Cold fusion information available at LENR-CANR.org

http://lenr-canr.org/ ^ | May 6, 2003 | Jed Rothwell

[JedRothwell]

Greetings. I am the librarian at http://lenr-canr.org/

Several people at this site have evidently been discussing our web site.

Our site is devoted to cold fusion, a controversial discovery in physics. It was first reported in 1926 by Paneth and Peters, and sporadically thereafter. In 1989 Fleischmann and Pons repored much more definitive results than any previous researchers, and they are generally given credit for the discovery. Or they are blamed for it, since most mainstream researchers reject the claims. Despite this rejection considerable work has been done on it and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers have been published. A small sample of peer-reviewed and proceedings papers are available at our site.

This subject is off-topic in this forum, and normally I would not bother people with it. However, during the past few weeks around 40 to 100 referrals per week have come from this site. In other words, someone here posted hyperlinks to our site. I cannot trace where exactly these links are. I cannot tell which individuals have visited our site, and I would not track them if I could. In any case, there appears to be some interest in the subject. Whether your comments have been pro or con, we welcome all readers and we thank you for your attention.

Cold fusion is mainly an apolitical subject. Most of the papers in our Library are strictly technical. A few touch on the political and social aspects of the research and its treatment in the hands of the establishment, subjects which may be germane to the themes here. For example, the journal Accountability in Research devoted an issue to cold fusion. The editor, Adil Shamoo, kindly gave us permission to reprint the entire issue.

Here are the names of some of the authors on our site who have written about politics and history. These names appear in the first index you see when you access the Library:

Beaudette
Bockris (See "Early Contributions from Workers . . .")
Chubb
Goodstein
Fleischmann
Nagel
Rothwell (me)
Shamoo

Cold fusion is a very involved subject so I do not think it would be fruitful to engage in a discussion of the technical details here, and the political aspects make little sense to people who are not well versed in the technical details. In other words, if you want to know anything, I am afraid you must start by doing a great deal of tedious, difficult work. As Storms and I wrote in our Appeal to Readers:

"These papers are not easy to read. This is not a subject a person can master in a few days or make a snap judgment about after reading one or two papers. We are pleased to see how many people are taking the trouble to learn more, and to make an informed, scientific judgment. We are confident that given a fair, objective hearing in the traditions of academic science, LENR will be accepted, and research will once again be funded in the United States."

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

Please note we do not necessarily refer to government funding. We would be delighted to see corporate research. Unfortunately, after the U.S. Government declared that cold fusion does not exist in the 1989 ERAB report, industry followed suit and has not funded the research. The state of Utah spent $5 million on a project led by Fritz Will, one of the world's leading electrochemists, from General Electric. These results were definitive, and in my opinion they should have convinced every scientist on earth that cold fusion is real, but when Will "shopped them around" to leading corporations, they all cited the ERAB report and turned him down. (See Will, F. G. and ERAB in our Library) Fortunately, corporations and government agencies fund this research in Italy and Japan.

While I cannot do justice to the subject here, I invite people who would like to know more to send a message to me at JedRothwell@mindspring.com. I will refer you to a paper or relay your message to a researcher.

- Jed Rothwell

[dirtboy]

This sounds like a series subject.

[ggekko]

I was under the impression that Pons and Fleischman had discredited the whole field of Cold Fusion Research because other reserachers were not able to reproduce their results.

Has something changed since 1989?

[yonif]

bump

[cinFLA]

Has something changed since 1989?

Years ago when this made big headlines I saw which professor my university had assigned to follow it. I know then that the search would not be fruitful in my lifetime or the next.

[cinFLA]

Has something changed since 1989? Another 14 years have passed while awaiting for the "hot" fusion that is only 20 years away.

[cinFLA]

Has something changed since 1989?

No nuclear fission power plants have been startet up in the US. I had to go work in Korea!

[r9etb]

Has something changed since 1989?

As the fellow says, work has been going on since then, and there have supposedly been some advances and some fruitful basic research by real scientists.

It's difficult to separate fact from fiction, however, because of the tremendously political charge surrounding the topic, and the very high threshold set up by the apparent falsity of Pons and Fleischman's claims.

The problem is made worse by the close association between cold fusion and the perpetual motion/500 mpg carburetor crowd.

[AdmSmith]

No, nothing has changed. there are still people trying to violate the thermodynamic principles, building perpetual motion machines, trisecting an angle etc.

[NukeMan]

"No nuclear fission power plants have been startet up in the US"

Watts Bar Unit 2 started up...only 20 years late.

[ggekko]

"Another 14 years have passed while awaiting for the "hot" fusion that is only 20 years away..."

Unless there is a miraculous advance in materials technology Hot Fusion is a dead end. At present there is no available material that can hold the Hot Fusion process for a sustained period of time and other approaches use more energy than they produce.

It seems like a dead end for now.

[El Gato]

No, nothing has changed. there are still people trying to violate the thermodynamic principles, building perpetual motion machines, trisecting an angle etc.

Nobody ever claimed cold fusion energy was from nothing. If it exists, it would be from the same source as "hot" fusion, or fission for that matter. Namely the loss of mass in a nuclear reaction. E=MC2 and all that.

The thing about "cold fusion" was that, at least initially, no one was able to explain how the nuclei of the atoms were forced close enough together to fuse, against the electrostatic forces tending to keep them apart, without using the brute force technique of simply heating them up until the speed of collisions between the nuclui was enough to overcome the electrocstatic repulsion.

[Wonder Warthog]

I was under the impression that Pons and Fleischman had discredited the whole field of Cold Fusion Research because other reserachers were not able to reproduce their results.

Which is not correct, and that is the whole point of the posting. Visit the website and see real scientific evidence to the contrary. You might also want to check out the "Science Fact" columns in "Analog" with an experimental example from another field of science as to why the initial efforts at replication were spotty.

[ggekko]

To the best of your knowledge, has a theoretical interpretation of physics or maybe quantum chemistry been posited by some of the new researchers that would provide a basis for believing that Cold Fusion could work?

[AdmSmith]

Try the standard model and calculate the possibility of a cold fusion reaction with a atoms at room temperature. Almost zero. Assume that you force the atoms closer => higher possibility. How do you do that and what is the energy requirements? From where do you get this energy?

Spend your research time with better projects, there a a lot to discover or calculate.

[TonyInOhio]

Try the standard model

I'm fresh out of standard models; would a supermodel do, instead?

Adriana Lima

The only thing keeping me from my true calling as an experimental physicist is about 80 IQ points. :-)

Tony

[Physicist]

If you build it, we will come.

If you're still buying power from the power company, you haven't built it.

[Quix]

Thanks for your series post on a potentialy hugh topic.

[pt17]

I am a great proponent of Cold Fusion as a web applications server but not as a physics endeavor.

[Return to the Public]

From my reading of your magazine combined with other internet searches, it seems to me to boil down to one quote from Tom Clayton at Los Alamos that he would like to see a massive trial and error program to test every possible palladium alloy, since tiny impurities seem to catalyze dramatic performance gains. "This is how ceramic superconductors were developed," he points out,"by testing 5000 different compounds." But no laboratory has mounted such an effort for cold fusion.

It seems that the key to repeatability will be found in creating a reliable pure alloy of palladium or perhaps some other material not yet discovered.

What do you think?