Cold Fusion Is Hot Again

60 Minutes: Once Considered Junk Science, Cold Fusion Gets A Second Look By Researchers

(CBS)  60 Minutes wondered what Richard Garwin would think of the Defense Department's appraisal.

"The experiments leave 'no doubt that anomalous, excess heat is produced,'" Pelley told Garwin.

"Well, that’s a statement," Garwin said. "I am living proof that there's doubt. Now, they can say that there, that excess heat is being produced. But they can't say there's no doubt. All they can say is they don't doubt. But I doubt."

"If you ask me, is this going to have any impact on our energy policy, it’s impossible to say, because we don't fundamentally understand the process yet. But to say, because we don't fundamentally understand the process and that's why we're not going to study it, is like saying, 'I'm too sick to go to the doctor,'" Duncan argued.

"You know, I wonder how you feel about going public endorsing this phenomenon on 60 Minutes when maybe 90 percent, I'm guessing, of your colleagues think that it's crackpot science?" Pelley asked.

"I certainly was among those 90 percent before I looked at the data. And I can see where they’ll be very concerned when they see this piece. All I have to say is: read the published results. Talk to the scientists. Never let anyone do your thinking for you," he replied.

There was one more scientist 60 Minutes wanted to find, a man who left America in disgrace and retired with his wife to the English countryside.

Martin Fleischmann, the man who announced cold fusion to the world, is hindered by years, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and maybe a little bitterness. At home, he pulled out an improved version of his experiment, something that he was working on when he was hounded out of science.

"When you hold that in your hand and you think back on what's happened these last 20 years, what do you think?" Pelley asked.

"A wasted opportunity," Fleischmann replied.

He thinks this way because it was discredited at the time.

He told Pelley he has two regrets: calling the nuclear effect "fusion," a name coined by a competitor, and having that news conference, something he says the University of Utah wanted.

"Now that you know that your experiments have been replicated and, and improved upon in labs all over the world I wonder, do you see a day when homes will be powered by these cells, when cars will be powered by these cells?" Pelley asked.

"I think so. It wouldn’t take very long to implement this," Fleischman replied, laughing. "You make me feel that I should take a part in this?"

"I'm getting you interested again?" Pelley asked.

"Yes," Fleischmann replied, laughing. "The potential is exciting."

[samuelblack]

>One of the misconceptions that seems to be evident is that only the government would be involved in attempting to suppress cold fusion research; otherwise who would oppose it. The answer: Hot fusion scientists at MIT.

If you are so gullible to believe that a few hot fusion scientists at MIT have enough power to suppress a revolutionary energy source that would provide unprecedented benefit to the US and its government, then it is no surprise that you are also gullible enough to believe cold fusion is real.

>Lobbyists for the 'hot fusion' community took the following steps:
>1. A committee visited several laboratories where low-energy nuclear reactios were achieved and declared them all invalid.

Big deal. What gives them a monopoly on declarations of validity? If CF were valid, where were the committees sent by non-hot-fusion scientists to declare the experiments valid? Funding agencies like the DOE go to great lengths to avoid reviews from scientists with conflicts of interest. Since they would stand to benefit immensely from the success of CF, they would surely seek unbiased reviewers, and there are plenty of them around.

>2. An agent was obtained at the Office of Patents and Trademarks to ensure that no cold fusion patents were approved

How do you ?obtain an agent?? How does a lobby group or an agent simply ensure that no patents on a particular subject are approved? Why didn?t the CF researchers ?obtain an agent? and ensure that no hot fusion patents are approved? You know that the money provided by the DOE for hot fusion research has to be accounted for, and paying lobbyists and bribing patent officers is not an acceptable line in the budget. The DOE after all, and the government it represents would benefit immensely from the success of CF. Maybe the patent office just decided not to grant patents for technology that doesn't work.

>(? It is possible to get patents in France, Italy, Israel, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have government-backed cold fusion programs.)

And isn?t it funny that CF progress in those countries is no better than in the US, which is to say, there isn?t any.

>3. All major U.S. technical journals were warned against printing any cold fusion articles.

Warned by hot fusion scientists? What possible weight could they put behind such a warning? That they would then withhold papers? Are you suggesting a scenario in which CF is valid, but journals won?t publish it for fear of losing hot fusion articles? Do you think they would be afraid to publish the most revolutionary, environmentally beneficial articles on energy in 50 years, and become the most cited energy journal on the planet, because they want to keep publishing luke-warm incremental progress on a so-far unsuccessful technology? Is that what you think?

>4. A fund of about $30,000 was provided to Random House to fund a book to destroy the credibility of cold fusion. This book was BAD SCIENCE, THE SHORT LIFE AND WEIRD TIMES OF COLD FUSION, a hatchet job by Gary Taubes.

Have you informed the DOE about this? Because, if it?s true, I?m pretty sure it represents an illegal use of their funds, and as a major beneficiary of successful CF research, I?m pretty sure they wouldn?t like it.

