parallel wrote:DancingFool,
Your answer is a good example of why I don't take you seriously.
Anyone who has been following LENR should know by now that it is not classical fusion, so what you wrote was largely irrelevant.
AA.
Parallel. You are half-right, but your half-wrong is monumental.
You're right that the proposed fusion is not classical. What you have consistently failed to admit to yourself is that, for the sake of argument,
I'm perfectly willing to assume that it occurs. Having done so, though, I'm not willing to ignore (as you seem to do) the consequences of that assumption. My argument has always been that, if you assume a Ni + H fusion occurs the consequences are well-defined and do not correspond to reality, so the assumption is not tenable. It is the
reductio ad absurdem technique, and I'm surprised that you do not realize that.
But. Let's take this in steps. I'll number them so you can address them clearly.
1) Once fusion has occurred*, (for instance) 58Ni must become 59Cu. The nucleus has acquired a single proton.
* Note that I have explicitly accepted the idea of a non-classical LENR. How it happens doesn't matter.
2) LENR-produced 59cu is not magical. It behaves just like any other 59Cu.
3) 59Cu has a half-life of 81 seconds. It decays to 59Ni, emitting a positron in the process, with a small proportion of decays occurring through electron capture and emitting a neutrino.
4) In a non-vacuum, the positron will almost instantly annihilate an electron and produce two 511 keV photons (gamma radiation).
5) 59Cu was not found by the isotopic analyses performed in the presentation.
6) Parkhomov et al do not, as far as I know, show any signs of exposure to the gamma radiation which would be produced in step 4.
And that's it. If you don't take it seriously, what is your alternative? Rossi's claim of a catalyst element (unnamed and in some cases not claimed to be necessary - see his last patent application) is supposed to permit overcoming the Coulomb barrier. Are you going to claim that an adjacent catalyst atom will also wildly affect the decay characteristics of the resulting 59Cu nucleus? Are you going to claim that the fused nuclide is, indeed, magic, or at least exempt from the results a century of observation of radioactive decay?
By the numbers, please. Where does the argument break down? Please take me seriously enough to identify (and justify that identification) where I've gone wrong.