FROM: GROUPS.GOOGLE/SCI.CHEM/MSG/
> mark_ta...@yahoo.com (Mark Tarka) wrote:
> One of the best sources of information on the current status, as
> viewed by a cynic, would be the reports posted to the group by Douglas
> R.O. Morrison of CERN. I'm not sure if he still attends and summarises
> cold fusion meetings to the group.
Despite the fact that Douglas Morrison famously denounced the entire
episode of cold fusion as "pathological science" on May 1, 1989, he still
traveled to every international cold fusion conference until his death in
2001 to observe and report. Here is his last report:
11 July 2000 UPDATE 13 DM-00-03
STATUS OF COLD FUSION and
REPORT ON EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL COLD FUSION CONFERENCE
Douglas R. O. Morrison, CERN
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Concluding Talks by Cold Fusion Supporters
3. Funding
3.1 General, Estimate of Minimum Total Funding
3.2 BlackLight Power - a Financial Success Story?
4. Experimental Results and Techniques
4.1 Regionalisation of Results
4.2 Calorimetry
4.3 Neutrons
4.4 Charged Particles, Gamma Emission - Do Good Experiments -
Try to Prove Yourself Wrong
4.5 Transmutations - How Many Miracles?
4.6 Low Energy d-d cross section
4.7 Alchemy
4.8 Biology and Cold Fusion
5. Material Sciences
6. Theories
7. Predictions of Commercial Applications
8. Brief Topics
8.1 US Patent Office; 8.2 Infinite Energy; 8.3 QED and QCD;
8.4 Court Appeal over Scientific Fraud Case;
8.5 Top Twenty Foul-ups of the Twentieth Century;
8.6 Papers, New Book; 8.7 Personalities not at ICCF-8
9. Future Meetings
10. Will Cold Fusion Continue?
11. Conclusions.
Appendix 1 - Problems for Edward Teller
Appendix 2 - Theories at ICCF-8
Appendix 3 - Russian Conference and Sponsors.
Appendix 4 - How Will True Believers Respond to this Status Report?
ABSTRACT
True Believers in cold fusion still continue and held their eighth
meeting in Italy in May 2000. They are slightly fewer and two of the
original three discoverers no longer attend. Experiments continue and
give remarkable results with abundant transmutations, biological
considerations, and even the conditions for alchemy are presented -
but criticisms and doubts are not expressed. Many complaints are made
of shortage of funds, and the only remaining government sponsor appears
to be ENEA. An exception to the shortage of funds is the remarkable
BlackLight Power company started by a medical researcher, R. Mills,
which has collected $22 million and plans an IPO on a stock market
to raise more money. Mills has doubtful results and a strange new
theory of a hydrogen atom with fractional electron orbits. Here it is
estimated that a lower limit of the money given in large grants, for
cold fusion is $100,000,000 - the total amount will be much higher.
This paper tries to explain why some enthusiasts continue despite the
overwhelming evidence against cold fusion. The talks of the summary
speakers are given almost in their own words. The conditions for doing
good experiments are described and the importance of trying to prove
yourself wrong is emphasised. The unusual theories proposed to explain
their results are presented. It is discussed if cold fusion will
continue.
1. INTRODUCTION
Yes, cold fusion is not quite dead as almost all scientists assume.
There is still a small group of True Believers who meet, discuss, and
compare. Their eighth International Conference on Cold Fusion, ICCF-8,
was held at Lerici, a beautiful small seaside resort close to La Spezia
on the Gulf of Poets (Byron, Shelley etc.) from the 21 to 26 May 2000.
The meeting was well-organised by Antonella De Ninno and Francesco
Scaramuzzi of the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the
Environment, ENEA, laboratory at Frascati with the assistance of the
nearby marine biology lab of ENEA. The main sponsor was ENEA. The other
sponsors were the Italian Physical Society, the Italian National Council
for Research, and the INFN.
A major personality missing was Giuliano Preparata who died at Easter
after a long illness. He was a strong and forceful character who was
not afraid of controversy - it was said that if he entered a blind
alley, when he left it, the alley was twice as long and twice as wide.
It was not said at the meeting, but I have been told that he was an
excellent teacher at Milan and formed many good students. Carlo Rubbia,
the Director of ENEA, kindly put him in charge of a strengthened
laboratory in Frascati and he worked there intensively until the end,
despite his illness. The ICCF-8 meeting was dedicated to him.
The yearly meetings have drifted into biannual ones. The attendance was
down to 145 from the previous 200 to over 300, and several important
figures did not attend. Stan Pons was again absent - since the collapse
of his Japanese-financed laboratory in the South of France, he appears to
have retreated to a farm nearby. Another of the original three
"discoverers of cold fusion", Steve Jones has also stopped attending.
Three of the International Advisory Committee members did not appear -
T. Bressani, C. Sanchez-Lopez and F. Jaeger, as well as many other
prominent personalities of previous years - they are listed under
section 8 - Brief Topics. As usual, I was the only sceptic present and
was generally well received though when four of us were talking one day,
they started a discussion as to whether I was dangerous or not. Two said
I was not, while Mallove, a spin doctor, who is more concerned about
public relations than science, said I was.
In this status report, a description of the ICCF-8 meeting will also
be given. The concluding talks plus discussion on the final morning will
be repeated almost in full. These are of particular interest as I am
often asked how these participants can continue to believe in cold
fusion despite all the scientific evidence against - are they sincere
in their activities? Everyone can make up their own minds reading these
Concluding Talks - my opinion is that they are sincere to themselves
and are True Believers in the non-ironical sense. But, with perhaps
one exception, they are not critical of the extraordinary and
contradictory results and theories presented at the conference.
2. CONCLUDING TALKS BY COLD FUSION SUPPORTERS
Here an attempt has been made to reproduce the actual talks without any
commentary, only with some changes for readability. The first person
is used and is the speaker (not this writer).
F. Scaramuzzi announced that there would be 5 prepared talks and then
free discussion.
He said there were 26 papers presented and 50 posters, giving a total
of 76 contributions. The number of people registered was 145. The four
biggest nationalities were 41 Italians, 35 Americans, 22 Japanese and
12 Russians.
His own personal comments on the conference were:
FRANCESCO SCARAMUZZI said:
The conference had been rich in results, some of which were: evidence
of strong correlations of excess heat and 4He by McKubre, Arata and
Takahashi who under certain conditions found both. This showed the
nuclear origin of cold fusion. Evidence of transmutations was growing
steadily and indicated the nuclear nature of the effect.
For palladium, there had been studies of the charging modes and
mechanisms, e.g. the work of De Ninno et al., Celani et al., in
Frascati.
There has been an important and definite trend in the cold fusion
experimental results. A feature was the low dimensionality of the
samples corresponding to the need for thin samples or powders. The
cathodes were all small in size but that would have to change in the
future, but at present, with bulk samples there were problems in
charging with deuterium gas.
In the field of theory, and there were many of them, some were
quantum effects. I am strongly pushed to think in terms of
coherence. Since we cannot see individual reactions, it must be
coherence. The theory of Profs. Preparata and Del Giudice seems
consistent with the experiment of De Ninno et al. Cold fusion is
just the beginning of coherence applications.
Where do we stand? The problem is frustrating; there is the
scepticism of conventional scientists most of whom think that cold
fusion is not Science and does not exist. We need much more
confirmation of results, with papers refereed and published, but major
journals do not accept cold fusion papers. Arata has published five
papers.
Fusion Technology with George Miley as editor, does help. There is
an absence now of groups in Europe except in Italy and also there
is one group in Paris, but none in Germany, none in Holland, none
in Britain. One way of interpreting this, is that our success has
made us too optimistic and this has promoted a negative reaction.
My personal conviction (not shared) is that cold fusion is mostly
Science. Progress needs lots of work and it would be much faster if
we had more funds. I have no doubt that it is nuclear energy. It
would be foolish to make predictions of working machines before some
10 years, but then progress will be very fast.
In Japan there have been two very important events;
a) The IMRA/Toyota organisation worked for 6 to 8 years on CF
b) the government through MITI and NHE, worked for 4 years.
Both were lost two years ago. There were many reasons, apart from
errors - they were set up for short term practical applications, and
also the death of Mr. Toyoda, the Director of Toyota. But we have 22
papers from Japan mainly from professors at universities who worked
with IMRA and MITI.
We meet only every two years now - we should stay in touch more
frequently. There is a simple message - the production of heat is real
and is nuclear.
GEORGE MILEY said:
Now the great direction is reproducibility, then we will work on the
basic science and finally on applications when we have government
support and industrial company proposals. At the start we were too
optimistic when we talked of "Electricity too cheap to meter".
Now we need basic science to go forward. Normally governments support
basic science then the information is freely available for everyone.
The propagation of information is basic to scientific exchange.
Theories - there have been improvements with the main classes of
theories being (a) new particles, (b) various neutron groupings,
(c) coherence, (d) photo-dissociation.
The challenge is that we need a benchmark experiment, then we can
measure new phenomenon, new experiments, loading of gas, flux needed
for reactions to occur. A question for theorists - what is the loading
and flux required? - (loading is the amount of hydrogen gas that is
loaded into the electrode, e.g. by electrolysis).
Experiments - reproducibility is needed for good science. Where are we?
I do not believe that we are quite there yet. For calorimetry there has
been a large effort with increasing accuracy but we need sufficient heat
that accuracy is not important.
For particle detectors - old techniques such as CR-39 etching plates
and photographic films, are returning. It could be argued that there
must be better ways as techniques advance, to measure loadings.
Scanning electron microscopes are now used.
At the first cold fusion meeting and at workshops, it was said that
we needed experiments that measured both heat and particles emitted,
that is, integral experiments that measured many quantities
simultaneously. This is still a key challenge as most experiments still
tend to measure one quantity at a time.
Experiments need diagnostics - more and better, specifically
designed for the experiment. Improved charged particle detectors
which are so small that they can go inside the cell.
Reproductivity - did not hear one paper that is fully reproducible.
We are still trying to reproduce the Pons and Fleischmann work. The
field contains d-d reactions, protons, neutrons, tritium, LENR,
applications.
There seem to be regimes where phenomenon do occur - the problem is
how to go from one regime to another. Heavy and light water each have a
regime. For practical applications, we need not just Watts but gain.
Inertial Confined Fusion needs a gain of a 100; here we need a gain
of 5 times. But at present our results give gains of 10, 20, 30%.
If the power input is 1 Watt and the output 1.2 Watts, then we need
to re-circulate or it will not sell.
Am fascinated by the papers on biological transmutations - we see
so many phenomenon which do not involve lattices.
A. ROUSSETSKI said:
In Russia there are some 20 groups working on cold fusion. There is
some small amount of funds from state support, universities, the Academy
of Sciences, Russian Physical Society, Russian Chemical Society and
Russian Nuclear Society. Financial support comes from commercial firms
- they enabled over half of us to travel here. We wish to thank the
organisers for support and accommodation.