Anyway, if all it takes is 30k, why don?t the CF proponents get a book written to rebuild the credibility of CF? Oh, that?s right. They?ve tried. With several books in fact. I wonder why it?s not working. They seem to spend more time writing about the saga than doing more experiments, probably because they?ve realized that more experiments with the same ambiguous, marginal, irreproducible, and impractical results aren?t going to be any more convincing than what they?ve already got. (Perhaps less.)

>5. An 'official' from Washington, D.C. called all major universities and warned them, 'If you have so much as a graduate student working on cold fusion, you will get NO CONTRACTS OUT OF WASHINGTON!'

What?s an 'official' from Washington? And how do lobbyists for hot fusion scientists persuade such an 'official' to threaten universities not to do research on a subject that purports to provide unprecedented benefit to the US? Do you think these hot fusion scientists can use government money to bribe government officials to act against the government's own interest by prescribing university research? And if that kind of circularity works, how would a well-funded area of research ever get shut down? Like say, the integral fast reactor?

>6. Robert Park, a self-appointed 'spokesman' for the American Physical Society has been vigorously lambasting cold fusion and its supporters for over ten years.

Park is not a hot-fusion scientist. Anyway, why doesn't a CF advocate self-appoint himself as a 'spokesman' for the APS, and vigorously advocate CF and its supporters? Maybe Park is more effective because he is right.

[samuelblack]

>Senator John Kerry and Hazel O'Leary acitively shut down a competing technology to the hot fusion program at MIT (Just check Wikipedia under the integral fast reactor).

And yet, solar, wind, and geothermal research continue, and research into fission reactors is picking up again, if not quite as much into breeder reactors.

>Why? It allegedly led to "threats to non-proliferation". Big tobacco said that nicotine was non-addictive.

But the medical establishment disagreed, with virtual unanimity.

>Big coal told you that CO^2 didn't cause global warming.

But the climatology establishment disagrees, with virtual unanimity.

>Big physics (MIT) told you that the IFR was a threat to non-proliferation.

No. That would be the environmentalist movement, which doesn't like fission reactors of any kind, and particularly dislikes breeders. Jane Fonda had a little to do with that attitude. The physics establishment is largely supportive of fission reactors for energy, with or without breeding, but most I think would admit that the production of plutonium in breeders requires special precautions to avoid proliferation, or at least the perception of proliferation.

>The real reason is that if the IFR had been selected, the hot fusion program at MIT would have been superflous and MIT stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants. Apparently Senator Kerry shut down the program to protect his constituents at MIT...

This doesn't make sense. The funding for the IFR was also in the billions. Why wouldn't the constituents doing that research deserve equal protection? Or even more, if the program really was more viable, and therefore offered more benefit to the country. The truth is that the economics of both technologies are very much unknown, and until the technologies are more developed, no one knows which is more viable, so continuation of the IFR would not have been an immediate threat to hot fusion. In fact, to date, all breeder reactors have been very expensive, and some have been shut down (in France e.g.) because they are not competitive. As promising as breeder reactors may be, fusion, if it can be made to work economically, still has dramatic advantages in terms of fuel sources, and in the public perception of waste products and the dangers of catastrophic failures (meltdowns). And so it is very unlikely fusion research will stop for advances in fission research.

>Cold fusion and the IFR were both shut down by MIT who stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants if either program was successful

But surely MIT's reach is confined more or less to the US, and (this may come as a surprise to you) there is science beyond the borders of the US. And yet, in spite of considerable work on both fast breeders (esp. in France and Russia), and CF outside the US, work outside the US is also continuing unabated in plasma fusion research. In fact, the next big plasma fusion reactor (iter) is being built in France, the country that supported Pons & Fleischmann for a while, and that has the highest percentage of its energy produced by fission (78%), and that has done the most research into breeder reactors.

You would be much more successful arguing that big oil or big coal was shutting down CF and IFR research. Their reach is much more global, they have a lot more money, the money doesn't come from the government (a potential beneficiary of CF), and a lot more people would be affected. But it's too late now. If you change horses now, we'll all recognize you as a conspiracy theory in search of a conspirator.

>Does anyone believe that politics played no role in shutting down cold fusion research and the IFR in this country?

Certainly not in CF, for which funding has been grossly out of proportion to the results produced (although not from the DOE). Environmental politics has regrettably played a negative role in the shutting down of research into fast breeders. That is likely to change when (if) global warming becomes manifestly obvious from the rise in sea level. Hopefully it won't take that long.

[crackpotsloughter]

One of the misconceptions that seems to be evident is that only the government would be involved in attempting to suppress cold fusion research; otherwise who would oppose it. The answer: Hot fusion scientists at MIT. Consider the following website by Emerging Energy Marketing Firm, Inc. Prepared for Republican National Committee. Subject: The politics of New-Energy Technology.

