HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: Re: Discretionary Spending
Date: 27 Jan 93 14:23:49 GMT
Reply-To: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Organization: SCRI, Florida State University

In article <930126163947_72240.1256_EHL56-1@CompuServe.COM> Jed Rothwell <ub-gate.UB.com!compuserve.com!72240.1256> writes:
>To: >INTERNET:fusion@zorch.sf-bay.org
>
>Rusty Perrin and J. A. Carr have questioned whether the DoE has any legal
>authority to conduct CF experiments in the first place, without authorization
>from Congress. This is a reasonable question. I have discussed it with

I did not say anything of the sort, Jed.  I said that DOE *contractors* 
must be careful to operate within their contracts, which is a bit different 
from the situation for an NSF grantee.  Congress only enters at the 
appropriation level (and could ban or mandate CF research, but has 
done neither) and this level is far removed from the level of all but 
the larger DOE contracts and the largest NSF programs.  Congress does 
micromanage DOE more than NSF, although that changed this past year 
with the LIGO earmark that has led to large (>10%) cuts in nuclear and 
materials research (plus others of which I am unaware).  

All contracts have some discretionary funds, but contractors, especially 
small ones, must act within the limits of their contract.  As Jed notes:

>Under normal circumstances, if a scientist at LANL, Fermilab or some other
>DoE lab had some level of discretionary spending authority, and he or she
>wished to, he could conduct experiments relating to energy. As long as the
>experiments stayed within the allowed budget, there would be no problem.

Further, with Congressional oversight the way it has been, I believe 
there has been a general reduction in the discretionary funds 
available at national labs.  Probably goes back to LAMPF, where they 
managed to excavate the accelerator hall with spare change and the 
soils testing money during the "pre-design" stage of the project. 

The situation is different when you are a university researcher with a 
$60,000 or $100,000 contract to explore some particular project.  One 
needs approval from the contract monitor to shift the entire focus of 
the contract to some other project. 

--
J. A. Carr                                    |  "The New Frontier of which I  
jac@gw.scri.fsu.edu                           |  speak is not a set of promises
Florida State University  B-186               |  -- it is a set of challenges."
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute |   John F. Kennedy (15 July 60)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: <None>=Hot vs Cold Fusion/to Carr&Britz
From: jonesse@physc1.byu.edu
Date: 21 Jan 93 16:36:00 -0700
Distribution: world
Organization: Brigham Young University

Just trying to add a title to my posting earlier today on the distinctions
between hot and cold fusion, which got out without a title.
--SteveJones

Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: Bruce Lewenstein <ub-gate.UB.com!cornella.cit.cornell.edu!LEW>
Subject:      OTA Report on Communication Technology & Cold Fusion
Reply-To: Bruce Lewenstein <ub-gate.UB.com!cornella.cit.cornell.edu!LEW>
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 04:31:48 GMT

Hello all,

As Dieter has pointed out on several occasions, I'm a historian of
science who prefers to lurk rather than interact on this bboard.
Has to do with theoretical issues in historical and sociological
analysis--the "Hawthorne effect," which is sort of like the uncertainty
principle: if the people you're studying are self-conscious about
you studying them, then they change behavior.

But, since he mentioned in his most recent bibliography my OTA report,
I thought I'd give more direct information on how to get it:

Write to "Knowledge Transfer,"
SET Program
OTA--US Congress
Washington DC 20510-8025

Request a copy of the report "Changing Culture of Research: Communication
Technologies and Knowledge Transfer."

Best wishes,

-- Bruce

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce V. Lewenstein                     Phone: 607-255-8310
Depts. of Communication and             Fax: 607-255-7905
   Science & Technology Studies         Email: b.lewenstein@cornell.edu
321 Kennedy Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: DROEGE@fnald.fnal.gov
Subject: Status #13 Cell 4A3
Reply-To: DROEGE@fnald.fnal.gov
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 08:00:58 GMT

Status #13 Cell 4A3

Yesterday's event to ponder may have an explanation after all.  It now looks 
like there is a gas leak.  If we assume that the cathode puffed out some D2 
gas, and it blew the cell seal, then the event would be explained.  I.e. the 
loss of gas would explain the accumulation of "cold".

