Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics
Rochus Börner, Ph.D, 2004

"Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the critic's ideas or the critic personally-by censoring writing, blocking publications, denying appointments or promotions, withdrawing research grants, taking legal actions, harassing, blacklisting, spreading rumors." [1]

Introduction
 
Science is in a state of crisis. Where free inquiry, natural curiosity and open-minded discussion and consideration of new ideas should reign, a new orthodoxy has emerged. This 'new inquisition', as it has been called by Robert Anton Wilson [2] consists not of cardinals and popes, but of the editors and reviewers of scientific journals, of leading authorities and self-appointed "skeptics", and last but not least of corporations and governments that have a vested interest in keeping the status quo, and it is just as effective in suppressing unorthodox ideas as the original. The scientists in the editorial boards of journals who decide which research is fit to be published, and which is not, the science bureaucrats at the patent office who decide what feats nature allows human technology to perform, and which ones it does not, and the scientists in governmental agencies who decide what proposals to fund, and not to fund, either truly believe that they are in complete knowledge of all the fundamental laws of nature, or they purposely suppress certain discoveries that threaten the scientific prestige of individuals or institutions, or economic interests. Research that indicates that an accepted theory is incomplete, severely flawed, or completely mistaken, will be rejected on the grounds that it "contradicts the laws of nature", and therefore has to be the result of sloppiness or fraud. At the heart of this argument is the incorrect notion that theory overrides evidence.

In true science, theory always surrenders to the primacy of evidence. If observations are made that, after careful verification and theoretical analysis, are found to be inconsistent with a theory, than that theory has to go - no matter how aesthetically pleasing it is, or how prestigious its supporters are, or how many billions of dollars a certain industry has bet on it.

But in current mainstream science, the opposite occurs with disturbing regularity. Anomalous evidence is first ignored, then ridiculed, and if that fails, its author attacked. Scientific conferences will not admit it to be presented, scientific journals will refuse to publish it, and fellow scientists know better than to express solidarity with an unorthodox colleague. In today's scientific world, the cards are just stacked too heavily against true scientific breakthroughs. Too many careers are at stake, too many vested interests are involved for any truly revolutionary advancement in science to take place any more. All too often, scientific truth is determined by the authority of experts and textbooks, not by logic and reason.

Referring to the fin de siecle "end of science" mentality and the scientific revolutions following it, Robert G. Jahn writes in 20th and 21st Century Science: Reflections and Projections [3]:

"As we enter the 21st century, science seems poised to execute a similar evolutionary cycle of advancement of their comprehension and relevance. We are opening with a steadily growing backlog of demonstrable physical, biological and psychological anomalies....  most of which seem incontrovertibly correlated with properties and processes of the human mind, in ways for which our preceding 20th century scientific paradigm has no rational explanations.

Thus, at the dawn of the 21st century, we again find an elite, smugly contented scientific establishment, but one now endowed with far more public authority and respect than that of the prior version. A veritable priesthood of high science controls major segments of public and private policy and expenditure for research, development, construction, production, education and publication throughout the world, and enjoys a cultural trust and reverence that extends far beyond its true merit. It is an establishment that is largely consumed with refinements and deployments of mid-20th century science, rather than with creative advancement of fundamental understanding of the most profound and seminal aspects of its trade. Even more seriously, it is an establishment that persists in frenetically sweeping legitimate genres of new anomalous phenomena under its intellectual carpet, thereby denying its own well-documented heritage that anomalies are the most precious raw material from which future science is formed."

In his debut editorial as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Henry H. Bauer gives a similarly bleak assessment of the state of modern science [4]:

"Mainstream orthodoxy routinely resists novelties that later become accepted. Throughout the 20th century there are examples: Bretz's Spokane flood, McClintock's recognition of "jumping genes", Mitchell's insights into biological energy mechanisms, Woese's Archaea, and McCully's homocysteine. Only late in the 20th century did science reluctantly grant that acupuncture can have some analgesic effect, that ball lightning exists, that the kraken is not myth but the real giant squid, that it is not foolish to look for intelligent life outside the Earth, that 5000-year-old megaliths incorporate substantial knowledge of astronomy, that human beings inhabited the Americas long before the days of the Clovis culture, and that living systems can sense not only electrical but also magnetic fields. Indeed, it may well be that the suppression of unorthodox views in science is on the increase rather than in decline. In Prometheus Bound (1994), John Ziman has outlined how science changed during the 20th century: traditionally (since perhaps the 17th century) a relatively disinterested knowledge-seeking activity, science progressively became handmaiden to industry and government, and its direction of research is increasingly influenced by vested interests and self-interested bureaucracies, including bureaucracies supposedly established to promote good science such as the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Parkinson's Law, it may be, applies to science as to other human activities: no sooner has an organization become successfully established than it is by that token already an obsolescent nuisance."

