Ron Maimon

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	age	39
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I do not participate on this site any longer, except to respond to comments regarding my own text, if that text is unavailable in another form. I do not accept the political moderation atmosphere here, it is not compatible with open science.

	44,802 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
245121 badges		location	New York City		seen	May 18 at 6:25

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Nov 19	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? This is not a reasonable way to evaluate a phenomenon that's sporadic and ill understood. What you want is a statistical thing--- If I order 100 different batches of Pd, load them with deuterium, you will detect tritium at levels far above negligible background in 5% of samples. This is dependent on factors people don't understand, in my opinion the most important thing is appropriate radiological contamination of the Pd, which gives a seed for the reaction to start. If you alloy Pd with good alpha emitter, you might be able to make a 100% reproducible sample (although it might also blow up).
Nov 19	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @EricWalker: I'll try to write something up over thanksgiving--- I am doing some bioinformatics work, and this is very time consuming, as it involves a lot of programming. I also am having a hard time finding good product data for 20MeV electron/photon on Pd, although I found the general patterns of ejections, I don't have quantitative fragmentation ratios. This is a little annoying, there's plenty of data, it's just hard to search through it. It's hard to predict fragmentation ratios theoretically.
Nov 19	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: I don't like the way you have of comparing careful experiments to careless work, you can discredit anything by comparing to the worst results. I agree that there are papers that are not stellar in the field, as in any field, but one has to look for the most carefully analyzed data and come to grips with it, and not reject it because someone else did a crappy experiment too.
Nov 19	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: The Ag, Ru transmutations are significant because they are detected radiologically by Wolf using gamma emissions. The Bocris results were many times background, and are done in an independent lab, who knows what Inyengar did exactly. I rely on Iwamura data, because it focused on large transmutations, I don't know anything about Rolison. I only know what theory predicts, it predicts fragmentation of protons, alphas, or ejection of highly stable nuclei (full shells) as appropriate for 20MeV excitation of a Pd nucleus, and this produces Pd atoms reduced by 4,8,12,16 mass units.
Nov 19	comment	What is the cause of the normal force? @ChrisGerig: Ok--- here's a question. Suppose I had two different types of electrons, duplicate the electron field and have two electron fields with the same mass and charge, just they are distinguishable. Suppose you now brought some electron-1 matter into contact with electron-2 matter. Would they repel? Even for a short time? What do you think happens? The only difference here is zero Pauli force. I can tell you, but please work it out. I am not wrong, I know this from reading the classic literature and also indepedently working it out myself, I am not citing authority (I never do).
Nov 19	comment	What is the cause of the normal force? @Ratz: Chris Gerig is relying on authority, and this is never compatible with science, and leads people to say a lot of stupid things. "Legitimate professors" say stupid shit most of the time, when pontificating on calculations they haven't done themselves. I would recommend reading Freeman Dyson's 1960s articles on the stability of bulk matter, as this includes references to original calculations which demonstrate the whole thing. People are trying to reduce Pauli's stature indirectly, since he was such a dick. That's admirable, and this is why Pauli was chosen by Einstein to lead physics.
Nov 19	comment	What is the cause of the normal force? @ChrisGerig: I have checked for myself, a long time ago, and you are wrong. There is a sense in which you are right, in that the "electrostatic energy" contributions in some calculation method is big and another contributions smaller, but this is not the correct way to compare contributions. The net neutrality of atoms, assuming they are classical charge distributions, leads to exactly zero electrostatic force at long distance. The small entanglements lead to London attractions. The way to show that it's Pauli is to replace electrons with bosonic spinning electrons, and then matter collapses.
Nov 17	comment	What is your simplest explanation of the string theory? @Eduardo: It's heuristic, so it has something to do with it, but it's only rigorously understood in AdS spaces and for certain black holes in certain limits, so the general correspondence between boundary states and interior states is not something one can pontificate about in general. The FLRW horizon is growing with time, that makes it very difficult to understand the state space of quantum gravity on this background, or even whether the universe is a pure state or mixed state, and what the Hilbert space is supposed to be. Realistic cosmologies are unfortunately an open question in ST.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: Ok--- take the dozens of tritium observations. They are just plain impossible without fraud, as you can't make tritium chemically, and you can't fake it's detection (it's radioactive with a clear signature). Bocris, Wolf, Bhabha, and Los Alamos detected tritium. End of story. Done. Nothing else needed. Dude, you are really pissing me off. By laughing off the evidence, the tritium, and making up bunk explanations for the rest, you make it impossible to have a rational discussion. I will no longer try, I have things to do.