Slashdot Mirror

Hi meta-monkey! I'm making a "meta" comment on the social-financial framework around battery (or any) science. :-)

Just look at the whole "cold fusion" or now "LENR / solid state fusion" controversy and fight over funding and recognition. The idea that a solid-state metal lattice can induce hydrogen atoms (on its surface, in a micro-crevice, or otherwise absorbed somehow) to behave differently than when hydrogen is in a gas is still heresy requiring immediate excommunication after vilification by a mob of virtue-signalling "disciplined minds" whose social standing and, worse, grant funding is threatened by the idea.
http://lenrtoday.com/lenrexpla...
http://www.infinite-energy.com...
"In retrospect, I have concluded that much of the blame for the "cold fusion war" -- and it certainly has been just that -- stems from a vituperative campaign against the field with deep roots at MIT, specifically at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center. Not exclusively in that lab, however."

Ironically, about thirty years later:
http://coldfusionnow.org/cold-...
"The Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments course will run again on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over the IAP winter break Tuesday through Friday Jan. 20-23, 2015."

Fusion via cavitation also falls into that category of heresy (but may be emerging):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://atom-ecology.russgeorge...

As does power via hydrinos (which may also just be LENR in disguise):
http://brilliantlightpower.com...

So, that's a third option to either it works or it does not work -- whether it works or not, your science career gets trashed because you even talked about an idea, let alone seriously tried to do an experiment about it. And your career gets trashed because of the *politics* of science funding. Science is a human enterprise after all, and humans being humans...

Several years ago I sent off a collection of wild ideas about "cold fusion" to a magazine, hoping for some feedback, and they published it as an actual article. Toward the end of the article was something about a possible way to test the hypothesis. Basically, if you could make some solid metallic hydrogen out of pure deuterium instead of ordinary hydrogen, some cold fusion might happen. It seems to me that the chances of someone being able to do such an experiment have now increased greatly....

There is many reference to misconduct. One it MIT tweaking of result that their editor (Mallove) have spotted. http://www.infinite-energy.com... http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw... One is Science not correcting errors in caltech paper http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/R... there is also the Oriani paper rejection for no serious reason (theory) there is also the rejection upfront of Report41 of Enea (Denino) showing He4/Heat corelation http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ra... (as 40+ other journals) There is a report by Pamela Mosier Boss, ex SU Navy Spawar, prolific author in Naturwissenshaften and Journal of Electroanalythical Chemistry who complained about emotional behavior in high impact journals http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/JCM... (page6+ in that proceeding). there are many more to list from the old ape of cold fusion... depending if you search academic misconduct, journal misconduct, insults, horse manure in the mailbox, nasty jokes ruining experiments, sabotaging grants by donators, demoting a researcher to the stock, ... some consider it is normal academic behavior, and it is in a way true, so maybe it is normal. Currently there are many report of similar problem, some by few Nobel like Sheckman or Sidney Brenner, who can afford to moan without being blacklisted. Maybe we cannot change that, not really say it is monstrous, but we should be aware that things works that nasty way, and not be too naive. Sorry for previous coward postings , forgot to logon...

Good point on asking what's the noticeable difference. Although sometimes we don't notice a difference until we go looking for it. That may require imagination first -- or it might involve taking facts previously stumbled upon and ignored and discarded and arranging them in some new way. For example. as mentioned on slashdot recently:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
From the article linked in the story: "And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking."

Also along those lines, here is a book that discusses the systematic ignoring of observed homosexual behavior in animals by biologists for over a century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://books.google.com/books/...

It turns out that most wildlife biologists for decades recorded their data to fit the assumption of heterosexuality in their studies. How many other times have scientists not seen (or reported) things that violate assumptions or cultural taboos? For example, look what happened with cold fusion. A quarter century ago, scientists funded by hot fusion grants claimed (after very little effort) that they could not replicate "cold fusion" and so it could not exist because it conflicted with current dogma, and the topic became verboten among academics. It could not be seen by most academics. Now, decades later, other MIT scientists teach a course on cold fusion and claim to be able to reliably replicate it.
http://www.infinite-energy.com...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

When Google takes a long time to return a search result, is it because the Google servers are slow or because the universe simulation is deciding what the answer should be, including inventing a backstory? :-) Who is going to investigate that? And how? :-)