In many cases of anomalous evidence that inconveniences establishment science, simple denial of publication suffices to suppress the anomaly. Sometimes, however, renegade scientists manage to capture the attention of the general public, pleading their case to a larger audience that has no vested interest in the validity of the established theories. When that happens, and significant interests are at stake, the scientific establishment will turn nasty, resorting to misrepresentation or outright falsification of evidence.

The Cold Fusion Scandal
 
Such misrepresentation and falsification of evidence happened after Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman [5] announced in March, 1989 that they had achieved fusion by electrochemical means. Several influential US laboratories (Caltech [6], MIT [7], Yale/Brookhaven [8]) reported negative results on Cold Fusion that were based on shoddy experimental work and a misunderstanding of the Pons-Fleischmann claims. [9] They gave a hostile hot fusion establishment the excuse it needed to conclude that the claims made by Pons and Fleischmann were bogus. In November 1989, a DOE panel concluded the same after a shallow mock investigation of only seven months. [10]

Eugene F. Mallove, who was the Chief Science Writer at the MIT News Office at the time and now publishes Infinite Energy, a journal dedicated to covering potential new energy sources ignored by mainstream science, played a part in exposing the MIT report as mistaken, possibly fraudulent [11], and resigned in protest over it in 1991. He writes in Ten Years That Shook Physics. [12]

"The 1989 reports of MIT [7], Caltech [6[, and Harwell have each been analyzed by other scientists and these analyses have been published (see references, page 34 in IE Issue No. 24). Each of the widely cited 1989 'null' experiments has been found to be deeply flawed in experimental protocols, data evaluation, and presentation. Each, in fact, contained some evidence of excess heat as claimed by Fleischmann and Pons. There is evidence that the MIT data was deliberately altered to erase an indication of excess heat. The altered data was published officially by MIT, and it was included in reports to a government agency under the official seal of MIT. The experiment was paid for out of federal government funds. This report had a dramatic impact on the perception of many scientists and journalists.

It is ironic that each of these negative results were themselves the product of the kind of low quality work of which Fleischmann and Pons were accused. The difference was that the reports said what the hot fusion community wanted to hear. This was the legacy of the 1989 ERAB report, but that legacy must now be reversed - and it will be, however long that takes.

Almost two years after they were concocted, Prof. Ronald R. Parker of MIT's Plasma Fusion Laboratory publicly stated that the MIT PFC cold fusion calorimetry data were 'worthless' (June 7, 1991). In the same period (August 30, 1991) after I had challenged this data, Parker stated that 'MIT scientists stand by their conclusions.' Which is it?"

A detailed chronology of this scientific coverup can be found in the same issue.

Most people, including physicists continue to be unaware that low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) are real, and have been verified in hundreds of experiments throughout the 1990s.

In February 2002, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center of the United State Navy in San Diego released a 310 page report entitled Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D₂O System [13] that discusses the overwhelming experimental evidence that the cold fusion effect indeed exists. Dr. Frank E. Gordon, the head of the center's Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, writes in the foreword:

"We do not know if 'Cold Fusion' will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding. It is time for government funding organizations to invest in this research."

A March 2003 New Scientist article [14] quotes Robert Nowak, an electrochemist and a programme manager in chemistry at the Office of Naval Research on the suppression efforts that the Navy research had to overcome:

"From the beginning, the idea was to keep things modest. 'We put less than $1 million a year into the programme,' Nowak says. 'Above that level, the red flags go up.' Saalfeld and Nowak never gave the programme its own line in the ONR's budget, but allotted money to it from miscellaneous funds. 'We were to keep working and we were allowed to publish our results, but we weren't supposed to say a lot about it,' Miles recalls. 'Some people were worried that word would get out and it would jeopardise the navy labs' funding from Congress for other research. We didn't even call it 'cold fusion'. We called it 'anomalous effects in deuterated systems'.