"When low-energy nuclear fusion (dubbed 'cold fusion' by the media) was first announced, the 'hot fusion' community falsely assumed that this low-energy nuclear reaction was a threat to the continuation of $500 million (or more) per year from the DOE. Lobbyists for the 'hot fusion' community took the following steps:

1. A committee visited several laboratories where low-energy nuclear reactios were achieved and declared them all invalid.

2. An agent was obtained at the Office of Patents and Trademarks to ensure that no cold fusion patents were approved (I will note in passing that the worst that would have happened if hot fusion scientists had been right is that a few perpetual motion machines would have been patented. Since they are wrong, it may have cost American inventors billions of dollars in lost patent royalties. It is possible to get patents in France, Italy, Israel, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have government-backed cold fusion programs.)

3. All major U.S. technical journals were warned against printing any cold fusion articles. (All but FUSION TECHNOLOGY, the journal of the American Nuclear Society agreed not to publish).

4. A fund of about $30,000 was provided to Random House to fund a book to destroy the credibility of cold fusion. This book was BAD SCIENCE, THE SHORT LIFE AND WEIRD TIMES OF COLD FUSION, a hatchet job by Gary Taubes.

5. An 'official' from Washington, D.C. called all major universities and warned them, 'If you have so much as a graduate student working on cold fusion, you will get NO CONTRACTS OUT OF WASHINGTON!'

6. Robert Park, a self-appointed 'spokesman' for the American Physical Society has been vigorously lambasting cold fusion and its supporters for over ten years. PARK IS NOW BEING SUED." As far as the final comment, Park recently went on the record to proclaim that cold fusion is "science" just not important science.

Senator John Kerry and Hazel O'Leary acitively shut down a competing technology to the hot fusion program at MIT (Just check Wikipedia under the integral fast reactor). Why? It allegedly led to "threats to non-proliferation". Big tobacco said that nicotine was non-addictive. Big coal told you that CO^2 didn't cause global warming. Big physics (MIT) told you that the IFR was a threat to non-proliferation.

The real reason is that if the IFR had been selected, the hot fusion program at MIT would have been superflous and MIT stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants. Apparently Senator Kerry shut down the program to protect his constituents at MIT because no other Senators felt compelled to shut down the program, only Senator Kerry.

According to the experts Charles E. Till and George S. Stanford, the IFR promised clean, inexhaustible energy that was weapons incompatible and proliferation-resistant. It was safe, could burn up all special nuclear materials, including plutonium from decommissioned warheads, and the radioactive wastes from light-water reactors.

Cold fusion and the IFR were both shut down by MIT who stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants if either program was successtul (When Kerry and O'Leary shut down the IFR, it was three years from completion and completing the work would have cost no more than shutting it down (Stanford)).

Does anyone believe that politics played no role in shutting down cold fusion research and the IFR in this country?

[JedRothwell]

Samuelblack wrote:

"And this is especially so given that your claim about reproducibility is contradicted in the paper [by Miles] you cite to support it."

Please note that I cited McKubre, Mengoli, Arata or Iwamura for reproducibility. I said that "Miles et al. showed that repeatability is a function of the material." I did not say they claimed high reproducibility. They found the main source of irreproducibility: the materials. Reproducibility has increased a great deal since they wrote that paper.

As for the rest, I will let you have the last word again.

[samuelblack]

>>The only specific reference you supply to support your claim of repeatability is not refereed . . ."

>In my opinion, China Lake reports are better than most peer-reviewed papers.

As you are careful to point out below, your opinion means squat. And this is especially so given that your claim about reproducibility is contradicted in the paper you cite to support it.

>>"And in table 10, by 100% repeatability, you are presumably referring to several materials in which the effect was observed twice in 2 tries."

>Yes, 7 out of 8 tests for the NRL material, 2 out of 2 for the Johnson-Matthey Type A palladium supplied by Fleischmann and Pons.

But in spite of this, the authors of the paper conclude explicitly in several places that CF is not reproducible. You said "I know many experiments that fit this description [consistently repeatable]" and cited Miles (1996) to support it. The paper actually asks two questions in the Intro:

1. Is the apparent physical effect real? and
2. If so, can it be reproduced regularly?

In response to question 2, it answers

"... no. The lack of reproducibility has made this research exceedingly difficult and frustrating. The only consolation is that no other research group in the world has been able to solve the reproducibility problem. Given that the excess heat effect is real, this will never be a useful energy source until the reproducibility problem is solved."

Gee, that kind of sounds like what Gruber was saying. So the paper you cite actually supports Gruber's point, and contradicts yours.

> See also the statistical analysis of the helium results in this paper:

Now, you're just trying to divert attention from the question of reproducibility, which was the reason you cited the paper. No one disputes the fact that the CF researchers claim their results prove CF. The point of this discussion was that even the CF researchers admit that it's not reproducible.

>"This statistical treatment shows that the odds are approximately one in 750,000 that our complete set of heat and helium results could be this well correlated due to random experimental errors in our calorimetry and helium measurements.

