer to put my editorial energy into resources here on Wikiversity, where they will stick, and this will get much better as others participate, including skeptics. --Abd 17:28, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Cold fusion theory is an extremely difficult field, with true experts, including Nobel Prize winners, having worked on it for many years. Without success. While there is nothing wrong with speculation, especially for learning purposes -- this is an opportunity, I suspect, for your knowledge of nuclear physics and chemistry to be rapidly advanced -- I think that you might also save yourself some time by realizing that the issue of electron density and the relationship of conduction band electrons to fusion cross-section would be something that would probably be quite obvious to an expert who is searching for possible explanations. Experts can miss things and can make mistakes, but .... I suggest not seriously betting on it.
 * Even experts sometimes see the forest and not the trees (or vice-versa). If all of them are as focussed on "orbits" as you, in spite of accepting the possibility that deuterium atoms completely dissociate inside palladium, that normal hydrogen orbits therefore logically no longer exist in there, then....
 * Not to mention that there are two crucial things that electron catalysis must explain, not just one. We have in this part of this page been discussing aspects of the problem of deuterons getting shielded.  I suspect that many a physicist who got this far, to see that maybe conduction band electrons could do this trick, stumbled over the second problem, the missing branching ratio of fusion products.  All of them know that muon catalysis does not significantly alter that ratio, so if electrons can catalyze fusion, why is the main observed product He-4???  And so they abandon the idea that the electrons might be responsible.  Personally, my answer to that question, about physicsts stumbling, relates to the "old fogey" syndrome.  Most of the detractors of cold fusion were old fogeys.  These were also the guys who spent years knowing about pions as the mediating particle of the strong nuclear force, before quarks and gluons were discovered.  The new young crop of nuclear physicists, though, never had that background, so while they know about pions, the youngsters don't see them as significant participants in the process of two nuclei fusing.  Here's something you might find interesting: www.docstoc.com/docs/2217180/THE-GHOSTLY-TOE-by-Vernon-Nemitz-March-31-1995-Theory-Of- (the author does not know who posted that essay at that site, which implies somebody liked it).  The essay does contain one disputable point, explained by the fact that it is actually the second of a group of 4 essays (the disputable point, about a link between the wave-particle duality and the mass-energy not momentum of a particle, is clarified in the first essay:  Just assume a bunch of particles are travelling at the same speed, direction-of-travel not important, before talking about their wave-particle dualities).


 * In particular, here, have your general physical assumptions been verified by anyone with deep knowledge? There are such who will not out-of-hand dismiss you, but who will try to explain the matter. I'm not an expert, I could be sticking my foot in my mouth deeply, and I try to keep that in mind before I confidently assert stuff. Sometimes I write assertively, though. It's just an exercise, a method for rapid learning through being corrected. Good luck.
 * I can sound excessively assertive, also. V 17:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Have you taken your theories to the Vortex list? There are loonies there, but also experts. If you ask them, and especially if you ask them nicely, they will, I'd expect, explain. And I'll watch and help if needed.
 * I don't recall hearing about such a place before. V 17:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It shows up on many cold-fusion related searches! . The private CMNS list is better, but you have to be invited. However, some of the CMNS scientists, though they don't often post to Vortex, do watch it, and that is how I became sufficiently well-known to be invited to the CMNS list, because I asked questions on Vortex. And there are some very knowledgeable people reading that list who sometimes respond. And the usual crazies or fringe advocates (not exactly the same!). Takes all kinds. --Abd 21:58, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, so I looked at that page and sent an appropriate email with "subscribe" in the subject line, and the email was rejected as undeliverable. Probably my email address is on a spam list, due to spammers forging emails in the past, as if they had been sent by me.  (Note the difference; I'm pretty sure my email account has never been hacked, but is is a legitimate account I've had for a long time, which makes it a target for forged-sent-spam, as well as a target to receive spam.)  So I suppose I won't be participating until/unless the spam filter(s) involved is/are made smart enough to tell a genuine email from a forgery. V 04:56, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Blank body of the message? If you had, for example, a signature in there, the mail processing could consider it possible spam. Spam doesn't usually have a blank body! But such things also happen transiently, with any service provider. The ISP here is eskimo.com, which is having frequent problems. Please, if you get another bounce with a completely blank email and "subscribe" in the subject header, sent to vortex-L-request@eskimo.com, email me the complete headers and complete mail you get back, and I'll check it out, I'll write to the list manager directly or, if necessary, to the list. Don't give up so easily? This could also be a problem with your ISP.... --Abd 17:35, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, when I wrote "appropriate" I meant that I had followed the rules and sent a blank message. I mentioned the spam thing because it has happened to me before, in attempting to send an email message someplace.  Not always; just sometimes, times that can be linked to spam filters.  And a second appropriate message has bounced, also. V 09:49, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I believe you have a direct email address for me. Please forward to me the entire rejection mail. If it is not fully quoted, also please send me a copy of the original subscription request mail. If you can't find my email address, then send a mail through the wiki system, copying the entire rejection mail. Please make sure that all headers are included, inclusing hidden headers. I've seen another who reported trouble subscribing to vortex..... --Abd 16:38, 17 December 2010 (UTC)