Last night in the course of normal checks I found the cell leaking.  Now the 
question is why.  Unfortunately this cell has a teflon to glass seal.  Not too 
easy to do right.  I think the next design will have only a teflon face in the 
cell and the rest will be made of something that can be glued.  

My preference at the moment is epoxy fiberglass.  Does anyone know if this 
is likely to be a bad material?

It is likely that there was a real pressure surge in the cell.  My pressure 
switch tries to hold very near ambient pressure, but there is a time lag as it 
can only adjust about 6 cc a minute.  

The seal was tested at an atmosphere or so.  To get beyond that would have 
required the sudden appearance of 50 cc+ of gas.  That is a lot to come out of 
the 0.1 cc cathode in a hurry.  The electrolysis makes 10 cc a minute of 
combined D2 and O2, so it should take a while to build up pressure even in the 
unlikely case of loss of catalyst function everywhere at the same time.  We 
have seen such events, but usually the catalyst starts working again in a few 
minutes.  Sigh!  More things to do to make the experiment better! 
                                      
Tom Droege

Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: jbs@watson.ibm.com
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 21:35:59 EST
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: what about heat pumps?

         People in this group seem to be assuming that if a cold fusion
experiment appears to yield 1+x units of heat energy out for every 1 unit
of electrical energy in, the experiment is a success.  This bothers me
since a heat pump can do this.  I have a couple of questions:
         1.  While I don't really believe that CF experiments are pro-
ducing heat by sucking it out of the environment, how is this possibilty
absolutely excluded?
         2.  Is it not the case, that unless a CF device has a gain
(value of x) better than that of a perfect heat pump, it will be use-
less for generating electricity or powering machinery (or for anything
except generating heat)?  How many of the 'positive' experiments report
such gains?
                          James B. Shearer
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: Rusty Perrin <U7584RT%DOEMA.BITNET@vm1.nodak.edu>
Subject:      Quick reply to Jed Rothwell
Reply-To: Rusty Perrin <U7584RT%DOEMA.BITNET@vm1.nodak.edu>
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 22:25:56 GMT

Jed Rothwell writes:

"If...we refuse to allow any new experiments (as DoE has done)"

There seems to me to be a big difference between refusing to fund any
experiments and refusing to allow any experiments. I presume that fund is the
correct word here. Keep in mind that DOE receives its money by law from
Congress, and can only spend the money on the activities for which Congress
has given to money. DOE cannot legally spend money on other activities no
matter how good they seem. So if contractors to the DOE are using DOE funds to
conduct CF research with funds intended for another purpose, DOE has to stop
that or people could wind up in jail. It's the law. At least in my mind, this
still falls under the heading of refusing to fund CF research, not refusing to
allow it.

Disclaimer: I work for DOE, but not in the Energy Research area. I just
personally find this topic to be interesting. The above is written based upon
my general knowledge of the funding process rather than any specific knowledge
of what has happened regarding CF. Actually most of what I know in specific
about DOE's history with CF comes straight from this list.I am certainly not s
peaking with the official voice of DOE.

Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: monkey@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Monkey King)
Subject: Re: Implications of hypothesis of subground states 
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 04:42:46 GMT

In article <1993Jan25.011105.16977@ns.network.com> logajan@ns.network.com (John Logajan) writes:
>chuck@coplex.com (Chuck Sites) writes:
>>At what point does a hydrino become a neutron?               
>
>Never.
>
Here is a physics question: when an electron in a atom radiates, which
particle loses mass -- the electron or the nucleus or both?  For example,
suppose a proton and an electron at rest, initially unbound, the total mass
is M = Mp + Me, where Mp and Me are rest mass of the particles, respectively.
The electron then combines with the proton to form a hydrogen atom in the
ground state, losing 13.6 eV in the form of radiation.  The total mass of the
two particles is now M - 13.6 eV.  Now the question is which particle is
lighter than before?   And why? Can you say here that you can't ask such a
question because you have to treat the atom as a single entity?  This
quesiton is relevant to Bollinger's argument about the electron becoming
lighter and lighter when it falls thru the basement to become a hydrino.  I
hope experts in this group can give a serious answer to my question (Blue,
Carr, Jones, are you listening?).  