This is based on unsupportable assumptions that errors would cause a 50/50 chance of excess heat and or excess He, and it is irrelevant if the artifacts that produce the errors are correlated (i.e. not random). The opposite of random errors is not fusion.

>>"I just flipped all the coins in my pocket twice, and the nickel came up heads both times."

>Let's see you get 9 out of 10,

If someone slipped 4 of 5 nickels into the mix with heads on both sides, that's what I'd see.

> or better yet, let's see you get 749,999 out of 750,000.

Now you're mixing up reproducibility with probability of a real effect. Even though the paper claims vanishing likelihood that the effect is not real, it admits that "Most experiments produced no evidence of any excess power. Overall, only 30% of our experiments yielded evidence for excess power."

>It takes several years to do this many experiments. You cannot expect better proof than 9 out of 10.

Why not? 10 out of 10 fission fuel rods produce heat. And they all produce the same heat to within small tolerances. And they did so less than a decade after fission was discovered.

Anyway, the authors don't claim 90%, they claim 30%. But even if you claim that for a particular material the reproducibility is 90% in this experiment, what happens when another lab follows the recipe? Will they get 90% too? And if so, then considering this was done in 1996, how is possible that a review of excess heat experiments in 2007 still only claims that 1/3 of the experiments are successful? And if a recipe for 90% reproducibility exists, how is it possible that it hasn't been made practical yet? So many questions. So few answers.

>>"You cannot be serious."

>This is not about me.

Yes it is. This is about you making false claims in this forum. This is about you and your claim that CF is reproducible. The paper you cited to support your claim contradicts it. Explicitly. Several times.

>Miles & Johnson are serious, and these results are definitive.

But they do not support reproducibility; nor do the authors claim it.

[JedRothwell]

I wrote:

"My reports were not erroneous. They were accurate, and authors did not retract."

I meant that my reports were accurate descriptions of the claims made by the authors, and those authors did not retract, as far as I know. One author is dead (CETI) and the other I have lost contact with (Hydrodynamics).

I did not perform the experiments or make the claims. I reported them. I did make measurements with my own instruments, as described in these reports, and as far as I could tell they confirmed the author's claims (except for the mistake I discovered at Hydrodynamics, which was corrected). My reports were carefully reviewed by the authors and by other outside observers, and I am sure they were accurate. But, as I said, several independent replications would be needed to establish these claims.

I should perhaps add that I have discovered and reported far more mistakes in cold fusion experiments than all of so-called "skeptics" put together. If anyone deserves to be called a skeptic in this field, I do. I have found no significant mistakes in any mainstream experiments, other than those that the authors themselves point out, such as Mengoli (1998), p. 167. The people criticizing the experiments here know nothing about the work, and nothing about the instruments and methods, and the few papers they have looked at they have grossly misunderstood. They are not "skeptics" in the traditional sense of the word.

[JedRothwell]

Samuelblack wrote:

"'See Table 10 in Miles, M. and K.B. Johnson, Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Systems, Final Report. 1996, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division.

The only specific reference you supply to support your claim of repeatability is not refereed . . ."

In my opinion, China Lake reports are better than most peer-reviewed papers.


"And in table 10, by 100% repeatability, you are presumably referring to several materials in which the effect was observed twice in 2 tries."

Yes, 7 out of 8 tests for the NRL material, 2 out of 2 for the Johnson-Matthey Type A palladium supplied by Fleischmann and Pons.

See also the statistical analysis of the helium results in this paper:

"This statistical treatment shows that the odds are approximately one in 750,000 that our complete set of heat and helium results could be this well correlated due to random experimental errors in our calorimetry and helium measurements. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that random errors would consistently yield helium-4 production rates in the appropriate range of 10E11 - 10E12 atoms/s per watt of excess power."


"I just flipped all the coins in my pocket twice, and the nickel came up heads both ties."

Let's see you get 9 out of 10, or better yet, let's see you get 749,999 out of 750,000.

It takes several years to do this many experiments. You cannot expect better proof than 9 out of 10.


"You cannot be serious."

This is not about me. Miles & Johnson are serious, and these results are definitive. You do not understand them.

[samuelblack]

Rothwell> With some materials he reported 100% repeatability. See Table 10 in Miles, M. and K.B. Johnson, Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Systems, Final Report. 1996, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division.

The only specific reference you supply to support your claim of repeatability is not refereed, and has as its second sentence in the abstract:

" Reproducibility continues to be the major problem in this controversial research area."

And in table 10, by 100% repeatability, you are presumably referring to several materials in which the effect was observed twice in 2 tries.

I just flipped all the coins in my pocket twice, and the nickel came up heads both times. I therefore conclude that nickels land heads-up 100% of the time.

You cannot be serious.

[JedRothwell]

penny_gruber wrote:

"Jed, if you've got documentation of specific repeatable experiments kindly pick one or two and direct me to same."

