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xedude wrote:

"They also have the advantage of producing megawatts of power in a reproducible environment. Cold fusion experiments are essentially consistent with zero."

Cold fusion experiments have produced far more integrated energy than any hot fusion experiment, albeit lower power. The biggest hot fusion experiment that I know of was at the PPPL. It produced ~10 MJ. Some cold fusion cells have produced 80 to 300 MJ. Also, hot fusion has never reach breakeven, whereas in some cold fusion cells are "fully ignited" (as they say in hot fusion), with zero input power.


"2. Cold fusion was more difficult to replicate HTSC, at first."

I would say they are still more difficult to replicate. I made my own high-temp superconducting material in a chemistry lab, and I have demonstrated the Meissner effect to physics students using a premade sample and some liquid nitrogen."

Since I have no experience trying to replicate HTSC I will take your word for that. On the other hand it should be noted that high school students using premade samples have successfully replicated cold fusion, in the U.S. and in Italy.

Also, I wouldn't know -- but I suppose that if you were to try to produce HTSC material from scratch, you would have considerable difficulty. Most researchers trying to do cold fusion must make material from scratch. That is a problem, because the machines used to fabricate cathodes cost anywhere from $50,000 to several million dollars, and they require considerable expertise to operate. The most skilled people are the US Navy's metallurgists. Their cathodes work every time. It is a shame they have been ordered not to do this research.


"How many cold fusion cells typically produce 'excess energy?' 1/3?"

That depends upon how much you want to pay. At the U.S. Navy, before the research was closed down, 10 out of 10 runs produced excess heat. At Mitsubishi 60 out of 60 have produced transmutations. (There is no way to measure excess energy with this set up, but in the previous experiments they did detect heat.) Mizuno has performed about 100 experiments over the last few years, and only a few failed. Will et al. (NCFI) reported: "Of twenty 'valid' (equipment debugged, procedures developed) experiments with Pd, nine or ten exhibited elevated levels of neutrons and/or tritium, representing a success rate of 45 to 50%." And they said, "tritium enhancements up to a factor 52 were observed." But to achieve that kind of performance back in 1990 you had to spend $5 million and assemble a team of world class experts, which is what they did at the NCFI.

http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGstudiesofe.pdf


"No one can adequately explain how you have a nuclear reaction w/o neutrons and w/o tritium production."

Explanations are irrelevant. This is an experimental claim, and experimental claims do not require theoretical explanations. As I pointed out in the book (in chapter 1), before 1952 no one understood how cells reproduce, but no one doubted that cells do, in fact, reproduce. See also:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf

(Page 1)


"As I mentioned before, the Japanese are more interested in the technology because the potential payoff is much greater for them in terms of their energy economy."

Considering recent events in the Middle East and terrorist attacks the U.S. has good reason to be interested in energy, to say the least. As my book shows, the "potential payoff" for all nations is unimaginably large. See:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf

- Jed

xedude writes:

"Calorimetry is notoriously difficult."

I think "notorious" is an overstatement. Difficult, perhaps, but long established. As Fleischmann pointed out, the instruments and techniques he used were perfected by J. P. Joule in the 1840s. Joule's own instruments and thermometers could have easily detected the excess heat from many cold fusion experiments, especially those with excess heat above 200 mW, and no input power.

Also, a wide variety of different calorimeters have now been applied, including static, flow, bomb and Seebeck types, and excess heat has been observed with all of them. So there is no possibility that the heat is an artifact of one particular calorimeter design. In some cases the s/n ratio has been extremely high. SRI, Mitsubishi, the Italian National Nuclear Physics Lab and others have built elaborate and expensive calorimeters with high sensitivity, and they have observed excess heat many orders of magnitude beyond the limits of chemistry at power levels high enough to be easily detected. Also, the excess heat is correlated with nuclear effects such as gamma rays, transmutations, helium, tritium and so on, whereas these effects are not observed during control experiments and runs in which no excess heat was produced.


"This is why experiments that report a burst of power in the range of a few watts, one must be careful not to leap to any conclusions."

No one has leaped to any conclusions. Professionals have devoted 10 to 15 years of their careers to this research. They have repeated experiments hundreds of times, using the best instruments money can buy, while consulting with a wide range of experts in every relevant field.


"Instantaneous power output and integrated power output are two very different quantities."

That is true. Fortunately, many calorimeter types integrate energy automatically, such as bomb calorimeters and Seebeck envelope calorimeters. It is difficult to detect the power level at any given moment with these types, but it is impossible for significant heat to escape undetected. It does not matter how infrequently you measure the output; once every 10 seconds would be fine. The heat will not go anywhere in the meanwhile. With some other types you might miss a small, momentary burst of heat, if you only check every 10 seconds. (Of course this will lower the excess energy, not increase it.)

