I’m in no way trying to support his claim, but I feel I should point out that in the description of the video, he wrote: “I didn’t show it in the experiment, but I did scrape off lead prior to the sparking and the magnet picked up nothing.”
Quote it and say “Why not?” or “Please repeat and show that part” or “I tried and magnet did attract the scrappings (if they do, I don’t know)” or “I have also proven cold fusion is possible, I just didn’t record it” or even just some jab about the margins being to narrow.
IOW, you can’t blow off the control because you didn’t feel like recording it. Hell, he can go back and record/upload it now.
If that lil’ battery is enough energy to make iron, then why isn’t an atmospheric lightning discharge enough, or does iron rain down after every lightning bolt?
Would the electric current “align” the magnetism in any existing iron? Maybe the OP should bring a great big electro-magnet and test the graphite before the demonstration.
IANAC, my degree in Physics doesn’t get that detailed, but…
Simple rates of reaction in CHEM 101 but also applicable to fusion dynamics - a reaction does not happen when 4 of the right atoms happen to ram together; collisions tend to happen 2 at a time, producing intermediate results. So a serious analysis of the results of the experiment should show a lot more fusion product 16+16, 12+16, 12+12, 12+12+16, etc. (Sulphur, Silicon, Magnesium, Calcium, etc.) The likelihood of any such intermediate products combining to form a 4-way product depends on the relative abundance of the reactants (and in the case of solids, their relative mobility to mix in the reaction mass). A 4-way collision is pretty much impossible, as is a 3-way. When the reactant is held in a quasi-crystal matrix and not moving around, it’s even mor difficult.
Basically, fusion is incredibly difficult and it takes a lot of energy to ram two nuclei together (as if 60 years of research didn’t give that away). It’s even more difficult for stable isotopes, and more difficult as the atomic number goes up ( repellent emf are larger). It’s no coincidence the favored reactants currently for fusion are deuterium and tritium.
He sure can, and I hope he does. I’m just mentioning it in case Saltire is planning to spring it on him at his presentation. It’s something that he’s already aware of and will be prepared for.
I just scraped some graphite particles from a couple of pencils onto a piece of paper and tested them with a magnet. None of them were attracted by it. Then I placed a second piece of paper (without a magnet inside) on top of them, and when I lifted it up, some of them stuck to it.
What this proves is that graphite adheres to writing paper. Wow, what a surprise.
But he foresaw that objection in the video and showed that the magnet caused the particles to MOVE, not just adhere to the paper. My test disagrees with yours; I was able to get dust scraped off a pencil to move (like he did with the sparked particles), by moving a very strong rare-earth magnet under the paper. But the effect was pretty weak. I imagine that the smaller the particles are, the easier they’ll be to move with a magnet. I used a very sharp knife, but burning with a spark probably produces very small particles. I imagine different pencils may also act differently, depending on the composition of the binder.
–Mark
Is the pizza joint aware of a possible nuclear fission experiment taking place? 
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission might wanna know about it too…as well as untold thousands of research scientists/universities/companies…etc…You better get the word out for this historic occasion.
Getting the nucleon count right this time, the reaction would need to be
[sup]12[/sup]C + [sup]12[/sup]C + [sup]16[/sup]O + [sup]16[/sup]O -> [sup]56[/sup]Ni -> [sup]56[/sup]Co + e[sup]+[/sup] + v[sub]e[/sub] -> [sup]56[/sup]Fe + e[sup]+[/sup] + v[sub]e[/sub]
[sup]56[/sup]Ni has a half life of 6 days and
[sup]56[/sup]Co has a half life of 77 days.
Now both nickel and cobalt are magnetic as well, so there is a (very slight) case to be made that this is still OK. However in both cases the decay mechanism is beta+ decay - so we should be seeing the result of the fusion cheerfully emitting gamma rays.
Not the mention the simply idiotic energy that still needs to be accounted for resulting from the actual fusion reaction. There is enough energy released to paint the walls with the experimenter, and have the remains baked solid with gamma rays. So the core question still remains. Why isn’t he dead?
Because it’s cold fusion*. Duh!