As I said, see McKubre (SRI), Mengoli, Arata or Iwamura. See also the SRI replications of Arata. See Dardik and the SRI and ENEA replications of Dardik. Miles et al. showed that repeatability is a function of the material. With some materials he reported 100% repeatability. See Table 10 in Miles, M. and K.B. Johnson, Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Systems, Final Report. 1996, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division.


"After the past erroneous reports supporting OU claims by Hydrodynamics, and CETI having a working CF device I trust that you understand my desire for more than just your word."

My reports were not erroneous. They were accurate, and authors did not retract. However, Hydrodynamics has not been independently replicated, and CETI was only replicated by U. Illinois, as far as I know. Without independent replications we cannot say for sure whether an effect is real or not.

In any case, my word has nothing to do with any of this. I do not work for the Naval Air Warfare Center or Mitsubishi. I did not make any of these claims, and I did not publish any of these papers. Nearly all of the papers at LENR-CANR.org were published elsewhere. You never need to depend on my credibility. You do not even need to trust that I copied them correctly. You can always find the originals where I got them, at the libraries at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech, or any other large university library.

[samuelblack]

> Mr. Black your definitive and self-assured comments speak volumes.

Thank you. I strive to make the definitive argument. But if it really were definitive, you would not be arguing against it, unless you make a habit of engaging in futile fights.

> Some of your comments are reminiscent of one who will cling so tenaciously to a belief that no amount of evidence or facts will convince them otherwise.

You have it the wrong way around. I and many others criticizing CF, in this forum and elsewhere, have been very explicit about exactly what sort of evidence would have us change our minds so fast, it would make your head spin. Just build a device that requires no energy input (other than D2O), and that generates obvious energy output that you can feel (meaning in the tens of watts range), for as long as you like, and as I've said over and over, the world will beat a path to your door. That mainstream science is receptive to evidence for cold fusion was proven in 1989, when the world *did* beat a path to Pons' & Fleischmann's door. The world was ready to believe it, excited to believe it, and enthusiastic at the prospects. The failure was a cruel disappointment to those of us who want clean energy as much as you do.

On the other hand, I cannot conceive of evidence or facts that would convince believers in CF that it is not in fact a source of limitless energy? I am certain that in another 20 years, if people are still claiming excess energy in electrolysis and calorimetry experiments, but have not actually succeeded in a simple and practical conversion of water into energy, there will still be true believers constructing (as ever) vast conspiracy theories, making (as ever) feeble excuses for the failure to scale the effect up, complaining (as ever) about the lack of funding, and citing (as ever) how Galileo wasn't believed either (even though other scientists did believe him). No, the only tenacity here is that of the cold fusioneers, since it is their belief that is not falsifiable, while the skeptics belief can be falsified in an imagined heartbeat.

As long as CFists continue to refer regular people to the literature to prove they have the source of infinite energy, they will continue to be ignored. You do not need to read literature to know that a burning log produces energy, even though burning logs will never supply all the planet's energy. You do not need to look at graphs to know that nuclear fission is a source of energy; a look at a mushroom cloud, or a nuclear reactor will do the trick. Evidence for fusion energy rises every morning in the east, and closer to home can be seen by exploding a hydrogen bomb; no days of number-crunching necessary. Even intermittent energy sources like wind or solar radiation don't rely on obscure journals to convince the masses that they can provide useful amounts of energy. CF, along with perpetual motion and some other claims of free energy, are in a category of their own, in which you have to look at literature to believe that energy is there; in which the man on the street has no hope of recognizing the experiment as one in which infinite energy might be provided; in which even experts have to puzzle over the data to be sure there is some excess energy produced; in which even the believers concede that after decades (centuries for perpetual motion) of claiming excess heat is produced, it still can't be used in any practical way.

[samuelblack]

>You are comforted by being part of the majority and cannot conceive of the majority being wrong. Consequently, anyone who proposes anything contrary to the consensus thinking of the time is crazy, a charlatan or just plain wrong in your mind.

This is completely wrong. All scientists are fully aware of the many examples in history where the consensus has proved wrong. But taken as a principle, this leads to a catch-22.

The consensus belief in a flat earth was proved wrong, but taking account of the new ideas and observations, the current consensus is that the world is round. In spite of the claims of the flat-earth society, I'm going with the new consensus on this one. You?

The consensus that the sun orbits the earth was proved wrong, but taking account of new ideas and observations, the new consensus is that the earth orbits the sun. And even though it makes sense to me, I have to admit that I have not done the astronomical measurements to prove that it is true. Still, without reading any literature, I'm going with the consensus on this one. You?

I don't know how to design a suspension bridge, but the consensus of expert engineers is that the Golden Gate bridge will support vehicular traffic, and every time I cross it, I accept the consensus. You?

The consensus is that if I release a golf ball from rest above the ground, it will accelerate towards the ground. I accept that consensus. You?

Obviously, consensus does not define truth, but unless you know something the mainstream does not, the expert consensus is certainly the most likely approximation to the truth.