- Jed

xedude wrote:

"There's good reason why neither of them still work in their former capacities . . ."

Fleischmann continued in his employment normally until he retired at an advanced age. Pons worked for Toyota for a while at the same job. I do not know where he is now. But I suggest you stop worrying about the personal affairs of these two professors and turn your attention to the scientific literature instead. Their personalities and actions have nothing remotely to do with the subject.


"When the claim was made and other people attempted to repeat their experiment (w/ null results), P&F spit out 'reasons' why only their experiment worked. One of those was that there were some 'details' that P&F hadn't disclosed."

This is incorrect. Again, I suggest you review the actual scientific literature, and also a reliable history of the field, such as Mallove or Beaudette.


"They made the mistake of trying to directly infer neutron production from their gamma spectrum."

Yes, they did. This is the first accurate statement you have made.


"They didn't initially run a control experiment!"

That is incorrect. They performed dozens of control experiments for many years before announcing the results


"As for the other experiments, there is still not something that pops out and says, "hey, here's cold fusion."

Yes, there is: excess heat 4 to 6 orders of magnitude beyond the limits of chemistry, tritium, transmutations and gamma rays.


"Extraordinary claims require extradordinary proof."

No, they do not. They require ordinary proof, with standard off-the-shelf instruments and long accepted techniques. They should be evaluated objectively and fairly, and held to the same standards and rigor we demand for ordinary claims. "Ordinary claims" should not be given a free pass. Many supposedly "ordinary" explanations for cold fusion have been offered that do not begin to meet minimum standards of credibility. See, for example, the critiques written by some of the DoE review panel members, especially #7. In my summary, I pointed out some obvious problems with #7's hypothesis. See:

http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm


"For those people who are interested in a nontechnical discussion of the events that kicked off the whole cold fusion debate, there is a pretty good book about the whole P&F fiasco, written by Gary Taubes called 'Bad Science : The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion'."

I disagree. My views about this author are here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf

(See pages 4 and 5.)

- Jed

expatpat writes:

"My point is that the folks pushing cold fusion the hardest were mostly chemists and electrochemists who know little of nuclear physics."

I am not sure what you mean by "pushing." Naturally, the electrochemists were most qualified to do the experiment, which was quite difficult. It is somewhat easier today, but in 1990 Richard Oriani, one of the world's leading electrochemists, said it was the most difficult experiment he had done in his 50-year carreer.

In any case, after 1989, groups of experts in materials, nuclear physics and other disciplines took part in successful replications, so even if there was a dearth of knowledge of nuclear physics -- as you claim -- the problem was fixed years ago.


"You seem to feel that chemists are moe qualified to evaluate a nuclear-fusion experiment than physicists!"

I did not say that. However, there is no question that electrochemists were *far* more qualified to perform the hands-on portion of a 1989-style electrochemical experiment. Perhaps nuclear physicists were better qualified to evaluate the x-ray, gamma-ray, tritium and other results from these experiments. Fortunatelly physicists have participated in hundreds of cold fusion experiments. Calorimetry is another important skill, and I think it is fair to say that many electrochemists and chemists are as skilled at it as any physicist. Fleischmann is among the top experts at calorimetry.

On the other hand, it took experts in nuclear physics to perform the ion-beam cold fusion experiments at the University of Osaka. It also took a $75 million ion beam machine, which is not something most electrochemists have at their disposal.


"Are you a chemist yourself by any chance?"

No, I am a computer programmer.

If you have any doubt about my qualifications to critique cold fusion, I suggest you review some of my papers at LENR-CANR.org, especially:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofmc.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJintroducti.pdf

- Jed

crail writes:

"No one I know resorts to a conspiracy theory to explain opposition to cold fusion. Certainly, I do not.

Then why hasn't it gained acceptance, from your posts, it seems you believe there is a conspiracy of politicians and publishers working to keep it down."

I do not know why you get the impression I think there is a conspiracy, since I have emphatically denied that. You seem to be putting words into my mouth. I said to the reason publishers and rival scientists oppose cold fusion was described by Max Planck, in the quote I copied above. It is not a conspiracy; it is human nature. It is ordinary closed-minded ignorance. There is nothing secret or conspiritorial about the opposition to cold fusion. People who have not read the scientific literature and who know nothing about the subject, such as Robert Park, have been attacking it openly for years. (I know Park has not read the literature because he told me so. He brags about it.) The plasma fusion lobby, in Gaithersburg Maryland, has been ranting and raving and attacking cold fusion from the day it was announced. They know cold fusion is a threat, since they have zero support from the energy industry and no prospect of commercial development. The only way they can survive is to keep bilking the Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Obviously when people who have not read any scientific papers criticize research and attack the authors, their behavior is political. It has nothing to do with academic science or logical analysis.


