[NewCandle] Heated thoughts (was crystallization weight change transients)

[Nick Reiter]

Hello all,

Yesterday and today, I found and confirmed some minor
artifacts that were probably giving me weight changes
that resulted from my tellurium crystal crushing. 
What I had neglected to observe adequately earlier was
the heat evolved from the act of grinding and
breaking, which was surprisingly high (about 7 to 8
degrees C)  Thus when I weighed the crushed crystals
in an open crucible, I got a lofting effect, but when
sealed immediately in a bottle the effect vanished.

Ah well.  So it goes.

Maybe the core issue of this whole adventure has been
how to de-couple the influence of heat transfer from
weight measurements.  In some cases, it was pretty
straightforward.  About 4 years ago, I agreed to run a
replication of an effect Pete Fred had seen where a
convex "bowl" of thin foil would get lighter when he
would heat it with a lamp from above.  Pete maintained
that he had weeded out the convective lift, and that
the effect still remained.  I set up the whole rig in
a bell jar, and ran it at a high vacuum (below 10^-4
torr).  The effect was gone, within the range of the
balance.

The ultimate solution for practical purposes is always
"run the whole darned thing in a vacuum".  But with
these pesky weight transients, they are down in the
milligram range.  And my milligram balance is way too
big to fit in a bell jar.

It would be simple enough to seal small test pieces in
a vacuum ampoule.  But then how do you "excite" them,
and also prevent the much slower but still present
heat transfer to the balance by radiation and
conduction?

So let me throw it out as a "thought experiment
challenge" to the peanut gallery...

Lets simplify our objective and apparatus.  We want to
see if a small simple object - lets go with a little
slug of platinum - weighs less at say 1000K than it
does at 300K.  If such a weight difference exists, it
might be in the realm of milligrams for say a 10 gram
sample.  We have a nice milligram balance, but one
which is too large to be put in a vacuum system.  The
maximum payload for the balance is 200 grams.

What would you do?  I'm all ears.

Now on a very peripherally related topic, I have
another question.  Does anyone in the group know what
the latest status is of the Woodward Drive?  Is anyone
else out there, or Professor Woodward still looking at
it?  Or has it been formally disproven?  Yes, the two
topics (weight transients and Woodward's drive) do
meet in a very peculiar way.

NR

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