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.

Re:evidence IS there, just look!

[The Mayor]

Let's see. You told this guy to stop ranting. He said he wasn't ranting, that the evidence was there. You then told him to stop ranting, and that the evidence wasn't there. So he sites a bunch of sources that support his side. You tell him "it is common to claim that people who disagree with you have not read enough".

Hmmm. It is common to provide a non-sequitor and resort to name-calling when one is obviously losing an argument. Mr. Lindahl, your arguments are trite and consist of complete non-sequitors. Stop the name-calling (i.e. "child"). It doesn't add much to the discussion (nor does my reply, but I felt your comments warranted more than a simple moderation).

For the record, aminorex never stated that "the evidence is clear". Instead, he stated, "The evidence is there" and to "Get off the couch and go read the papers". He is not stating that the evidence is incontrovertable. He is merely stating there is a wide body of evidence that supports the claims of cold fusion.

Greg, your debating skills are weak and you retreat to simple name calling and the use of non-sequitors when you are losing. It is not aminorex that is dilluting this discussion; instead, it is you.

Ugh... Enough with shouting 'conspiracy'!

[ediron2]

I'm diving into the pool early here, but the first two mod-3+ comments are up, and they both need a nice, sensible rebuttal:

First: there is no grand conspiracy in science. Fox and Mulder are as nonexistant as Santa Claus. Likewise for cold fusion's early claims. How do I know this? Because I was in a tiny little physics department 150 miles due north of Pons & Fleischman (sp?) when they released their results. No big science. No big budgets. No reason to fudge results wrong and lots of reasons to verify a nearby peer's claim. Just a dozen PhD's, a very minimalist beam lab, some grad students pursuing Master's Degrees, and a whole boatload of freshman Astronomy courses.

Our department faculty jumped on it, because it was nearby, it was novel, and the experiment was easily reproduced. The math even somewhat works. Papers written all over the world came to the same conclusion ours did: close... but no cigar.

So... ditch the conspiracy theories. Rather than ask a physicist about cold fusion (a wild-card answer is all you'll get, 'cuz they're all tired of the subject like I'm tired of Roswell and any other tabloid topic), ask any physicist more carefully phrased questions:

1 - was the cold fusion experiment mentioned above a bust: yep.
2 - is there a conspiracy to bury cold fusion: nope.
3 - would it surprise you if cold fusion became a reality (in *any* form) someday: nope.
4 - what do you watch for as you snore your way through new papers or claims: breakthroughs, significant exothermy, or mention of something useful and unexpected, together something different about aparatus or method that explains the cause.

As for conspiracies, the closest to truth there is that top scientists do have monumental ego's. Perhaps even too big, if you ask me. Does it impede (as in SLOW DOWN) progress? At times. Does it ever prevent the truth getting out? Hell, no. It can slow release of information down, but nothing stops curiosity. More importantly, nothing ever stops all the rest of us from wanting to help discovery along, get famous (perhaps) or even for a brief time be 'Smarter than a Nobel Laureate'. And regardless of how shouted-down someone might be for an iconoclastic view *this year*, the truth gets out. Even a bad idea gets attention (I was once asked to build a prototype to help a professor convince a politician that some rube-goldberg gravity-defying device wasn't a perpetual-motion device capable of launching anything into space).

So, stop with crying 'conspiracy'. Yes, there might be papers being written. Are they making advances? Probably. But enough reputable papers have been written and enough effort has been put into this that it isn't conspiracy that makes physicists all shrug when people talk small, incremental cold fusion advances. The problem's just unsolved and we're all busy elsewhere on our own unsolved problems. The collective non-shrug will come when a respected peer calls one of us up and say "Hey, this one's *INTERESTING*".

-- The most powerful declaration in the scientific method isn't "Eureka!", but "That's funny..."