In October 2000, there will be a conference in Russia, near Sochi on
the Black Sea, to discuss cold fusion transmutations - this year will be
the eighth. There are meetings in Russian universities every month.
JEAN-PAUL BIBERIAN said:
In 1989, there were two questions; is cold fusion reproducible?
and are there any cold fusion applications? If there are applications,
then we can believe. If Christ comes back flying in the air, then
people would believe. I think we solved point one.
When you have artists in the family, some wait for a prince to arrive
and recognise you - it is the Cinderella syndrome. Instead you have to
go out and be recognised.
One has to go and talk about cold fusion to the American Physical
Society, the American Chemical Society, and the American Nuclear
Society.
Enemies of cold fusion are not active when they retire, but friends of
cold fusion are active after they retire, so eventually with time,
cold fusion will win in the end!
There is a new generation coming who are more open-minded and who
are against nuclear power.
It is 11 years since Pons and Fleischmann announced cold fusion
- a solar cycle - it is time to start again.
George Miley will retire in a few months from the editorship of
Fusion Technology - this may give a problem in getting published.
Our other publishing help is J-P Vigier who is an editor of Physics
Letters A, but have heard little of him recently. These are the two
sources of entry to publishing cold fusion, but they may be lost
soon. We should start our own journal with referees. An electronic
journal which would be cheaper, faster and better - too good to
be true. A journal on the internet - I will be busy on this - let's
make it the next gateway for cold fusion. Then when one types "cold
fusion" one will find lots of companies selling software with internet
security.
We need to write papers on cold fusion to Nature, Science, Physical
Review Letters - and if they are rejected we need to ask why - the
editor needs to have a good reason.
In Italy there is an official programme funded by the government -
small but it could be a start.
A. TAKAHASHI said:
To summarise the key facts;
a) Almost confirmed:
4He in correlation with excess heat - McKubre, Isobe, De Ninno, ..
b) Nearly confirmed;
Transmutations - Warner, Iwamura, Mizuno, Miley, De Ninno, ....
Photofusion - Takahashi
c) In progress;
Cold fusion theory - Hagelstein, Chubb, Del Giudice, Violante, Hora, .
d) Heat
Large excess heat and products of glow discharge - Mizuno,
New Hydrogen Energy, NHE, was wrong - Miles, Fleischmann. (I have
no responsibility to answer - perhaps someone in Tokyo)
e) Neutrons and charged particles - Kasagi, Lipson, Karabut, Isobe,
Wang,
f) Loading with deuterons in thin wire - Coehn-Ahansohov effect now
called the "Preparata effect" in memory of him.
The ICCF meetings will continue in the 21st century - the second
phase, as Fleischmann says. Noted that the attendance at ICCF meetings
is decreasing with time. To attract more people, science is not enough,
we need industry people. Also young people who do not reject "crazy"
ideas.
ED STORMS said:
We need reproducibility and we need a theory - both at the same time.
Initially Palladium was chosen as a base for heat experiments, but
palladium is one of the most irreproducible metals known to man - it
was a poor choice. Others such as Pt, Au, Ni, or Ti are better and also
absorb large amounts of hydrogen.
There is a problem that many theories of cold fusion prefer other
materials. Suggest that any theory based on palladium alone must be
wrong from the experimental results. Any theory of cold fusion must
work for all materials.
There should be a Web site which contains all information on
the field, including accounts from this conference. People are asked
to contribute.
We need to exchange samples of materials, especially if they work.
This despite priority claims - does it matter if we make only
$50,000,000 instead of $1,000,000,000? Have found that if people
discover how a material works, they stop talking and do not tell you.
The Web site would be called: www.alteng.org
R.A. MONTI said:
This meeting considers only one aspect of a large field called
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, LENR, which began in France in the 1960's.
Even the name of cold fusion is not new. It is a large field that you
are starting to discover. It started in 1938 when a biologist, Kervoran,
discovered fusion. The term cold fusion is not appropriate. There are
important biological and geological effects - this is a wide field
and "cold fusion" is inappropriate.
F. SCARAMUZZI said:
Fusion is the historical name used by Fleischmann and Pons. As
thermonuclear fusion was used for hot fusion, cold fusion is the best
name.
EUGENE MALLOVE said:
I very much agree with Jean-Paul Biberian, we have a Cinderella complex.
Agree that there were more attendees at ICCF-7.
We must have demonstration units. The single missing unit is a
reproducible cell. It should be widely available, even if it is from
CETI. As a media person, we must have 10, 100, 1000 of them working.
We do not want the Cinderella part. While we should perfect basic
science, we need illustrations which would give the whiff of money.
After the brunch, I will show the video of my book "Fire from Ice".
The famous author, Charles Beaudette's book is now available and
can be purchased now - I do not want to take copies back to the States.
ROBERTO ANDREANI said:
I am responsible for a large lab of ENEA for thermonuclear fusion,
hot fusion, and have the responsibility of getting ITER built. I will
soon go to Garching near Munich for this.
In 1989 in Italy, I was working on fusion but we had to look at
possibilities. Only heard of science problems - when one talked of cold
fusion, it was not popular.
For the most common fusion objectives, one needs the production of
neutrons. Best reaction is proton-Boron which gives off no neutrons.
Please accept my opinion. We work in extreme scientific ways.
The Cinderella complex can be overcome by good Science.
It was said "almost confirmed" - I will tell my colleagues. The
measurements must be absolutely right. It must be possible to do in one
lab and repeat in another lab, a perfectly comparable experiment. I have
been impressed by the strong will of the people here.
In hot fusion we have to fight strong opponents for reasons that I find
debatable. I wish you good success . You have a strong opposition,
therefore you must do experiments that are beyond doubt.
FRANCESCO SCARAMUZZI said:
Agree that we must be more positive. Accept the point that we
must exchange work and make checks. The reason that it is not done,
is not that we are unwilling, but lack of money.
JOHN FISHER said:
About theories - there are many with lots of arguing. It is not
necessary that a theory is correct - after all, Columbus thought he was
going to India. Pons and Fleischmann had a theory, and had the energy
and courage to test it - their theory was useful. Without them, how
long would it be before anyone else tried - a decade? a century?
I think most theories are wrong, but all are useful. It's tough being
a theorist, referees are down on you, but we press on.
TALBOT CHUBB said:
There are already examples of transfers - of 4He by SRI and now of 3He.
JEAN-PAUL BIBERIAN said:
Biological transmutation is important. I have done experiments on it
with sprouting seeds. There is also the production of iron and other
metals. In 1799, it was discovered at the Vaudin (?) Street in Paris
by a very famous scientist .
We have booked a First International Workshop on Biological
Transmutation in Geneva. We have no funding and a non-perfect
organisation. We will open a web site.
The 21st century will be very exciting!
LI XING-ZHONG said:
Ten years ago, I was a visiting scientist for fusion in Austin and
had a telephone call from Prof. Scaramuzzi asking me to be a member
of the International Advisory Committee for a cold fusion meeting -
realised that I would be a hot potato.
Now ICCF-9 will have as its main themes;
- In theory: coherence
- In solids: reproducibility - most important
- In research and development: NHE? heater? based on "heat after
death"
- Cold and hot fusion should merge.
What we want is green fusion energy without nuclear energy.
Note that the above five Concluding Talks plus comments, were given
by Believers in cold fusion.
3. FUNDING
3.1 GENERAL - ESTIMATE OF MINIMUM TOTAL FUNDING
True Believers in cold fusion frequently say that they would have
succeeded in demonstrating it's existence if only they had been given
adequate funding. Often they are convinced that there exists a plot by
oil companies, the scientific establishment and others to destroy cold
fusion to safeguard their own interests. We will recall some of the
facts and budget estimates to see whether the total funding was
adequate or not.
The first major supplier of funds was the State of Utah who gave
$5,000,000 to the National Cold Fusion Institute, NCFI, which was set
up in Salt Lake City with Stan Pons working full-time and Martin
Fleischmann as adviser. Despite these advantages, Pons left unannounced
and it was hinted that he was in the South of France. Then NCFI
collapsed.
The UK research establishment, Harwell, were informed by Fleischmann
before the Utah press conference on 23 March 1989, and made a major
effort with a multidisciplinary team headed by an electrochemist who
was a friend of Fleischmann. They could not repeat the P&F results
using what they believed to be identical cells, and when they used the
best technology, they found no excess heat nor emitted articles. These
experiments cost a half million pounds and used four million pounds
worth of equipment.
The Electrical Power Research Institute, EPRI, which has a budget
of some $600 million per year, and which represents the industry,
has spent some $10,000,000 on cold fusion of which the largest part,
over $6,000,000, went to McKubre's group at the SRI. They stopped
funding a few years ago.
Mr. Toyoda, the President of the Toyota car company was enthusiastic
as he considered that oil would not last for ever, and the company
should search for substitute energy sources. Some $40,000,000 was spent
over eight years. Two parallel laboratories were set up by the Toyota
research company, IMRA, one in Japan and the other in the South of
France in the Sophia Antipolis Science Park near Nice. The French lab
had the advantage of Pons full-time and Fleischmann as consultant.
Security was exceedingly tight and hardly anyone visited the lab despite
the Fifth ICCF conference being held nearby in Monte Carlo. At the
ICCF-6 meeting held in Hokkaido, the French lab reported small heat
excesses but the lab in Japan reported no excess heat. When asked the
reason for the inconsistent results, no answer was given.
The ICCF-3 meeting was held in Nagoya in 1993 and on the first day
there was an announcement by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone company,
NTT, that they had solved the problem of reproducible cold fusion (the
shares of the company rose by $8 billion that day but quickly returned
to the long term trend). The Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry,
MITI, announced the setting up of a national laboratory in Hokkaido
where government workers plus workers from some 20 major Japanese
companies and from universities, would do research. The laboratory was
very well-funded and equipped.
The organisation was called New Hydrogen Energy, NHE, thus avoiding
the words "cold fusion". It was said that $30,000,000 would be invested
but after finding no evidence for cold fusion, (presented at the ICCF-6
meeting in Hokkaido), the NHE was terminated after four years and the
loss was declared to be $20,000,000. However this loss was probably only
the government loss - it is not known how much the companies invested.
The French government Commission de l'Energie Atomique, CEA,
supported a relatively small effort at Grenoble but at Lerici it was
learnt that this has been terminated and no results were presented at
Lerici.
The US Naval Weapons Research Lab. at China Lake has supported cold
fusion strongly and has done many experiments but is said to have
stopped activities in 1995. The amount spent on cold fusion is unknown.
The Italian National Alternative Energy, ENEA, has supported the
Frascati laboratory of Prof. Scaramuzzi since 1989. Its new Director,
Carlo Rubbia provided a new laboratory at Frascati for Prof. Preparata.