That was still not enough to keep the sceptics off their backs. 'Fairly prominent individuals within the physics community voiced threats,' Nowak admits. 'They said that they were aware that federal funds were going into cold fusion research and they were going to do what they could to stop it.'

That "cold fusion" continues to be ignored by the scientific establishment, and, to add insult to injury, is being used synonymously with "bad science", usually in such expressions as "the cold fusion debacle", constitutes one of the greatest scientific scandals in human history, and a human tragedy. While wars over oil are being fought, a potential source of energy that could solve humanity's energy problems for all eternity is being ignored by all but a small community of researchers. At the same time, the dead-end "hot fusion" program continues to receive billions of dollars in public funds. If there is a scandal associated with cold fusion, this is it.

So addicted is the plasma fusion community to federal research funds that even innovative concepts for hot fusion that threaten to lead to practical fusion energy soon and to a corresponding gigantic embarrassment for the hot fusion establishments are viciously suppressed. A recent example are the suppression efforts aimed at Focus Fusion. Plasma physicists Eric J. Lerner, Dr. Bruce Freeman and Dr. Hank Oona used an innovative design to achieve hydrogen-boron fusion, which, unlike the deuterium-tritium reaction the hot fusion mainstream is trying to create, creates no lethal neutrons. Yet (or therefore?) the discovery met with stiff resistance from the hot fusion establishment. A 2002 press release of the Focus Fusion Society describes the suppressive efforts of the hot fusion establishment:

"On May 23rd Dr. Richard Seimon, Fusion Energy Science Program Manager at Los Alamos demanded Dr. Hank Oona, one of the physicists involved in the experiment, dissociate himself from comparisons that showed the new results to be superior in key respects to those of the tokamak and to remove his name from the paper describing the results. The tokamak, a much larger and more expensive device, has been the centerpiece of the US fusion effort for 25 years. Seimon did not dispute the data or the achievement of high temperatures. He objected to the comparisons with the tokamak, arguing that it was biased against the tokamak. In addition, Seimon pressured Dr. Bruce Freeman, another co-author of the paper, to advocate the removal of all tokamak comparisons from the paper. “Both of my colleagues in this research have been threatened with losing their jobs if they don’t distance themselves from the comparisons with the tokamak,” says Lerner who is lead author on the paper. “Both of them had carefully reviewed and approved the paper originally and had endorsed its conclusions. For them to be forced to recant under threat of firing is outrageous. It undermines the very basis of scientific discourse if researchers are not allowed by their institutions to speak honestly to each other." [15]

If the claims about Focus Fusion pan out, it could be the cheap, clean, inexhaustible source of energy that the hot fusion establishment has been promising the world for half a century, but failed to deliver.

Transmutation
 
If a new class of nuclear reactions can take place under low energy conditions, then it is reasonable to expect even transmutations of heavy elements. But to conventional chemistry and physics, the claim of heavy elemental transmutations occurring in "chemical" systems, apparently validating the ancient proto-science of alchemy, constitutes an even greater provocation than cold fusion.

John Bockris, a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A&M and one of the world's leading electrochemists, had to learn this lesson in the early years of the cold fusion scandal. He successfully replicated the Pons and Fleischmann experiment in 1989 and discovered bursts of tritium production.

He then became one of the principal targets of a smear campaign against cold fusion research by science journalist Gary Taubes. Taubes was writing a book on Cold Fusion [16] and had already made up his mind that cold fusion was "pathological science". He spent time with Bockris and his students at Texas A&M, posing as a disinterested seeker of the truth. There, he got the idea that Nigel Packham, one of Bockris' graduate students had "spiked" the cold fusion cell with tritium. The allegation was utterly baseless, but Taubes was out for blood and needed to have his scandal. He got Science to publish his allegations in June 1990. [17] Bockris called the editor and asked for the right to publish a detailed response, but his request was denied. Eventually, he managed to get a one-column letter published denying the allegations. Publication of Taubes' paranoid delusions in Science gave them wide credence and circulation.

A fair-minded Nov. 1998 article in Wired [20] sets the record straight:

"'We thought Taubes was genuine at first,' Bockris told me recently, speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired before he moved to the United States in 1953. 'We exposed our lab books to him, and told him our results. But then he said to Packham, my grad student, 'I've turned off the tape, now you can tell me - it's a fraud, isn't it? If you confess to me now, I won't be hard on you, you'll be able to pursue your career."

(Taubes has been shown Bockris's statement. He prefers not to comment.)

