Posted on 01/05/2005 11:33:47 AM PST by JedRothwell
In December 2004 the Department of Energy, Office of Science, completed its review of cold fusion and published online, "Report of the Review of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions." This was briefly reported in some newpapers and journals. A short statement was published on a DoE website. We have more detailed information, including the complete set of comments from the anonymous scientific reviewers themselves. This is not available at the DoE website. See:
(Please scroll down to the third news item.)
The second news item is about a book that I wrote myself. It is the first deliberately amusing book about cold fusion. This message would constitute an advertising plug (which I gather is not allowed here), except that I am giving away the book for free in Acrobat format -- so this is merely self-promotion, not commercial advertising.
- Jed Rothwell
ping for later
ping
Thanks, Jed. I've been following the saga of 'Cold Fusion' since March '89--patiently waiting for the scientific process to come to a definitive conclusion on the matter (it's not my field of expertise, so I don't presume to have an authoritative opinon, one way or the other.)
I agree Completely! All the wishful thinking in the world will not make it so if you cannot reproduce the results consistently and predictable with proven nuclear physics theory. A lot of these cold fusion fanatics tend to ignore TANSTAAFL just like the solar/wind/renewable boosters.
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
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
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
bump
Acronym penned by Robert Heinlein in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". On the Moon colony, one paid for everything, even the air one breathed.
The problem was they were a couple of chemists trying to be physicists.
I gather you are convinced of the effect, and are wearing a tinfoil hat.
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 'refereed journal' J.Electrochem. Anal. may be refereed, but it's a journal for elctrochemistry test folks, not physics.
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
It would take slightly less energy than 17.6 MeV to fuse the nuclei. About 2% or 3% less. This makes the process inefficent without raising the temperature of the nuclei to several million degrees in a vacuum where the heat overcomes the mutual repulsion of the positivly charged nuclei.
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