Many industrial companies have invested heavily in cold fusion
but never disclose how much was spent. Still more companies have
invested smaller sums to keep a watching brief.
The countries involved are not widespread but are concentrated in just
five nations - USA, Japan, Italy, China and France It is impossible to
give a reasonable estimate of the total amount of money that has been
devoted to cold fusion, but a lower limit would be a hundred million
dollars.
At present the only official support appears to be from ENEA. On the
other hand, the company, ENECO, which was set up to collect all the
patents from the original cold fusioneers - Fleischmann, Pons, et al.
- and to raise funds for further cold fusion research and development
- appears not to be active. At the previous meeting in Vancouver in
1998, F. Jaeger of ENECO,was skilfully busy with potential investors
and provided funding for many activities, but he was not at Lerici
this time. There seemed to be fewer investors now.
At ICCF-6 meeting in 1996 in Hokkaido, a special session was scheduled
then cancelled, for the Clean Energy Technology company, CETI, with
Dr. Patterson and C. Redding as promoters and with Miley and Claytor
offering supporting results. But at ICCF-8, the promoters were in
attendance, but were not presenting any results - they said they were
waiting.
One company that has been successful in raising money is Dr. Mills
and his BlackLight Power Company - see below.
3.2. BLACKLIGHT POWER - A FINANCIAL SUCCESS STORY?
3.2.1 GENERAL - HISTORY, HYDRINOS
Back in early 90's, Dr. Randell L. Mills was associated with cold
fusion groups and at a press conference at Lancaster, Pa, he
announced [1] that he had performed a thousand experiments obtaining
heat out which was 40 times that of heat in. He used nickel in an
aqueous solution of KCO3, and he believed the heat was chemical not
nuclear. Patents had been applied for. He was a medical researcher
with a medical degree from Harvard. He then developed a new quantum
theory which he published in a book entitled "The Grand Unified
Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics", 1048 pages, $80. The essence of
this theory is that while the hydrogen atom has its known energy levels
with n = 1, 2, 3,.... etc., Dr. Mills believed that the apparent
ground state was not the true ground state but there were another
series with n = 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ... etc. so that the electrons could drop
to these lower orbits thus releasing energy. And this energy released
would be "in excess of the energy required to start the process".
Mills then started a company called BlackLightSM TM Power, Inc.
This company "has raised over $22 million in equity capital since its
inception. Its current assets of plant and equipment are worth in excess
of this amount, and the company also has over $9 million in cash." This
would seem to indicate clear financial success. "BlackLight has
purchased a new corporate headquarters and chemical R&D facility near
Princeton, New Jersey. This 53,000 square foot building, located on 11
acres for expansion should allow the company to grow." Currently, the
Company has 23 full-time employees, the majority of whom are scientists,
including 8 Ph.D.'s. The company is looking to employ 75 scientists and
technicians as well as 25 management and support staff within the next
1 - 2 years."
Further quotations are given below from its web pages:
http://www.blacklightpower.com
Also the company "believes it has developed a new hydrogen chemical
process that generates power, plasma, and a vast class of new
compositions of matter." "The lower-energy atomic hydrogen product of
the BlackLight Power Process reacts with an electron to form a hybrid
ion which further reacts with elements other than hydrogen to form
novel compounds, hydrino hydride compounds (HHCs), which are
proprietary to the Company." "if the Company's data proves correct,
the novel compositions of matter and associated technologies have
far-reaching applications in many industries including chemical,
electronics, computer, military, energy, and aerospace in the form
of products such as batteries, propellants, solid fuels, munitions,
surface coatings, structural materials, and chemical processes."
"The Company has developed hydrogen gas energy cells that operate at
temperatures in excess of 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, produce energy in
excess of 1,000 times that of known chemical reactions of hydrogen,
and achieve power densities similar to those of many electrical power
plants (approximately 100 mW/cm3)."
Please note that the words "cold fusion" do not appear despite Mills'
impressive 1991 claims of forty times more heat out than in.
3.2.2. PATENTS, POSSIBLE IPO
"The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent
#6,024,935 on February 15, 2000 with 499 claims which broadly covers
the Company's advanced gas energy cell. The Company has paid the
issuance fee for six additional US patents."
"The Company recently executed a two year agreement with Morgan
Stanley to serve as the Company's investment banking firm. The Company's
goal is to be public within the next two years." There has been
discussion among critics of cold fusion, as to what would happen if
the Company were to attempt an Initial Public Offering, IPO, as then
SEC rules would apply.
3.2.3. VERIFICATIONS
"The Company's plasma, power, and chemical technologies have been
confirmed by 26 types of tests at over 25 independent laboratories as
summarised in Table 1 'Summary of Independent Tests'." This looks
pretty impressive, however on the Sci.Physics fusion pages people like
Dieter Britz have been trying to verify these claimed confirmations,
and have found it difficult as frequently only the name of the
institution is given and not the name of the person or the year.
On the Web pages, a prominent heading is Astrophysics - this states;
"The detection of atomic hydrogen in fractional quantum energy levels
below the traditional "ground" state - hydrinos - is reported by the
assignment of certain lines obtained by the far-infrared absolute
spectrometer (FIRAS) on the Cosmic Background Explorer."
So I asked a friend who is a senior member of the Cosmic Background
Explorer, COBE, experiment about this. He wrote;"Their claim about
COBE FIRAS is off-base. There are lines in the FIRAS spectrum from all
along the Galactic plane. When I looked at them, they could be all
explained as CO, C, etc. known emission lines. Note that the energy
levels in the range 1 - 90 cm^-1 for the frequency (0.01 - 1 cm
wavelength) is quite low and correspond mostly to rotational levels.
BLP explains this with spin-nuclear hyperfine levels for the hydrino
atom. Most of these lines have to be there from interstellar molecules
and represent the major cooling for interstellar clouds." In other
words, there is no need for hydrinos.
3.2.4. LEGAL LETTERS
Bob Park who has just published a book "Voodoo Science", has written
in his Whatsnew articles that many prominent physicists, including
Nobel laureates, who had criticised Mills' hydrino theory and claims,
had received lawyers' letters asking them to "stop engaging in further
defamatory and disparaging activities concerning BlackLight and Dr.
Mills."
This is very reminiscent of the letter from Pons' lawyer, C. Gary
Triggs to Mike Salamon, after Mike had done an experiment in Pons' lab
and published in Nature that there was no evidence for gamma or
neutron emission. The letter said "Please be advised that any damages
suffered by my clients proximately caused by any act or omission on
the part of yourself or any other coauthor of the subject paper will
not be tolerated. I have been instructed by my clients to take such
legal action as is deemed appropriate to protect their interests in
this matter." Frank Close was also honoured by an unpleasant letter
from Triggs.
These affairs caused Nature to show [2] a cartoon with the caption
"A single hydrino can produce enough energy to keep an expensive
law firm running for a year".
3.2.5 FUNDAMENTAL WORRIES
Many objections have been made against Mills' hypothesis. In particular
for it to be true, then an incredible number of experiments have to be
wrong - in particular, scattering experiments with electrons, for
example, should have shown the new spectral lines caused by the
fractional orbits.
4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND TECHNIQUES
4.1. REGIONALISATION OF RESULTS
At the APS meeting in May 1989, I reported that the positive and null
results lay in separate parts of the globe. This regionalisation has
become more marked with time. Scaramuzzi said in 1992 at Nagoya that
"Cold fusion stops at the Alps." Since then it slid round them and
the CEA lab in Grenoble reported excess heat but this has now stopped.
Also Jacques Dufour in CNAM in Paris claimed excess heat but when I
visited him, I was very worried that his apparatus was at different
temperatures in different rooms and had poor insulation, but he has
now changed it in some way. In Spain there was one episode of neutrons
probably due to a faulty BF3 counter - they are most unreliable.
So now Western European cold fusion effects are only in Italy and in
Paris. They are also claimed by a few groups in the USA and more groups
in Russia, Japan and China, but not apparently in other countries.
4.2. CALORIMETRY
The Japanese government made a major effort to study cold fusion and
set up the New Hydrogen Energy, NHE, organisation with a budget of
$30 million over 4 years. The lab combined government and industry.
A series of careful experiments were carried out to repeat the
Fleischmann and Pons experiments with them as advisors, plus new
experiments. They found no excess heat or any other anomalous effects.
The NHE lab was closed down and it was said $20 million had been spent
Melvin Miles of the Naval Warfare Research labs at China Lake went
there and tried to repeat some of the experiments while Fleischmann
studied the calculations used.
After Miles spoke, Ed Storms stated that from his experiments,
it was unsafe to use a heater pulse to calibrate the cells. Fleischmann
said "Ed, you are wrong" and that he would explain next day. But
next day, his explanation was all about mathematical calculations and
did not answer Ed.
Miles said that the NHE people had stated that the errors were
(+/-200) mW while he claimed that the errors were only (+/- 20) mW.
This was already said at ICCF-6 in Hokkaido when the NHE people noted
that the fluctuations claimed as excess heat by Fleischmann were all
within their errors. Further they stated that the distribution of
fluctuations gave a perfect Gaussian distribution with three standard
deviation limits of +/- 2.3% with no indication of excess heat
occurring spasmodically Morrison said that at Provo in 1990 and at
ICCF-3 in 1992, he had tried to define the conditions for obtaining
results that would convince sceptics. The two major requirements were:
1. Do good experiments
2. Try to prove yourself wrong
An example of how not to do it, is the excess heat claims [3] of
Focardi et al. Basically they heat a nickel wire to 500 C, measure
the temperature with vacuum and with hydrogen gas around the wire
and deduce excess heat which they say comes from the hydrogen entering
the nickel and fusing. They were soon sponsored by industry.
They have very few temperature measurements. The basic question is
"is it fusion or a failure to understand heat transfer?" Hydrogen is
the second best heat conductor. I suggested several years ago that a
simple way to resolve the question, would be to use helium instead
of hydrogen since helium does not fuse but does conduct heat almost
as well as hydrogen. They have not done this test despite letters,
faxes, phone calls, and direct discussion. This experiment has been
repeated carefully by another Bologna group [3a] who could not
reproduce the claimed results of Focardi et al.
To do good calorimetry, one should use a null measurement like the
Wheatstone bridge - that is, the apparatus should be completely
isolated from the outside by surrounding it with a bath of water kept
at a fixed temperature by an electrical heater. If the cell gives out
excess heat, this will tend to raise the temperature of the bath and
to compensate, the electrical heating is reduced - this measures the
excess heat. And there is no interchange with the surroundings. Of all
the experiments described here, except one, the apparatus could be
affected by the room temperature. For example, McKubre's poster
describes the importance of the mathematical model used to separate
off room temperature fluctuations.