According to Bockris, 'A postdoctoral student named Kainthla, and a technician named Velev, both detected tritium and heat after we took Packham off the work because of the controversy. Since then, numerous people have obtained comparable results. In 1994, I counted 140 papers reporting tritium in low-temperature fusion experiments. One of them was by Fritz Will, the president of The Electrochemical Society, who has an impeccable reputation."

Still, Taubes's report in the June 1990 Science magazine clearly suggested that Packham might have added tritium to fake his results. This reassured many people that cold fusion had been bogus all along. Packham received his PhD, but only on condition that all references to cold fusion be removed from the body of his thesis. Today he works for NASA, developing astronaut life-support systems. "I don't know why Gary Taubes wrote what he did," he says. "Certainly I did not add any tritium in my experiment."

But for Bockris, the worst was yet to come. In 1991, he was approached by a self-taught inventor without formal scientific credentials from Tennessee named Joe Champion who claimed that he had discovered a process that could perform heavy element transmutation. Bockris eventually brought Champion to Texas A&M as a consultant and started experiments to replicate the claimed results. In 1993, the local media got wind of the research and made it widely known that medieval alchemy was being performed at the university! This led to a second, even nastier scientific witch hunt against Bockris. 23 distinguished professors at Texas A&M signed a petition to the provost asking that Bockris be stripped of his title, and 11 full professors in the chemistry department wrote a letter asking that Bockris be removed from the department. The petition stated: [18]

"For a trained scientist to claim, or support anyone else's claim to have transmuted elements is difficult for us to believe and is no more acceptable than to claim to have invented a gravity shield, revived the dead or to be mining green cheese on the moon. We believe that Bockris' recent activities have made the terms 'Texas A&M' and 'Aggie' objects of derisive laughter throughout the world...."

Bockris was subsequently investigated for fraud, based on charges that he was trying to defraud investors with false claims of being able to manufacture gold. He was "completely exonerated" only one week after a hearing in which he had been allowed to present his research and defend himself in January 1994.

The professors in the department of chemistry who had initiated the investigation, lead by distinguished professor Frank A. Cotton, were disappointed at this outcome. So they secretly formed a committee to start yet another investigation. Bockris learned of the existence of this "Ad Hoc Committee" only when information of its existence was leaked to the press in June 1994. In classical totalitarian fashion, he was subsequently denied the right to defend himself before the committee and even to know what the charges were. He later learned that he was being investigated because his results were "impossible".

After 11 months of investigation, Bockris was exonerated again in May 1995. But the official investigation is only part of the story. An article in Infinite Energy [19] which describes the entire affair in full details suggests a psychological explanation for the unscientific conduct of Bockris' colleagues.

"One of the most difficult aspects of the treatment to which Bockris was subjected was social ostracism, starting with Dean Kemp's accusation and not even ending with the second exoneration. There were about sixty-five professors in the large Chemistry Department at Texas A&M. Most ignored Bockris for much of the two-year period in which the University, egged-on by ring-leaders in the Department, acted against him. After the first complete exoneration, two professors did congratulate him, but he was isolated. Bockris' wife Lilli felt it perhaps more than he, because she had a number of faculty wives whom she had known as friends. When she met them now in the supermarket, instead of having the usual kindly chat, they turned their backs on her. Lilli recalls that the year she spent in Vienna after the Nazis took over seemed to her less unpleasant and threatening than the isolation and nastiness which she felt in College Station, Texas from 1993 through 1995.

One would have thought that after all that had been done, everything would be settled now. This was not the attitude of many of Bockris' colleagues. The motivating force for the antipathy may be the subconscious fear that the discoveries of the Bockris group might eventually be proved and recognized. Then his original contributions would be rated as discoveries of great magnitude. There were at least two professors in the Chemistry Department who had made it known that that they expected to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry some day. The possibility that it might go instead to a colleague whose work they so much denigrated must have been an unwelcome thought. (They did not have the attitude of physicist Richard Feynman, who was displeased by the artificial focus on one person's accomplishment that the Nobel Prize system encouraged.)