"You know, there were two huge breakthroughs in experimental physics in the 80s. Experiments that went exactly against the accepted theories, but their stories couldn't be more different. The other was high temperature superconductors in 86 by Bednorz and Mueller. It seems to me the stories should be similar... if budgets, politicians and publishers have the capability and desire gather together to slow ongoing research on cold fusion, why not the same suppression of high temperature superconduction?"

I believe the answer is very simple. There are three reasons (besides the obvious one cited by Planck):

1. It is a pocketbook issue. Researchers are being paid billions of dollars to work on plasma fusion and other energy research, and their funding was threatened by cold fusion. (Plasma fusion scientists have no relevant qualifications or skills that might apply to cold fusion. The job calls for experts in materials and electrochemistry.) No one was being paid billions of dollars to work on low-temperature superconduction, so there was no opposition and no lobbing organization. The few researchers who were working on that easily switched over to high temperature superconductivity (HTSC) instead. As Stan Szpak puts it, "scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe."

2. Cold fusion was more difficult to replicate HTSC, at first.

3. Politics. Unfortunately, research budgets are micromanaged by a small number of people in Washington, DC. These people are, in my opinion, extremely narrowminded, conservative, and they have far too much power over other researchers. Julian Schwinger should have been allowed to publish anything he wanted in the APS journals according to the APS rules, because he had a Nobel prize. But when he tried to publish papers about cold fusion he was rejected and viciously attacked personally. He wrote: "The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf

This sort of thing should bother conservatives. It seems to me the readers of this forum should be the first to defend academic freedom. But I have seen no articles about cold fusion in conservative political forums. For that matter, the environmentalists have paid no attention to the subject. Apart from Mitsubishi, Toyota, and a few other Japanese corporations, large corporations have also largely ignored the field.

- Jed

expatpat

"Apparently, we are expected to accept positive results from BARC, Bombay and amoco, but ignore negative results from the best physics labs at MIT, Harwell, and CalTech."

No, you are not expected to any such thing. you are expected to carefully read the papers from these different laboratories and compare them, then arrive at an informed view of a complicated scientific subject.

But I take issue at your portrayal of MIT and Harwell as "best." Best in what sense? By whose evaluation? The people at BARC are widely acknowledged as the world leaders in detecting tritium, and they run actual full-scale nuclear power reactors, so they have a great deal of practical experience. The researchers at Los Alamos are also among the leaders in detecting tritium, whereas the researchers at MIT and Harwell did not even attempt to look for tritium. The researchers at Amoco were well-known expert electrochemists and chemists, whereas the researchers at MIT and Harwell knew nothing about these subjects. They were plasma physicists and graduate students.


"The 'refereed journal' J.Electrochem. Anal. may be refereed, but it's a journal for elctrochemistry test folks, not physics."

Since there have been hundreds of other papers published in physics journals, you are free to ignore this particular one and read something else instead. I do not think you should form all of your views about a scientific subject based on one paper published by one pair of researchers when thousands of other papers are available. Your approach seems excessively narrowminded and uninformed.

- Jed

expatpat writes:

"The authors did not realize they were positive

Come on, think about what you are saying -- that's laughable. Please cite literature where the authors of those papers agree that the results were in fact positive."

I am not aware of any, but I have not seen every single paper, so perhaps I missed a retraction. In any case, the errors made at these three places were fairly simple, and I am confident that the peer reviewed critiques of these papers are correct, and there really was excess heat. If you are having difficulty understanding Miles' critique, I invite you to read my simplified, layman's version:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJintroducti.pdf

But let me hit that ball back to your side of the court. Hundreds of scientists at large, respected laboratories such as Los Alamos have published positive results. Many have published in peer-reviewed papers, unlike MIT or Harwell. Can you cite any literature in which these authors retracted, or for that matter, in which critics found errors in their work? I have read thousands of papers, but I am not aware of any.

Let us make another comparison. You seem to be saying that three experiments performed over a few weeks in 1989 outweigh all other evidence. Let us compare just one pair of experiments, MIT and Mitsubishi.

MIT worked for a few weeks, published a mistaken analysis, and quit. The MIT researchers were phyicists, not electrochemists, and one of them said this experiment was extremely difficult and he did not understand it. The work was never peer-reviewed or formally published as far as I know. Mitsubishi, on the other hand, has devoted 12 years to this project, millions of dollars, and a staff of experts. They have published in Japan's top journal of physics. Their results have been confirmed by the best laboratories in France and Italy, and are now being confirmed and replicated in two of Japan's top labs, the Spring8 facility and Tokyo University.