 * What I hear from you is a mixture of classical physics (electrons as particles with specific locations) and quantum physics (probability wave functions). If I've understood what you are saying, consider a deuterium nucleus, atomic deuterium, with an electron: the probability of finding the electron at a particular location is a wave function with a peak at the Bohr orbital distance from the nucleus, if I'm correct (I can be fuzzy, it's been many years). Now consider this assembly as it enters the lattice. The electron is effectively stripped, and becomes a conduction band electron, shared by the lattice. You have the probability of finding the electron within the Bohr orbit increasing, not decreasing. That is, you assume a uniform probability distribution at every location within the lattice. Yet at the same time you assume higher probability closer to the nucleus. I think that you are half right. There is a higher probability closer to the nucleus, but not within the Bohr orbit. Effectively, when the electron is stripped, its probability everywhere in the vicinity of the nucleus declines. The maximum probability, my guess, would still be at the Bohr orbit.
 * You have a concept of "free electrons" that is as if the electrons were different entities than "orbital electrons." They are not. If free electrons were freer to enter the nucleus, then electron capture, the mode of decay of some isotopes, would be more common in the ionized environment, with "free electrons" zinging around, than in the electronic chemical environment, when the reverse is true. Beryllium-7 is stable when ionized and becomes unstable when bound chemically. (It's a nice, known counterexample, to the claim that the nuclear environment cannot be influenced by the chemical environment.)
 * You are now giving loose electrons an ability that I do not give them: the ability to dive through fully-populated electron shells to reach a nucleus. Remember that electrons electrically repel other electrons, therefore Conduction-Band electrons will be kept away from the nucleus by orbiting electrons; CB electrons will not be the ones associated with electron capture (almost always, only the innermost normally orbiting electrons will be captured).  The absolutely critical/key thing about hydrogen is that it has only one electron.  So, if that electron joins the Conduction Band, there is nothing to keep any CB electron from diving through the bare nucleus.  Regarding ionized matter, my preceding statement will depend on how thoroughly ionized.  Beryllium, for example can become a +2 ion and still have 2 orbiting electrons to repel loose electrons (and, of course, to be captured for EC decay).  I hadn't heard any claim before about Be-7 becoming more stable as an ion, and would like to see some of the source-data.  One (remote!) possibility that springs to mind relates to the known fact that a muon can have a much longer lifespan than the normal 2 microseconds when it is moving at relativistic velocity, which of course means the same could be true of Be-7 nuclides (but the "remote" thing is whether or not such nuclides are the ones that were measured).  If you were talking about fully-ionized Be-7 then the temperature is still very important, since the higher the temperature, the faster-moving are the electrons, and the smaller their wavelengths (smaller interaction cross-sections with Be-7 nuclides) --that's the simplest most obvious explanation I can think of.  The "cool" thing about cold fusion, in terms of electron catalysis and the possibility that electrons could acquire some energy from virtual pions, is that the electrons start out at room temperature and have a huge interaction cross section.  V 23:30, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I had only hydrogen (or deuterium) in mind, not atoms with more complex electron shells.
 * That is not consistent with this that you wrote: "If free electrons were freer to enter the nucleus, then electron capture, the mode of decay of some isotopes, would be more common in the ionized environment, with "free electrons" zinging around, ..." --because no isotope of hydrogen does Electron Capture. V 04:48, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That's irrelevant to the point. The point is the behavior of electrons with respect to a positively charge nucleus, it doesn't matter what the composition of the nucleus is. With a particular nucleus, the "inward fuzziness" of the Bohr orbit allows, in the chemical environment, where the nucleus is such as to be sensitive to electron capture, such capture and transmutation, resulting in -1 atomic number, i.e., a proton is converted to a neutron. That this does not occur in the ionized environment indicates that the density, near the nucleus, in that environment is lower than in the chemical environment. Your concept of "hyperbolic orbits" is contrary to this. However, you might also claim that in the ionized environment, the overall electron density is so much lower that an increase which might show up in a metal lattice is not seen. Since the half-life of isotopes which show the capture effect is apparently infinite in free space, that's not likely. I conclude that filled shells, maximizing the density *at the Bohr orbit*, also maximizes the density within the orbit, through the normal fuzziness. Thus I expect that electron density near the nucleus is lowered in palladium deuteride, as it will be with any electron-sharing atomic species, when an electron enters the conduction band. Note that cluster fusion theories frequently assume that the electrons are involved, that is, they are bound, not conduction band. This typically involves Bose-Einstein collapse or the like, and the rarity of the fusion might be explained by the infrequency of bound electrons in or at the surface of the lattice. --Abd 17:41, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd like you to look, as a thought experiment, at what happens to the electron wave function as an atom of deuterium enters the lattice and loses its electron to the conduction band. In what volume does the "presence" of the electron increase, and in what area does it decrease? It looks to me like, close to the atom, i.e., near the Bohr ground-state orbit, and within, the presence decreases, and further away but within the metal, the presence increases. To really look more closely at that, some math would need to be done! You are assuming an increased presence, without doing the math. That's, I'd say, rather difficult to know without calculation, though my intuition is strongly that losing an electron doesn't increase local presence!
 * You cannot magically say that there is not a significant electrostatic attraction between a bare deuteron and a loose electron. MY intuition tells me that on the average, a loose electron, that is not loose because of its thermal energy, but is loose because of deuterium alloying with palladium, can spend just as much time as before in the vicinity of the deuteron.  The main difference is that the distribution of its location can be radically different from a Bohr orbit, since by very definition of being "loose", it is not in orbit!  And that is also why one electron that leaves the scene can be replaced by another, thereby maintaining the average. V 04:48, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * But, of course, I have not said that. "Loose" is not a precise description. You have assumed that by becoming a shared electron, which is what happens, it no longer is affected by the exclusion principle and the quantization of energetic states. Truly "loose" means "not affected by the electrostatic attraction." In fact, it's relative. A "bound" electron has maximally precise orbits (or "energy states"). A "loose" electron has no orbit, precisely because it is (relatively) unaffected by the positive charge. In fact, it's still in orbit, just a looser one. Mostly, the math for this becomes horrific, if one tries to calculate with precision the wave function for a shared electron. I've suggested that you look at what happens when the electron becomes shared. You have, in your analysis, an idea that the probability increases within the Bohr orbit. When more than one electron is involved, as is the case here, the probability at any location is the sum of probabilities of all the electrons. But the "individual electron probability" has declined; compensating for this, partially, is the addition of probabilities from other electrons. The quantum states have been smeared out over a large volume, involving many atoms, but the local probability is still that there is no more than one electron average, per lattice cell, from the hydrogen, plus a small increment from the conduction band palladium electron, making two total, if I'm correct, I don't recall the details.
 * By "loose" I simply mean "not in orbit". It does not mean an electron must be totally dissociated from a nucleon; Conduction-Band electrons must be both loose and near the atoms that contributed them to the CB.  And when we are talking about room-temperature electrons, we most certainly cannot say that they are unaffected by nearby positive charges.  Perhaps the thing to talk about is the diameter of a normal unexcited monatomic hydrogen atom, versus the space inside a "cell" of palladium atoms.  If the hydrogen is bigger than that space, then it is logically physically impossible for a Bohr orbit to exist around the hydrogen nucleus (it would intersect the orbits of the electrons of the Pd atoms of the cell).  This is not a problem because the electronegativity of hydrogen and palladium are the same, allowing the hydrogen to donate its electron to the Conduction Band of the metal, so that the tiny tiny bare deuteron has plenty of room in the cell.  It is a problem for another atom like helium, which holds onto its electrons tightly and therefore cannot permeate palladium the way hydrogen can.  Anyway, if there is no room for a Bohr orbit around a deuteron, inside a palladium cell, then any electron approaching that deuteron is going to be able to do things that it cannot do when the deuteron is outside the cell.  You also seem to be forgetting that we are talking about palladium that is so saturated with deuterium that some cells have at least two (and 4 if you want to talk about "cluster fusion"!) deuterons in them --for those cells, two electrons from the Conduction Band can be closely approaching the deuterons (and the place of greatest electrostatic attraction for those electrons is still directly in-between the deuterons).  Finally, since Conduction Band electrons are indeed as you say shared throughout the cell, it means that any electron that dives in-between the deuterons and rejoins the CB can be replaced by some other CB electon, which will also tend to dive toward the point of greatest electrostatic attraction for it.  The logic is simple and pretty solid; the math will decide whether or not electrons can actually pass in-between the deuterons often enough to shield them enough to allow the deuterons to fuse, should they happen to be on a thermally-induced collision course. V 09:49, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Breaking a break
I'd like to expand a bit on the above indented paragraph (not indenting this one to make it stand out). It is a fact that a helium atom has a smaller diameter than a hydrogen atom. Since helium cannot permeate palladium to any significant extent, it logically follows that the spacing between palladium atoms is smaller than the diameter of a helium atom --and consequently it is smaller than a hydrogen atom, also. Therefore it is basically illogical to hold any notions that limit a conduction-band-electron's motion, when it happens to be in the vicinity of a hydrogen nucleus inside the palladium, to a Bohr orbit. V 05:12, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That's not an accurate analysis. First of all, the "size of an atom" in this case refers to a fuzzy diameter, defined by the electron shell. The Helium shell consists of two tightly-bound electrons, filling the first energy band. Removing these electrons is difficult. Helium can pass through the lattice, though, given some force. Researchers have removed helium from the lattice by loading and deloading deuterium. Deuterium, however, has a single electron which is easily stripped. The process of entry of deuterium into the lattice is exothermic. (Deuterium gas will spontaneously enter metallic deuterium, at least at room temperature, I'm not sure what the minimum temperature must be. It may take some enegy to strip that electron, but when the deuterium is "sited," that energy would be recovered, and more, I think.) You have a concept of electron behavior and motion which is highly localized, as if a conduction-band electron is some different kind of electron than a bound one. The "conduction band electron" behaves the same as a bound electron, these are two extremes in a continuum. If the "conduction band electron" is close to a particular nucleus, it behaves the same as a "bound electron." The Bohr model describes the allowed orbitals, which are, by definition, close to the nucleus. The discrete orbitals are a consequence of the quantization of energy. You are assuming that a conduction band electron is somehow immune to the quantization of energy. There is, in fact, no "conduction band electron" as an individual entity. When the deuterium atom enters the lattice, its electron is normally shared with with all the other deuterium nuclei and palladium atoms in the lattice. At every point near the deuterium nucleus, the electron density is lowered. At every other point in the lattice, the electron density is (slightly) raised, respecting the exclusion zones for all the other nuclei. Because most of the lattice volume is far from a nucleus, relatively speaking, we have an increase in density everywhere, by one electron summed over the whole volume, matched by an increase in positive charge from the addition of one deuterium nucleus. This is all basic quantum mechanics, I think, and I highly recommend discussing this with people very familiar with quantum mechanics, which is why I suggested the vortex list. I could also communicate with that list on your behalf, but I wouldn't want to spontaneously ask questions for you. I'll communicate them if you cannot overcome the subscription obstacle.
 * Somewhere in this you seem to have assumed that I'm denying the attraction of the electrons to positively charged nuclei. No. The Bohr orbitals are created by that attraction. If not for the attraction, the electron cloud would have uniform density -- but, of course, it would not remain confined to the lattice! Dropping a nucleus into an electron cloud, like the conduction band electrons, causes zones of increased density and decreased density to appear, due to the attraction. The increased density is directly due to attraction, and the decreased density is due to the quantization of energy. You have postulated that conduction band electrons are immune to energy quantization, so that their behavior in the region near a nucleus is different. It is, indeed, different, but only that the density of the electron in the entire volume near the nucleus is lowered. At any point within that volume, the maximum density would be that of a bound electron. --Abd 18:09, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * A Bohr orbit is what you get when an electron orbits --you have yet to indicate why an electron that is not in orbit must pay any attention to the Bohr radius, especially when that radius intersects the electron shells of other atoms (Pd atoms in the metal crystal). Do recall what I wrote earlier about electrons being used (1970s, I think) to probe nucleons to discover "partons".  Such probing would be impossible according to the stuff you wrote above.  Since it is possible for electrons to pass inside a Bohr radius, there is an error in your logic somewhere. V 20:41, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Think about it, Objectivist. All electrons are "in orbit" with respect to all nuclei. When the nucleus is far enough away, we may, however, neglect its contribution to the state of the electron, but that doesn't mean that the contribution doesn't exist. You have some idea about electrons that makes being "in orbit" different from not being in orbit. The Bohr orbits are a consequence of the quantization of energy; as the electron is further and further from the nucleus, the quantization has less and less effect on the behavior of the electron, but it's still quantized, as I recall, with the same incremental energy between each state and the next. You seem to have a mechanistic view of electron "orbits," as if they were like planetary orbits. They are not. I don't recall what you said above and it's not convenient to look for it right now, but to "probe" the space within the nearest Bohr orbit requires, if I'm correct, high energy electrons. I have not stated that electrons may not pass inside the Bohr radius, and I've indicated the contrary, if you read carefully. There are two forms of "penetration." The first form results from the fuzziness of the Bohr orbit, i.e., it is not a crisp energy, but is smeared. However, this only allows small penetration, the electron in this state cannot affect the nucleus, except with certain elements vulnerable to decay by electron capture; this shows that there is some presence of the electron within the orbit. The other form is high-energy penetration that makes the Bohr limitations, resulting from energy quantization, insignificant. You want electrons inside the Bohr limit? Just fire them with high energy at a target nucleus. Give them enough energy and it will be as if that nucleus wasn't even there. This kind of electron probing of the nucleus is being done, it may be what you described. They use GeV electrons.... --Abd 00:38, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I have indeed thought about it. Perhaps you need to think about the things that I've thought about.  For example, remember we are talking about a hydrogen nucleus surrounded by metal atoms.  If an electron dives toward that nucleus from the general conduction band, you might think that the electron has to radiate a photon while it swings around the nucleus, thereby forcing Bohr energy-orbital-levels to be applicable, but I don't think that.  Because the surrounding metal constitutes a "cavity".  The electron can simply take a basically Newtonian parabolic or hyperbolic path around the nucleus, not radiating energy, and therefore not needing to pay attention to normal quantization rules that apply outside a cavity.  Which also means it can pass arbitrarily closely to the nucleus.... V 07:52, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Return to original break

