Cold Fusion Conference Counts Eleven Labs

James Salsman writes: "From an American Physical Society conference session held a week ago, there appear to be now eleven institutions actively publishing cold fusion results: Research Systems (Arlington, VA), SRI International, ENEA (Italy), JET Energy (Welleslley, MA), Middle Tennessee State Univ., Russian Academy of Sciences, U. of Il. at Urbana-Champaign, U.S. Navy's SPAWAR Systems Center in San Diego, First Gate Energy (Woodside, CA, and a few blocks from my house), New Energy Research Lab. (NH), and MIT. Credible or crackpot? You be the judge."

Comments

Blind fundamentalists

[aminorex]

Academic orthodoxy and political correctness
has blinded the physics community to the
accumulation of evidence in favor of some sort
of CF process, from excess neutrons, to impeccable
calorimetry. The bottom line is that the hot
fusion industry is big money for big science, and
CF is percieved as a threat to a lot of grants.

Really, the only respectable excuse for this
blindness is the subtlety of the materials aspect:
The reproducibility of CF experiments is amazingly
sensitive to the origin and process application of
the Pd electrodes. This makes it genuinely
difficult to generate consistent results, in the
absence of consistent experimental apparatus.
Those who discount CF on this basis have retained
some credibility.

The greatest lesson of the CF saga is simply
that press releases are a double-edged sword,
because popular press sensationalism created an
enormous antipathetic backlash against CF.

It seems most likely at this point that classical
CF is some sort of lattice-distributed analog of
sonoluminescent fusion, which also has been
demonstrated to produce excess neutrons.

I think that if Pons and Fleischman had chosen
not to release their results publically, progress
in this area would have been much more rapid.
I don't blame them for feeling obligated to make
such a fundamental breakthrough public knowledge,
but in retrospect, it was an enormous tactical
mistake. Even if (and it is by no means a given
that this will ever happen) one day a practically
useful powersource can be developed from CF or
sonoluminescent fusion, it will be a huge uphill
struggle to reverse the entrenched biases of
even the public, let alone the well-heeled hot
fusion lobby.