*may not contain fusion
Given that people are using carbon rods to make small scale electric arc furnaces that melt metal pretty much by the radiance of the arc alone, I think there’s a fairly good chance that this guy is producing smaller arcs that are refining or smelting the exising iron particles in the pencil lead into larger blobs of metallic iron (or more magnetic iron compounds)
Turns out that pencil lead is itself magnetic. Just google composition of pencil lead and follow the hits you’ll get stuff like this from a scientific journal in the Cornell University archives:
Ferromagnetism in lead graphite-pencils and magnetic composite with CoFe2O4 particles
R.N. Bhowmik
(Submitted on 8 Jul 2011)
This work has been initiated with a curiosity to investigate the elemental composition and magnetic response of different grades of lead pencils (6B, 2B, HB, 2H, 5H) that people use in daily life. Interestingly, experimental results landed with a great achievement of observing soft magnetism in lead pencils, indicating a wide scope of magnetic tuning for room temperature applications. A novel magnetic composite has been synthesized by mixing different concentration of CoFe2O4 (CF) nanoparticles in 5H and 6B pencils for studying the magnetic tailoring aspects using pencils. Our results showed different possibilities of controlling disorder induced ferromagnetic parameters and a simple approach of producing sufficiently high coercive magnetic composite using pencils.*may contain nuts
I hope the OP reports back on the evening.
One suspects that there will be the usual set of reasons for why the objections are somehow avoided. Lots of moving of goal-post, and some special dispensations needed.
Maybe he will claim the reaction actually yields [sup]57[/sup]Fe and there is some special process that allows a depressing number conservation laws to be broken in the process. Thus avoiding most of the energy balance issue. Most that is, the serene nature of the demonstration would suggest as near to zero energy from the reaction as possible. This is altogether a common tactic. There was a lot of this with the original cold-fusion claims. But the claim is that this is fusion - and somehow the cold-fusion adherents like to claim that they will solve the world’s energy problems with it. So where is the energy? He can’t have it both ways.
I wonder if a simple chemical reaction that could be used after the demonstration on some of the pencil lead and the reaction products to indicate the presence of iron. Somehting like this: Total Iron Test Kit* At $22 is would be a reasonable investment if you could get one in time.
I sent the video link to CodyDon of Cody’s Lab on YouTube - he does a lot of cool chemistry experiments and demonstrations - including assaying (although usually of precious metals) - I reckon it shouldn’t be too hard to measure the proportion of ferrous metals in a pair of before/after samples.
I’m still laughing at the video. I expected something that at least tried to look like a scientific experiment. Amazing nobody has ever noticed the mass of iron particles collecting underneath carbon arc light mechanisms.
Plenty of people have noticed them. Of that tiny fraction of humanity that have operated carbon arc lights. Those couple of semesters on the stage crew finally paid off for me in this thread.
As always, the guy’s an idiot and his persuasiveness score is zero to anyone with a logical thinking mind but about 100 to the rest of the I-need-to-believe crowd.
One hopes this guy doesn’t take up alt-right politics any time soon. They’d love the idea of unlimited free energy made at home. It’ll show them damn ferriners right. As in “Take your oil & shove it; we don’t need it any more!!! La la la I can’t hear any objections La La LA!!!1!”
You think alt-right sorts dislike fossil fuels?
They dislike buying fossil fuels from Muslims and thereby sending them money to be spent attacking our wimmin.
OTOH, local fossil fuels smells like … Jobs!
Just got back from the meeting. It was both better and worse than I expected.
I had posted a link to this thread on the Meetup page. He seems to have read it. So he’s done a new version of his demonstration. It tries to deal with the iron already in the sample, but he admits it doesn’t do it very well. He says he probably won’t ever be able to do it with any real rigor, and hopes a real lab will do more someday.
Then he got into his theory. Basically, to explain how fusion is so much easier to do than current physics predicts, he’s going to overturn the Standard Model. He’s come up with the Cubic Atomic Model.
Those of us in the group that know a bit about physics asked a lot of questions. Let’s just say that I wasn’t satisfied with the answers. I won’t write too much more at this point; I need to go to bed. But here are a couple of links.