 * But the total of two are spread out over, pretty much, the entire cell, except for the valleys close to the nuclei. The wave function near the proton or deuteron still shows the quantum states of the original atom, but all the probabilities are lowered. The peaks are greatly lowered, I believe. Those quantum states are due to the attraction between the positive nucleus and the negative proton.
 * There are no "negative protons" (also known as "anti-protons") involved in ordinary CF experiments. (Some extraordinary experiments, of course, have proved that an antiproton can work like a muon to catalyze deuterium fusion, but that fact is not relevant to this discussion --antiprotons cost more to make than muons, and while they are not observed to decay, they do get destroyed as soon as they encounter ordinary protons--very quickly, that is. :)
 * And this is what I think a quantum physicist would tell you. But, hey, why not ask? --Abd 18:46, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * As to Be-7, I thought it was well-known, but it does seem to be overlooked by some sources, who talk about small changes in half-life from the chemical environment. The relativistic effects have no bearing on this, the ions need not be moving at relativistic speeds at all. They are *stable* in the fully ionized form, according to Hoffman. The sources I looked at, for example, do not seem to consider the case of fully ionized Be-7, but that source does make the statement of stability for Re-187, not as dramatic a case. HOffman cites Leininger et al, "Experiments on the Effect of Atomic Electrons on the Decay Constant of Be7," Physical Review, 74(7) (Oct. 1949). However, whether or not this bears on the situation you are describing is more obscure. Be-7 decays by beta capture, and with no electrons ... nothing to capture. You are talking conduction band, where there are definitely electrons. --Abd 03:36, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Another factor that can help explain a reduced rate of electron capture for ionized Be-7 is the speed of the electrons --not the aspect of smaller interaction cross section, but the aspect of time-spent-passing-by a nucleus. Electron Capture is a Weak Force event.  Consider ordinary neutron decay, another WF event, and the fact that it can take on average about 12 minutes for it to happen, even though the quarks inside the neutron are all very close to each other for the whole time.  So, why should an electron passing by fleetingly, even if close, automatically participate in an EC event? V 04:48, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This was why I brought up electron capture. Indeed, I think you have missed the point. "Free electrons," which means electrons with higher than a threshold energy with respect to a nucleus, cannot participate in EC. Only bound electrons, which means electrons with *lower* than a threshold energy, and particularly, at the ground-state energy, the energy of the smallest Bohr orbit, can participate. That minimum orbit -- "orbit," implies an object with a precise location circling a nucleus, which is a bit misleading -- is as low as the energy can go. This was so contrary to intuition, you know, that we should be very careful with our intuition about what it means! My suspicion from this analysis is that electrons within the Bohr orbit would have higher energy, not lower. And therefore are not available for EC. These would not be "conduction band" electrons, they would be high-energy electrons from other sources.
 * You do know, I presume, about hydrino theory, which proposes that the Bohr orbit ground state is not the true ground state, that electrons can lose energy below that level, down to 1/n of the ground state energy. 1/n is considered to be limited to 1/237, at which point the orbital velocity has approached the speed of light. This is, to say the least, not accepted physics. These lower-energy electrons, with the smaller orbital radius, could function for Coulomb screening. But .... until BlackLight Power manages to pull off some serious demonstrations, with truly independent replications, this must remain a claim without proof. A notable one, by the way! Covered in independent secondary sources. --Abd 18:46, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