It might be thought that room temperature fluctuations could not
be important, but usually the palladium piece used is extremely small,
e.g. 0.04 cm3 for F&P. Naturally Fleischmann objected while Storms
declared that he had not said it was impossible to use a heater pulse
to calibrate, but one had to be very, very careful.
The essential point is that experimentalists should do experiments
instead of trying to obfuscate with mathematical models using
non-linear regression analysis with Kalman filtering (at ICCF-3 in
Nagoya, when I asked all people who have found excess heat, if they
also had used a non-linear regression analysis, no one put up their
hand).
The second point is that scientists, when they have a result,
generally do not rush into print or press conference, but first
try to find any mistake and check that if their result is correct,
what would be the consequences, and to do checks on these consequences.
For example, if it works for a very small volume, 25. 10^-6 cm3 for
George Miley, then they should worry that a small effect could change
the result and so they should repeat with a bigger piece - one gram,
10 grams, etc.
One worry about P&F's 1989 claims, was that the hydrogen and
oxygen produced at the electrodes were recombining inside the cell
which would give apparent excess heat in the cell - this was a worry
as the electrodes were so close together in the tiny cell. They
claimed that their calculations had shown that there was no
recombination - but they did not do any simple experiments to
demonstrate this. But after Steve Jones realised that there was no
cold fusion, his colleague in Provo, Lee Hansen, did experiments.
Firstly, he moved the electrodes apart and the excess heat decreased
to zero. Secondly, with the electrodes in the close P&F position,
he obtained excess heat but then as he blew in nitrogen gas between
the electrodes, the excess heat ceased. Now why have P&F not done
these simple experiments instead of doing calculations based on
doubtful assumptions? And others who claim excess heat - have they
seriously tried to prove themselves wrong?
It should be noted that groups which have made null measurements
using a calorimeter with external water bath kept at a constant
temperature, have found no excess heat and no particle emission.
4.3 NEUTRONS
On the 23 March 1989, the observation of neutrons formed the best
experimental evidence that a nuclear reaction was taking place and
justified the name "cold fusion". Jones claimed only neutrons. Pons
and Fleischmann, P&F, showed a very impressive peak of gammas from
the absorption of fast neutrons by protons - unfortunately the peak
was at 2.5 MeV which agreed with their calculations. However at Harwell
on the 28 March, it was pointed out to Fleischmann that the neutrons
have to slow down first and therefore the peak should be at the
well-known value of 2.2 MeV. Within two days this peak at 2.5 MeV had
moved to 2.2 MeV. Later the neutron claim was said to have been a
"mistake". However in 1991, P&F claimed that they were observing 5 to
50 neutrons per second. But now this is forgotten.
Many claims have been made for neutron emissions. Thus in the Gran
Sasso tunnel, Italian-American groups have claimed signals but these
appear to be from the radon background. The best experiment was in
Kamiokande where Steve Jones and Howard Menlove inserted many cells
in this huge 3,000 ton detector used for neutrinos - they claimed
success but finally it is agreed that no significant neutrons were
observed.
Tullio Bressani and his group claimed [4,5] to have observed a neutron
peak at 2.45 MeV which they wrote was significant at the five standard
deviation level but when he gave the review talk on this subject at
ICCF-6, he omitted to mention his own result. This may be because
earlier I had long discussions with him pointing out that there was
no peak at 2.45 MeV but a very broad enhancement and the increase from
3 to 7 MeV was even more significant, but was only background.
At ICCF-8, Lipson et al. made a similar claim to have observed a peak
at 2.45 MeV, but when we discussed, his graph was the same shape as
the Bressani graph, i.e. a broad excess from 2 to 7 MeV.
In both cases the graph was obtained by subtracting one distribution
from another and both have much higher statistics with a very high
peak near zero - always an error-prone procedure.
Many experiments have searched for neutrons and found none while
a few have found very low numbers.
The overall conclusion is that the balance of evidence shows there is
no emission of neutrons from any experiment of the cold fusion type.
4.4. CHARGED PARTICLES AND GAMMAS - GOOD SCIENCE - TRY TO PROVE
YOURSELF WRONG
At ICCF-8, there were very few results on the emission of nuclear
ash. Claims of neutron emission are discussed above. Helium and other
claims are presented in the first section in the words of the
concluding speakers. It was noted that copious X-ray emission is
expected of 21 keV X-rays which are characteristic of palladium - but
none have ever been reported.
There are some reports of observations of particle emission from
groups employing glow or spark discharges. This is natural as it is not
cold fusion but lukewarm fusion as the fluctuations in the discharges
can give sufficient energy to the deuterons to cause fusion as even a
few keV can cause fusion as discussed in section 4.6. Note, it is not
the average which should be taken but the highest energy since the
cross section rises extremely steeply with energy. Incidently, someone
was heard to say that one does not need a complicated system as he found
that an ordinary car spark plug does perfectly well.
At the cold fusion meeting in Provo in 1990, people told me they
were happy when I said that to convince others, it was essential to
do Good Science.
In Morrison's 1993 paper[6] "Review of Progress in Cold Fusion", there
is a major chapter "Do Good Experiments" where there is a detailed
discussion for calorimetry, particle detection, etc. It was emphasised
that if one does find a positive result, it is essential to design
further experiments to try and prove oneself wrong - this is what normal
scientists always do. For example, if an excess heat is found with a
tiny 0.04 grams piece of palladium, one would have expected Fleischmann
and Pons to repeat their experiments with 0.4g, then 4g, and then 40
grams to check that the excess heat scales with mass, for one could
suspect that there was a small error which looks like an enormous number
of watts per gram, but with 4 grams of palladium, this small error would
give negligible excess heat - but this is not done. Some claim that they
must use thin films so their mass is 10^-3 grams, but they do not
enlarge all their apparatus to attain even one gram.
There is an uncomfortable feeling that people do not want to check
or to prove themselves wrong.
In 1990, McKubre of SRI, agreed strongly with me and said that SRI
would now do experiments measuring many species of particles and gammas
as well as excess heat. In an account of ICCF-3 in 1992, it was written
"Mike McKubre said that the 3C's of cold fusion were Collaboration,
Co-operation and Correlation. After three and a half years, there was
no excuse for working on a single variable. All of experiments should
be addressed and a correlation matrix established, The Harwell work
which gave a null result, had correlations, we can similarly get
information." Harwell did 127 varieties of experiment, and searched for
excess heat, neutrons, gammas and tritons, but did not find any
significant signal of them. But in the year 2000, SRI only reports on
excess heat and helium - but it is well-known that 4He is very
accident-prone ever since 1924 when Paneth and Peters found that they
had wrongly claimed helium production from hydrogen, so that every 4He
result is criticised. Why did SRI who received generous funding, not
measure also some other products where the signature is unequivocal?
Back in 1990, Julian Schwinger pointed out [7] that p-d fusion is
much more likely than d-d fusion. It was suggested that the ratio of
H2O to D2O be varied from (100%/0%), to (90%/10%), to (50%/50%),
to (10%/90%) and finally pure D20. But Schwinger's suggestion has
never been tried by True Believers. However Ettore Fiorini of Milan,
whom some consider one of the most complete and careful experimentalists
in Italy, studied both d-d and p-d fusion during electrolysis with a
palladium electrode. Also mechanical straining was added to search
for fracto-fusion. No excess heat was found. Also gammas, neutrons,
helium, and tritium were searched for, but none were found - this in
a lab with a very low radioactive background. Now if Ettore can do
such an extensive series of experiments with limited resources, why
has SRI not been able to do similar experiments considering that they
have been well funded having received over $6 million from EPRI?
In Dick Feynman's famous Commencement Address at Caltech in 1974,
called the "Cargo Cult Science" lecture, he says "we really ought to
look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science".
He finishes with advice to the new students: "So I have just one wish
for you - the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain
the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel
forced by a need to maintain your position in the organisation, or of
financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that
freedom."
4.5. TRANSMUTATIONS - HOW MANY MIRACLES?
In the first few years of cold fusion, no one predicted that
transmutations (e.g. alchemy) would be claimed. Yet at ICCF-3 in Nagoya
in 1993, five groups claimed that transmutations had been observed,
including mercury into gold!
Still when one considers how many major miracles were already required
for cold fusion, why not one more? Indeed it is well established that
the first miracle is the most difficult to believe, but once that
hurdle is overcome, it is easy to believe other miracles. In 1989, the
list of miracles, or major violations of laws of Nature that had been
confirmed by thousands of experiments, was:
1. The rate of cold fusion claimed by Fleischmann and Pons, and
Jones was some 10^40 times larger than expected. It is hard
to explain simply how large a number is 10^40 - suggestions
please, for any practical analogies? (The best suggestion so
far, is from Frank Close. The radius of the proton is 10^-15
metres. The radius of the Universe now {if10^10 years of
expansion at the speed of light} is 10^26 metres. The ratio
of the Universe to the radius of the proton is then 10^41.
2. The relative absence of nuclear "ashes". If the reaction was
nuclear as claimed, then neutrons, protons, tritons, and 3He
should be produced in huge quantities; plus about 10^-6 times
less 4He and gammas of 24 MeV should be observed.
3. The ratios of these ashes is well-determined even in muon-
catalysed fusion which is cold, but the ratios claimed by
True Believers, varied widely but not as expected.
4. When Fleischmann was invited to CERN on 31 March 1989 by
Carlo Rubbia, after his talk, the first question was from
Carlo, who asked if they had repeated the experiment on D-D
fusion in D2O, but in normal light water, H2O, as this would
be a control and nothing should be observed in water. This
was one of the rare times that Fleischmann looked uncertain,
and he replied it was the next experiment. There were a
variety of replies before Pons and Fleischmann agreed that
H2O gave no cold fusion. However in recent years at ICCF
meetings, many groups, such as Miley's, say they find fusion
with H2O and no one comments let alone complains in public
though a few of the better scientists say in private, that
they are unhappy.
There are a number of other miracles such as biological effects,
creating black holes, solving the solar neutrino problem, etc. but
as they are not general, they will not be counted.
So the fifth miracle could be the observation of transmutations from
one element to another. Most of the claims involve a very small piece
of metal which is treated, for example, by electrolysis, and it or
other material elsewhere, is examined by a very sensitive apparatus
and traces of other elements are detected. Here it must be emphasised
that the quantities are very small - so small that some wonder if they
were not trace elements existing somewhere else in the apparatus
which the electrolyte had transferred to a new site.
It will be recalled that in the whole history of Polywater, the
sample sizes were always less than one cm3 - here they are much less.
For example, Miley uses five small layers of 1000 A thickness. It would
be good to see even one cm3 of transmuted product. Miley also claims
excess heat but is severely criticised also for these claims as errors
are not considered and instrumentation is inadequate. It may be
significant that Miley's work is based on the Patterson power cell.
CETI, which could not present any results at ICCF-8, despite selling 40
kits at $3,750 each some years ago. Incidently, Miley uses normal water,
H2O and not D2O.