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: You are doing foolish politics. You can't get radioactive elements (detected by gamma) from a nonradioactive cathode. No segregation can produce tritium, and yes, the codeposition He levels have been as high as 10 times atmospheric. The fusion does not require new physics, I explained how it happens, it is required by existing physics, and one can predict it happens regularly in any sufficiently heavy metal capable of deuteration, and there is no way to avoid it. The experiments are excellent for their funding levels, and your pseudo-explanations of the results are pathetic.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @BenCrowell: Gai is not competent. The competent people are the ones who reproduced it.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? -1: Lack of full knowledge of controlling factors is not enough to deny a nuclear effect. All you need for a nuclear effect is one reliable measurement of a nuclear transmutation of any kind. The tritium measurements are enough to prove this, nothing further is needed. One can ask good questions about the controlling factors only after one acknowledges that there are nuclear phenomena in these systems. One does not have to understand everything to understand something (although by now I think I understand everything). One can be sure that one can't make tritium by non-nuclear chemistry.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @EricWalker: I don't think it is fine to not find the claims of fusion products compelling: this is not reasonable, since it requires Bocris, Wolf, the Bhabha folks, Mizuni, Iwamura, and a dozen other people who found tritium to have committed outright fraud. There are only two options: Bocris committed fraud, or cold fusion happens. There is no third option. This is why Bocris was brought up for ethics violations--- his results are impossible without cold fusion. There is no further conversation necessary in my opinion, the denial is all politics at this point and no science.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? Regarding loading: I am not persuaded that any experiments except those that see nuclear products are reliably nuclear. I want He, and I want tritium, and better yet, transmutations. Palladium deuterides which are .85 loaded are fully loaded at the surface, the deuterium diffuses in, and any fully deuterated section, even if it is small, is potentially a site where you can have fusion. The surface issue is not so significant, but the proton issue is: there is no way in heck any of the proton experiments are reliably nuclear, you can't overcome the Coulomb barrier. But these don't see ash.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: The reason is that you have done nothing to honestly analyze the data, so it is pointless to have a conversation. Leaks cannot produce He levels 10 times atmospheric, or He levels that increase with time as the cold fusion runs. If you want them to do this test give them some money, they are not required to pay for bullshit tests that are not normally necessary out of their own pockets. There is no justification for rejecting the measurements of He as leaks, you wouldn't do so in any other case (it is impossible), and certainly no justification for rejecting tritium.
Nov 15	comment	What are the challenges to achieving cold fusion? @KirkShanahan: Correlating He to heat when the He is 10 times above background proves you've made He and heat, or else you've violated the second law of thermodynamics by having He diffuse backwards. Finding tritium proves you made tritium, or else that you are lying. Correlating a response to a response is a mischaracterization, it's massive obvious, undeniable, evidence of nuclear events, and it is impossible to know it and also to deny it, and since you know it and deny it, I don't know what to say except you should reconsider if only for the sake of your immortal soul.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: There is another possibility that the X-rays are emitted at the fusion spots and getting diffracted by the crystal, which I find much more likely. In SPAWAR experiments, the film is placed far enough away from the codeposition region to make the heat exposure impossible. I trust the careful observations of the cold fusion folks over the careless speculation of people who have made up reasons to deny the phenomenon (in other words, I don't trust your judgement on this, as you have been monumentally wrong in the past and have yet to reverse yourself).
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @EricWalker: Collimation is a bit of a stretch, but the easiest way to see is to surround the cathode with film, and look for spots. I didn't see any report of spots in the X-ray photos. I'm sure there is low-level X-ray emissions on the order of 10 photons per fusion the whole time excess heat is going on. That's not a lot of photons per joule, since there's 24 MeV heat per fusion, and only 240KeV in X-ray photons per fusion, that's 1% power in X-ray photons, it might be as high as 10% of the excess heat (if all the band goes X-ray), but that's the extreme upper limit. It's a few deciwatts.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @EricWalker: The transmutations are nuclear fragments of the spectator Pd in the fusion, getting emitted and absorbed by other Pd's. This is why you see peaks at +/- 8 +/-12 +/-16, and peaks at every +/- even number. Emitting light nuclei of this sort is easy, these are the stablest fragments (this is explained in the new version of the answer, please read the changes). The thing I thought was killing the theory--- the large transmutations--- are actually now the best evidence for it. I will write something formal up about it.
Nov 15	awarded	Necromancer