another section break 2

 * My interest in cold fusion does not depend on theory, nor does it depend on dreams of free energy. I've simply become aware of strong evidence that there is an effect that produces helium from deuterium, and it is amazing that shallow criticism of this evidence, not found in peer-reviewed reliable source, is found in the Wikipedia article, while the evidence itself, amply covered in peer reviewed secondary sources, for many years, is missing entirely, and that efforts to add sourced text have been strongly resisted for years. It was only a little while ago that the blatant error from the 2004 DoE report was removed. By ScienceApologist, ironically. At least now, the evidence that is supposedly for heat/helium is not so mangled that it appears to be evidence against it! The real evidence, amply covered in Storms (2010) -- which is very clearly, by Wikipedia guidelines, a gold standard peer-reviewed reliable secondary source -- is conclusive: helium is being produced at a ratio with heat that is commensurate with the fuel being deuterium. That is fusion. I don't see any significant doubt about that which remains possible for those who know the evidence. But, strangely, there is very little discussion of that evidence, except Storms underscores it.


 * A letter from Chubb just appeared in the latest issue of Physics Today, I don't know how long this link will be good: http://link.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=PHTOAD000063000011000011000001&bypassSSO=1, and Chubb does refer to the evidence, but does not clearly explain it, Feldman, whose review of Goodstein Chubb is criticizing, replies not at all to the evidence cited, and it looks like he didn't even read it. Experiments measuring heat and helium are not only replicable, they have been confirmed many times. Looking for correlation, there is no need to have every experiment produce the same results and, in fact, if the results vary, it can make the conclusion of common cause stronger, because of associated variation, it's one of the signs of pseudoscience, that the results don't vary like that.


 * "Fusion" is a hypothesis, and the heat/helium results give us no mechanism at all, but only an Occam's Razor conclusion that the process results in fusion. Every proposed cold fusion theory can be attacked, and none enjoy sufficient experimental validation through accurate predictions to be safe from that. It's an error to focus on theory, at this point, when it is so important to establish the basic experimental facts, which do not depend on theory at all. Are heat and helium correlated? That is a question that has quantitative answers, as to the ratio and as to the strength of the correlation. This is standard science.


 * Remarkably, one of the letter-writers claims that cold fusion experiments are reproducible, but only because they reproduce the same errors. Great. Now, it would be a service to the world if someone would demonstrate this, since it is agreed that the experiments are reproducible, by showing through proper controls that excess heat is a systematic error, with a prosaic cause.


 * That's a great letter, because it is what many have thought but few have said, perhaps because they realize the implications.