Having failed in the three official investigations that had been carried out against Bockris, they decided that all they could do would be to persuade the head of the department to have Bockris shunned—as in an excommunication for religious heresy. No one was supposed to speak with the errant Bockris. For a long time, absorbed in his work as ever, he didn't understand that shunning was underway. Most of the colleagues had been ignoring him anyway since the inquiries had begun in 1993. He did notice, however, that whenever he wanted to talk to the Head of the Department, perhaps once every few months, he came to his office and did not invite Bockris to come to his. Of course, he was more than twenty years younger than Bockris, but later Bockris realized that this was an example of the shunning. The Head did not want anyone to see that he was talking collegially with Bockris!

Bockris' colleagues in the physical chemistry division took no notice of the shunning order, which might have gone around unofficially. In practice, the shunning made no effective difference to how Bockris carried out his work, though it was a very considerable act of spite. It proved once again that at least in the Chemistry Department at Texas A&M University, research results which do not agree with existing theory are not tolerated."

The Wired article suspects financial motives behind the scientific establishment's anti-scientific witch hunt:

"Financial factors may have played a part in the fierce animosity exhibited toward cold fusion experiments. When a congressional subcommittee suggested that $25 million could be diverted from hot fusion research to cold fusion, naturally the hot fusion scientists were outraged." [20]

Today, the evidence that transmutation of heavy elements can occur in electrochemical systems has become fairly strong. Yasuhiro Iwamura, Mitsuru Sakano and Takehiko Itoh of the Mitsubishi Advanced Technology Research Center have shown reproducible transmutation of Cesium (Z=55) into Praseodymium (Z=59) and Strontium (Z=38) into Molybdenum (Z=42) in a deuterium-palladium system. Their results were published in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics. [21[

These results were recently independently replicated by Higashiyama et al at Osaka University and presented at the Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge, Massachusetts 24 - 29 August 2003. [22]

At lenr-canr.org the interested reader can find a comprehensive collection of papers on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

References

[1]

Brian Martin, Stamping Out Dissent, Newsweek, 26 April 1993, p.49-50.

[2]

Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition, New Falcon Publications, 1991

[3]

Robert G. Jahn, 20th and 21st Century Science: Reflections and Projections. Journal of Scientific Exploration 15, 1, p.21 (2001)

[4]

Henry H. Bauer, Journal of Scientific Exploration 14, 3, p.304-305 (2000)

[5]

Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann, Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry 261,2A, p. 301-308 (April 10, 1989)

[6]

N. S. Lewis et al., Searches for low-temperature nuclear fusion of deuterium in palladium, Nature 340, p.525 - 530 (1989)

[7]

D. Albagli et al., Measurement and analysis of neutron and gamma ray emission rates, other fusion products, and power in electrochemical cells having Pd cathodes, Journal of Fusion Energy 9, 2, p.133 (1990)

[8]

M. Gai et al., Upper Limits On Neutron And Gamma-Ray Emission From Cold Fusion, Nature 340, July 6, 1989, p.29-34

[9]

Charles G. Beaudette, Excess Heat - Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, Oak Grove Press, 2000, p. 113

[10]

Ibid., p. 90-97

[11]

Eugene F. Mallove, MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report, Infinite Energy 4, 24, p.64-118 (March-April, 1999), available online at:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf

[12]

Eugene F. Mallove, Ten Years That Shook Physics, Infinite Energy 4, 24, p. 3 (March-April, 1999)

[13]

Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/tr/1862/tr1862-vol1.pdf
www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/tr/1862/tr1862-vol2.pdf

[14]

B. Daviss, Reasonable Doubt, New Scientist 177, 2388 (March 29, 2003)

[15]

Billion Degree Supression http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php/site/article/billion_degree_suppression/

[16]

Gary Taubes, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, Random House, NY, 1993

[17]

Gary Taubes, Cold Fusion Conundrum at Texas A&M, Science 248, p.1299-1304 (June 15, 1990)

[18]

Mike Epstein, Editorial, Journal of Scientific Exploration 8,1 (1994)

[19]

Eugene F. Mallove, The Triumph of Alchemy: Professor John Bockris and the Transmutation Crisis at Texas A&M, Infinite Energy 6, 32 (July/August 2000)

[20]

Charles Platt, What If Cold Fusion Is Real?, Wired 6, 11 (Nov. 1998)

[21]

Y. Iwamura, M. Sakano, T. Itoh, Elemental Analysis of Pd Complexes: Effects of D₂ Gas Permeation, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, 41, p.4642–4650 (2002)

[22]

Higashiyama et al, Replication Of MHI Transmutation Experiment By D₂ Gas Permeation Through Pd Complex
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Higashiyamreplicatio.pdf