4.6 LOW ENERGY D-D RATES
At Lerici, J. Kasagi of Tohuku University presented results on the
measurements of cross sections for deuterium ions hitting deuterium-
loaded metal targets with some partly surprising results.
Previously F.E. Cecil and G.M. Hale had shown results [8] at ICCF-2 at
Como in 1991 where the cross section fell precipitously as the energy
decreased towards 2 keV as would be expected from the strong potential
barrier effect. Nothing anomalous was observed. The target was CD2
sheets.At ICCF-6 in 1996, Kasagi found that the cross section fell very
steeply with decreasing incident energy, but was slightly higher than
predicted. He interpreted this difference in terms of a screening
effect, Us, and values of 19 +/- 12 eV and 60 +/- 10 eV were calculated
for Ti and Yb metals resp. A CERN expert was surprised and considered
these values very high.
At ICCF-8, Kasagi again found slightly higher cross sections than
predicted and gave Us values of 600 eV for PdO, 310 eV for Pd-black
(palladium deposited on carbon balls) and Fe, and 75 eV for Au and TI.
These values are very high and merit checks. It may be noted that at
the lowest energy of 2.5 keV, the counting rate was one per week.
The rates of the products of the reactions found in 1996 and 2000,
were normal, that is, the production rate of 24 MeV gammas was
about a million times lower than the emission of protons, 3He and
tritons - this is in contradiction with True Believers claims that
cold fusion proceeds almost entirely by production of 4He plus
electromagnetic energy of 24 MeV (a gamma) which somehow converts
into very low energy X-rays or phonons which cannot be detected, not
even as 21 keV X-rays characteristic of palladium.
In 1996, Kasagi noted the emission of high energy alpha particles
which he interpreted as a secondary interaction of 3He with another
deuterium giving an alpha plus proton with a Q of 18.35 MeV. It is not
clear if secondary interactions were considered in the 2000 data.
4.7 ALCHEMY
R. A. Monti showed a poster entitled "Nuclear Transmutation Process
of Uranium". He claimed that a series of positive results were
obtained from 1993 to 1995 and then independently, at the ENEA labs
from 1997 to 1998 and more tests have now been made.
Essentially a mixture of compounds are heated in a furnace to 1150
degrees C. The compounds were listed and include 330 g carbon, 900 g
KNO3, 80 g sulphur which are the basic ingredients of gunpowder. He
wrote that when Bockris tried a similar procedure he failed due to
"lack of knowledge of elementary alchemy" as he was completely "out
of season". "The right season is 25 March to 15 June." Monti tested
this by showing that in tests done 4 May and 25 May, he reduced the
amount of uranium originally present from 4.39 to 3.07 grams and from
4.56 to 2.5 grams resp. but when he tried on January 8, the uranium
was reduced from 5.34 to only 5.08 grams.
It may be recalled that Bockris together with his unusual student,
Champion, had some success in transforming mercury to gold, but never
talked of a seasonal effect (these adventures terminated when Champion
was sentenced to prison for another affair in Arizona).
It would appear that the historical alchemy, transforming mercury to
gold, is now replaced by the more contemporary elimination of uranium
which has greater investor appeal - Monti said that it was not difficult
to find investors. He claimed that Eucan Technologies Gmbh had signed
an agreement with ENEA starting in October 1996.
4.8 BIOLOGY AND COLD FUSION
In 1993 L. Kervran was awarded the Ignoble Prize for Physics [9] for
his book "Biological Transmutations" in which he argues that a cold
fusion process produces the calcium in eggshells.
V.I. Vysotskii et al. of Kiev (abs. 008) reported using time of flight
mass spectroscopy to study nuclear transformations in microbiological
studies using Bacillus subtilis. The expected reaction was 23Na + 31P
= 54Fe in a growing culture in sugar-salt nutrient medium deficient in
Fe but containing 23Na and 31P isotopes. The mass spectrum showed that
the rare isotope 54Fe was enhanced as expected.
F. Celani et al. of Frascati (abs. 096) reported impurities in the
heavy water. Some were bacteria which DNA sequencing techniques showed
were of the Rarlstorica family and were exceptionally hard to destroy.
These bacteria metabolised the mercury which was used as a thin film
of the surface of the palladium to avoid de-loading the hydrogen.
Biberian of Marseilles, said that the First International Workshop
on Biological Transmutation is being held in Geneva.
5. MATERIAL SCIENCE
It is many years since Fleischmann declared that cold fusion was
easy, just high school level chemistry. As many groups who found a
positive result then found that they could not repeat it, they
reasoned that since cold fusion must be true, then there had to be
some subtle special way of preparing or choosing the electrodes.
Hence many groups quickly started a programme of studying the material
of electrodes and of ways of loading them with deuterium or hydrogen.
At ICCF meetings, a large fraction of papers is now devoted to these
material science questions.
A consistent feature of these experimental papers, is that the authors
do not read previous publications. There is an enormous literature,
even journals, on hydrogen isotopes in palladium and other metals.
Once a Japanese expert, Prof. Y. Fukai, was asked to speak[10] to
ICCF-3 in Nagoya. The great problem of cold fusion is that the two
deuterium nuclei are too far apart to fuse - because of the large
potential barrier. In D2 gas, they are 0.74 Angstroms apart and to
obtain the modest fusion rate of 10^-20 fusions per second, a
separation of 0.14 A is required. But in palladium crystals, they
are even further apart, 2.84 A for the orthohedral placings and
1.74 A for tetrahedral placings! It was suggested that coherent
oscillations could reduce this distance but Fukai said their maximum
amplitude corresponded to 1 eV which was too small. He also showed
that the suggested use of a screened Coulomb potential was erroneous.
His talk did not please everyone - one senior theoretician said that
"something was missing from the talk - could you tell me why metals
exist? You could not answer: And if you would answer, I would shoot
it down. People find heat. You think we are idiots but people fin
things" Del Giudice presented alternative ideas and after his talk, Ed
Storms commented that he had claimed that there were three phases of
hydrogen in palladium, alpha, beta, and gamma. But in previous work
only alpha and beta phases are described and in a rather different way
- there are no references to a gamma phase. Could you please quote any
other experimental evidence in favour of the existence of a gamma
phase? As always, there was a reply, a flow of words, but could not
detect any answer from Del Giudice. There have been claims that 4He
is found in cold fusion by Arata et al. and Case et al. Here activated
carbon is employed as a carrier, It is said that helium is not
absorbed by carbon but Rich Murray did a literature search and found
that Maggs et al. Nature, 18 June 1960 p. 956-958 and P. Malbrout et
al. Chem. Abs. 126 148921, both found substantial absorption of helium.
6. THEORIES
Cold fusion has an incredible number of theories all which claim to
explain it, but generally, the theories are mutually exclusive. For
ICCF-4, I made a list of the 23 theories that were proposed then.
Further at ICCF-3, Rabinowich, Kim, chechin, and Tsarev reviewed
recalled that at a previous ICCF meeting, the experimentalists thought
it would be profitable to have a comparison of theories and of their
predictions, e.g. would excess heat be provided by proton-proton
fusion as well as by deuteron-deuteron fusion? However after a
compilation was started, some theoreticians refused to give even
simple predictions and some walked out of the room - the attempt was
abandoned.
This ICCF conference was similar to previous meetings - there were
many predictions, most were mutually exclusive, and clear predictions
and statements were missing.
Del Giudice presented the theory of Preparata, Bressani and Del
Giudice which requires coherence in the palladium metal lattice. He
did not respond to the suggestion of Storms at the end, that a theor
to be successful, should also explain how excess heat is found in
non-metals. Previously I had asked if cold fusion was predicted to
occur in ice since it also has a lattice structure, but it seems that
this calculation may not have been done. Drs Talbot and Scott Chubb
in their agreeably harmonious double act, presented their approach
based on ion band states. A list of the theories presented at ICCF-8,
is given in Appendix 2.
7. PREDICTIONS OF COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
As pointed out by several in the Concluding Session, for cold fusion
to be accepted, it is necessary to have some commercial application
that can be readily purchased and which works reliably. Hence it is
worthwhile recalling the previous predictions.
1. July 1989 - zero time. Pons not merely predicted an application
but stated that it existed then. This was a water boiler "giving off
15 to 20 times the amount of energy that is put into the cell. Simply
put, in its current state it could provide boiling water for a cup of
tea". "It wouldn't take care of the family's electrical needs, but it
certainly could provide them with hot water year round' said Pons who
said he has always believed that the practical application could happen
this fast."
2. 1992 - less than one year. Pons working with IMRA (Europe) said
he had obtained 1000 kW per cm3 of electrode using a new type of
palladium alloy. He expected a practical application before the end of
the year.
3. 1992 - one year. Fleischmann said a 10 to 20 KiloWatt power
plant should be operational in one year
4. Nov. 1993 - six years. Pons expected that by the year 2000,
there should be a household power plant operational.
5. May 2000 - no predictions for 10 years - Chairman of ICCF-8,
F. Scaramuzzi. It may be concluded that the time to a commercial
application is receding into the distant future as time passes.
8. BRIEF TOPICS
8.1. US PATENT OFFICE
Gene Mallove explained to me that in the US Patent Office, there are
experts assigned to each subject. When a patent application arrives
with the words "cold fusion" it is sent to the expert. It is
generally acknowledged that the USPO has decided, after due study,
that cold fusion comes into the same category as infinite energy
machines or perpetual motion machines, and are immediately rejected.
The result is the people filing patents cunningly avoid using the words
"cold fusion".
There is great prestige if having your application granted a US patent
and it helps in fund raising even though the granting of a patent does
not necessarily mean that the proposed machine will work as claimed.
The US Patent Office has apparently decided that some patents that
have been granted, should not have been approved and they are now
trying to withdraw their approval. Naturally the applicants object
and now some of them are considering filing law suits.
In Mallove's glossy magazine, "Infinite Energy", it is stated that
Thomas Valone had been fired from the US Patent office. He has a
curious history. After he joined the USPO, he invited cold fusion
believers to apply to join the Office, writing that the conditions
were good (canteen, swimming pool, pension, etc.) and said that they
could help to approve patent applications for new energy devices.
Then early in 1999, he organised a Conference On Future Energy, COFE,
under the auspices of the US State department and had invitations sent
to foreign embassies. When this was blocked, he shifted and had the
same conference organised by the Commerce Department. However people
at the department were told that at the American Physical Society's
Centennial meeting in Atlanta, March 1999, some thousand people had
been roaring with laughter at cold fusion in talks given by James
Randi, Bob Park, and Peter Zimmerman - the Commerce Dept. sponsorship
was withdrawn. However the COFE meeting was still held - it was an
unusual meeting with some serious talks about wind energy etc., but
also talks on anti-gravity, Zero Point Energy, cold fusion, etc.