 * Obviously this letter-writer doesn't realize that he's asserting what the rest of the skeptical field has denied: that the experiments are reproducible. "Reproducible errors" are *reproducible,* and therefore testable. And looking for the ash was, from beginning, the course suggested, the absence of ash (it was assumed that it would be neutrons, protons, tritium, and 3He) was considered a killer argument against cold fusion. Until helium was shown to be the ash, and the nonsense about ambient helium is just that: nonsense completely inconsistent with the experimental results.


 * And, of course, to seal this demonstration of error, the helium correlation would have to be explained as well. Anyone who could reproduce the calorimetry errors could test the helium hypothesis and rebut it. But nobody has. Experiments that found no helium did not find any heat, and that happened many times. So: simple challenge. Do the actual science, as was done with N-rays and polywater. Show the reported effects. Then show the prosaic cause. That letter writer believes there is one. A few possibilities have been asserted: failure to stir, etc. However, there are plenty of replications where different techniques were used, so that explanation and others like it are not supportable. And heat/helium kills and drives a stake through the heart of the "systematic calorimetry error" hypothesis. Unless someone figures out how that could happen as it does, with helium continuing to rise above ambient, not merely approaching it asymptotically. Okay what about the theory that helium found in the electrode is being driven out by heat. That's sounds decent as an explanation, but ... it would take a lot of helium stored in the electrodes, and it is not found to be present. And hydrogen controls don't show helium, etc. And there are other controls as well.... Nobody has rebutted the heat/helium data with actual experiment, the most that is asserted is some explanation that might possibly explain some of the effect.


 * But these pseudoskeptics are armchair critics. They will not be countered by other armchair critics, except through solid reliance on experimental results.


 * If you want your electron catalysis theory tested, you might have to do it yourself, unless you can convince those with resources to do it for you. Don't hold your breath. There are many lines of investigation, considered much more promising, that are competing for that kind of attention. And, I suspect, the theory is rooted in some misunderstandings of electronic behavior.


 * You are right, heavy electrons are interesting; Widom-Larsen depends on them. That "heavy electrons" have a reality other than as a certain computational device is quite controversial, apparently, there is a Hagelstein paper on this, fairly recently published.


 * My own work at this point is to make cold fusion replication cheap and accessible. But it's codeposition, and mostly it's simply looking for neutrons, which are a bit of a red herring, since it is clear that the basic reaction is aneutronic. They are simply a convenient marker for "some kind of nuclear reaction is happening in there." --Abd 18:56, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It might be better to look for tritium than for neutrons. After all, if there are reactions that can produce neutrons, then per the branching ratio there must be just as many that can produce tritium (and the electron catalysis hypothesis has no trouble with ultra-thin codeposited metal having insufficient conduction-band electrons to affect the hot-fusion branching ratio).  Just get a Geiger counter.... V 17:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Detecting the low amounts of tritium from CF reactions is difficult unless one has relatively sophisticated equipment. Detecting neutrons from a small space is cheap, I can do it for under a dollar per detector stack. If I were content with a single SSNTD -- I'm not -- it would be $0.40 per detector. No, a Geiger counter won't cut the mustard, background radiation is way too high. Now, if I wanted to fabricate special Geiger-Muller tubes that were very small, maybe. Not a bad idea, actually, but not for my first project! --Abd 21:52, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Fun at Cold fusion
I see that the Wikipedia article has been blessed with a section of material written based on essentially one author, in several primary sources. Almost entirely, the Shanahan analyses have been ignored or dismissed, as to secondary source coverage. They are fringe, in fact. The claim that this was "made RS" recently by publication is misleading. A letter from Shanahan was published, critiquing the Marwan/Krivit review in Journal of Environmental Monitoring. Letters are not necessarily reviewed with the same attention as a review paper, and the editors of JEM elected to co-publish Shanahan's solitary critique with a response, not merely from Marwan and/or Krivit, but from Marwan plus a host of the researchers whose work was covered by Marwan and Krivit.

It is obvious, actually, that the editors recognized that there was uninformed criticism out there, but the best critique they got, on more of a detailed level than "Why are you publishing this nonsense," was from Shanahan. They realized that it could look like they were publishing fringe, since many still believe that cold fusion was conclusively rejected in 1989-1990, and that only a small number of "true believers" are still interested in it. So they did publish the letter from Shanahan and the response from the researchers that followed it.

The only secondary source review, then, of Shanahan's claims, of any depth, is that response. Yet that response is ignored and only Shanahan's idiosyncratic arguments are reported in the article.

Meanwhile, the very clear and definitive Storms review of the entire field, in Naturwissenschaften, "Status of cold fusion (2010)" is being excluded as to any report of what it contains. This is mainstream secondary source, peer-reviewed, published independently, there is no doubt about that other than silly mud being tossed by certain editors. It is mainstream secondary source confirming what is in many other mainstream secondary sources, it is not "recentism."

It's very clear that cold fusion was rejected in 1989-1990, but that rejection was never definitive, and the first DoE review confirms that. The conclusion was "not proven," not "bogus." In 1989, that conclusion represented a supermajority of the panel, probably about 13/18. In 2004, the panel was very divided, it's obvious that the question, looking at the report, is open about cold fusion. That report did not treat cold fusion as "fringe." There are popular media reports and some tertiary sources, after 2000, that treat cold fusion as "rejected by the mainstream," or the like. But that flies in the face of actual mainstream journal behavior.

It's clear that some elements in the mainstream community consider cold fusion pathological science or worse. But that's a political opinion, not a scientific one. And there is plenty of contrary source. The article, quite simply, does not tell the story as found in reliable sources -- on either side!

We can do it at Wikiversity, and I've been, slowly, trying to encourage some knowledgeable physicists to participate. I have tons of sources, about all the skeptical books, much of the positive books, and CDs full of conference papers and the like. Wikiversity isn't Wikipedia. "Fringe" doesn't particularly apply here, unless we don't misrepresent facts. We can have pages and pages on "fringe ideas," so it's not necessary to establish that cold fusion is not fringe. But, in fact, it became what Wikipedia calls "emerging science," long ago. It got slaughtered politically.

What the pseudoskeptics do not seem to understand is that negative replications are simply replication failure, unless the cause of the original data is identified. A series of misrepresentations and misunderstandings of scientific process led to the conclusion that the "experiment could not be replicated," when, in fact, it was replicated very many times, thousands of times. Shanahan raised a critique that could apply to *some* cold fusion work, though only as an unproven hypothesis, and one which appears to not explain very much of the data.