Also, as a counter example, does it really make a difference (in the short term to Earthly affairs) if there is just one galaxy of billions of them? Yet it is still somehow interesting to know and discuss that. Of course, that was based on verifiable observation. But no doubt there was speculation before that...
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu...
"In the early 1900s, astronomers were debating the makeup of spiral nebulae -- cloudy, spiral-shaped objects found throughout the night sky. Were they gas clouds located within our Milky Way galaxy, or were they vast groups of stars located far beyond our galaxy?
In 1919, American astronomer Edwin Hubble tackled the question. His keen astronomical knowledge was combined with a powerful tool - the Hooker telescope with its 100-inch mirror, on top of Mount Wilson in Cal

According to the article: "The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago".

While I agree it's a terrific response technically, It's incredible to now see hot fusion scientists from MIT blaming their problems on cold fusion in the 1980s when the scandle is more about what MIT did unprofessionally to discredit cold fusion / LENR; see: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
"The events of 1989-1992 are past history, but one must learn from the past or be condemned to repeat it. I hope that MIT students will also study the wrongs that have been done by MIT faculty and staff, which perverted the process of science in this area. Ironically, those very faculty and staff who so loudly pontificated about the alleged unethical actions of cold fusion researchers Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons are themselves most culpable. They launched distortions about cold fusion that have gained such wide currency."

To explain why PhDs may think and act this way, read this book:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

Just search on Widom-Larsen, LENR, and so on.
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379

Yet, some at MIT are finally moving beyond the shame:
http://cleantechauthority.com/lenr-resurrected-by-mit-the-early-detractors/
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looks to be one of the first academic institutions to validate the claims that cold fusion is real. Cold fusion is now more commonly called Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reactions (LENR), partly to avoid the stigma the term "cold fusion" evokes. And in a strange twist of fate, MIT -- who was one of the most aggressive detractors of cold fusion in the 1990s -- is now leading the charge in resurrecting the technologies it once vilified.
    Dr. Swarts and Prof Hagelstein of MIT publicly demonstrated how a device can not only run itself indefinitely, but their experiment also produced ten times the energy output that was input. They ran the experiment for two days to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology using a NANOR by Jet Energy. The device, as of this publishing, has been running for five days straight."

Of course, even if LENR does not pan out, we'll have dirt cheap solar long before 2050, too, with widespread consumer-level grid parity in just a few more years, and then probably a stampede of research dollars into solar afterwards (making use of the fusion plant in the sky):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity

That said, I agree with the people at MIT that basic research and applied research should be funded much more lavishly. I think it would be quite reasonable to spend a hundred billion dollars on fusion research just because it is a neat thing and especially would have value in space exploration (assuming other things were also funded at that level like solar panels and LENR and so on).

Although even a vast increase in funds won't really resolve the competition problem in academia given the exponential growth of PhDs; see what this physicist has to say:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

We need a basic income, a bigger gift economy, better local subsistence, and more participatory planning at all levels of government so researchers would truly have more financial freedom to pursue basic research of all sorts.

Getting a patent issued doesn't mean that you can actually get it to work. Case and point, there was a patent issued for cold fusion back in 2001.

Article
Patent

By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[73] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals (see indices in further reading, below). In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat and articles have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy (see indices in further reading, below).

The generation of excess heat has been reported by (among others):

* Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
* Giuliano Preparata (ENEA (Italy))
* Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
* Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
* Yoshiaki Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
* T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
* T. Ohmori (Japan),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Experimental_reports [wikipedia.org]

"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."

"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all# [wired.com]

U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue44/navy.html [infinite-energy.com]

""Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat.""

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312 [concordmonitor.com]

"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of

you still shouldn't out the others working on similar things:

-------------

By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[73] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals (see indices in further reading, below). In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat and articles have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy (see indices in further reading, below).

The generation of excess heat has been reported by (among others):

* Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
* Giuliano Preparata (ENEA (Italy))
* Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
* Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
* Yoshiaki Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
* T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
* T. Ohmori (Japan),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Experimental_reports

"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."

"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all#

U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue44/navy.html

""Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat.""

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312

"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design."

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_team_confirms_ucla_tabletop_fusion_10017.html

Science in Neglect - Nobel Laureate S

You're closer to the truth than you realize. There is a multitude of hobbyists toying around with primitive anti-gravity technology. Here's one article among many to describe the phenomenon. As for large-scale commercial applications, well, that's going to require serious investment from the likes of Hyundai or Antonov. Meanwhile, we can keep dreaming.

