Cold Fusion?

Factual Questions
21

No. Zero-point energy as I understand it consists of extracting energy from the quantum “noise” of virtual particles. Empty space is constantly foaming with particle-antiparticle pairs that come into being for short times and then disappear. This can be demonstrated in experiments, specifically the Casimir effect. Good explanation there of zero-point energy. What’s not clear, however, is how to extract energy from this in a practical way. However, we’re pretty sure it (or something like it) does happen, see Hawking Radiation, where a black hole radiates “zero-point energy”. Or something else like zero-point energy but described by hideously complicated math.

Another big area of crackpot/genius activity (are they crackpots? Are they geniuses?) is “hydrinos”, which involves taking Hydrogen at its ground state (supposedly the lowest energy state of the hydrogen atom) and inducing it to go to a lower energy state.

Neither of these is cold fusion. The “something strange” that is going on in experiments which attempt (and fail) to replicate cold fusion could conceivably be something bizarre like hydrino formation, if one is to accept for the sake of discussion that hydrinos can be created.

I personally am of the opinion that hydrinos and trying to extract zero-point energy is in “crackpot” territory, but I’m done fighting crackpots.

22

It says hundreds of verified duplications of the experiments Here This is by an MIT scientist Dr. Eugene Mallove

Quote

According to Mallove “hundreds” of others have also confirmed it. "There are several thousand papers published in the peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed literature.

This same Dr. Mallove resigned from his job at MIT to protest the treatment of others who apparently had some success in duplicating those very same experiments.

I have no axe to grind either way…I was just curious at the vehemence with which physicists derided Pons and Fleischmann.

Others have wondered the same thing about those same reactions Here

Quote

One prominent physicist at Cal Tech derided Pons and Fleischmann with invectives I had never before witnessed at a scientific gathering. I later likened it, in my nationally broadcast report, to the kind of trash talk one hears in the build up to a heavyweight title fight.

Quote

One by one, influential scientists, most of them physicists on the federal dole, denounced cold fusion as being either scientific idiocy or outright fraud.

But there were others who seemed to look at this as just another experiment not as something that challenged their core beliefs…and incidently lined their pockets with federal money.

Quote

But there were other voices. There was, for example, the soft-spoken John Bockris. At the time, Bockris was a distinguished professor of physical chemistry at Texas A&M University, and a cofounder of the International Society for Electrochemistry. His name was revered in the field.

By late 1989, Bockris had replicated the Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion work. So had another scientist I spoke with, professor Bob Huggins, at Stanford University. “The reaction is real,” Huggins told me at the time. “It won’t go away.”

It seems according to that article that many influential scientists pressured respected journals from publishing the results that seem to indicate there is something no one understands happening.

Quote from here

Unfortunately, rejection of the phenomenon has not been based solely on logic and scientific arguments, methods even skeptics demand be applied to their own work. Instead, arbitrary restraints have been placed on publication and funding. As a result, many legitimate questions remain unanswered and technological application has been delayed. Although many good reasons can be visualized to reject some claims, a wise student of science always keeps an open mind because great changes happen regularly, are always at odds with current theory, and are never foreseen. Unfortunately, the level of arrogance demonstrated toward “cold fusion” shows how far some scientists have fallen from the accepted standards of their profession. We all need a reminder once in a while that our personal view of nature is not always correct. “Cold fusion” is a recent wakeup call. Others are just over the horizon.

As I said it would be cool if cold fusion turns out to be for real but I don’t think we have enough information to make that determination right now. And if those in the establishment who are spending megabucks from the government going in a different direction(with virtually nothing to show for it) have their way we never will have the definitive proof we need…one way or the other.

BTW Thanks for suggesting I cite…this was my first time doing this and it was interesting. It is hard to find information without bias either way. Since most scientists dismiss this out of hand I had to resort to those who might be leaning a little in the other direction. It just rankles me when people don’t have an open mind especially those in the scientific community who really given their profession ought to rely the most on facts and build their theories from those facts not the other way around.

It seems like SOMETHING is happening in those experiments whether what they called cold fusion is what it is I have no idea…but I’d like to know.

