Eric Walker

136 reputation

bio	website
	location	Oakland, California
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visits	member for	1 year, 5 months
	seen	May 3 at 4:45
stats	profile views	34

Dilettante and armchair philosopher.

	136 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year, 5 months
9 badges		location	Oakland, California		seen	May 3 at 4:45

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Dec 9	comment	Is diffraction affected by interaction between photons and electrons? Would there be a crust of regular matter on the outside of the neutronium sheet?
Dec 5	awarded	Citizen Patrol
Dec 3	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @RonMaimon: I've started a chat room to continue this line of questioning -- I'm not sure if you will have gotten my ping.
Dec 1	awarded	Quorum
Nov 24	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @RonMaimon: Two interesting comments on your proposal: bit.ly/ThCPfj and bit.ly/SgBOqi.
Nov 17	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @Ron: please post a link to your write-up when a draft is available.
Nov 16	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @StevenDevijver: Perpetual motion machines (that do work) violate CoE, by definition. What falls under the term "cold fusion" is primarily a set of empirical claims that seek explanation. The nontrivial explanations that readily come to mind generally violate known laws of physics. But the empirical claims themselves are not the same as the explanations we come up with. This puts cold fusion and perpetual motion machines are in very different categories.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @Ron: I'm definitely sympathetic to this view. :)
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: It's quite fine for people not to find the claims of fusion products compelling. But people should try to have a conversation, addressing specific details, rather than rely upon blanket assertions that the audience is expected to fall in line with (there were no fusion products, reproducibility is non-existent, analytical methods are not explained). You yourself see the need for this, as you've gone into an admirable level of detail elsewhere. Harwell, MIT and Caltech saw the need for this.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? -1 There are plenty reports of "nuclear ash" -- helium-4, tritium, low levels of neutrons above background, fast alpha particles and protons, and x-rays. It may be that these reports are all incorrect or inadequate. But we should address the dubiousness of the reports rather than giving a blanket assertion, as in (3) above, that no fusion products have ever been found.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: the effect, if it exists, is often thought to be a surface rather than a bulk effect. It is true that Fleischmann and Pons sought to charge the palladium cathode with deuterium and had a set of reasons for this that assumed a bulk effect. But this could have been a red herring. So it is possible that permeability is irrelevant.
Nov 15	awarded	Critic
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @BenCrowell: I understand neutron detection is as much an art as a science. Fleischmann and Pons were chemists. I cannot imagine they thought they were good at neutron detection, and they surely didn't know what they were getting into. They should have sought out help, and it was a big error for them to try to go it on their own. They attempted to ship their apparatus to Harwell in 1989 where sophisticated measurements could be made, but customs prevented it from happening before everything collapsed around them. See Close for details.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @sigoldberg1: You're approaching the question of cold fusion from a theoretical angle -- basically saying that theory doesn't allow it. I think it's very good to point this out. But at their heart, the central claims relating to cold fusion are empirical ones at the present time. For this reason, it seems to me that criticisms must address the purported experimental phenomena and that arguing from theory is getting things backwards; to agree with you, we must assume that present theory is ironclad in this area.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @annav: I don't think a lack of consistent demonstration in experiments says much about the reality of a purported experimental phenomenon. Some things are hard to pin down. It took years to figure out how to make reliable transistors, for example.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @RonMaimon: I will take your word on the energies involved in x-ray output. Re collimation, see Karabut, Karabut and Hagelstein, iscmns.org/CMNS/JCMNS-Vol6.pdf, p. 217 ff.
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @RonMaimon: any pointers on the transmutation experiments are welcome.
Nov 15	awarded	Commentator
Nov 15	comment	Why is cold fusion considered bogus? @KirkShanahan: the x-rays are thought to be collimated. Assuming this were true, perhaps they could be missed if the detector were not in the right location.
Apr 30	revised	In what environments can a dipolariton form? add an example