Now, when someone (with credentials) proposes something new and contrary to the consensus thinking of the time, outside observers are likely to accept it with varying degrees of caution, and if the proposal has positive implications, they will be optimistic, many enthusiastically so. This was certainly the case in 1989, and I was among the cautiously optimistic. At the same time, the examples of QM and relativity really do provide definitive proof that the scientific establishment does not automatically reject such proposals as crazy, or the proposers as charlatans. In those two cases -- certainly the biggest revolutions in physics, since they define the transition from classical to modern physics -- the proposals were adopted quickly and enthusiastically. In the case of CF in 1989, they gave P&F a fair hearing, but after scrutiny and testing and 20 more years of experiments, taking account of new ideas and observations, the new (almost unanimous) consensus is that the phenomena attributed to CF are not likely nuclear. I'm betting on this consensus.

[samuelblack]

> History is rife with examples of just how closed minded mainstream scientists, journalists and people in general can be and how long it can take to open their minds to new ideas?and the more radical the idea the longer it takes to be accepted. Here are just a few examples that refute your position of how willing scientists (and others) are to accept new ideas.

You have been digging, I see. But if these are the best examples you could come up with, that only strengthens my case. They bear very little resemblance to the current situation with CF. Of course it's true that new ideas often meet with resistance, but cases where a new idea that is rejected with virtual unanimity for a period of decades turns out to be true is scarce indeed. And I can't think of a single example of a benchtop experiment in the last century in which that is the case. On the other hand, N-rays, polywater, and of course perpetual motion machines have all been rejected for decades, and remain discredited today.

The notion that the more radical ideas take longer to be accepted is contradicted by the examples I gave (QM and relativity), easily the most radical ideas in physics, from a fundamental viewpoint.

And even if they weren't the most radical, and even if your examples were closer to CF than they are, what all of this would demonstrate is that sometimes new ideas are accepted quickly, and sometimes it takes a longer time. This would suggest that when it takes a longer time, it is not because of deliberate and stubborn suppression of new ideas, but simply because the new ideas are genuinely not believed. No one really thinks a new idea, if correct, can be kept down indefinitely, and history makes it clear that fame and recognition in science comes from discovering new ideas or phenomena, and helping to test and explain them. And embarrassment follows rejection of ideas that turn out to be right; and ostracization follows deliberate suppression (or promotion) of ideas for self-interest.

Consider Wegener's theory of continental drift (a better example for your case than any you cited). It was dismissed for a long time when supporting data was scarce, and no mechanism identified, but when new discoveries supported the theory, the scientific community came around. In the case of CF, there is no conceivable reason for scientists to dismiss it if they thought it had a chance of being right. And the risk of dismissing it if it is right is huge.

>The Wright Brothers were flying for a year before they could get a reporter or anyone in authority to come out to one of their demonstrations, Scientific American wrote an article titled ?The Lying Brothers,? and the US Patent office rejected their design in 1903.

A year? CF has claimed excess heat for 20 years, and in the internet era. Not really the same thing. There are other major differences. Although there were a number of famous skeptics (like Lord Kelvin), the general opinion of the scientific community was (and had been for some time) that heavier than air flight was inevitable. Certainly no one believed it violated a fundamental principle or theory; after all, birds are heavier than air. It was only a question of developing the technology of efficient, light engines (internal combustion), and the skill and means to control flight (again, much more than a benchtop experiment). Two years before their infamous skeptical article, even Scientific American wrote of a much more modest demonstration of flight by the Wright brothers: "This is a decided step in advance in aerial navigation with aeroplanes". So they were not rejecting the idea, but merely accusing the Wrights of exaggeration. And if you believe their spin, they had understandable reason: the Wrights were deliberately secretive, and refused to demonstrate the flight to anyone until an offer of purchase was on the table.

[your other examples considered separately]

[samuelblack]

>C.J. Doppler?s Doppler Effect was opposed for two decades because it did not fit with the physics of the time.

Do you have some evidence for this? Doppler proposed the effect in 1842, and it was demonstrated by Ballot 3 years later for sound, and independently for electromagnetic waves by Fizeau in 1848. Maybe you're thinking of Doppler's proposal that the Doppler effect could explain the different colors of stars. While the Doppler effect subsequently became important to determine the relative speed of stars by the red shift of characteristic lines in the spectrum measured by spectroscopy, this effect is too small to change the perceived color of the stars. So in fact Doppler was wrong about that idea.

> B. McClintlock was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1984 for his mobile genetic elements transposons, 32 years after being ridiculed and ignored by his peers.

Barbara McClintlock suffered from some discrimination because of her sex, and it does seem to be true that many of her contemporaries failed to recognize the importance of her ideas, but her more recent biographer, Comfort, asserts that McClintock was well regarded by her professional peers, even in the early years of her career. Certainly she won awards throughout her career, including several fellowships from NRC and Guggenheim after her PhD, from which she moved into a faculty position at Cornell. We should all suffer such ridicule.

> Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was viciously attacked by colleagues for 50 years before being awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for his Black Hole theory.

That sounds a little revisionist. The idea of a black hole predates Chandra's limit by more than a century, and was theorized using GR by Schwarzschild 15 years earlier. Chandra calculated a mass limit for the collapse of a star, and this idea was opposed by Eddington during the early 30s (not for 50 years, not even for 10; Eddington died in 1944), although he was not defended by other physicists. Chandra's collapse does not lead to a black hole unless the mass is about twice the size of his limit, a limit calculated by Oppenheimer in 1939. Chandra was awarded the Nobel prize for his study of the structure and evolution of stars. To me this sounds like pretty normal give and take in a theory about phenomena that are about as far from a benchtop as you can get, and one in which advances necessarily move more slowly.

> The first signs of Quantum Mechanics date back to the middle 1800s (Farady and Kirchhoff) yet it took the work of dozens of physicists over 80 years before ?mainstream? science began to accept it?

You've lost me now. Mainstream science never questioned the spectroscopic data that accumulated in the 19th century, and empirical equations were developed to describe the data. It is inconceivable that anyone could have invented QM based on those data alone, and so there was no theory to accept or reject. It was simply not understood. You are really grasping to take the absence of an idea as an example of suppressing an idea.

The first suggestion of quantization of electromagnetic waves came from Planck in 1901 to explain blackbody radiation, and as I've previously argued, it was rapidly accepted, and in 1905 Einstein built upon it to explain the photoelectric effect. It took 30 years to develop a formal theory, but it came in small dribs and drabs, each of which were consumed voraciously. When Bohr's atom was postulated to explain the discrete emission frequencies observed by Kirchhoff and others, the idea was accepted overnight, even though it turns out to be rather naive. More or less the same can be said of progress made by Born, de Broglie, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Fermi, Dirac, and many others. QM is a dramatic counter-example to the claim that scientific progress is inhibited by inertia and dogma.

> and even now only a handful of physicists understand it.

That's a gross exaggeration. As Feynman said in his Nobel lecture, *nobody* understands quantum mechanics. And yet, every physics graduate knows how to use it to predict the energy levels of a hydrogen atom, among other things. In its relativistic form, it is the most successful theory in history, remaining valid across many many orders of magnitude of dimension and velocity, and still without experimental contradiction.

>Do these examples portend scientists who ?fall over themselves? to get involved?

Your last example most certainly does.

[samuelblack]

>And just like J.P. Morgan who pulled Nikola Tesla?s funding when he learned that Tesla wanted to give away his free energy technology to the world, the current energy cartel not only has no interest in these ?free energy? systems, they are willing to go to great lengths to keep this technology suppressed.

If that were true, why was fission energy promoted so strongly? It has regrettably not lived up to its promise of electricity "too cheap to meter", and has other perceived difficulties, but in the early days, optimism ran rampant, and yet the funds flowed freely. The same can be asked of hot fusion research. If it ever succeeds (and color me skeptical), it also promises clean, nearly limitless energy. The energy cartel doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop funding for that.

But even if the energy cartel wants to suppress CF, what is the motivation of the government, which presumably would like nothing better than to be independent of oil producing countries? And surely the transportation industry doesn't depend on oil revenues; a new technology means more opportunity to sell more cars. If CF had promise, they would fund the research themselves. Look how digital revived the photography companies. Finally, scientists are not beholden to oil companies. The idea that oil companies can suppress an idea like free energy is too absurd to contemplate, in my opinion.

>Again I say, if there is nothing to this technology then what are mainstream science, the energy cartel, and our government afraid of?

What gives you the impression they are afraid? They are skeptical, for good reason.

They are not afraid of my theory that magnets cure cancer, but that hardly means they will give me anything I ask to study it.

>particularly if these technologies can rescue us from our highly polluting and rapidly depleting fossil fuels and give us non-polluting, unlimited free energy?
You certainly can?t say it?s the money.

If it's not money, then this argument can be used to demand arbitrary funding for any theory that anyone says can produce free energy. That would make a scientific career a lot easier: Tell the government you have a free energy technology that needs research, and then use the millions to do what you are really interested in.

Here's a clue. Just because you want a theory to be true, doesn't make it true. And it doesn't make it worthy of funding. Theories have to compete for limited resources. CF is not competitive.

>We?ve all heard about the absurd government funded studies like studying the mating habits of the titsy fly,

What if I claimed the "titsy" fly could produce free energy.? Then should we fund it?

>Only a fool would argue that research into those types of studies are fine, but research into energy technologies that could give us unlimited, renewable non-polluting energy?that could quite literally save this planet?are foolish and a waste of time.

True. Which is why funding is currently going toward hot fusion, improving fission, wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable sources of energy.

>I gave a list of just a few well respected scientists and inventors of the thousands who are working in these fields and believe the technology is real and can be developed for commercial use very quickly if they can just get adequate funding.

If you base your decision on the opinion of well respected scientists, there are far more of them who think CF has no merit.