23

The first part of the sentence is correct, the second not. Pons and Fleischmann certainly saw temperature rises and such rises are indeed trivial to replicate. The problem is that these temperature rises are in a system they were pumping energy into. Thus the issue all along was whether the rises are too great to be accounted for by conventional electrochemistry. That’s what’s never been convincingly demonstated. Only when that’s established can one start to talk about “extra energy”.
Actually, even this is a slightly misleading summary of the controversy. The startling aspect of the original paper was the claim to have measured a neutron flux. Stuff energy production, that was a gripping claim in and of itself. And unambiguously nuclear. That was what mainly interested everybody at the time. However, this claim dissolved within weeks. After that, it was merely a horribly messy experiment in electrochemistry.

I read a lot of Mallove’s writing on the subject in the early nineties (the physics library had a subscription to his privately published newsletter and it was an amusing distraction from the latest Phys.Rev.Lett., etc.). I’m sure he’s sincere, but by trade he effectively a publicist. And for over a decade he’s been publicising unverifiable claims and each time this latest experiment is The One and there’ll be cold fusion powered cars within the year.

Not really the same process at all. It’s been a fairly uncontroversial suggestion for some time that the temperatures attainable in sonoluminescence are possibly great enough for fusion to occur. I don’t know much about the concensus on the subject these days, but proving such an effect wouldn’t necessarily be particularly startling. It wouldn’t tell us anything about the Pons and Fleischmann “effect”.
Actually some people, notably Julian Schwinger, did suggest that it might provide an explanation. But we’re talking about two very different systems.
Frankly, the entire article reads like axe-grinding.

Like everybody else, Bockris saw a temperature rise. More unusually, he saw a few neutrons, though far less than Pons and Fleischmann had. But the most important aspect was new: he claimed to be detecting the production of tritium. There were never any convincing replications of this either. The science writer Gary Taubes subsequently made a circumstantial case that someone, possibly a grad student, was spiking the experiment with tritium. (The argument as summarised in his Science articles seemed plausible, but I haven’t read Bad Science, his book length version.)

What little “vehemence” there was - and it’s easy to exaggerate after all this time - was an expression of disappointment that a high-profile, interesting claim so quickly turned out to be so thin. Granted, my initial reaction was probably fairly typical: on being told of the first news reports, my instant response was “that’s impossible.” But I think the response over the next few days at least was broadly fascination with the possiblility that there might be something in it. And many of us learnt a lot of interesting stuff in the weeks that followed.
The other utterly memorable moment was finally seeing the Nature papers. A fellow physicist handed me a photocopy of them and waited while I skim read them. When I finished, I asked “That’s it ?” and he replied “That’s it.” This wasn’t dismissal: it was just the puzzled realisation that, while still very interesting, the papers themselves didn’t justify the media firestorm that was underway. Seeing the papers, it was fairly obvious that the neutron results weren’t likely to be replicated. Jones has a marginal effect, while Pons and Fleischmann were out of their depth in the area. As I say, to physicists at least, that turned it into a messy, rather tedious, debate about electrochemistry.
Any “vehemence” now is entirely impatience that there are still people out there beating a long-dead horse.

Bias is the wrong way to think about this. Cold fusion as proposed by Pons and Fleischmann was one of the most thoroughly examined scientific issues of its day. The original claims quickly evaporated, despite people being interested in the possibilities. Sure, there are still cold fusion proponents out there publishing stuff on the web and elsewhere. It’s not that physicists dismiss this activity out of hand, it’s that it’s not really part of physics at all. They don’t try to publish in Physics Letters and they don’t go to nuclear physics conferences. It’s all websites and newsletters. To the extent that the proponents are either talking to themselves or trying to address a public over the heads of scientists, for the most part, the latter really couldn’t care. Nobody is trying to stop them.(*)
The physics literature on cold fusion pretty much stopped dead with Huizenga’s Cold Fusion (Oxford) back in 1993. If you really think this is a story with two sides, that’s the last word by a physicist. At a slightly more popular level, you might try Too Hot to Handle (W.H.Allen, 1991; Princeton, 1991) by Frank Close. I’d be surprised if either is still in print.

(*) There are a few people, like Robert Park, who feel a duty to the public by pointing out that the proponents are talking nonsense. But that’s a matter of the public understanding of science, not a debate within science.

24

If this wasn’t as contentious as you can then why…

That quote is from one of the links I provided in my earlier post.

