It takes unbelievable care and perseverance to do science, especially nuclear science. I have rebuilt bubble fusion my reactor dozens of time. This involves complete disassembly of everything you see on this picture down to the last bolt, cleaning everything from oil, washing with isopropyl followed by hours and days of pumping to remove water vapor.
Reactor fails for a variety of reasons, with the main one being vibration from the acoustic drive. 6″ ConFlat viewport broke three times shattering the glass, spilling oil and sending splash into the turbo-vacuum system. Once a brand new $400 viewport failed only minutes after installation – the entire glass assembly separated from the flange. Now I know why $400 parts are cheap and why the same viewports elsewhere cost $900-1,900, they don’t break easily! (I hope)
Vacuum gauges failed numerous times due to accumulation of oil vapor and plash.
Reactor seams failed more than once.
Piezoelectric transducers failed a number of times.
Branson power supplies fail regularly – that is why I have five, three you can see on the picture, only two are working.
Branson piezo-drives fail too, I have four with three still working.
Each failure requires a reactor disassembly, cleaning and reassembly.
Neutron detectors fail too – but when they do not fail they tend to pick up a signal, which looks perfectly normal and well form, but in fact arises from a variety of systematic factors such as electrical noise, vibration (yes, vibration!), coaxial connector failures, wire failures, electronic failures, etc.
Everything fails all the time. This is a nature of doing science. Scientific equipment is sensitive, and until you start experimentation you never know what to ‘overengineer’ because the experimental conditions are different for each experiment and various engineering tolerances end up being violated in different ways.
Returning to neutron detectors – it is not enough to filter out your gammas and electromagnetic noise, one has to actually observe a perfectly formed thermal neutron spectrum in order to have some confidence that the reported counts are indeed neutrons. When you have only a few counts per minute it may not be possible to build a good smooth spectrum or it may take days to build one. But it may not be possible to run the experiment for that long, hence the problem. You can never know that your measurement device works or not unless you have a secondary means of confirmation, i.e. when you have another totally different instrument that reads the same result (or provides a corroborating reading).
What I am saying here is this: nuclear science is exceedingly difficult, because we are dealing with a handful of events! I mean, we are dealing with a quantity of x-rays, gammas or neutrons that we can actually count. Maybe 10 counts, maybe 100, may be one thousand. Now compare this against an Avogadro’s number, which is 6 x 1023, which is the number of atoms in one mole of substance. A typical experiment has on the order of one mole of substance, from which we expect to count only 10 to 1000 events, I am talking a 1020 difference! Wrap your mind around this, no really.
Finding needle in a haystack is a cakewalk by comparison. If you are looking for impurities that result from transmutation – you are looking at a handful of atoms, which you allegedly detect in quantities that are at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 less than the quantity of all other atoms in the system. This is a staggering accuracy to claim, and such accuracy is not easily achieved (if at all). There are impurities, always and all the time. Given the 23 orders of magnitude you can pretty much find any atom and any isotope everywhere, just because nothing s a pure substance.
The same goes for x-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. They are present in background, the background is often influence by cosmic events of solar, galactic or extragalactic origin. And if you say that these events are small and infrequent – you’d be wrong. Some cosmic ray particles have energies compared to that of a baseball (I am not kidding), they are able to influence weather and seed clouds to the point that the entire planetary climate is affected. I am not exaggerating. These events happen all the time and they make interpreting a handful of data points well, impossible. That is why any nuclear experiment that is intended to prove anything must be run for months or years, collecting data and counts to the point that signal at last surpasses the noise and a statistical statement can be made with respect to the veracity of data and its interpretations. Therefore I do not believe any LENR paper that claims transmutation or a nuclear reaction of any sort and you should not either. It is sufficient to ask two questions: 1) How long was the experiment? 2) How many data points / counts were collected?
You can find anything in any sample, all you have to do is to look. It is not just measuring, it is demonstration of correlation and ultimately causation coupled with statistical significance of result in the face of painstakingly eliminated systematic errors can lead to any conclusion. I am sad to say, but only organized science has the resources, funding and tenacity (in the form of young, hungry and eager post docs) to do it.
But even then I refuse to believe any results originating from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC team claims to detect 1 or 2 events that in their mind challenge the Standard Model of particle physics. All I can do is laugh.
Conclusion
People engage in scientific research for a variety of reasons. For some it is a job, which pays the bills. Few others seek attention. For many it is a matter of egotistic aspirations mostly based on prestige. Certain unscrupulous individuals rely on pseudoscience to swindle investors and donors out of their money. Only select few practice science because they yearn for the truth. For those few it is a life-long quest, which may not result in a discovery. If you are on this path – prepare to go to grave disappointed.