To be specific, he asserts a "calibration constant shift," which, at the extreme, could explain some results. Not others. He shows no experimental evidence that this shift actually explains the results. He waves away other evidence that confirms that the calorimetry is reasonably accurate, most notably, in my opinion, the heat/helium ratio, confirmed by twelve research groups around the world, and with four "particularly careful studies," i.e., taking steps to capture and measure all the helium, or as much as possible, it's difficult work, leading to Storm's conclusion of 25 +/- 5 MeV as the ratio.

Shanahan claims that if the calorimetry is not accurate, and if helium could also be error, the correlation means nothing. That's the opposite of the truth, because correlation of two independent effects is a confirmation of both as having a common cause. Shanahan hints that perhaps unexpected recombination causes heat causes helium to be driven off, which completely neglects the experimental fact that it's quite difficult to drive the helium out of a palladium cathode, McKubre et al did it by repeated flushing, i.e., by repeated loading and deloading with deuterium. Others have used other techniques, and I hope that more work will be done in this field.

But it's a replicable experiment, a blatant counterexample to the claim that there is no replicable experiment. It's easy to describe:

1. Set up the conditions where excess heat is reported. This is an art. And following the state of the art is normally a requirement in any difficult replication, and this one was very difficult, initially. 2. Do this with many cells. It is acceptable to change the protocol in an attempt to increase apparent excess heat. It does not matter if the heat is caused by recombination or by fusion. Just look for the P-F effect, and record the net excess heat for each cell. 3. Measure the helium evolved in the cell. It does not matter if the helium comes from pre-absorbed helium, from the atmosphere or whatever. An Italian group did not bother to exclude atmospheric helium, they looked only for increase over ambient! They were using, as I recall, cathodes where pre-loaded helium wasn't likely. However, most of these experiments took steps to initially exclude helium, and controls show helium only at very low levels. Report the helium.

That's the basic protocol. It's been done by many experimenters, including the original negative replicators, who confirm the results.

There is no contrary data of significance in the literature. There is no report of helium being found without excess heat. There are very isolated reports of excess heat without helium. Storms lists three cells. With one, he claims that the calorimetry was suspect for some reason, for the other two, they involved different cathode material. All other cells showing excess heat show helium at roughly the right value for deuterium fusion.

Anyone who understands this now can understand why cold fusion isn't fringe any more. What I've described is very amply covered in peer-reviewed reliable secondary sources, independently published. The pseudoskeptics have a circular definition of reliable source. If it is by an author they call fringe, a "believer," it is not independent. But "independent" in RS standards doesn't refer to the author, except under narrow conditions. It refers to the publisher.

Springer-Verlag is one of the oldest scientific publishers in the world. It is the second-largest scientific publisher. They are not about to risk their very consirable reputation, and the very considerable reputation of Naturwissenschaften, by publishing "fringe nonsense." As a review of the field. On the first page of their September 2010 issue. And they are not about to appoint a "fringe believer" to their editorial review board, as they did with Storms in December 2010. A certain Wikipedia editor, you know, has attempted to impeach the NW article by pointing out Storms's position. It's the reverse: that appointment shows that cold fusion is being taken seriously, by a major journal, which is essentially eating the lunch of the journals that still consider the topic blacklisted.

And that blacklisting is covered in reliable sources. I think I tried to put that in the article once, and it was pooh-poohed. Reputable journals would never blacklist a topic, it was said, the problem was only that low-quality papers were submitted.

This is all pseudoskeptical POV-pushing, by a particular editor, most strongly, but with help from others, who was banned for it at one point. I was also banned, as was Pcarbonn, because the involved faction was quite powerful at one time. It's losing that power, but it is still kicking. Both Pcarbonn and myself were banned in spite of following COI guidelines, not revert warring, remaining civil, etc. Both bans were requested by the same admin previously admonished by ArbComm for his anti-cold-fusion use of tools. And the other main banned expert in the field, Jed Rothwell, also followed COI rules but is quite blunt. And usually quite right, to be sure, but he should have been restrained by Wikipedia, not banned. He was banned, though, by the admin he'd been blunt with, which was clear recusal failure. Rothwell is a true expert on the field (if we include the history as a part of the field, he's not a scientist, he's a writer and editor.)

What ArbComm did, unfortunately, was to ban one side of an issue, apparently believing that this was "fringe," and that therefore anyone trying to tell the story must be a "fringe POV-pusher," and they only temporarily banned the other side, since they could readily imagine that he was right, but just going about it the wrong way. That's how that faction managed to be successful for so long, it is a generic problem, I wrote about it in general on Wikipedia, "Majority POV-pushing."

In any case, I have not -- yet -- appealed the renewal of my ban, it's simply way too much work, and I don't have any personal need to put in the necessary effort, particularly if there is nobody else willing to work on it. I can do the pedagogical work here, and others will, I believe, join in that, so we can develop true educational resources here. Eventually, we could work on drafts of articles for Wikipedia, and improve them according to Wikipedia standards, as an educational exercise, and, I believe, when we have a truly clear, reliably sourced, solid article here, it will be relatively easy to get it taken to Wikipedia. The best article, indeed, will win, when the Wikipedia community can see them side-by-side. I have no need to fight about it at Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia article is truly impoverished. As McKubre once wrote about himself, I could write a far better skeptical article on cold fusion than these pseudoskeptics. And I will, or, at least, I'll make sure that the notable skeptical arguments are all covered, and also all notable history, which includes errors made by cold fusion researchers, etc.

Meanwhile, pages here can be useful resources, and I may work on the general principle of encouraging links from Wikipedia articles to this sister wiki, it should be allowed, always, where there is a resource here, because WV does have a neutrality policy, it is simply applied differently, and external sources, in general, can be advocacy sites, as long as they can be useful for learning and educations. The pseudoskeptics don't want people to study topics for themselves, because they fear that people will be gullible, and fall for pseudoscience. This is, again, a generic problem. --Abd 19:35, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Cold Fusion in Popular Culture
It is customary in Wikipedia articles to note when a subject turns up in popular culture.

I happened to be thinking about the (not terribly popular) science fiction genre of steampunk, and wrote a rather whimsical blog post imagining how a SPAWAR Cold Fusion Cell might be used in the context of a bit of science fantasy in the style of steampunk. There would be no pretense to authentic science or technology in such a riff. It's just fun to think about incorporating ideas from science or technology in bits of fantasy fiction.

Now my personal blog typically draws about 25 hits a day, and yesterday was no exception. Yesterday's new post on steampunk drew only four direct hits from referrals on Facebook and on one other site where I mentioned it in a discussion thread.