If there really is nothing there I’d think any opposing scientist would be happy to have it on record to prove once and for all that it was really a waste of time.

It is things like that that that concern me…that article says it was remarkable that it got published at all and I think perhaps there could very well be other articles that never got published when put under such pressure not to publish them.

Science magazine is not some fly-by-night publication…if THEY can be put under this pressure then what about other magazines? And could it be the reason all we mostly hear about is the failures that the successes are squelched before we ever get to see them in print?

25

In a fuller context, the actions of the Oak Ridge management look a little less like squelching. Taleyarkhan et al wrote up their results and submitted them to Science. There was then a 3 month period during which Science went through its reviewing process. At the end of this, the paper was accepted in this form (a pdf that takes some time to download). However, by then the Oak Ridge management had become aware of the paper (it’s unclear whether this happened before or after submission). Clearly mindful that any media coverage was likely to go for a “cold fusion” angle and so, if the paper was wrong, it was likely to particularly damage the reputation of the lab, they obviously decided to double check. They asked two members, Shapira and Saltmarsh, to conduct an internal review of the experiment. This is unusual, but given the possible media interest, in my opinion entirely reasonable. As part of this review, Shapira and Saltmarsh conducted a varient on the original experiment. Their report (another pdf) concluded that this experiment contradicted Taleyarkhan’s. The latter responded with a rebuttal (again, a pdf). This is a national lab manager’s nightmare: someone in the lab has submitted a high-profile paper to Science, but other employees disagree with it. What are your options ? The most politic is surely try to persuade Taleyarkhan to halt publication until the internal issue is resolved. Or at least until he convinces you he’s right. But your mechanism for convincing yourself was Shapira and Saltmarsh. And Taleyarkhan’s standing by his guns. The only other option is to say to Science “we think it may have problems, don’t publish it yet.” Which seems to be what they did. I haven’t read Donald Kennedy’s piece as editor of Science explaining his decision to publish (it doesn’t appear to be freely available online). Instinctively, I agree, on the grounds that Oak Ridge internal wranglings are not for him to decide on. On the other hand, Science (and Nature) is an odd case: it’s both a serious journal and a news magazine. After all, how often do you see Phys.Rev.Lett. on sale in newsagents - even though in some fields a paper there is far more impactful than one in Science ? He obviously wants the papers he’s publishing to be correct, but he also wants some of them to be controversial. From his point of view, carrying it in these circumstances is an affordable risk. (Clearly, if every paper in Science was like this, it wouldn’t have the status it has, but it does mean that there can be special cases.) He accepts it.
At this point, there’s a leak to Bob Park, who writes this article, which the source of the quote in the article you cited. While the conclusion is strongly worded, I think his basic point is fair: Kennedy’s decision was as much journalistic as anything else. Subsequent pieces by him are here and here. Some of the comments are a bit prissy, but that’s Park for you.
As an example of how the physics press covered the story, here’s how Physics World ran it.

Overall, it’s an unusual case, but I don’t think anybody acted unethically. And it doesn’t seem to be “remarkable” that the paper got published. Realistically, what pressure could Oak Ridge have applied ? The only leverage they had was what they used: “we think it may have problems.”

Having read the papers, I suppose I should make some more technical comments. Most of the argument is over details of experimental design and the last time I had to worry about that in a hands-on fashion was, well, back around Pons and Fleischmann. I therefore can’t really comment on that. On the data analysis side of things, everything revolves around coincidence detection. When the bubbles collapse, two things are alleged to happen. There’s a flash of light and neutrons are emitted. The first is entirely standard and indeed leads to the name sonoluminescence. The second is the heart of the claim. Both experiments have two detectors, each of which looks for one of these signals. You’re interested in those cases where both detectors fire at roughly the same time: where bubble collapse, as signalled by the flash, is coincident with a neutron burst. As is entirely standard, you don’t have both detectors looking the whole time. One does, and then you only activate the other when the first sees something. Neither detector sees every event. Taleyarkhan’s response to the criticism is that Shapira and Saltmarsh trigger on the flash, while he triggers on the neutron burst. He claims that, since neutron bursts are more commonly seen than flashes, his is the correct procedure. To the bystander, this is, at least, a plausible counterargument, though one would want to wade through the statistics to be convinced. Through sheer laziness, I haven’t.