Just on the surface, without looking at the technical details, it seems to me Mitsubishi has a lot more credibility than MIT. There are, as I said, thousands of other papers, many of them of excellent quality in my opinion. (And unless you have read a few hundred of them very carefully, I do not think you can have an opinion about them, either positive or negative.)

Why do you insist that these three papers in 1989 far outweigh all subsequent papers published by other researchers? Why are you so positive that MIT is better at physics and chemistry than Mitsubishi, Los Alamos, China Lake, Tokyo University, Tsinghua U., NASA, BARC, and all of these other labs?

- Jed

expatpat wrote:

"Apparently, we are expected to accept positive results from BARC, Bombay and amoco, but ignore negative results from the best physics labs at MIT, Harwell, and CalTech."

The results from MIT, Harwell and CalTech were positive, not negative. The authors did not realize they were positive, but careful re-evaluations of the calorimetric data revealed that they were. See:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MalloveEmitspecial.pdf
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesManomalousea.pdf
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MelichMEbacktothef.pdf

In any case there were hundreds of subsequent replications. You seem to be saying that MIT, Harwell and CalTech should overrule Los Alamos, China Lake, Mitsubishi and hundreds of others. If we are going to do science by majority vote, cold fusion wins by a wide margin.


"The 'refereed journal' J.Electrochem. Anal. may be refereed, but it's a journal for elctrochemistry test folks, not physics."

As I said, dozens of other journals have published. If you don't care for J. Electrochem. Anal. how about the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics? It is Japan's most prestigious journal and I believe the second or third most cited physics journal in the world.

In any case, I think you should judge the results purely on merit, without reference to the journals or the alleged prestige of the researchers. This is particularly true with a new and controversial claim such as cold fusion.

- Jed

crail wrote:

"But there was also a large number of laboratories which tried and failed to reproduce the experiment."

No, there were not. There were rumors that dozens or hundreds of laboratories tried it, but only a handful actually did as far as I know. That is to say, only a handful published any papers in peer-reviewed journals or proceedings, or left any other trace of their work. I would have no way of knowing about others. In any case, a cold fusion experiment takes months and it requires expert knowledge of electrochemistry and materials. A few hundred laboratories worldwide were qualified to do the experiment in 1989. By 1990 most of them had done it and had reported positive results.

I know of several unpublished positive results, mainly from corporations such as Amaco. See:

http://www.newenergytimes.com/reports/amoco.htm

Also, positive reports from 1989 still surface occasionally. Just yesterday someone sent me an interesting short paper from NASA, which was quite similar to a 1989 experiment performed at BARC, Bombay India. See:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/FralickGCresultsofa.pdf

They observed excess heat but no neutrons -- which is exactly what you would expect. If only they had performed an autoradiograph the way BARC did, I expect they would have seen the same x-ray results.

The most famous negative results were from MIT, Caltech and Harwell. As it happens, extensive independent analysis show that all three were actually positive, albeit nothing to write home about by present-day standards.


"They say no increased neutron emission."

That is correct. I know of only one technique that has produced significant neutron emissions.


"And as measurement devices improved, there is still many laboratories that cannot see the effect . . .

Not as far as I know, there aren't. Please list two or three of these laboratories and I will follow up.


" . . . or find that the effect always remains at the limit of their measurement devices."

That is definitely not true! Excess heat has been reported at Sigma 90. It has been so intense in some cases it has melted plastic and ceramic materials with virtually no input energy (milliwatts, or zero input). The tritium measured at Los Alamos was in such high concentration that if it had been caused by contamination, the building would have to be evacuated. At another site in Canada, tritium from an Arata cell was about a million times higher than the instrument was designed to measure, and the filters had to be replaced. The Mitsubishi transmutations are permanent and easy to detect, and they have been confirmed by leading laboratories in France and Japan at very high s/n ratios.


"The fact that a large number of labs report reproducible effects is irrelevant if a large number of respectable labs cannot reproduce the effect with identical setups."

As far as I know, there were only a few "respectable labs" that could not reproduce, but in any case, obviously the setups were not identical. If they had been, the same results would have been obtained. That would be true even if those results were not anomalous (i.e., chemical energy).

There were some noted failures in 1989, but in every case in which details of the experiments have been published the reasons for the failures are now clear.


"In my opinion, any scientific theory that resorts to a conspiracy theory as the reason other scientists disbelieve their results is probably incorrect."

That may be true. No one I know resorts to a conspiracy theory to explain opposition to cold fusion. Certainly, I do not. I think opposition is caused by conservatism, budgets, and unfair competition. The biggest problem was describe by Max Planck in his autobiography: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (See the Introduction to my book.)


