Well, that may be a case of science acting quite seriously Bayesian. No theoretical backing for something at ordinary energies = very low prior. Making deuterium in-situ with electrolysis = obfuscation of the process, which is bad too. The stuff about extreme purity of palladium being necessary, that lowers prior probability even further because now not only you have cold fusion, but it is also sensitive to impurities in far away lattice points. Which is very weird for a non-semiconductor.
Then, on various interesting bits of evidence. Strong excess heat, that sounds good, but strong excess heat implies possibility of making a working product out of it, and no one did, so assuming a possibility of strong excess heat you get a lot of evidence now that it doesn’t work.
Explosions, you can of course spin this as evidence and claim that energy stored was insufficient to cause the explosion, which sounds like evidence, but look, you’re postulating that explosions which apriori (given theoretical ignorance) can range from microscopic to a megaton blast, fit in the window of a dynamite stick.
So you get a very low prior for it working, and then, in absence of a theoretical model, you have really wide expectations which make the evidence weak—as the evidence comes in you end up postulating extra things about your fusion—i.e. switching to hypotheses with lower priors.
edit: and you have simultaneous lack of neutrons and lack of hard gamma radiation. So, somehow, not only the energy gets distributed (which you can argue would be provided by time symmetry on the same unknown mechanism that collides the deuterons), either something happens to neutrons, or the D-D fusion does only follow the neutron-less branch.
edit: a better way to state it: For all new evidence, the “its mistaken” provides a strong prediction: the group will be unable to make a commercial product, the explosion will not level the city block (edit: and it won’t be a lot of micro explosions that look obviously very weird), the experimenters won’t die of radiation sickness, and so on and so forth. It assigns the probability of 1 to those things not happening, and when they don’t happen, by the Bayes formula, it’s probability stays the same. Whereas “its real” assigns <1 probability, and according to Bayes formula, drops in its probability any time anything dramatically nuclear does not happen. Interestingly, the experimenters themselves seem to heavily rely on this “nothing dramatically nuclear can possibly happen” model when they don’t buy lead shielding, don’t move experiment to a remote location, and the like.
Not knowing any significant level of detail about it, I’d assume that there’s a lot of energy in lightning. When things with megavolt+ potentials cause stuff to happen that normally requires megavolt+ potentials, I am… unsurprised. So, I don’t see any particular update on cold fusion probabilities due to lightning research.
Am I missing some connection that you’re thinking of?
Not knowing any significant level of detail about it, I’d assume that there’s a lot of energy in lightning. When things with megavolt+ potentials cause stuff to happen that normally requires megavolt+ potentials, I am… unsurprised.
That’s like saying “Tom (whose a millionaire) should be able to pay of the (multi-trillion dollar) national debt because both involve a lot of money”. It’s not just a matter of energy, it’s a matter of putting enough of it into a sufficiently small space. Producing X-ray normally involves phenomena capable of splitting atoms, which lightning can’t do (as far as we know).
Lightning produces potential differences of many million volts. When an electron or proton goes across the difference of potentials of 1 million volts, it acquires energy of 1 million electron volts, which is enough to produce some high energy x-rays, and even nuclear reactions. Air pressure has an effect though, as the electron won’t gain much energy if it keeps colliding with air—unless the electric field strength (volts per meter—it is similar to slope) is pretty high. Lightnings propagate weird -with a streamer going ahead—near the streamer it is plausible that electric field is strong enough.
It’s not that different from early linear particle accelerators powered with a big Van-de-Graaf generator. A lot of energy ends up in single charged particle because that particle moved across big potential difference.
. Producing X-ray normally involves phenomena capable of splitting atoms, which lightning can’t do (as far as we know).
Producing x-rays normally does not require splitting or transforming nuclei. The traditional way to make x-rays, say, in a dentists office, is just colliding high-energy electrons with a metal plate. It’s mildly interesting to do the same in free air, but it doesn’t seem to require any sort of new physics. Atmospheric electromagnetic fields are, trivially, strong enough to ionize a lot of air, and that gets you some pretty fast-moving electrons.