Back in the early 90's I was a personal assistant to Dr. John O'M. Bockris (Professor of Electro-Chemistry at Texas A&M University). His laboratory was the first in the world to "verify" the results of Pons & Fleischmann.

During my year and a half as a personal assistant (one of several), one of my main responsibilities was to help with correspondence with other scientists. I'd open their mail, scan it for importance, and act on it (usually forward it to the Dr. Bockris if it was personal correspondence or reply back to the sender with relevant publications if it was a request for information). Needless to say, I saw a lot of unpublished information about "cold fusion".

Among many, one particular hand-written note stands out in my mind: it described the palladium cathode melting during the course of the experiment, with no apparent cause, other than "cold fusion". I don't remember the researcher, but I do remember that this particular guy had tons of papers to his name & was a highly respected scientist.

Of course among the correspondence, there was also some petty squabbling. I was most disturbed by the fact that anyone that researched "cold fusion" was regarded as a wacko by the entrenched scientific community. The attitude that normal physicists seemed to have was that "cold fusion" was a hoax & that further investigation was an entire waste of time. They'd cry "But where are all the neutrons", or "You'd be dead by now if that much excess heat were actually being produced." What most of these so-called entrenched scientists failed to realize was, this was something entirely new. Maybe it doesn't follow the laws of nuclear physics as we understand them now. But the same thing can be said for almost any major change in our understanding of the universe (relativity and quantum physics certainly fit the bill). But the effect of their collective crying, bitching, and moaning was to make funding for "cold fusion" research a difficult thing to acquire. All this did was slow down progress on research on something that could radically alter our understanding

Anyway, the constant influx of reports during those years ('92-'93?) showed that there was something new going on. The problem was that nobody could reliably reproduce their results. But regardless, in the decade since I worked there, "rogue researchers" kept pounding away at the problem & the damned problem just won't go away. In fact, it seems (from this article and many other publications: http://www.defusion.com/ & http://www.infinite-energy.com/) that people are making real progress on the problem.

I still read some of the lighter publications & summaries, but to tell you the truth, I'm a programmer with a BS in engineering and that stuff is WAY over my head. But progress is being made. It's about freakin' time the main-stream science community stopped their bitching & started taking a good, long, hard look at this problem.

As my grandma says, "Many hands make light work."

Hey, maybe this has something to do with the DOE's current re-evaluation of cold fusion...or the much-discussed sonofusion results...

Infinite Energy has been asking for continued investigation of cold fusion for a long time. See Their press release on this story.
There are many more CF and LENR resources at their web site.

Infinite Energy has been asking for continued investigation of cold fusion for a long time. See Their press release on this story.
There are many more CF and LENR resources at their web site.

Here's a pdf of an article from Infinite Energy Magazine detailing "Scientific Misconduct at MIT in 1989" dealing with the verification of Drs. Fleischmann and Pons claim to have have jointly produced cold fusion at the University of Utah on March 23, 1989, among other things such as skepticism about the viability of hot fusion.

Here's a pdf of an article from Infinite Energy Magazine detailing "Scientific Misconduct at MIT in 1989" dealing with the verification of Drs. Fleischmann and Pons claim to have have jointly produced cold fusion at the University of Utah on March 23, 1989, among other things such as skepticism about the viability of hot fusion.

'dark' energy? try

http://www.infinite-energy.com/resources/faq.html

puts a few holes in a number of physics theories. and lets face it - trying to convince ourselves we're so smart sure ain't gonna convince the 'alien' species out there who've already figured all this stuff out and look at us like we're monkeys throwing feces at the zoo. about time some 'theorists' started flipping burgers for the good of humanity, and the rest of us started making realistic estismations of our own ineptitude. all good programmers know you're predicates are only as good as your assumptions. if we've got the whole thing wrong from the beginning, then the whole codebase needs to be turfed

looking for a link about cold fusion? As a matter of fact, yes, I have at least two. One will require a (paper based only) subscription. Here is the link to relevant info. FWIW, the paper-based subscription will require a link to the magazine, which was founded by Arthur C. Clarke. You might also Google for things related to "Blacklight Power" and "Tesla", since we're still trying to explain a few physics-related things which simply don't fit into the current socio-political scene