26

I’d like to thank you bonzer for taking the considerable time and energy to answer my questions on this topic.

I do have one last thing(hopefully…so say I and I bet you too).

Why has THIS topic garnered so much attention? There have been a millon and one additives to water to make a fuel or perpetual motion machines out there that barely raise a blip in the worldwide awareness.

Why does cold fusion…if there is nothing to it…still continue to get reputable scientists(there is alot of research being done on this still…in Japan especially) to continue to risk their reputations and careers on something other scientist ridicule as poppycock?

I would think a scientist with his years of training behind him and at risk his standing with his peers would be even more careful not to attempt to publish a paper saying cold fusion works unless they went over their results a hundred times or more just to make sure.

You see my problem? No scientist is going to say this or that additive to water makes his car run without gas but there are still many even today who are willing to say that whatever cold fusion is…something IS happening and needs to be investigated.

Why?

27

Tommy – Why cold fusion instead of water-to-gasoline additives, or mechanical perpetual motion machines? Because any idiot grease monkey knows how gasoline engines work, and can easily test a fuel additive, and show it doesn’t work. But cold fusion is very esoteric – which means not only are there relatively few people to prove it doesn’t work, but also it’s harder for lay people to follow the argument.

And then the fact that physicists make up an elite, esoteric order makes them an emotionally more fulfilling target for the cold fusioners. How much fun is it to say ‘every idiot grease-covered auto mechanic is wrong and I’m right’ , compared to saying ‘every hoity-toity Princeton PhD is wrong and I’m right’ ?

28

I can see that could be partially right however since the original experiments were made with relatively cheap apparatus…things most college labs have in stock mostly…it seems like most any lab could disprove it once and for all.

And yet there are scientists still who are running those experiments 14 years later who say sometimes it(whatever “it” is) works.

I am really curious as to why SOMETIMES the experiment apparently works…at least enough for people to risk their professional reputations and attempt to publish their results.

It seems to me anyway if there is nothing there the “cold fusion” experiments would NEVER work and yet according to many scientists it does.

Sure if it was only the original guys who made these claims and no one else found anything I could see it dying the death it would deserve and no one would ever hear about it anymore.

There are many scientists who HAVE duplicated the original experiments and succeeded.(According to them anyway) And as I said earlier…the research still goes on…in Japan at least.

29

This is a very hairy-edge experiment. There’s a lot of “noise” in the form of background radiation, natural concentrations of deuterium and tritium, and so forth, on top of which some experimenters claim to see a very small “signal.” The signal could be real, or it could be a random fluctuation in the noise.

This is the case in a great many cutting-edge experiments. And this is why a good physicist is very skeptical of his own results and takes great care not to overstate his findings.

The way physics is supposed to work is that physicists share their interesting (if hairy) results with the community, and other physicists try to reproduce it, focusing their collective brainpower on the problem in order to refine the techniques involved. If they’re measuring something real, the many physicists trying many different experiments should be able to find some ways to reduce the noise and boost the signal, demonstrating that there’s something there.

In this case,those still pursuing cold fusion aren’t making any serious progress. They continue to get the same hairy, inconclusive results, which, in most circumstances, would be taken to mean that there’s nothing going on there.

Unfortunately, it seems to me (an astronomer, not a physicist–so take my opinions with a grain of salt) the cold fusion enthusiasts have cut themselves off from the mainstream scientific community and have formed a pathological little community that’s afraid to criticize itself, so when they keep getting the same lousy results, and instead of saying, “Well, guys, we’ve been trying an awfully long time, and, sadly, looks like there’s nothing here,” they cling to any seemly-positive result to keep the dream alive.

30

No need - some of us just find physics interesting.