Well, that may be a case of science acting quite seriously Bayesian. No theoretical backing for something at ordinary energies = very low prior. Making deuterium in-situ with electrolysis = obfuscation of the process, which is bad too. The stuff about extreme purity of palladium being necessary, that lowers prior probability even further because now not only you have cold fusion, but it is also sensitive to impurities in far away lattice points. Which is very weird for a non-semiconductor.
Then, on various interesting bits of evidence. Strong excess heat, that sounds good, but strong excess heat implies possibility of making a working product out of it, and no one did, so assuming a possibility of strong excess heat you get a lot of evidence now that it doesn’t work.
Explosions, you can of course spin this as evidence and claim that energy stored was insufficient to cause the explosion, which sounds like evidence, but look, you’re postulating that explosions which apriori (given theoretical ignorance) can range from microscopic to a megaton blast, fit in the window of a dynamite stick.
So you get a very low prior for it working, and then, in absence of a theoretical model, you have really wide expectations which make the evidence weak—as the evidence comes in you end up postulating extra things about your fusion—i.e. switching to hypotheses with lower priors.
edit: and you have simultaneous lack of neutrons and lack of hard gamma radiation. So, somehow, not only the energy gets distributed (which you can argue would be provided by time symmetry on the same unknown mechanism that collides the deuterons), either something happens to neutrons, or the D-D fusion does only follow the neutron-less branch.
edit: a better way to state it: For all new evidence, the “its mistaken” provides a strong prediction: the group will be unable to make a commercial product, the explosion will not level the city block (edit: and it won’t be a lot of micro explosions that look obviously very weird), the experimenters won’t die of radiation sickness, and so on and so forth. It assigns the probability of 1 to those things not happening, and when they don’t happen, by the Bayes formula, it’s probability stays the same. Whereas “its real” assigns <1 probability, and according to Bayes formula, drops in its probability any time anything dramatically nuclear does not happen. Interestingly, the experimenters themselves seem to heavily rely on this “nothing dramatically nuclear can possibly happen” model when they don’t buy lead shielding, don’t move experiment to a remote location, and the like.
Another fun exercise. How does the recent discovery of dark lightning, basically lightning that produces X/gamms-rays, affect the posteriors?
Not knowing any significant level of detail about it, I’d assume that there’s a lot of energy in lightning. When things with megavolt+ potentials cause stuff to happen that normally requires megavolt+ potentials, I am… unsurprised. So, I don’t see any particular update on cold fusion probabilities due to lightning research.
Am I missing some connection that you’re thinking of?
That’s like saying “Tom (whose a millionaire) should be able to pay of the (multi-trillion dollar) national debt because both involve a lot of money”. It’s not just a matter of energy, it’s a matter of putting enough of it into a sufficiently small space. Producing X-ray normally involves phenomena capable of splitting atoms, which lightning can’t do (as far as we know).
Lightning produces potential differences of many million volts. When an electron or proton goes across the difference of potentials of 1 million volts, it acquires energy of 1 million electron volts, which is enough to produce some high energy x-rays, and even nuclear reactions. Air pressure has an effect though, as the electron won’t gain much energy if it keeps colliding with air—unless the electric field strength (volts per meter—it is similar to slope) is pretty high. Lightnings propagate weird -with a streamer going ahead—near the streamer it is plausible that electric field is strong enough.
It’s not that different from early linear particle accelerators powered with a big Van-de-Graaf generator. A lot of energy ends up in single charged particle because that particle moved across big potential difference.
Producing x-rays normally does not require splitting or transforming nuclei. The traditional way to make x-rays, say, in a dentists office, is just colliding high-energy electrons with a metal plate. It’s mildly interesting to do the same in free air, but it doesn’t seem to require any sort of new physics. Atmospheric electromagnetic fields are, trivially, strong enough to ionize a lot of air, and that gets you some pretty fast-moving electrons.