"This is the exact technique employed by ID proponents."

I do not know what ID means in this context.


"Why would any scientist who can produce cheap plentiful energy, overthrow dozens of current accepted theories with overwhelming evidence, and achieve fame and prestige along the way, willingly censor himself?"

They have not been censored, merely ignored -- and they were not funded, despite the 1989 DoE recommendation. As I pointed out, they have published over 3,000 papers, including many peer reviewed papers in some of the world's leading journals. Where there has been censorship, researchers have been censored by others, not by themselves. See the introduction to my book, and these books:

Krivit, S, "The Rebirth of Cold Fusion . . ." 2004: Pacific Oaks Press

Beaudette, C.G., "Excess Heat. Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed." 2000, Concord, NH: Oak Grove Press.

- Jed

xedude wrote:

"There is no new information here. Since Pons & Fleischman threw away the scientific method and peer review process in 1989 . . ."

I would say they did, since their paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal, after all. (J. Electroanal. Chem., vol. 261, 1989, pp. 301 - 308.) However, they are not the only ones making the claim. Hundreds of other researchers have published over 3,000 papers on cold fusion. So if you do not care for Pons and Fleischmann, I suggest you read other authors instead.


". . . follow up experiments in cold fusion show one consistent result: no reproducibility."

That is incorrect. Los Alamos, the U.S. Navy, Mitsubishi and others have developed 100% reproducible techniques. Mitsubishi's experiment has been repeated dozens of times since 1995; it always works; and it is particularly impressive. The Nikkei voted Mitsubishi's cold fusion experiment the third most important advanced research development of 2004. (See the News section.)


"When someone can reproducibly show excess neutrons, energy, He, gammas, or whatever, outside systematic and experimental error, then I'll get optimistic."

Neutrons are rare. Excess energy, helium, gammas and transmutations have been reported by hundreds of researchers. See the LENR-CANR.org library for a small sample of the published papers.

- Jed

In my opinion the scientific process came to a definitive conclusion on the matter by late 1990. It takes six months to one year to run a cold fusion experiment, and then takes a long time to publish papers. By late 1990, hundreds of laboratories had successfully replicated, and many had published their results in peer-reviewed journals of electrochemistry and physics. Techniques have improved tremendously since then; the U.S. Navy, Mitsubishi and others achieved 100% reproducibility. But the basic discovery was confirmed about 18 months after the announcement. All the opposition since then has been political, not scientific.

- Jed

Doctor Stochastic writes:

"DOE may refuse to fund projects but they don't censor papers (except for security reasons.)"

The DoE and the Navy ordered its scientists not to publish any papers on cold fusion or attend conferences. I call that censorship, and so did Schwinger, in the quote I cited previously. Perhaps you would call it something else, but in any case, that is what I had in mind when I said the DoE censors cold fusion.

Also, every major science journal refuses papers and letters on the subject, and although thousands of papers have been published, and hundreds of high sigma replications have been performed, as far as I know, no leading journal has ever published any mention of this research. I would call that "censorship" as well.


"Most physicists I've talked with are unimpressed with the Pons and Fleischmann stuff because P&F presented a paper with a neutron energy that didn't make sense."

Yes, Fleischmann said as much a few months later. However, you should not judge the subject solely on this aspect of their report, or for that matter solely on their research. If cold fusion had never been replicated it would obviously be a mistake. However, as I said, hundreds of other researchers replicated and published papers, verifying many aspects of the original claims, so if you do not care for Pons and Fleischmann, you should look at someone else’s papers instead.


"I though CF had possibilities until I searched for spectroscopic data on hydrongen inclusion in metals. (Ti is about 4% H for example.) It took me over a year as the books on the subject were all checked out. In all cases, the hydrogen included in the metals is molecular hydrogen, H2. This configuration doesn't allow the neucleons to get close enough together to react."

I am surprised it took you so long time to learn this. Fleischmann, Oriani, Bockris and many other expert in hydrides pointed this out many times in the weeks following the 1989 announcement. A simple model in which deuterons are crammed together in the lattice makes no sense at all.

In any case, the findings are purely experimental, and not predicted by any theory. As far as I know they have not been explained by any theory yet. Therefore, your concerns about theory are irrelevant, since you can never deny a replicated, high-sigma experimentally proven fact by pointing to theory. It always works the other way. When theory and experiment conflict, experiment always wins, theory always loses. That is the most fundamental rule of the scientific method. Any other rule would invite chaos, since we can spin as many theories as there are theorists. Experiments are the only standard of truth. There can be no way to test any theory, settle any dispute or establish any fact except by experiment.

- Jed

no-s writes:

"He explained he had some redirects from FR. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but it's a reason."