[penny_gruber]

Jed, if you've got documentation of specific repeatable experiments kindly pick one or two and direct me to same. Repeatability is your claim. It is up to you to support it. After the past erroneous reports supporting OU claims by Hydrodynamics, and CETI having a working CF device I trust that you understand my desire for more than just your word.

[penny_gruber]

ceetee9, your list of individuals includes established kooks and crooks. On the kooky side you've got luminaries like Jeane Manning and Stephen Greer. Jeane doesn't seem to mean harm, but when asked for references to back some of her conspiracy theory claims such as that John Keely's "work" has been suppressed, she falls silent. Stephen Greer is promoting alien encounter claims straight from the aluminum deflector beanie set. At last count he was giving money to Pete Sumurack for his magic power technology. Pete's magic consists of turning down the acceleration ramp control on a motor control. Naturally, Pete claims he is a victim of suppression by the black ops.

On the crook side, you've got Tom Bearden who makes a living fleecing gullible fools with his nonsense scalar wave and magnetic asymmetry claims. Those are claims he never evidences. Ask Tom Bearden to demonstrate a working version of his MEG. Even EarthTech reluctantly debunked the MEG.

[Brian_Josephson]

In answer to Larsen's blind reliance on the dictionary definition of nuclear fusion: "Nuclear fusion. 1. A type of nuclear reaction in which atomic nuclei of low atomic number fuse to form a heavier nucleus with the release of large amounts of energy." I could simply have quoted

http://www.answers.com/topic/transuranium-element

where it says

"Super-heavy atoms have all been created during the latter half of the 20th century and are continually being created during the 21st century as technology advances. They are created through the bombardment of elements in a particle accelerator, for example the nuclear fusion of californium-249 and carbon-12 creates rutherfordium."

Hardly 'low atomic numbers' there (californium has atomic number 98). Definitions move with the times; new technology, new definition.

[JedRothwell]

penny_gruber

"Repeatable, verifiable experiment can trump existing theory. After 20 years no CF / LENR experiment that I know of is consistently repeatable."

I know many experiments that fit this description, such as the ones reported by McKubre, Mengoli, Arata or Iwamura. If you do not "know of" these experiments it is because you have not bothered to read the literature. The fact that you do not know about these experiments does not prove that they do not exist; it proves only that you know nothing about cold fusion, and you have no business pontificating about it.

I suggest you read some papers in a university library or at LENR-CANR.org.

[ceetee9]

Ms. Gruber, I don?t know where you get there is no evidence for these technologies. I have just given you dozens of credible scientists who not only believe there is evidence, strong evidence?including some working prototypes?and there are many, many more if you would take the time to look. Have either you or Mr. Black done any serious investigations into their research? I seriously doubt it.

And as I have provided in the examples I gave, history has proven time and again that just because mainstream science doesn?t believe or accept radical new ideas of their time doesn?t make them not so (and these people were very confident in their arguments and opinions as well). In your own statement you acknowledge that the experiments in CF/LENR are inconsistent. Government and mainstream science have poured billions of dollars into hot fusion over the last few decades with no solution to harnessing it as an energy source. And you have the audacity to say putting money into these other technologies is idiocy and complete folly. How disingenuous!

No, the idiocy and folly is in ignoring any potential solution that may provide unlimited, renewable, non-polluting energy sources while we grow ever closer to sure destruction?up to and including extinction?through pollution, global warming, or world war as our current resources run out.

[penny_gruber]

ceetee9 Samuel Black's comments reflect the confidence that opinions based on hard evidence should. Just because someone believes something is possible doesn't make it so. There are thousands of people who think they can rearrange magnets to get free energy. None of them ever do. There is no basis in our knowledge that supports the idea. I am sure they would like funding. I am sure that any number think that with enough funding they will get past the infamous sticky spot. Absent credible evidence that none of them have, putting resources towards such idiocy is complete folly. What makes them so different from the CF / LENR crowd?

Repeatable, verifiable experiment can trump existing theory. After 20 years no CF / LENR experiment that I know of is consistently repeatable. When you can do that, you have a reasonably good chance that you have isolated effects of the thing you are interested in studying. As long as experiments are inconsistent it is anybody's guess what the experiments mean. CF/LENR interpretations of existing, but inconsistent experiments are just one interpretation of many possible interpretations.

Despite the fact that CF / LENR research over the past 20 years hasn't delivered squat in terms of a reproducible experiment, money still goes towards it. The McKubres of this world don't have lavish budgets or staffs, but they still draw a check and get to toil away at their dream.

Mr. Black has very patiently and very eloquently explained his objections to claims coming from the CF / LENR community. He doesn't propose witch hunts against CF / LENR advocates. He asks simply as any reasonable person would: Show him reliable evidence that makes the claim obvious to a disinterested lay observer. Boil his tea consistently. Surely if CF / LENR is going to boil enough steam to run a power plant, it can be made to consistently boil a cup of tea.