The fisrt and last argument against hydrinos is that there is NO EXPERIMENTAL
proof.  Maybe you can argue that people have not been looking for them.  The
1 -- 1/2 transtion giving a photon of 54.4 eV, or 228 angstroms, is indeed a
rather inaccessible energy.  One needs a vacuum grazing-incidence grating
spectrometer, like a Hettrick, to see it.  But I can't believe nobody ever
saw it during all these years.  I remember Prof. Farrell hinted once that
they were trying to look for this 54.4 eV radiation by asking for a vacuum
spectrometer.  Well, have you succeeded, Prof. Farrell?  Besides the M&F
theory is, as it stands, rather shaky (remember the episode where they try
fix a dimensionless constant?).



















-- 
Monkey King                 | This message printed on 
monkey@engin.umich.edu      | recycled material.
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: ub-gate.UB.com!fnald.fnal.gov!DROEGE
Subject: The Other Side
Reply-To: ub-gate.UB.com!fnald.fnal.gov!DROEGE
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 04:32:14 GMT

While I have just zapped Jed Rothwell's list of good experiments, let me point
out that I don't find the negative experiments all that good either.  

If we assume that as McKubre says, that essential conditions are 1000+ running
hours, and 200+ ma per sq cm, then almost all negative experiments are 
eliminated.  If we add a need for Si or Al or B, then we may eliminate them
all!  Someone remind me of a negative experiment that achieved high D/Pd 
loading, ran for 1000+ hours, ran at 200+ ma, and had traces of Al, B, or Si?
Oh yes, add 1% or better sensitivity or eonugh runs to get a hot one.

So I think the jury is still out.

Tom Droege
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: logajan@ns.network.com (John Logajan)
Subject: Re: Implications of hypothesis of subground states 
Organization: Network Systems Corporation
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 01:11:05 GMT

chuck@coplex.com (Chuck Sites) writes:
>At what point does a hydrino become a neutron?               

Never.

A neutron has a rest mass of 939.573 Mev/c^2

A proton has a rest mass of  938.280 Mev/c^2

An electron has a rest mass of 0.511003 Mev/c^2

If a MKF electron/proton pair didn't lose any energy/mass at all to radiation
then it would come out to be 939.573 - 938.28 - 0.511 = 0.782 Mev's too light
to be a neutron.  But, of course, MKF claim each transistion does radiate,
thus in a fall from n=ground to n=1/210 (an orbit the size of the proton radius)
the MKF electron/proton pair lose an additional 0.6 Mev.

Therefore an n=1/210 MKF pair is about 1.4 Mev lighter than a neutron, or about
1/6th of one percent lighter than the neutron mass.

The electron/proton pair start out too light in the ground state, and lose mass
for each subground state, thus at no point will they intersect the mass of the
neutron.

-- 
- John Logajan MS010, Network Systems; 7600 Boone Ave; Brooklyn Park, MN 55428
- logajan@network.com, 612-424-4888, Fax 612-424-2853
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: ub-gate.UB.com!fnald.fnal.gov!DROEGE
Subject: Status #14 Cell 4A3
Reply-To: ub-gate.UB.com!fnald.fnal.gov!DROEGE
Organization: Sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 04:31:57 GMT

Status #14 Cell 4A3

"Anomalous Cold" kept increasing.  When it got up to the 200 mw level I 
decided that it was time to do something about it.  I opened up the 
calorimeter and while everything was live and continuing to operate, smeared 
my favorite black rubber gunk over the likely leak.  No success.  So I pulled 
the cell out of the spool piece and examined it.  

There were two holes burned through the side.  Looks the like hot catalyst in 
one of the glass tubes got close enough to the side of the cell to burn a hole 
through it.  It is possible that one of the catalyst pieces has jumped out of 
the glass tube and burned its way into the cell wall, but I cannot see clearly 
enough through the semi-opaque polypropylene to say for sure.  

So out came the 5 - minute epoxy.  Not much inside the cell, but it is at 
least a fair patch.  

Now everything is sealed up and again the gas, catalyst temperature, cell 
temperature, and power measurements make sense.  Because some liquid had been 
lost during the long period of operation with the leak, we added 4 cc of the 
boric acid mix.  Accumulated -energy matched the electrolyte loss only to a 
factor of three.  This indicates some vapor loss too.  This addition should 
produce an electrolyte boron content of order 400 ppm.  Since the addition 
there has been a steady accumulation of gas in the cell.  