If I had not seen redirects, I would never have known this forum exists. I believe these redirects came from this post:

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/902354/posts

That is dated 4/29/2003, which is when the first redirects appeared in the LENR-CANR.org records.

- Jed

Doctor Stochastic writes:

"...no paper be published...

This is false for the Department of Energy."

Well, let me put it this way. I am in frequent contact with most of the known cold fusion researchers. They, and I, are not aware of any instances in which the DoE has allowed a paper to be published, or a project approved. Perhaps there are some instances I did not hear about. If you know of any please list them.


"Of course to get a paper published one would actually need results. Getting results is a hurdle that the pseudo-scientists do have trouble leaping over . . ."

I think the results available on line at LENR-CANR.org are actual results. I think they are valid papers that deserve publication. I invite you to read them and evaluate them yourself. Perhaps you will find that all of them are sloppy, invalid, and not worth publishing. In that case, I invite you to write a critique, which, if you like, I will upload to LENR-CANR, assuming it meets a reasonable standard of academic rigor. We have uploaded a few papers that claim cold fusion does not exist. I know of only five such papers in the literature. No doubt there are others I have not heard of. Perhaps you can recommend some.

I am not the only one who thinks these results have merit. As I mentioned, the editors of some of Japan's leading journals of physics, such as The Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, agree. I suggest that you should think twice and examine the evidence carefully, with an open mind, before you condemn or dismiss these papers as the work of "pseudo-scientists." With all due respect, unless you have written a detailed critique, I would not be inclined to take your views very seriously. This is a technical subject. It is not something you can glance at, or read a few news articles about in Time magazine and then jump to a conclusion.

As for my views, you can read them in considerable detail in several papers and books that I authored, co-authored, translated or edited. I do not ask anyone to accept my views based on one or two paragraphs I post here. On the contrary, I hope that people will suspend judgment, and read some of my papers plus a substantial number of the papers I cite in the footnotes before trying to reach a conclusion.

- Jed

AdmSmith writes:

"If the science community thinks that a specific project is crap then do not expect the taxpayers money. But feel free to spend your own. If the science community thinks that it is fruitful then expect some researcher to spend resources in it to be the first one in your block to get he result."

The science community is divided on this issue. Many members think the project is crap, but in my experience these members have not read the literature, and they know nothing about the research, so I do not think their opinions count. Other members of the community, including two Nobel laureates and the editors of Japan’s leading journal of physics, think that the projects have merit. So what are you proposing? Do you think that all scientific research should be subjected to an up or down majority vote? Do you think that scientists who know nothing about a project should be given equal rights to veto it? How about scientists working on a competing project, such as plasma fusion?

Furthermore, as I pointed out in the previous message, the scientific community thought that many, many previous projects were crap, yet these projects turned out to be valid, and very important in some cases. Rabi, Kusch, Thomas, Bohr and von Neumann and most other scientists were convinced that the laser was “crap” and would never work. They told Townes, “look, you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work. We know it's not going to work. You are wasting money. Just stop!" (p. 65)

If we had followed your method in the past, and allowed the majority of experts to veto any projects they consider "crap,” we would not have airplanes, lasers, transistors, MRI machines and countless other inventions. I am a conservative, and I believe the traditional academic model works much better than your radical new plan. I believe that free inquiry and open-minded, unfettered scientific research has brought great benefits. Individual scientists should be allowed to perform research that other people -- including other scientists -- think has no merit. Ideas and experiments should be free to compete in the marketplace of ideas. This freedom may occasionally allow researchers to waste research funding on fruitless projects, but more often it has allowed uniquely creative individuals to forge ahead when they see possibilities that others fail to see. This system has served humanity well for 300 years. I do not think we should replace it with a “majority rules” or “winner takes all” approach, or today's evolving system in which the all-knowing DoE managers and the Congress micromanage every project. I do not think the government, or the majority, should be given the power to approve or squelch any research project.

- Jed

RightWhale writes:

"The US has not banned cold fusion research, nor has it banned cloning research, nor antigravity research, nor any of the other areas of current interest."

In my opinion, the U.S. has effectively banned cold fusion research. That is to say, many powerful people in the U.S. Navy, DoE, APS the major journals and other leading institutions have ordered that no funding be allowed for any experiment, no paper be published, and no discussion be allowed at physics conferences. The Navy and others have ordered that a researcher who requests funding, attends conferences, or tries to publish a paper be punished. By "punished" I mean the researchers were reassigned to menial jobs, they had their telephones turned off, and they were denied permission to enter a laboratory, use any laboratory instrument, copy machine, etc.