That's par for the course. Almost no one ever reads my blog, even when I mention that I've written a new post.

So when I mentioned it late yesterday afternoon in IRC to JWSchmidt, he asked me if the Navy's SPAWAR Cold Fusion Cell had actually achieved any significant results, in terms of excess heat or reaction products. Of course I had no idea, not having read the technical literature on it, so I suggested he just Google up "SPAWAR Cold Fusion Cell" to find the official reports.

Imagine our surprise when we discovered that, just 8 hours after having written a silly and whimsical blog post on steampunk (that at best only four or five people had actually read), Google was listing my blog post as the 8th ranked hit on "SPAWAR Cold Fusion Cell" even though serious reports on it have been out there for years.

What does that tell you about the popularity or importance of the Navy's work on its SPAWAR Cold Fusion Cell?

Moulton (talk) 09:21, 18 December 2010 (UTC)


 * If you think that's weird, try the Bing Search engine where Moulton's blog post on Steampunk is now the #2 hit for "SPAWAR Cold Fusion Cell." —Caprice 23:29, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Objectivist, the above two edits are by the same editor, he uses a series of pseudonyms for dramatic effect, though it may have been inadvertent here.

SPAWAR doesn't call their work "cold fusion." And asking Moulton about SPAWAR is asking someone who knows almost nothing about their work. Generally, for the most recent work, they haven't been measuring excess heat at all. They did work with excess heat more than a decade ago. They have been reporting, most recently, neutrons as a reaction product, but from what reaction? The levels of neutrons are extremely low, on the order of a neutron per minute, perhaps. In these particular experiments, there is no independent measurement of reaction rate, as there are in experiments that check for heat and helium. In this case, simply that one can generate a few neutrons through electrolysis is remarkable enough to get them published in Naturwissenschaften (in 2008), with followup in other journals or academic publications. And to inspire my attempt to replicate.

Lots of people want to know, right off, if there is some commercial potential, so "significant heat" probably means something with commercial potential. Probably not! However, "significant" also can mean at levels that establish the reality of an effect. Yes, they have done that, but so have hundreds of other groups. Excess heat is the most solid result of cold fusion, the most widely reported, and after that comes confirmation that the reaction is fusion through correlation of the excess heat with helium production. That's been known since about 1993, and has been amply confirmed, with measurements becoming increasingly precise as to the ratio. Storms is now using a mass spectrometer capable of directly resolving D2 from He-4, which isn't a common thing, so we may see some even more precise work. He's doing calorimetry with gas-loading and measurement of helium; as he's noted in his review, helium measurement is becoming a standard method for assessing if a nuclear reaction took place in cold fusion experiments. I'd do it if I could! Unfortunately, Dr. Storms' mass spectrometer cost $14,000. --Abd 06:08, 19 December 2010 (UTC)


 * SPAWAR doesn't call their work "cold fusion."


 * In U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion, Infinite Energy introduces the reader to the official technical reports (the first of which one can directly read for themselves). Even as Infinite Energy highlights in the Foreword by Dr. Frank E. Gordon, Head of the Navigation and Applied Sciences Department of the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, we read, "We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world." Indeed the capitalized label, "Cold Fusion," appears in four out of the seven paragraphs in Frank Gordon's Foreword — notably in the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs. Then, of the five technical articles in Volume 1 of the official report, the label, "Cold Fusion" appears in the title of two of the articles, notably the first and the last (as well as in the title of the appendix to Volume 1 of the report). (Volume 2 of the report fails to load from the Navy's site, but it discusses Calorimetry rather than Cold Fusion.) In short it appears to me that SPAWAR refers to "Cold Fusion" by expressly (and prominently) calling it "Cold Fusion" in their official report on the subject. —Caprice 06:59, 19 December 2010 (UTC)


 * This was also discussed elsewhere, and they do not call their "work" cold fusion, the term does not appear in the chapters on their work. It appears in the introduction and in the final chapter in the first volume of the technical report that is about theory, which is by Scott Chubb,, who is with a different lab, not SPAWAR. (Theory is not the "work" of SPAWAR.) I don't see the term in the second volume at all, but it's huge. And it was written by Fleischmann.


 * And the point is? --Abd 03:26, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * What is the name of the work being undertaken at SPAWAR? Do you know why the second volume (on the methodology of calorimetry) is no longer available on the Navy's site?  Did they intentionally take it down because it is not their own work?  —Caprice 03:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Second question first: No, they did not take down the file, it is at, but perhaps, being 42 megabytes, your computer had indigestion. Interesting, eh? A Fleischmann paper published by the U.S. Navy. By far more material on the subject of calorimetry, at which he was truly an expert, than he's written anywhere else, which is precisely why they published it.
 * First question. Among themselves, or colloquially, in something written for general public consumption, they call it "cold fusion," I'm sure. For publication in journals, they use various terms of art. First, take a look at for papers considered important by Krivit of New Energy Times. You might notice that, in the list of "recent papers," only one, by Biberian, mentions "cold fusion." Lots of other terms are used, such as "condensed matter nuclear science," or "the Fleischmann-Pons experiment," or "Pd/D codepositon" (a SPAWAR term, but also used by others.)
 * Truly remarkable, that listing on NET. Storms' paper is not listed, and it's transparent why. Krivit supports Widom-Larsen theory, which is skewered in the Storms NW review, so, even though the Storms review is the deepest and best in the field, to date, even though it is published in the journal of highest reputation, he leaves it out, but does cover Hagelstein, published earlier this year in the same journal, and does cover a publication a month later by Srivastava, Yogendra, Widom, and Larsen, on Widom-Larsen theory, in a relatively obscure journal. This would be a clue as to why Krivit has largely demolished his own reputation in the field. He's staked his reputation on a theory, whereas Storms has not, beyond the very general and nonspecific (as to mechanism) theory of "fusion." Krivit is not a scientist, he's a writer, and doesn't seem to realize that if it starts with deuterium (as Widom-Larsen theory does) and ends with helium (as one of the predicted products from W-L theory does), it is fusion. Krivit is on a crusade to point out that it's not necessarily "fusion," but he, like the earlier skeptics, assumes that "fusion" means "d-d fusion," which is pretty unlikely for all the obvious reasons. There are lots of problems with W-L theory which Krivit doesn't seem to understand. Maybe he'll learn.
 * Krivit is too late, "not-fusion" but "some other nuclear reaction" would have been a very useful slogan in 1989-1995. We now know enough to conclude that, indeed, some kind of fusion is operating, because the most likely fuel is deuterium (for a number of reasons) and the known product is helium, and the heat/energy ratio is correct for that combination. That's an astonishing finding, Huizenga pointed that out in 1993. He just didn't expect it would be confirmed. And, besides, eh, no gammas.
 * Did I mention that there are no gamma rays? --Abd 03:48, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Volume 2 was indeed timing out because it was taking too long to download. I switched to a manual download from the Unix command line, and that fetched it.  The page layout is different from the archive copy on the LENR-CANR site.  But the errors in the list of references is the same in both versions.  The significant difference is that the figures and tables are included.  It's clearly a daunting document, the main thrust of which is that Fleischmann excoriates NHE for departing from the prescribed methodology.  The second footnote says it all.

