Wall for Ron Maimon

I already saw that, but it is important, because it is online and it presents the evidence very clearly.

http://coldfusionnow.org/2014-cflanr-colloquium-at-mit-audio-files/

It's not clear that a blog is not the best venue for presenting new things. Mostly, the material on blogs is rehash of old things, already known.

Ok I see. But your own blog is really the only way that you can present your own thoughts and theories in full glory detail to everyone. Just saying.

I might do that, but you should read Motl. His science is accurate, aside from global warming, and his politics is just a reaction to the trauma of a childhood under communism, so it can be understood and perhaps forgiven.

Hey Ron, instead of figuring out the secrets of the universe on your own, why don't you start your own blog? I'm tired of reading Lubos's physics mixed with politics stuff.

Oh, I calculated a nice thing, and then I found out it's a whole field (the Thomas-Fermi-Walker atom), so I read about that. The main issue is still unsolved, how the heck can a virtual transition with so many final states ever be coherent? Until I understand this, I am not confident that I have anything useful to say. At the moment, I have no model that can produce such an effect, but I cannot rule it out either, so it's just torture.

How's the cold fusion article for Lubos getting on?

I find it worrying for different reasons--- it shows that there are no actual young scientists left in condensed matter physics or nuclear physics, only frauds.

Hagelstein wasn't old when he started, and there are plenty of young experimentalist folks, like the folks at Energetics, and Rob Duncan formerly of Missouri, who looked about 50.

Rossi is a fraud, everyone knows. Lubos said wrong things regarding this, as I already explained there. the peak of fusion between two d's is 100 KeV (.1 MeV, not .4), it's reduced by ordinary tunneling from the classical value Lubos is using, the plots of cross section are well known, and 20KeV is plenty of energy for fusion, the cross section is about 1/4 of the peak. Even 3KeV is enough for a significant cross section, although much smaller.

I don't intend to dumb down anything, I expect readers of the blog to follow perturbation theory, and any new methods of quantum mechanics. Hagelstein has already explained the experimental situation more clearly than I can ever hope to do. My goal is to make a quick summary of the experimental situation, and explain the theoretical situation, to show that it is not hopeless, rather it is fruitful, to study the phenomenon theoretically (this is important to get theorists interested--- intractible problems, even if interesting, don't get attention. Hardly anyone works on low-energy QCD vacuum structure anymore, because it's hard). The most important thing to explain is that it is not at all ruled out by existing theory, the arguments have been based on a bogus arguments which fail in environments with highly excited inner shells.

The point of theory is that you learn what is important and what is not, and what future experiments to explore. Without theory, experiments are very limited in elucidating a phenomenon, you don't know what is going on microscopically. This is the usual situation in physics, once you have an idea of what is going on on the atomic level, you can much more easily make progress.

Well that's great. I just find it all worrying that the guys claiming cold fusion is real tend to be very old scientists, even if brilliant in their youth such as Schwinger. But at least you thought up your theory while still relatively young in comparison.

I hope in particular that you take on board the comments Lubos left on his blog:

http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/andrea-rossi-and-cold-fusion.html

"You're being completely ludicrous, Ron. The Coulomb barrier between pairs of nuclei is never smaller than 0.4 MeV..."

And lay out your guest post as clearly as Liam McAllister's:

http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/bicep2-primordial-gravitational-waves.html?m=1