8.2. INFINITE ENERGY
There are a few publications devoted to cold fusion and to various
forms of desirable energy sources which have a doubtful justification,
such as Zero Point Energy, ZPE. The most glossy of them is undoubtedly
the magazine Infinite Energy whose editor is Mallove. He was chief
science writer at MIT until he split with them and accused some MIT
staff of unethical conduct over cold fusion. He is a spin doctor who
is very skilled at public relations and exploits fully the slightest
occasion such as any favourable statement by a well-known personality
who has often not seriously studied cold fusion.
8.3. QED AND QCD
At ICCF-8, a talk was given about quantum electrodynamics, QED, where
it was said that there was the mystery of why quarks were not observed.
This was a fine talk for the late 1960's but experiment and theory have
moved on since. The colour quantum number is now accepted and supported
by many experiments. The corresponding theory is called Quantum
ChromoDynamics, QCD.
It would be entirely appropriate if at the next meeting, ICCF-9,
Asymptotic Freedom and Quantum Chromodynamics were to be explained to
us by Dr. Mallove.
8.4. LIBEL CASE - FLEISCHMANN, PONS AND OTHERS VERSUS LA REPUBBLICA
After La Repubblica wrote that cold fusion was scientific fraud, they
were sued for 8,000,000,000 lira (about $5,000,000 then) by Drs.
Fleischmann, Pons, Bressani, Del Giudice and Preparata. I was asked
by La Repubblica to provide scientific evidence for the case. The
five Believers lost the case and also had to pay La Repubblica's
costs - the judges said that Fleischmann and Pons had lost touch with
reality. In 1996 they announced in Nature [12] that they would appeal
but nothing further has been heard of this - perhaps because of the
reply in Nature. [13]
8.5. TOP TWENTY TECHNOLOGICAL FOUL-UPS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The Ig Nobel Board of Governors, commissioned by the Wired News and
the Annals of Improbable Research, have made a list of the top twenty
foul-ups involving technology in the last century - they said it was
a difficult choice from the several hundred thousand candidates.
Number one was Blondlot with his N-rays. Number 16 is Chernobyl while
Cold Fusion was 18th.
8.6 PAPERS, NEW BOOK
At ICCF-8, it was surprisingly hard to obtain papers giving the results
or theories. There was a small table, later two small tables. Initially
the first one seemed to contain only material from Mallove - copies of
his glossy magazine with the unusual and unphysical title "Infinite
Energy", plus copies of a book that he was selling called "How Cold
Fusion Prevailed" - again the title is unusual as few appear to believe
that cold fusion has prevailed except the author.
The book was written by Charles Beaudette who says he first went to a
cold fusion meeting in 1995 "for a lark" he wrote. However he was
impressed - as an engineer. The book is unremittingly biased in favour
of cold fusion - it even makes Mallove's book seem almost neutral.
Embarrassing incidents like the moving of the gamma peak by Fleischmann
and Pons from 2.5 to 2.2 MeV, secondly, widening it and thirdly,
increasing the number of counts by a factor of ten, are ignored - they
were under stress, he explained. When criticisms are made of results or
of disagreements with many previous experiments, they are not discussed,
rather the writer of the criticism is attacked but the justification of
the attack is not made - "attack the messenger, not the message".
If any copies of papers which were suitable for refereeing by a
journal were left on the table for distribution, they must have
vanished before I saw them. In contrast I left out a copy of the review
of world energy that I had been working on since 1991 and updated
several times, and invited people to contact me if they wished a copy.
A few papers were obtained by asking the people who made presentations.
8.7. PERSONALITIES NOT AT ICCF-8
Former regular attendees or major personalities at ICCF meetings who
did not come to Lerici for a variety of reasons unknown, apart from
Stan Pons, Steve Jones, Tullio Bressani, Carlos Sanchez-Lopez and
Fred Jaeger, include; A.J. Appleby, N. Asami, R. Bass, H.E. Bergson,
J. O'M Bockris, B. F. Bush, R. T. Bush, F. E. Cecil, T. N. Claytor,
S. Crouch-Baker, J. Drexler, Tom Droege, R. D. Eagleton, J. Foos,
L. Forseley, Y. Fukai, D. Gozzi, Wayne Green, W. N. Hansen, Nate
Hoffman, R. Huggins, J. R. Huizenga, H. Ikegami, B.Y. Liaw, B. E.
Liebert, Scott Little, Bruce Klein, G. Kreysa, K. Kunimatsu, K. Matsui,
T. Matsumoto, H. O. Menlove, K. Nagaoka, T. Nakata, R. Notoya, M.
Okamoto, T. Omura, F. Oriani, M. Rabinowich, M. Schreiber, A. Spallone,
D.T. Thompson, V.A. Tsarev, J-P Vigier, Fritz Will, D. Worledge, E.
Yamaguchi, etc.
9. FUTURE MEETINGS
It was announced that Prof. Li would host the next meeting, ICCF-9,
in Beijing in two years time. The month was not announced but could be
again in the spring time.
There will be a meeting in October 2000, in Russia near Sochi on the
Black Sea in a holiday area. This is the eighth of the series where all
are welcome. Details and list of 7 sponsoring organisations are given
in Appendix 3. The series of meetings in Asti in Italy, will continue.
These are private meetings, by invitation only.
10. WILL COLD FUSION CONTINUE?
When the First Cold fusion conference was held in March 1990, there
was a joke that the first would also be the last, because it seemed
so evident that cold fusion had been disproved and shown to be
ridiculous. But this prediction was wrong, for although over 99.9%
of scientists think that cold fusion is disproved and ridiculous,
nonetheless there is a hard core of True Believers and hopeful
investors who have just had their eighth conference eleven years
after the 1989 publications of Fleischmann and Pons, and of Jones.
Why? Will they continue?
Initially they had a dream which we all have - would it not be
wonderful to have a limitless energy source which did not pollute?
Yes, but while most consider that such a practical energy source
does not exist, these True Believers think that cold fusion has been
proved but that there is a conspiracy by entrenched interests to
suppress cold fusion, e.g. by refusing it patents and funds.
They are not discouraged by a lack of success of reproducing lab
experiments and of making a practical application, despite predictions
and even claims (e.g. Pons working boiler[14] in 1989 - we are still
waiting for our cup of tea). Would anything discourage them? Doubtful.
There are always willing investors who hope that this is a secret
process missed by the mainstream, which would make them very rich and
famous. It is the great lottery syndrome - if the prize is large enough,
the buyers do not care what the odds are.
There is a saying by Planck that a wrong theory only dies out when
the promoters are gone. Well, we do not wish harm to anyone, but of
the three original promoters, Jones has re-evaluated his work,found
flaws and turned completely against cold fusion, even doing experiments
to show where Fleischmann and Pons had gone wrong; Pons for a second
time, has vanished and does not attend ICCF meetings anymore;
Fleischmann does attend ICCF meetings but has not provided any new work
for some years. These defections appear not to influence True Believers.
But if Fleischmann were also to drop out?
As cold fusion continues its slow decline, there is a change of
direction. Instead of feeling strong enough to stand alone, the media
enthusiasts, Mallove, Fox, et al., are linking up with a loose grouping
of True Believers in other unusual energy sources such as anti-gravity,
zero point energy, ZPE, which to work, would require yet more violations
of the Laws of Physics. A recent example was the Conference On Future
Energy, COFE. As usual with doubtful presentations, there was a mixture
of serious speakers (e.g. from DOE, wind power) whose reliability can be
checked, and doubtful ones whose reliability is hard to check. Again,
there is a worthwhile dream - clean, non-polluting, cheap energy - and
under the cover of this dream, some do not mind proposing impractical
solutions which have been disproved many times.
11. CONCLUSIONS
I have often looked at experiments which gave results that appeared to
violate the laws of Nature which had been established by previous work.
Later these experiments turned out to be false, but I have often found
it very difficult to see just where the error was.
But the fact that I had not detected the flaw, did not mean that the
experiment was correct and that the laws of Nature had been violated.
Rather I feel the same as being at a circus watching a magician.
Normally he and I know that the laws of nature are being obeyed but
there is a trick which is hard to spot. At trick one, I may spot the
trick and am happy that there is no problem with the laws of Nature
- similarly with trick number two. But suppose at trick three, I do not
see how the magic is performed. The magician may say "I won, I tricked
you" and it is left unsaid that the laws of nature have not been
violated. But suppose the magician says "You did not see anything
wrong with my demonstration, therefore it is true. See, I have
supernatural powers. The old laws of Nature have been replaced by new
laws". And if I protest, I am told that I have a closed mind, am an
establishment figure, and do not face up to the happening performed in
front of me. But almost all magicians admit that it is all trickery
and the laws of Nature are not threatened.
So if someone comes along and says, "Look - excess heat - do you see
anything wrong?", then I feel as if I am at the circus, and although
I do not immediately see anything wrong, I am reluctant to give up
well-established laws of Nature unless the proof is very strong.
Here reports on cold fusion happenings are described, especially in
the summary talks by True Believers in cold fusion in their words,
and then some clues as to possible explanations are offered.
How many Elvis sightings constitute a proof?
APPENDIX 1 - PROBLEM FOR EDWARD TELLER
Back in 1992, Edward Teller attended a private meeting on cold fusion
in Washington. He delighted the media-aware people, e.g. Mallove, by
proposing a new particle which would explain the contradictions of the
then cold fusion results - how to have lots of excess heat without
commensurate production of protons, neutrons, 3He, tritium, and gammas.
When I phoned him, he explained that the clue was in the name of this
hypothetical particle which in his native Hungarian means "Crazy'.
Little was heard of this afterwards. At the 2000 meeting in Lerici, a
friend of Teller attended. If he were to list the properties required
of another new hypothetical particle that could explain all the various
results of cold fusion experimenters, then the list of requirements
would look something like this:
1. Gives heat of cold fusion at a rate 10^40 times more that
expected from potential barrier considerations
2. Gives excess heat in cold fusion in both light hydrogen and in
deuterium
3. This excess heat should give some 4He and possibly some tritium
but no protons, no neutrons (except in certain labs), no 3He
(except in certain labs) and no gamma rays of 24 MeV
4. When the fusion takes place in palladium, X-rays of 21 keV,
characteristic of palladium, should not be observed.
5. Transmutations should occur on electrolysis, mainly into stable
ground states, but not into radioactive isotopes
6. These positive fusion and transmutation processes should only
occur with very small quantities of material, typically 40
milligrams, but not in bulk material
7. Transmutations and excess heat should also be observed when
there is no metallic crystalline structure (i.e. no coherence
effects)
8. The cold fusion should occur at both low loading, e.g. by gas,
as well as high loading of hydrogen into the electrode. But at
very high loadings, obtained using a diamond anvil, no excess
heat is produced.
