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Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

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Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#51

Post by pfdietz »

ncmncm wrote: post #42
raziel2701 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now the easiest explanation is contamination, ordinary and easy to explain.

No. Claims Require Evidence. Maybe it's contamination. Maybe it is something interesting. Ordinary evidence will reveal which. Demanding extraordinary evidence is just defending turf, and not science.

The level of evidence required increases with the audacity of the claim. That's because outrageous new physics is almost never the case, for the same reason that miracles or aliens are almost never (or just never) the explanation for something.

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#52

Post by jiggawatts »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #7
cromwellian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about a control experiment? How about letting the PdAg sit in a vacuum for the same amount of time under similar conditions and see what develops? How do they rule out contamination, such as by cosmic rays?

If I read the abstract right, they did in fact have a control. They had the exact same palladium/silver mix in it, but didn't cycle D2, H2, or He in and out. It wound up with much fewer of the surprising elements.

But the "control" wasn't. It was a different coil, and they didn't characterise either of the coils' metallurgy prior to the experiment.

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#53

Post by zaroth »

ncmncm wrote: post #43
zaroth wrote: post #30

Last week we got cold superconduction. What would the trifecta be? EM drive working probably. Maybe the universe is trying to balance out the cosmic 2020 scale.

Cold superconduction is pretty familiar.

Ugh, that should have read warm.

Warm superconductors, cold fusion, next up would be EM drive.

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#54

Post by gus_massa »

beervirus wrote: post #36
dumbfoundded wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odds that cold fusion has been discovered are 0.

Lattice assisted nuclear reactions exist. They just don't generate usable amounts of power.

> Lattice assisted nuclear reactions exist.

"Lattice assisted nuclear reactions" is just another name for "cold fusion" (or perhaps a branch of "cold fusion"). All the papers published about this have been unconvincing.

> They just don't generate usable amounts of power.

All the papers I remember report an small excess of heat. The problem is that heat is very difficult to measure accurately (the different parts of the equipment have different temperatures, estimating the heat transported in convection is a mess, some chemical parts may react, ...)

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#55

Post by lumost »

robocat wrote: post #32
raducu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't there be some kind of radiation detectable if fusion did occur?

It could easily be that the radiation is well below the noise floor for background radiation or cosmic rays. The experiment doesn’t allow for selecting the type of radiation, and if the fusion is different from normal then the signature could be strange. Detecting elements can be done for incredibly small amounts, but instead the problem is avoiding contamination.

There's a non zero chance that the transmutations would also be due to cosmic rays.

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#56

Post by lumost »

gus_massa wrote: post #54
beervirus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lattice assisted nuclear reactions exist. They just don't generate usable amounts of power.

> Lattice assisted nuclear reactions exist. "Lattice assisted nuclear reactions" is just another name for "cold fusion" (or perhaps a branch of "cold fusion"). All the papers published about this have been unconvincing. > They just don't generate usable amounts of power. All the papers I remember report an small excess of heat. The problem is that heat is very difficult to measure accurately (the different parts of t…

There are strong theoretical grounds for lattice assisted fusion. The metal lattice acts to screen the deuterium atoms, and the lattice increases the overall cross section.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01685...

Unfortunately no practical mechanism for creating a self sustaining reaction has been proposed. Although the theoretical benefit has been demonstrated by heating the fuel via hot neutron bombardment.

https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.0...

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#57

Post by gus_massa »

zaroth wrote: post #53
ncmncm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cold superconduction is pretty familiar.

Ugh, that should have read warm . Warm superconductors, cold fusion, next up would be EM drive.

But in high temperature superconductivity there has been an steady progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... The trick is that since a few years the different groups are using an extremely high pressure.

So a combination of a material and pressure that shows superconductivity at room temperature is new, but not unexpected.

(A material that is a superconductor at room temperature and atmospheric pressure would be a more interesting and surprising. I'd wait until it is reproduced before throwing a party. )

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#58

Post by lumost »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #7
cromwellian wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about a control experiment? How about letting the PdAg sit in a vacuum for the same amount of time under similar conditions and see what develops? How do they rule out contamination, such as by cosmic rays?

If I read the abstract right, they did in fact have a control. They had the exact same palladium/silver mix in it, but didn't cycle D2, H2, or He in and out. It wound up with much fewer of the surprising elements.

The addition of deuterium will open new avenues for reactions by cosmic rays.

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#59

Post by HarryHirsch »

im3w1l wrote: post #33
HarryHirsch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper does them no credit, though. Cold fusion hs associated with the crazy fringe, and for very good reasons.

As long as it's good work by credible scientists and filled with caveats about being a work in progress and that it may turn out to be nothing, I don't see the issue.

This paper is just crap, a contamination problem sold as a breakthrough. It's worse in cold fusion, cold fusion in palladium is almost feasible, given the low energy barrier for D-D fusion. The setting is quite like the lifetime of the proton, a decaying proton would open up new avenues of theory, unfortunately the next prediction for the half-life is just outside experimental capabilities.

Anyway, first thing you do when you see a new paper is check what's journal it's in. If the journal has a crap reputation you skip it. This paper does nothing to improve the journal's standing, so the papers in there must be the usual "nothing new to see here, let's all move on" junk.

Re: Transmutations observed from pressure cycling palladium

#60

Post by hansvm »

versteegen wrote: post #41
hansvm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, P=NP could be independent from our current commonly used axioms; it doesn't have to be purely true or false.

My understanding is it's necessarily either true or false, but may not be provably true or false. This could allow us to actually have an algorithm that solves all NP problems in P time, but ZFC can't prove it works for all inputs. Edit: So in that case, what would it mean to add an axiom that P=NP? See https://mathoverflow.net/questions/50023/independence-of-p-n... especially the answer by Andreas Blass. Basically,…

Agreed, definitely off topic. Fun to consider anyway :)

Without considering many facts specific to P=NP, it could be feasible for it to neither true nor false in ZFC (i.e., some model of ZFC has P=NP, and some other has P!=NP), in which case you could take P=NP as another axiom. Other statements that work this way include the continuum hypothesis.

If I'm not mistaken (and misstatements regarding P=NP are common, so don't take this blindly), P=NP has a substantial amount of additional structure to it due to it being a low-complexity arithmetical statement. In particular, I believe you're correct that in ZFC it is actually either true or false in all models, but not necessarily provably so from within ZFC. In this case you could try to take it as an axiom (e.g. ZFC+PNP), but you'd either wind up with ZFC itself or an inconsistent axiom set.

As a related (maybe equivalent?) statement, P=NP has the property that if A is an axiom independent from ZF and P=NP (resp P!=NP) is provable in ZF+A then P=NP (resp P!=NP) is provable in ZF, again due to its nature as a low-complexity arithmetical statement, so either P=NP is unprovable in any meaningful extension of ZF, or it's provable in all of them.

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