Cold Fusion Isn't Dead, It's Just Withering From Scientific Neglect
Posted on Friday, September 26, 2003 @ 01:40:20 UTC by vlad
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From the latest IRI Future Energy e-News (see our Newsletters section for the full newsletter):
Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, Science Journal, Sept. 5, 2003
"Well, we're here," said physicist Peter Hagelstein to the 150 scientists at the 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge, Mass., last week. "Many people in the scientific community feel we should be shot."
Yet the cold fusioneers persist. In paper after paper last week, scientists reported that when a metal, usually palladium, absorbs huge amounts of deuterium into its atomic lattice, the result is more heat than plain old electrochemistry can explain, as well as particles thought to be by-products of nuclear fusion.
Some of the most extensive work has been at the Naval Research Laboratory, whose scientists found both excess heat and a telltale sign of fusion, particles of helium-4, in dozens of experiments. And Michael McKubre of SRI International, Menlo Park, Calif., is still, after hundreds of thousands of experiment-hours and $4 million, getting more heat from his cold-fusion cells than can be explained conventionally...
"The question I get more than any other is, 'Are you still doing this?', " says Prof. Jones. "The answer is yes, and what we are seeing is very difficult to explain outside of cold fusion. The repeatability of these experiments now approaches 80%." Although he still detects no excess heat, the telltale signs of nuclear fusion "make us conclude that we are seeing new physics."
Although the persistence of the cold fusioneers makes skeptics shake their heads, proponents see it differently. "If there were no effects and it were just experimental error," says Prof. Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "we would have figured that out by now. I don't think there is any doubt about the existence of nuclear anomalies. Excess heat might be real, too."
"If you 'know' that cold fusion is impossible, then you don't have to pay attention to these results," says Prof. Hagelstein, an award-winning DOE physicist before being ostracized for his work in the theory of cold fusion. "The initial criticism was that people needed to do the [heat measurements] right, but now that some groups have spent millions of dollars doing just that, the critics still won't read the papers."
I, for one, would love to hear smart physicists explain why the excess heat from the deuterium-filled palladium reflects not nuclear fusion but the release of mechanical energy -- sort of like letting go of a stretched spring. I'd love to see a smart critique of a 2002 paper by Japanese scientists, published in a Japanese physics journal that few American scientists saw, describing (shades of medieval alchemists) the transmutation of elements through cold fusion...
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