From: ames!FNALD.FNAL.GOV!DROEGE
Subject: We are all Crazies on this Bus
Reply-To: ames!FNALD.FNAL.GOV!DROEGE
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1992 07:29:06 GMT

Dick Blue says "Tom you have badly misinterpreted my earlier post about 
hunches."   Yes, Dick, it was intentional exaggeration.  Forgive me.  I 
thought my "putting words in his mouth" made that clear.  All done in what I 
hope is good fun.  I respect Dick as a reasonable skeptic who will not go to 
his grave clinging to his old ideas if we somehow find some new phenomena.  
Have I noticed a softening of your tone lately Dick?

The good thing about experience is that it guides you to the next experiment.  
The bad thing about experience is that it tends to prevent you from trying off 
the wall ideas.  All this was started by P&F's off the wall idea.  

For some reason, everyone sends me their theory papers.  I have a great stack 
of them.  Just tossed the NCM model on the stack.  Name a particle and I can 
give you a paper which uses it to explain "cold fusion".  I think there is 
even one which used the sigma-.  Only two so far (besides P&F) have proposed 
clear cut experiments.  One was Mills.  I was able to try a confirmation of 
the heat and to look for the incredible shrinking hydrogen.  The second was 
Ying.  So far I have only attempted "pseudo Ying" but it is beginning to look 
like there might be something to look at.   

I agree very much with Dick's comment about screening the "Crazies" ideas 
before attempting replication.  What I tend to look for in the claims is an 
unexpected result that would be at least one step away from a direct fake.  I 
look for them to tell me something in the course of the discussion that is 
unimportant to them but which does not match my ideas of the real world.  With 
Ying that turned out to be the "hot ring" and "burned out geiger counter" 
incident.  (I defy anyone to burn out a portable geiger counter at a distance 
of a few feet with less than about 10 cu ft of high power electronics.)  When 
I talked to him about these events, he was either an excellent actor playing a 
naive theorist experimenter, or he was describing something very strange.  
Since he checks out as a normal local businessman, it is hard to find where 
his pay off might be by lying.  When I asked him for his explanation according 
to his theory, he described high energy gammas pair producing and cascading 
down to microwave photons.  I was quick to tell him that his theory was either 
wrong, or he was dead.  My judgement was that he was not "setting me up".  
Since the results were strange and it was not too hard to try (at least part 
of) the experiment, I am doing "pseudo Ying". 

On the other hand, my eyes are open.  So far we have a melted palladium cube, 
an exploding calorimeter, a hot watch, a burned out geiger counter, a melted 
cell, and the fantastic Brown's gas which requires less energy to produce than 
it generates when burned, and which cuts Tungsten like butter.  All brought to 
us by the actors in this little game.

It appears that Ying and Shults have had a falling out.  My brother, who was 
active in the early days of the semiconductor industry, notes that whenever 
something new is discovered the participants quickly fly apart and form new 
companies.  I guess this is a plus for the Ying work.

So Dick, keep being a skeptic.  But it will be hard work.  It is already hard 
for me to find anything wrong with McKubre.  You will soon have to explain my 
tick-tock data if you want to maintain your skeptic qualifications.  There are 
those "true believers" who seem to take the slightest hint of a positive 
result out of context and use it to claim a government conspiracy.  I need to 
be able to describe what I measure without having it "prove" anything.  We 
need you.  

My position is that it is worth while to make difficult measurements.  This 
"anomalous heat" flap is just an excuse to try out a new kind of measurement 
device.  High energy physics, (and hot fusion, I believe) have become so 
complex that development of new instrumentation requires tens of years, 
hundreds of researchers, and countless meetings.  This is not my idea of fun.  
My beliefs are confirmed by a mid five figure retainer (most of which has gone 
to patent attorneys) and two patents so far.  Just because I have tried to 
make a new kind of measurement.  You could study the patents for days and not 
be able to tie them to "cold fusion" in any way.  Hard work making difficult 
measurements produces strange jumps of intellect which don't happen unless you 
wander off the beaten path.  

I have not gone "crashing off through the woods" - quite.  My thesis was that 
if various researchers from time to time see heat in in large quantities, then 
perhaps it is there all the time in very small quantities.  If this is true, 
then a very sensitive apparatus will allow one to figure out how to change 
conditions to locate the high power operating point.  Of course, if it is a 
threshold effect, then I loose.  

Dick, I never got into quartz crystals.  Did do an experiment involving two 
containers of yogurt, an EEG, and warm milk though.  Also built some very good 
lie detectors and attached them to plants.  Please consider that doing strange
experiments does not make one a "nut".  That requires claiming results from 
bad experiments. 

Tom Droege

Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion