From: logajan@SLEEPY.NETWORK.COM (John Logajan)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: The importance of being chained
Date: 29 Jul 92 00:06:42 GMT

Tom Droege reports an apparent 9mW average difference between 
bosons on and off.

If we postulate that the source of the 9mW of heat is D+D=>He plus 
24MeV, we find that that implies a minimum of 1.2 Curies of 
activity (A Curie is 3.7E+10 events per second.)
 
However, Tom's boson source is nowhere near one Curie.  In fact, 
it is marked 0.5 microcurie -- one two-millionth of a Curie.  He 
further suggests that the source is old and is only a fraction of 
its marked activity, he speculates as low as (or lower than) 0.008 
microcurie.  This is less than one 150-millionth the number of 
events required to generate the observed heat on a one-for-one 
basis.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that some sort of chain 
reaction *must* be appealed to. [Standard disclaimer about the 
reliability of the original data, etc.]

An average gain per trigger event of less than 1.0 will never 
account for the gain of 150 million.   An average gain of exactly 
1.00000 will not account for it either.

Only gains greater than an average of 1.00000 can hope to account 
for the net gain of 1.5E+8.  And gains greater than, yet very 
nearly, 1.00000 are improbable due to the arbitrary geometry of 
the Pd cathode surface which presumably "leaks" doomed chain 
events.

The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that the gain is 
greater than 1.0000 by some significant amount.  But that leads to 
further requirements.  If the event times are on the order of 
picoseconds, all the pending event opportunities will be consumed 
in a fraction of a second.  If these be all the D's in the Pd 
lattice, we ought to have a serious nuclear explosion rather 
than tiny quantities of excess heat.

I see two general possibilities to explain the absence of mushroom 
clouds in Orlando and Batavia.
 
One is that at any given time there are only a very few pending 
event opportunities -- a fraction of the available D's.  They all 
do go off in a very quick chain reaction flash, but their numbers 
are relatively small.  A fraction of a second later after the 
previous flash, new event opportunities arise, and the relaxation 
oscillator can be triggered to fire again.  Sort of like the early 
German V-1 "buzz bomb."  (Depending upon the rate of relaxation, 
an RF "signature" might arise from this hypothetical mode.)

A modification of this is to postulate that there is always a 
continuum of event opportunities appearing in the lattice, and 
these overlap the firing of their predecessors.  The chain is 
controlled, then, by the rate of event opportunity creation, just 
as a rocket engine self-ignites new fuel.  (This would be a 
continuous "burn" and might have no RF "signature.")

The second possibility is that event opportunities can assume bi-
stable states.  One state is the ground state, and one state is 
the excited state.  The excited state halflife is (apparently) on 
the order of minutes or hours -- if the statistics do actually 
show a "lag" effect.

The problem with the bi-stable state theory is that it ought to 
still lead to a runaway condition, although the onset of such 
slowed to hours or days.  There is no evidence yet of such an 
ongoing runaway condition.  So I have to conclude that the bi-
stable is not present, or is further controlled by some secondary 
mechanism.  In any case the evidence is ambiguous.

  -- John Logajan