   However, the high precision of the instrumentation (relative errors below 0.01%) has been converted into a 10% error by the group at NHE. It is hard to see how anybody can make such an assertion while still keeping a straight face. If the errors were as high as this, then it would be impossible to say anything sensible about calorimetry – for that matter, it would remove one of the main planks of scientific methodology.   


 * Evidently both camps are raising concerns about scientific methodology. As I read the literature, each camp is accusing the other of departing from correct (or reliable) scientific methodology, and thus coming to opposite conclusions.  Therein, I reckon, lies the lesson for science education: "How do we determine if our scientific methodology is reliable?"
 * Krivit seems to be distancing himself from the "True Believers" (although it's unclear to me exactly where he stands on the many complex elements of the controversy).
 * Caprice 16:00, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Krivit still "believes in" low energy nuclear reactions. He's signed on to Widom-Larsen theory and thinks that the researchers in the field are biased toward what he calls "fusion," i.e., d-d fusion. Maybe, maybe not. He's put a lot of energy into trying to debunk the heat/helium ratio evidence, since it's fatal to W-L theory. That's backwards. There is video of the ACS National Conferences in 2009 and 2010. In 2009 he was a speaker, up at the press conference with the rest. In 2010, he was in the audience, asking hostile questions that probably made sense to nobody but those who were very familiar with the field, and generally acting like a POV-pusher. ("How come" this and "how come" that, with things that were really trivial experimental details, errors in early publications corrected in later ones, etc.) It was embarrassing. He was supposedly a reporter, but this wasn't the only case where he developed an axe to grind. And he was totally resistant to any suggestions he might be going over the edge.
 * Krivit, as I mentioned elsewhere, doesn't seem to realize that helium produced from deuterium, whatever happens in the middle, is still "fusion." He's correct to point out bias toward d-d fusion, because that, proposed as a mechanism -- without some explanation of the "three miracles," -- damages the field. However, he goes way beyond that. I saw him excoriate a researcher for reporting a certain number and then changing that number, allegedly, by a factor of ten in correspondence with Krivit. He published this exchange and commented on the lack of ethics on the part of the researcher. I pointed out that he'd overlooked the exponent. Both numbers were identical, just expressed as 0.5 x 10^N in one case and 5 x 10^(N-1) in the other. He added a small footnote to the end. Last I looked, the original criticism was still there. But I'll check.
 * Krivit has also never reported, as far as I've seen, on the very serious problems of Widom-Larsen theory, in any recent analysis. I do know about some of the problems from his old reporting, which was still in place. W-L proposes absorption of the gamma rays from neutron activation by the "heavy electrons" he posits. He was asked, I think it was by Garwin, about experimental evidence for this effect. "Proprietary," Garwin was told. Indeed. That would be a "miracle," and W-L theory proposes a series of such miracles. And would, on the face, predict reaction products that are not observed. It's pretty bad. It just seems nice at first blush to some people because it doesn't seem to involve that nasty beast, "fusion." After all, doesn't everyone know that cold fusion is impossible?
 * Krivit's job, and his support, came from the need for an investigative reporter in the field. That's his profession. As to the science, he's a follower. It seems he had a penchant for following minority views. He's written that he believed in cold fusion because a lot of PhDs told him it was real. Now, having had a conversion experience, he doesn't believe them but believes two more PhDs. He really hasn't changed at all, he's just following his earlier prediliction toward being the "courageous investigative reporter bucking popular wisdom." --Abd 18:40, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

There was a movie several years ago, "Chain Reaction", which I have tended to think incorporated some stuff that might be called "cold fusion", even though the phrase was never used in the movie, and the gadget they showed may have resembled a "bubble fusion" device more than anything else (therefore locally-hot/generally-cold fusion, not "normal" cold fusion). I'm not aware, off-hand, of any other pop-culture references. I suspect that the general public has more of a wait-and-see attitude about the topic of CF than the "mainstream" science community, and that's why the topic has failed to widely pervade popular culture. V 16:29, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The movie "The Saint" referred to cold fusion. The common software probably took it's name from the field. There is now an advocacy group run by some young and very enthusiastic people, called Cold Fusion Now. But, to me, what's important is that publication in mainstream journals has expanded. People are entering the field. It's not going to die. Unless, of course, one of those skeptics gets up from his old armchair and actually does some research and identifies the artifacts. He's got a huge job now, piled up for many years. Pretty tough.
 * They managed to get the APS LENR book cancelled. That's the APS, I was surprised that the APS had agree to publish the book in the first place! Basically, behind-the-scenes maneuvering is what the pseudo-skeptics have been reduced to. They cannot survive debate in the mainstream journals, so they continue to attempt to keep it out. They are losing, because sooner or later the blackout journals are going to realize how foolish they are starting to look, with Springer-Verlag, Elsevier, and Oxford University Press -- and many minor publishers -- eating their lunch. --Abd 18:40, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Objectivist! This is Jed Rothwell. It seems I have been permanently banned from all of Wikipeida so I cannot communicate with you in the section you marked for me in your page. Abd suggested I contact you here to let you know why I have been silent. I have no idea who or what has blocked me, but it is unimportant.


 * Anyway, regarding the movie "The Saint," Gene Mallove consulted with the producers and screenwriters from the start. He is listed in the titles. The equations that the heroine saved in her . . . ample bosom were taken from papers by Peter Hagelstein. Peter was thrilled to see them featured in this, ah, location. That would be an example of "product placement," I think. - Jed


 * See also: The Outer Limits, "Final Exam" about a disgruntled cold fusion scientist who threatens to blow up a city. See:


 * http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi709100313/


 * - Jed