Ah, the Japanese. It’s always the Japanese who’re going to have invented that cold fusion powered car in time for next year’s Paris Motor Show. Not having seen much from cold fusion proponents in a while, I was sufficiently curious to see who was speaking at the 2002 conference in Beijing to Google what there was on the web about it. Not a great deal, but I did come across this article, which includes this:

Doesn’t sound like a particularly thriving field, even in Japan.
More generally, the question of why such sub-cultures survive is a very interesting one, largely because I don’t think there’s a simple answer. For some participants, it’s merely the very human failing of being unable to admit they were wrong. That happens all the time, in all fields: the guy who stubbornly continues to plow his own furrow long after everybody else has moved on. But others may have effectively been outside the mainstream to begin with. In the Japanese cases, pursuing such research may have been an attractive option in 1989. By way of analogy, many scientists work in the defence industry without really agreeing with its aims, but rationalise that it’s a job and an opportunity to use their skills. More peripherally, some people (usually amateurs) are attracted to contrary positions.
The initial media attention seems to make a big difference. It’s surely no coincidence that the other obvious such sub-culture to emerge in the last twenty years resulted from the only bigger scientific news story of the eighties: the HIV doesn’t cause AIDS crowd. On the other hand, the polywater fuss in the seventies - often seen as a possible parallel to cold fusion - didn’t. (I am, of course, setting myself up for someone to successfully Google for a pro-polywater website. You can probably even find a pro-phlogiston one.) Steady State vrs. Big Bang got a lot of media attention in the sixties and several of the eminent on the Steady State side still don’t accept the Big Bang, but they don’t have any organised followers. Politics may make a difference. In one case, proponents can blaim a “pro-HIV establishment” for covering up the evidence to hide an unprofitable cure, in the other a “hot fusion establishment” for suppressing research that will stop their funding.
The point is that you can have all the trappings without there really being anything to debate.

31

All the above taken into account, it does need to be said that there can be a nasty streak of adhrence to current doctrine for its own sake in the sciences. Pruisiner, for example was castigated quite nastily for years before the prion’s existence and its function in one type of amyloid brain disease was confirmed and as late as 1994 prions were being dismissed in some medical pathology textbooks.

In a way, the vehemence with which genuine discoveries like prions are attacked only adds fuel to the fire of crackpots and quacks.

32

As for “cold fusion” cites, this website has a large collection of research papers:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/
SF Chronicle had some articles:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/technology/archive/1999/05/17/coldfusion2.dtl&type=printable
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/technology/archive/1999/03/15/coldfusion.dtl

http://home.netcom.com/~storms2/index.html
*In stark contrast to the impression given by the popular press and by a recent book (Voodoo Science) [click on for a review], the phenomenon called “cold fusion” has been duplicated hundreds of times in laboratories throughout the world and the subject has been discussed in over 3000 papers, many in peer reviewed journals. The reviews and articles listed below give a partial insight into what is known and the direction taken by experimenters and theoreticians over the years. This work is now being done in at least six countries. Unfortunately, because of the rejecting attitude of conventional scientists, much of this information is not available in scientific journals. However, a serious student can obtain most of this information from myself or from Cold Fusion Technology, Inc. The readers can decide for themselves how much truth is in the often heard statement that “cold fusion” is nonsense and has not been duplicated.

One might reasonably wonder why, in view of the rising price of energy and global warming, a potential source of cheap, inexhaustible and nonpolluting energy would be so completely ignored by governments and scientists alike. Anyone wishing to learn about the sorry treatment this phenomenon has received at the hands of academia and government should read the several articles about the subject in Accountability in Research, Vol. 8, 2000.

For those of you who do not have time or interest to read the following papers, I have prepared a Summary-In-A-Nutshell.
*

33

I too had heard of the prion discovery but I had also heard of the scientist(sorry forgot his name) who said there was a bacteria that lived in the stomache and was a major cause of ulcers. And you could cure most ulcers with antibiotics.

This scientist was rode out of town on a rail(Much like Pons and Fleischmann) and it wasn’t until much later he was proven correct.

There were alot of red faces in the scientific community after that example.

This seems to be the usual thing whenever there is some groundbreaking advance in most any area of science. The problem is…when the next new thing is wrong the reaction of the scientific establishment is the same as if it is right. That makes it very hard for people like me to know whether whatever it is is actually real or not.

I was just curious if anyone had finally come up with a definitive experiment to prove or disprove “cold fusion” after all this time.

34

A few months ago the U S Navy reproduced the cold fusion experiment and took some very nice pictures of the process.
More recently, the U S Dept. of Energy has agreed to re-investigate cold fusion.
This past weekend Dr. Eugene F. Mallove (a leading cold fusion proponent) is violently murdered in Norwich, Connecticut.