From: Jed Rothwell <72240.1256@compuserve.com>
Subject: Guilty as charged
Reply-To: Jed Rothwell <72240.1256@compuserve.com>
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 17:44:39 GMT

To: >INTERNET:fusion@zorch.sf-bay.org

One little essay, then I will go back to bothering the Democrats.

Frank Close says:

"Jed Rothwell would say (has said) that the amounts of heat are too much to
be chemical, but that seems to me to be theory prejudice :-)"

Guilty as charged. Yes, I firmly believe that the maximum limits of chemical
energy storage are well known, and have been know to every man, woman and
child for the last 100,000 years. A candle will not burn for eight months
nonstop, not even for eight days. In the Old Testament, people described a
candle that burned for eight days as a miracle, because they understood
perfectly that such a thing can never happen under ordinary circumstances.
Furthermore, chemical reactions always create macroscopic changes in the
material, like ash. CF devices run thousands of times too long to be
chemical, and they never create macroscopic amounts of ash.

Frank Close, and the other so-called "skeptics" are trying to evade this
simple, ancient, and obvious truth. They like to make little jokes about it,
with these :-) happy face things. This attitude is not funny, it is sick.
These people are trying to rewrite the last 500 years of science, and
overthrow everything we know about thermodynamics, calorimetry and chemistry.
They are desperately trying to avoid facing simple, convincing and elegant
proof from instruments as rock solid and reliable as mercury thermometers. It
is an outrage that they refuse to look at evidence like McKubre's, and it is
even worse that they pretend to have evaluated "all of the evidence." This is
a travesty. It is a mockery of fair play, intellectual honesty, and the
scientific method.

Close also says, "I left open the question of whether there is an atomic
(chemical not nuclear) energy storage mechanism responsible for transient
heat bursts." This is absurd nonsense, as Close and everyone else knows. When
CF appears in "bursts" it never goes negative; there is no storing up
interval, no negative heat (after the initial palladium loading). At no time
during the process do you see the energy storing up, so it cannot be coming
out in chemical bursts. Furthermore, there have been many, many recorded
examples of steady state, high level positive heat events that go on
uninterrupted for weeks or months.

In the video Pons showed at Nagoya, 2.5 moles of electrolyte boiled away,
which required 86,000 joules of excess heat energy. This was one, continuous
event lasting about 10 minutes, which did not stop, cool, and store up energy
midway through. The cathode was 0.0392 cc, so the excess energy came to 200
electron volts per atom of cathode palladium, which is far beyond the limits
of chemistry, unless you want to claim the electrolyte was burning.

You cannot just make up facts, Frank. You are writing fiction. You have to
pay attention to real experimental data, beyond the earliest experiments.
Don't tell us about the experiments on page 3 of your book: they failed! They
did not work, there was no heat. 10,000 failed experiments mean nothing, if
one works convincingly. It is absurd nonsense to say an experiment that
failed to produce heat in one laboratory proves that another experiment, in
another lab, also failed. Sometimes experiments work, and sometimes they
don't, and you -- a particle physicist -- know that as well as anyone.

- Jed


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