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Cold Fusion Gets a Boost From the US Navy
Tjeerd writes in to alert us to the publication in a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal of results indicative of table-top fusion. The US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, CA (called Spawar) has apparently been conducting research on "cold fusion" since the days of the discredited report of Pons and Fleischmann. They are reporting on the reproducible detection of highly energetic charged particles from a wire coated in palladium-deuterium and subjected to either an electric or a magnetic field. Their paper was published in February in the journal Naturwissenschaften (which has published work by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Lorenz). New Scientist also has a note about the fusion work but it is available only to subscribers.
On the contrary, I'd suggest that the LENR work is far more exciting because we don't have a theoretical framework which describes it. New physics, anyone?
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How else could the sentence "Why was it published in a German journal?" interpreted? He didn't ask "Why was it published in a low-impact journal?" or "Why wasn't it published in a journal with better reputation?".
Of course, otherwise the question is valid. If you had proof of cold fusion, the first place you'd submit it to would normally be Physical Review Letters. Not because it's American, but because it's simply the most reputed magazine in physics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Lets stop tiptoeing around it. This is a credible journal but not the first choice because the most obvious choices refused to publish an article on cold fusion no matter how credible the source.