There is now a small "anomalous heat", 60 mw or so.  With the 35 mw one sigma 
claim, this is not significant, but the cell noise level has gone up to 30 mw 
from  15 mw.  This does seem to be significant, as I have hundreds of hours 
earlier in this run where it was 15 +/-2 mw.  There is a small increasing 
trend, but not possible yet to distinguish the trend from ambient temperature 
effects.  We are roughly at hour 820 of this experiment.   

Tom Droege

From: rauchfuss@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Brian Rauchfuss)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 17:53:35 GMT
Subject: Re: Coulombic Barrier to Fusion?
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion

In sci.physics.fusion, noring@netcom.com (Jon Noring) writes:

> As a mechanical engineer, some aspects of the discussion about fusion are
> above my head.  For example, yesterday, I was talking to an electrical
> engineer who stated that fusion of certain nuclei can readily take place if
> the 'coulombic barrier is overcome'.  This did not make any sense to me, so
> if anybody out there could educate me on this matter, I'd appreciate it.
> 
> Jon

That is one of the secret things electrical engineers are taught :-)

Nuclei have to be very close together to fuse, but if for example two hydrogen
ions (p) approach each other, the positive electric charges will push them
apart.  If you "push" them hard enough, they will get close enough for the
strong force to take over and they will fuse. (Some details left out for
clarity).  The natural repulsion of nuclei is the coulombic barrier.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Rauchfuss (Smokefoot)  "... the world could change in the blink
brian@hpfcbdr.fc.hp.com           of an eye."
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
From: chuck@coplex.com (Chuck Sites)
Subject: Re: Implications of hypothesis of subground states 
Organization: Copper Electronics, Inc.
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 10:33:30 GMT

logajan@ns.network.com (John Logajan) writes:

>chuck@coplex.com (Chuck Sites) writes:
>>At what point does a hydrino become a neutron?               

>Never.
>A neutron has a rest mass of 939.573 Mev/c^2
>A proton has a rest mass of  938.280 Mev/c^2
>An electron has a rest mass of 0.511003 Mev/c^2

>If a MKF electron/proton pair didn't lose any energy/mass at all to radiation
>then it would come out to be 939.573 - 938.28 - 0.511 = 0.782 Mev's too light
>to be a neutron.  But, of course, MKF claim each transistion does radiate,
>thus in a fall from n=ground to n=1/210 (an orbit the size of the proton radius)
>the MKF electron/proton pair lose an additional 0.6 Mev.

And the winner is John!  A neutron decays in 15.5 Hrs, by
               n -> p + e- + (anti)v_e 
because the neutron is 0.782ev too heavy and a half-spin in the wrong
direction! I was half-heartedly kidding about neutron production from
a hydrino collapse. Yet by electron capture,
                p + e- -> n + v_e
I'm not going to suggest cold EC. MKF is basically the Borh model for one
electron atoms taken to the extreem.  It's the exact oposite of ionization,
electron orbital collapse.  The difference between an electron spiraling
into the nucleus and MKF is that, MKF treats the photon as a wave and  
certain syncronous components of that wave are trapped by the electron
charge density.  If the phase of the trapped photon hits C, that
component of the photon is emitted, and the shell collapses. It's 
pure and simple a 1/n Bohr model (a Bohr model all the way down to
the nucleus).   

The implications are obvious, an absorbtion spectrum should be seen
for 1/n and I understand Mill's claims that these lines have been 
seen in an UV sky survey.  I'm skeptical that there is anything to
this, but I'll see what I can find in the library. 

Have fun,
Chuck Sites
chuck@coplex.com
From: aq817@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Steve Crocker)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Subject: Japanese Replication Kits - Results?
Date: 21 Jan 1993 08:57:08 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu


I don't read this group often, so perhaps I have missed news on 
this. As I recall, late last year a Japanese lab was providing
inexpensive kits which supposedly contained all the necessities to
replicate a working cnf experiment. Have there been any results yet
from those using these kits?