Many people who are well versed in the history of cold fusion agree with me, most notably the late Julian Schwinger, Nobel Laureate. As a senior member of the APS he was supposed to have the right to publish any paper he wished overriding peer-review in some journals, but they refused to allow him to publish a paper about cold fusion. He resigned in protest, and later wrote:

"The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf

He was not joking, or exaggerating. Unless you have carefully examined the events and the problems that he and others encountered, I do not think you can judge whether the research has been banned. You can learn part of this history by reading the New Scientist article, the paper by Bockris, the anti-cold fusion diatribes published by the APS, Scientific American, New Scientist and the book by Beaudette. Of course, the history is complicated and multifaceted. For that matter, some research in the U.S. is allowed, and is continuing. But overall, if this is not a “ban” on research, I cannot imagine what would be. I suppose the authorities might begin throwing researchers into jail, or firebombing labs. In 1989 some of the leading plasma fusion scientists at the DoE said that Pons and Fleischmann were frauds and they should be arrested and imprisoned, so they have at least considered such extreme measures.

- Jed

AdmSmith wrote:

“... and I will defend your right to waste your own money, but no not ask for us (=taxpayers) to spend our money on it.”

If your attitude has been the rule in the past, many key innovations would never have come about. The vast majority of laymen and expert scientists opposed important innovations such as telegraphs, airplanes, computers, the laser, radio telescopes, microcomputers, MRI machines and so on. As I mentioned in a previous message, Rabi, Kusch, Thomas, Bohr and von Neumann all thought research on the laser was a waste of money, and they tried to prevent it.

You are suggesting, in effect, that we should decide by vote which subjects will get research funding. Unpopular ideas, especially those that the DoE and American Physical Society denounce, will never be funded, because most people will agree they are “a waste of money.” The DoE and the APS are extremely influential, after all. Perhaps you feel that you would not be influenced by them, but most people will be, so if the majority wins, things like cold fusion will always lose.

I think the traditional academic method of allocating funds is much better. Professors with tenure and industrial research laboratory Fellows should be allowed to study any topic they feel is worth the effort. They make the greatest sacrifice after all, devoting years of their lives to excruciatingly difficult labor.

Perhaps you are suggesting that scientific research itself should not be funded with public money. I would be delighted to see private corporate industrial money spent on cold fusion, but this may be difficult to bring about. For one thing, the DoE deeply opposes cold fusion, and it has a great deal of influence. It spends billions of dollars per year on competing ideas, and awards huge amounts to industry. This is bound to affect the decisions made at industrial research laboratories. For another, cold fusion at this stage is basic physics, which cannot be patented. It is difficult to imagine how a corporation could make money doing such basic research, but without this we will never develop the knowledge we need to make practical devices. Also, corporations must usually keep the research confidential. I cannot imagine cold fusion research will make progress unless it is done in the traditional open, collaborative academic manner.

Perhaps you oppose funding of scientific research in general, because you feel it is frivolous, or unnecessary, or not public business. On this issue, I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote:

“Some good men, and even of respectable information, consider the learned sciences as useless acquirements; some think that they do not better the condition of man; and others that education, like private and individual concerns, should be left to private individual effort; not reflecting that an establishment embracing all the sciences which may be useful and even necessary in the various vocations of life, with the buildings and apparatus belonging to each, are far beyond the reach of individual means, and must either derive existence from public patronage, or not exist at all. This would leave us, then, without those callings which depend on education or send us to other countries to seek the instruction they require. . . .”

http://www.founding.com/library/lbody.cfm?id=132&parent=50

In the case of cold fusion, if the U.S. continues to ban research, and others succeed, we will have to purchase the technology from Japan, Italy, Russia and/or China.

- Jed

RightWhale writes:

"Have looked at some of the articles in your library. They seem to be on the short side of physical modeling as to what is going on."

Several theory papers have been written, but I only uploaded the ones by Chubb & Chubb. The other authors cannot supply their papers in electronic format, and it is a great deal of trouble for me to retype them starting from paper copies.


". . . If you have some mathematical models, quantum mechanics theory perhaps, comparable to what is found in contemporary science of physical phenomena somewhere in your literature, please point the way."

I know little about theory and I cannot judge how far along or how successful the physical modeling has been. I believe some of the respected theorists in the field include the late J. Schwinger, P. Hagelstein, E. Kim and T. Chubb & S. Chubb (who are uncle and nephew).



"It might be a lack of mathematical geometry modeling that is causing the lack of interest."

Perhaps that is true among the theorists, but cold fusion is an experimental breakthrough, and experimentalists in related fields such as material science and electrochemistry are used to working on research that still lacks a firm theoretical basis. They often get excited about phenomena long before anyone can explain them, such as high-temperature superconducting.

