Cold fusion information available at LENR-CANR.org

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."

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.

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

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

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:

"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 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

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

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

Most physicists I've talked with are unimpressed with the Pons and Fleishmann stuff because P&F presented a paper with a neutron energy that didn't make sense. Later presentations showed the same figures with the peaks changed. No reasons were given to change the figuers.

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 used the reaction rates of muon-catalyzed fusion to get an idea of how the nucleon wave function would have to be have; I fit a Leonard-Jones 6-12 and an Exponential-6 to the intermolecular potential for both proton+electron and proton+muon atoms. In neither case could the densities of the included hydrogen force the protons close enough to react. These densities are high but not high enough. About 1 mole of hydrogen goes into 1 mole of palladium. This is an effective pressure of 22,000 atmospheres but the densities are not high enough to improve the reaction cross section.

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

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