9. Biological transmutations should also occur
10. Alchemy should occur but most strongly in the time window
between 25 March and 15 June.
It has also been suggested that cold fusion has an 11-year solar cycle,
but this may not be a serious suggestion, so will be excluded to
lighten the requirements.
APPENDIX 2 - THEORIES AT ICCF-8
1. Runbao Lu, (abstract 010) "Electron-ion bound state and its
introducing of nuclear fusion".
2. H. Hora, G. Miley and J.C. Kelly (abs. 011) "Swimming electron
layers theory" - dielectric effects in the metallic plasma.
3. A. Takahashi, M. Ohta, and T. Mizuno (abs. 012) Low Energy
Photofission, LEPF with multi-photons of 0.1 to 10 keV.
4. M. Ohta and A. Takahashi, (abs 013) electron-phonon plus heavy
electron gives screening.
5. S.R. Chubb and T.R. Chubb (abs. 025) Interaction between ion band
states.
6. A.D. Vita (abs 028) Mechanical statistics of a second order phase
transition in Pd-metal hydride.
7. M. McKubre et al. (abs 029) extended lattice coherent processes.
8. J.C. Fisher (abs 030) Polyneutrons - mobile droplets of neutron
liquid give reactions, e.g. with a 100 neutron droplet and Oxygen, O;
100n + 18 O ----> 102n + 16 O
9. Y.E. Kim and A.L. Zubarev (abs. 033) Ultra low energy nuclear
fusion for Bose nuclei in ion traps.
10. V. Violante et al. (abs. 034) Electro-magnetic oscillations produced
by coherent oscillations of the Fermi level electrons in the metal
lattice.
11. J.J. Dufour (abs. 040) "Hydrex" is a resonance, 1H1 of a proton
and an electron (lifetime a few seconds, size a few fm, energy a few
eV).
Nucleons, ANuZ, plus several Hydrex catalyses alpha particle emission
giving transmutations , e.g.
ANuZ + 2 1H1 -----> A-2NuZ + 4He2 + x MeV.
Also e.g. uranium into lead.
12. H. Kozima (abs. 044, 045, 046) Trapped Neutron Catalysed Fusion,
TNCF model. Energy band of neutrons interacts coherently with lattice
nuclei. e.g.
n + 46Pd -----> 13Al + 33As or -----> 26Fe + 20Ca.
13. A.A Nassikas (abs. 053) "Cold fusion as a Space-Time Energy
Pumping Process" based on "Quantum Space Time-Aether".
14. Y.Z. Li (abs. 062) A selective resonant tunnelling model shows
that when the Coulomb barrier is thick, can have fusion with no
strong neutron or gamma emission.
15. P.L. Hagelstein (abs. 064) Fast ion emission from metal deuterides
is explained in terms of a second order off-resonance fusion reaction
with the lattice phonons. The strong force between deuterons is viewed
as a very high order phonon non-linearity which gives an intimate
coupling with phonon and fusion event. A clean separation has been
found between the coherent part of the non-linear interaction from
the incoherent part giving a collective phonon mode which couples
to the coherent part. "The model predicts the possibility of alpha
emission from Pd-D with alpha energies up to 21 MeV as reported by
the NRL group."
16. Yu. N. Bazhutov and V.G. Grishin (abs. 081) Erzion model of
Cold Nuclear Transmutations, CNT. The Erzion is a stable heavy
particle which catalyses CNT. They claim to have detected the Erzion
in cosmic rays. This will explain many problems such as dark matter
in the universe, the solar neutrino problem, ball lightening etc.
Numerous applications include transmutation into gold.
APPENDIX 3 - RUSSIAN CONFERENCE AND SPONSORS
The 8th Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutations, RCCNT-8,
will be held at Dagomys near Sochi. from the 4 to 11 October, 2000.
The subjects will include ball lightning as well as cold fusion and
transmutation.
The full cost is $900 which includes hotel and meals etc.
The sponsoring organisations are;
Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Physical Society
Nuclear Society of Russia
Mendeleev Chemical Society of Russia
Moscow Lomonosow State University
Russian Peoples' Friendship State University
State Technical University, MADI.
APPENDIX 4. HOW WILL TRUE BELIEVERS RESPOND TO THIS STATUS REPORT?
Some will say it is biassed, part of the Establishment attack on cold
fusion. But since I am independent, this is not too serious. Some,
the spin doctors, e.g. Dr. Mallove, will scan the report carefully
searching for any error or fault that they can detect.
Thus the Concluding Talks will get particular attention as Mallove
can compare what is written with the video recording he made (and no
doubt will offer for sale at a fair price, as he has done previously).
Having detected a few faults, they will then declare it is ALL wrong,
typically using the phrase "this report is full of errors, for example,
.....", thus implying that the entire report can be safely ignored.
This report probably contains hundreds of facts and pieces of
information, but these will be ignored, and, in particular, there will
be no discussions of the inconsistent results such as some people using
hydrogen as a blank control for deuterium, while others claim cold
fusion with hydrogen - or the list of miracles needed for cold fusion.
These commennts will then be distributed by the spin doctors, to their
supporter, sponsors, and potential infestor.
Will some lawyer send a cease and desist letter in the Triggs style?
I do not know.
REFERENCES
1. New York Times, 26 April 1991.
2. Nature, 16 March 2000.
3. S. Focardi, R. Habel, and F. Piantelli, Il Nuovo Cim.,
1897(1994)163-167.
3a. E. Cerron-Zeballos et al., Il Nuovo Cim. 109(1996)1654-1654.
4. Botta et al. Nuovo Cimento 105A(1992)1663.
5. T. Bressani et al., NC 104A(1991)1413.
6. D.R.O. Morrison, Fourth Intl. Conf. on Cold Fusion, Trans. of
Fusion Technology, 26, No. 4T (1994) 48-55.
7. J. Schwinger, First Annual Conf. on Cold Fusion, Natl. Cold Fusion
Inst., Salt Lake City, 1989, p 130.ΚΚ
8. F.E. Cecil and G.M. Hale, 2nd Annual Conference on Cold Fusion,
"The Science of Cold Fusion", Eds. T. Bressani, E. Del Giudice, and
G. Preparata, Soc. It. di Fisica, Bologna, (1991) p. 271-275.
9. Science, 262(1993)509.
10. Y. Fukai, 3rd Intl. Conf. on Cold Fusion, "Frontiers of Cold
Fusion",
Ed. H. Igekami, Univ. Acad. Press, Tokyo, (1993) p.225.
11. M. Rabinowitz, Y.E. Kim, V.A. Chechin, and V.A. Tsarev, Trans. of
Fusion Technology, 26(1994)3-12, and ICCF-4, pages 3 to 13(1993).
12. E. Del Giudice and G. Preparata, Nature 381(1996)729.
13. D.R.O. Morrison, Nature 382(1996)572.
14. Deseret News, Salt Lake City, 8 July 1989.
(C) Douglas R.O. Morrison
Address for Correspondence:
Dr. Douglas R.O. Morrison
CERN
CH-1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland
Tel 41 22 767 35 32
Fax 41 22 767 90 75
Email; douglas.morri...@cern.ch
NOTE: this paper has no connection with CERN.
From vortex-l-requ...@eskimo.com Mon Jul 17 13:18:06 2000
Received: (from smartlst@localhost)
by mx1.eskimo.com (8.9.1a/8.8.8) id NAA06809;
Mon, 17 Jul 2000 13:10:51 -0700
From: Edmund Storms
Organization: Energy K System
To: vorte...@eskimo.com, "Morrison, Douglas" ,
"Mallove\", \"E.F." ,
"Rothwell, Jed" ,
"Larsen, Lewis" <73763...@compuserve.com>,
"(IDS), Bass, Robert W"
Subject: Debate
Dear Douglas,
I would like to suggest an approach which might help clarify our
different opinions about cold fusion. Your review of ICCF-8 and my
comments about your review, I suggest, would make a good starting
point for a debate between us about the subject. If you agree, this
exchange could be published on the internet as part of Vortex-l and/or
sci.physics.fusion. In addition, this will give other people a chance
to raise issues we might have missed. To start the ball rolling, I
have extracted the comments you made about my comments from your
longer reply, to which I will reply. If you think this is a worth-
while project, I would invite you to respond in kind.
Best regards,
Ed Storms
From Douglas Morrison:
I would like to thank Ed for the serious tone of his letter - so
different from some other communications. On the other hand, was
surprised by some of his phrases which seemed out of character, such
as "you distort the facts and give a completely false impression",
"you completely ignored", "you should at least represent the
controversy honestly". Well, I will try and respond to his points
paragraph by paragraph:
From Ed Storms:
I will avoid such comments in the future because I realize you do not
believe you are distorting facts, any more than I believe I'm doing
such a thing. I will simply state the facts and allow the readers to
come to their own conclusions.
From Douglas Morrison:
¶ 1 and 2 - no comment - expressions of opinion.
¶ 3. You asked where is the "Overwhelming evidence" against cold fusion?
For this see the paper "Review of Cold Fusion" which I presented at the
ICCF-3 conference in Nagoya - strangely enough it seems not to have
been published in the proceedings despite being an invited paper - will
send a copy if desired. As Dieter Britz has shown, most cold fusion
papers were published before 1993 and are therefore in my summary.
There it is shown that for every subject (excess heat, neutrons,
tritium, 4He, 3He, Gammas, protons) there are more null papers than
positive papers. Further, and which is very damning, the quality papers
almost all show null effects. The fact that cold fusion is in
contradiction with a vast body of research, is expressed by saying that
from this research work, theories have been developed which are in
agreement with the experimental results. Thus when it is written that
cold fusion is in disagreement with theory, this basically means that
it is in disagreement with the overwhelming experimental evidence on
which the theory is justified.
From Ed Storms:
While it is true, many papers as well as much unpublished work show
null effects, this does not provide "overwhelming evidence" as you
claim. Early in the field's history, much was not understood about
conditions needed to make the effect work. Also, most of the work was
based on the original method proposed by P-F, a method which has been
found to resist reproduction. As understanding developed, methods
using finely divided palladium in ambient D2 gas, gas discharge
techniques, and proton conductors have been more easily duplicated.
In addition, in spite of the known difficulties inherent in the P-F
method, positive results continue to be reported.
The second point you raise goes to quality of work. This issue is
very subjective and is difficult to quantify in a short answer. I
admit, much early work was either poorly done or showed obvious
limitations, not all of which would be fatal. On the other hand,
work at SRI (Stanford Research International) under the direction of
Dr. McKubre employed very high quality calorimetry. This work showed
anomalous energy in 19 samples, they showed the same patterns of
behavior found in other equally good studies, and they revealed some
of the requirements need to make the effect work. Surely, this study
along with ones of the same high quality done in recent times should
have some impact on the issue, and not be ignored in favor of poor
work done in the distant past.