Also, most theorists I have communicated with have read no papers about cold fusion, and they believe the results were wrong, fraudulent or never reproduced. I suppose if they believed the results were real they would suddenly become interested.

It is difficult to judge whether there is a genuine lack of interest are not. The issue is clouded by the frenzied opposition to this research. Very few papers about cold fusion were published in 1989, and none can be published today. The experimental results were never reported in any major journal such as Nature, Scientific American, Bunsenmagazin Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft Fur Physikalische Chemie, or Physical Review. This may indicate a lack of interest. Perhaps it is because all of these results are substandard and do not merit publication. However, I think this blanket refusal is politically motivated. Starting in the summer of 1989, long before any serious replication was undertaken, the editors at Nature and Sci. Am. denounced cold fusion as fraud. Since then, the journals I listed (and most others) automatically reject any manuscript about cold fusion, usually with a polite form letter. Several researchers have shown me these form letters. In nearly all U.S. government, university and corporate laboratories, cold fusion was banned in 1989. As described in the recent issue of New Scientist (referenced above), distinguished senior researchers who attempted to publish papers were reassigned to menial jobs as stock clerks. Some were forced into early retirement. Before this harsh opposition took hold, I believe there was considerable interest in cold fusion, and success in verifying it. Several corporations, notably Amoco Production Company, performed superb replications. Amoco concluded:

“The calorimetry conclusively shows excess energy was produced within the electrolytic cell over the period of the experiment. This amount, 50 kilojoules, is such that any chemical reaction would have had to be in near molar amounts to have produced the energy. Chemical analysis clearly shows that no such chemical reactions occurred.” - T. Lauzenhiser, “Cold Fusion: Report on a Recent Amoco Experiment.”

They discussed this report at early conferences, but then abruptly withdrew it. As far as I know they will not discuss it today. I doubt they would give me permission to upload the report to LENR-CANR.

I realize this account sounds lurid, like something out of a third rate thriller novel. Actually, I doubt these events constitute anything like a cover-up or a conspiracy. (In any case, if there is a conspiracy the organizing committee is hardly likely to invite me to their monthly meeting, so I wouldn’t know about it.) I have studied history, and found that most important innovations met this kind of frenzied opposition, especially innovations that threatened people's pocketbooks. If cold fusion is accepted, it will bring about the quick end to several multi-billion-dollar government research programs such as plasma fusion. So it is not surprising that much of the opposition originates in the DoE, particularly the plasma fusion program. In his autobiography, “How the Laser Happened,” Charles Townes describes how several of the leading lights of 20th-century science tried to stop him from inventing the laser, because they were convinced it was theoretically impossible, preposterous, and a waste of time and funding. They included Rabi, Kusch, Thomas, Bohr and von Neumann. As Townes put it, “I was then indeed thankful that I had come to Columbia with tenure.” (p. 65) He meant he was free to do controversial research even though these famous people opposed him. Unfortunately, nowadays academic freedom has atrophied to some extent, and even professors with tenure who try to do cold fusion experiments will be stopped. Their funding will be cut off. If they persist and try to do the experiments with their own money, they may be harassed or forced into early retirement. This situation ought to upset both liberals and conservatives, but I have seen no evidence they are aware of it, or they care about it. In that regard, the subject is political and germane to this forum.

Despite the obscurity and opposition the field must contend with, I see evidence that there is widespread interest in it. Since we established the LENR-CANR web site five months ago, readers have downloaded 85,000 papers. That activity is modest compared to the number of downloads at a site devoted to something like Barbie dolls, but it is impressive for a collection of dull, turgid, specialized papers about an obscure experiment in electrochemistry that 99.999% of the scientists in the world do not believe in.

- Jed

RightWhale wrote:

"It's been a long time and no results."

Actually, it has been a short time. In research, time is measured in man-hours, and equipment hours. It takes somewhere between two man-months and two man-years to perform a single cold fusion experiment. It usually requires the use of many instruments that cost millions of dollars in the aggregate. Given the number of people who have been working on the field, and the amount of time they have been allowed to work with these expensive instruments, only a little research has been done, yet the results have been astounding and compelling.

Measured in man-hours and research funding, and compared to other research such as plasma fusion, high-temperature superconductors, or the DNA Human Genome project, cold fusion research has lasted a week or so. Yet some cold fusion devices have already produced hundreds of times more energy than any hot fusion experiment on record, albeit much less power.


"There's a lot of new stuff in science, but this ain't it."

The authors of the papers at LENR-CANR disagree. They think that the science is new. If you believe otherwise, I suggest you write a detailed critique of the papers explaining your reasons. A single sentence here on this forum does not constitute a valid response to the literature in my opinion. If your critique is well written I would be happy to add it to the LENR-CANR Library even if I disagree with it.

- Jed