-Steve
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
Organization: Penn State University
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 16:29:12 EST
From: <DTC3@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: gravitons

How about the Hawking effect, whereby gravitons could tunnel past
the black hole's event horizon?  (Although I'm sure the graviton
"flux" due to this effect would not lead to a correct statement as
to the mass of the object...)

In any event, a prime assertion of General Relativity is that gravity
is *not a force*, but a characteristic of the geometry of spacetime;
it seems, then, that the notion of a force propagator (the graviton)
moving about in spacetime is not consistent with this assertion.  And
as there are  no   direct experimental data regarding the behavior of
gravity at the quantum level, can the existence of a neutral, massless,
spin-2 graviton be justified on symmetry grounds alone?

Any thoughts?

                         Christopher M. Webster (dtc3@psuvm.psu.edu)
                         VLSI Laboratory
                         Penn State Harrisburg
Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: kepley@photon.phys.unca.edu (Brad Kepley)
Subject: Re: sci.physics.research: Are there imp
Organization: University of North Carolina at Asheville
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 23:40:57 GMT

In article <1541700025@gn.apc.org> antennae@gn.apc.org writes:
>
>
>  How you puffed and
>strutted, as you put the boot in, one after another.  Well, you
>people may be clever, but you're not very intelligent.  You're not
>very wise.  You're not very kind.  And now you've all got so
>worked up about winning one another's worthless approval that
>you're going to let your conference be hijacked by a
>self-appointed clique who are going to tell you what it's okay to
>read and to know and to discuss.  How very dismal.  
Your name is never going to be up there alongside
> Newton, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli
>and the rest until you realise that Judgement Day is not the day
>the world ends, but the day it begins.  It's every day.
>Especially today.

I wouldn't be so sure that Newton, Einstein, Plank, Bohr, Heisenberg,
and Pauli were above all this "puffing and strutting" and insulting
people on occasion.




Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: re: integrity of moderators
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 20:25:04 GMT


sci.physics has been an informal forum for all sorts of half-baked ideas,
jokes, brawls (flames) etc. Like Prince Hal I can play with Falstaff, or
even be Falstaff. But I have spend lot's of time in close observation of
really great physicists like Feynman, Bethe, Heisenberg, Salam etc.
So if you really want a high quality mderated conference your selection
of moderators is crucial. I fool around and play with outrageous ideas- but
I know what it means to be professional and fair when the occasion calls for
it - not the case with some of the present moderators who are not
"cultured".
From: paul@mtnmath.UUCP (Paul Budnik)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: hidden variables
Date: 26 Jan 93 20:04:03 GMT
Organization: Mountain Math Software, P. O. Box 2124, Saratoga. CA 95070

In article <1993Jan26.061326.19668@cs.wayne.edu>, atems@igor.physics.wayne.edu (Dale Atems) writes:
> [...]
> Sorry, I don't follow your objection. This wave function isn't
> dependent on the relative angle, explicitly or otherwise.  I can expand
> the polarization kets in any basis I choose. I choose to expand each
> ket in a basis aligned with the polarizer the "attached" wavefront
> encounters. This is to separate out the term that gets absorbed from
> the one that goes through. The relative angle comes from applying that
> expansion separately to the kets attached to distant wavefronts.

The `sin@' and `cos@' terms make the equation you gave are explicitly
nonlocal. That equation cannot be derived from the Schrodinger equation.
What you seem to be claiming is that this equation does not define 
the wave function but serves is a basis for determining the wave
function on the other side of the two polarizers. I do not understand
this distinction unless you are invoking some form of the collapse postulate
at the point the wave function traverses the polarizer. The explicitly
nonlocal equation you are using is not Lorentz invariant and is
inconsistent with the relativistic Schrodinger equation.

> The wave function itself is unaffected by changing the transmission
> angle of a polarizer, except that it affects the component absorbed
> when a wavefront encounters it -- exactly as in the one-photon case.

A wave function model in which the amplitude of one 
component on the other side of a polarizer is an explicit function of a
distant polarizer angle is not local and not Lorentz invariant. In the one
photon case, the polarization of the wave function just past the polarizer
changes *continuously* with the angle of the polarizer. If you build
such a continuos change as a function of a remote polarizer angle into
a wave function for the singlet state case you will have an explicitly
nonlocal non Lorentz invariant wave function.

Paul Budnik