The third point involves theory. Here, the important issue is being
ignored. The present theory of fusion is based on studies using high
energy plasma or high energy ion bombardment. The theory applies very
well to these conditions. However, cold fusion involves low energy and
a solid environment of regularly spaced atoms, i.e. a lattice. To
equate these two conditions is like trying to equate air and a rock.
I realize that some scientists argue that the same type of reactions
should result from, and the same rules should apply to both
environments. However, this assertion is a matter of debate, not an
absolute requirement of nature. As such, it can not be used as a basis
for rejecting cold fusion unless the assertion is proven to be true.
Competent theoreticians on both sides of the issue have made very good
arguments for their respective views. We need to be patient and wait
to see which side prevails.
From Douglas Morrison:
¶ 4. Sorry for my mistake in misquoting you. I appreciate you making
the point that theories should take into account metals other than
palladium.
From Ed Strong:
This is an important point on which I would like to elaborate further.
Because of the field's history, palladium has been given an extreme
amount of attention. Early in the history, skeptics pointed out that
palladium does not have the basic properties required to produce the
effect. The atoms are too far apart, the electron structure is not
sufficiently unique, and the claimed concentration of deuterium was
too low to produce anomalous interaction. We now know that beta-PdD
is not the active material. Instead, another phase having a very
high deuterium content and having unknown electron and atom structures
is the active material. We also know that many other metals, most of
which do not absorb significant deuterium, are claimed to produce
anomalous energy. Clearly, the conditions in which the anomalous
effects occur are not understood and may, when they are understood,
provide the mechanism demanded by skeptics. Again, we will just have
to be patient.
From Douglas Morrison:
¶ 5. Harwell - "subsequent work revealed the presence of overlooked
excess energy". This is a completely misleading statement. What I
wrote was "Harwell did 127 varieties of experiment, and searched for
excess heat, neutrons, gammas and tritons, but did not find any
significant signal in any of them". Please note the phrase "significant
signal".
From Ed Storms:
Point taken. However, even P-F never claimed a significant signal by
your definition.
From Douglas Morrison:
Remember what happened; Before the press conference of 23 March 1989,
Fleischmann talked to his friend David Williams, an electrochemist,
and told him of a simple experiment that would verify his Utah work.
Harwell assembled a multi-disciplinary team which spent half a million
pounds on this "simple experiment". They tried to repeat Fleischmann
and Pons work and could not get the same results - despite having
Fleischmann's help!
From Ed Storms:
Of the many mistakes made by P-F, the worst was claiming the method was
"simple" and could be easily reproduced.
As for Fleischmann's help, according to Fleischmann, Williams refused
to accept the help, deciding instead to attempt a completely
independent replication. If this approach had been successful, the
work would have provided a more convincing proof than if Fleischmann
had been involved. Unfortunately, they made some serious mistakes by
ignoring Fleischmann's advice.
From Douglas Morrison:
Also there is the problem of analyzing these different results. For
example, should they use Newton's Law of Cooling as Fleischmann and
Pons did at that time with a T to the power one term, or should they
guess that they should switch, as F&P did later, to using Stefan's Law
with a T to the power four term? Strangely enough, this did not seem
to worry Fleischmann and Pons!
From Ed Storms:
If absolute calorimetry were being used, this issue would have been
important. However, P-F used relative calorimeter based on a heater
calibration and based on a result assumed to be null, measured during
the long wait for anomalous heat. All that is required for their
method to succeed is stability. This is why P-F were not worried.
They would see a null signal for weeks, with periodic calibrations
using the heater to make sure the calorimeter was stable. If they
were lucky, the signal would rise above the null value.
Again, the heater calibration was used to determine whether this
increase was real or not. Use of T to the first power (Newton) or T
to the 4th power (Stefan) would only influence the amount of anomalous
heat claimed, not the existence thereof. Unfortunately, the
description provided by P-F is very difficult to understand. As a
result, what they did in the real world was not properly understood.
From Douglas Morrison:
I wrote "When they used the best technology, they found no excess heat".
Now "best technology" is not the Fleischmann and Pons technique. Hope
you agree that when they used best technology (the null method), they
found no excess heat? Would it be fair to ask you why did you"completely
ignore", in your phrase, the best technology results of Harwell?
From Ed Storms:
Attributing failure to see anomalous energy only to the method used is
not appropriate in this field because other variables are equally
important. The sample is very important in producing the effect because
potentially active samples are so rare. As I summarized in my review in
Infinite Energy Vol. 6, Issue 31 page 10, only a small fraction of
samples from certain batches have been found to be active. Unless an
active sample is transferred from one calorimeter to another, it is not
possible to reach any conclusion about the role of the calorimeter.
From Douglas Morrison:
Now some desperate people looked at the data using not the best
technology, and claimed that they had found excess heat - which David
Williams et al. deny - they say that there were minor statistical
fluctuations but when all the results were combined, there was no
significant signal. And what I wrote on page 16 was "did not find any
significant signal".
I am sorry that you have adopted the position of certain people who
search for the slightest fluctuation and claim that this particular
run showed excess heat while neglecting all the other runs which show
that there is no significant signal. Further, and what is worse, they
neglect the very careful work done with one of the world's best
calorimeters where they have three temperature controlled water baths
round the object being studied - this is a super-Wheatstone bridge
technique. The major point is, that it is much better to do a good
experiment to show that outside (room) temperature effects are not
important by eliminating them, rather than doing a poor experiment
where one has to do doubtful calculations to try to prove that heat
exchange with the environment is not important or is adequately
corrected for....
From Ed Storms:
On the other hand, McKubre used a water bath stable to ±0.003° and
calorimeters stable to <0.05 watts in which he detected heat up to two
watts on one occasion, and heat significantly above the detection limit
on 19 occasions, yet you ignore this work. As you have suggested, I
have included in my reviews the fact that the effect is difficult to
produce no matter what kind of calorimeter is used, good or bad. In
contrast, I also include in my reviews the fact that many people have
produced the effect and each has seen the same pattern of behavior,
i.e. a relationship to applied current, a relationship to the D/Pd
ratio, and a relationship to the properties of the palladium used.
These patterns can not be produced by chance or error alone. Why do
you not include and evaluate these observations in your reviews?
From Douglas Morrison:
The Harwell series of experiments were magnificent and it is pretty
mean to look for a fluctuation and to try and ignore the totality of
their results on neutrons, tritium. gammas and tritons, apart from
excess heat with what was probably the world's best calorimeter.
From Ed Storms:
Everyone, believer and skeptic alike, admits that neutron emission is
very rare and at a very low level, much below the detection limit of
Harwell. Tritium is produced only very rarely and under conditions
different from those that produce heat. Apparently, microwhiskers of
metal plated on the cathode surface are required, a bit of information
not known at the time of the Harwell study. Gamma emission is absent
even when helium is being produced, much to the disappointment of
skeptics. On the other hand , tritons and alpha emission have been
detected when the work is done under conditions which permit their
detection. Failure of Harwell to see these other anomalous effects is
not the issue at the present time.
From Douglas Morrison:
P5A. Similar comment about the NHE lab experiments in Japan. But here
we can make a more precise statement - which in fact is in my report
but I see it needs expanding to make it clear to all.
I wrote two paragraphs about Miles's visit to NHE lab. He and
Fleischmann claimed to find exceptional excess heat peaks. But they
were all very small (much smaller than the Fleischmann and Pons claims
incidentally). This was answered by the NHE people at ICCF-7 when they
said that there were fluctuations but these fluctuations were always
within a few standard deviations and therefore did not represent
significant signals of excess heat. In my report, I quoted that Miles
claimed errors of +/- 20 mW while NHE people said the errors were ten
times bigger, +/- 200 mW.
From Ed Storms:
It is easy to say errors are 20 mW or 200 mW, but it is much more
difficult to prove these assertions. Miles went to some trouble in
his paper to justify his claim of 20 mW. The NHE people simply stated
their value as a belief. Yet, you emphasize the 200 mW value. Why?
From Douglas Morrison:
Now the General Electric group who did a thorough analysis of the
Fleischmann and Pons work, concluded that F&P's calculated errors were
far too small (the response of F&P did not answer the points made by
the GE group of Wilson et al.).
From Ed Storms:
The GE group came to the conclusion that the error claimed by P-F was
too small, but it was not large enough to cause them to reject all of
the P-F claims. On the other hand, their failure to reproduce the
effect caused them to reject the P-F claims, not the error analysis.
Hansen also evaluated the P-F work and also came to the conclusion
that the errors were well below the claimed anomalous energy. (See
Storms, "Review of the Cold Fusion Effect", J. Sci. Exploration, 10
(1996) 185 for more details). Three published and many unpublished
evaluations of the P-F errors have come to the conclusion that errors
in calorimetry did not produce the claimed anomalous results. Perhaps
you might want to examine the literature in this area in more detail.
From Douglas Morrison:
However this question may be settled another way. It is universally
agreed that the excess heat claimed is not reproducible - even by True
Believers. Then for a True Believer, the result of a series of runs
should be a combination of two sets of results - firstly, a Gaussian
distribution of random fluctuations with a certain standard deviation,
and secondly, some runs where excess heat occurs and this would have a
different distribution with a significantly higher average value. So,
combining these two sets of runs, one would expect a messy distribution
of excess heat values. But the actual results found as I wrote, "the
distribution of fluctuations gave a perfect Gaussian distribution with
three standard deviation limits of +/- 2.3% with no indication of
excess heat occurring spasmodically". I hope this is clearer to all
now.
From Ed Storms:
This approach is valid when a process is being influenced by random
variables, and it is suggested here because skeptics believe the
anomalous effects are caused by random error in the calorimetry.
However, all of the work shows that the effect is not random. It
depends on the nature of the palladium, i.e. it being crack-free, and
on the particular batch used. As Miles published, and other people
have experienced, once a piece of palladium becomes active, it stays
active and can be made to produce anomalous energy at will. Miles
took an active piece which made anomalous energy at China Lake in the
US and showed the same effect at NHE in Japan. A dead piece was dead
at both places while using the same calorimeter.
From Douglas Morrison:
¶ 6. I am sorry that in one place I missed out Russia as an important
collaborator. However, I did mention them extensively elsewhere and
indeed Appendix 3 is devoted to them. Incidentally, I had lunch today
with the Director of a major Russian Laboratory who is an excellent
physicist, and he was very surprised to hear that someone in his lab
was publicly involved in cold fusion.
From Ed Storms:
I hope you did not blow someone's cover.
From Douglas Morrison:
¶ A. Do not understand the comment about India - I was only talking
about countries where experiments were being done now. I was not making
a list of countries which have stopped such as Spain, which could not
find neutrons after I visited the group.
From Ed Storms:
Point taken.
From Douglas Morrison:
¶ 7. I do not think that the balance of publications on the reliability
of the Fleischmann and Pons methods, is in favour of them.