Thanks for posting this Jed. I was an interesting read. Dave
-----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Jun 8, 2012 3:26 pm Subject: [Vo]:An essay by Chris Tinsley Here is an essay by the late Chris Tinsley, written around 1994, I think. A view from across the pond Christopher Tinsley Cold fusion is the greatest discovery of the age. It can only be seen as a tragedy that its opponents were so successful - for a time - in delaying its development. But all that has happened now, so instead of getting all bitter and twisted about it we can maybe see what can be learned from the affair. >From my distant dugout on the fringe of the cold fusion underground it is >possible - at times - to see the funny side of it all. It helps that here in >the UK there is no research work that I know of, that all controversy was >settled in 1989 when cold fusion was proved to be pathological science, and >that our main contribution to the subject has been to provide the world with >more than our fair share of notable and highly vocal detractors. Spare a tear for these poor souls. They set out on the philosophically difficult task of trying to prove a negative, and will be dogged henceforth by their more egregious quoted remarks. Science historians have in the past been kind to those whose entrenched views delayed scientific progress, but I fear that no quarter will be given this time. Indeed, future students will fall upon the story with happy cries, certain that they will be able to squeeze yet another cheap doctorate out of it - if not in psychology they maybe in anthropology. Never - ever - in the history of science has there been such an utter shambles, and never one so painstakingly documented; on paper, on tape and in the capacious bowels of Jed Rothwell's computer. I doubt, however, that anyone - least of all myself - can claim that their thinking throughout has been completely untouched by emotion, prejudice or sheer stupidity. One classic confusion is that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof! No they don't, they just require proof. What this statement means is that any result or evidence will be accepted as proof if it supports an existing theory, and will not be accepted at all if it runs contrary to current thinking. In the case of cold fusion, results are called 'claims'. Even the most open-minded people, shown the current evidence, will say they want to see the results of the next replication of the 'claims' before accepting reality. When they in their turn try to persuade the next person, he or she will again want to see yet another result. Replications of results are greeted with calls for replication. In fact any of us should have accepted that something very strange and inexplicable by current theory was going on when that early experiment blew a four-inch deep hole in a concrete floor in Utah. A cubic centimetre of metal cannot cause that sort of damage, we all know that, so why ignore it? True enough, science must eventually discount results which cannot be replicated, but if there is solid evidence of a strange event it should try very hard indeed before doing that. Most of us are guilty of being reasonable and not rational. A reasonable person would accept that peer-review, publication and confirmation are used to ensure that progress in science proceeds in a correct way. In this case it has done no such thing, so we might be excused for asking whether its true function is to protect scientists from uncomfortable new ideas, or even to protect editors from having to lay such ideas before their readership. We all know that papers have been excluded from publication simply because of their subject matter, and that reviewers have been carefully chosen because of their known opposition to cold fusion. So the whole idea of peer-review and publication has been a disaster in this case, and for all we know it may be happily throttling some other development of crucial importance right now. We should also be a little sceptical about scepticism. It is quite easy to show that for every case of N-rays or polywater - where the scientific community has investigated a non-existent phenomenon there are literally scores of examples where there has been a failure to investigate, or even publish, perfectly real findings in science. Scepticism is cheap. Nobody laughs at a sceptic, no matter how outrageous his comments, laughter is reserved for anyone who might be considered credulous. Just the same, it cannot be just fear of mockery which makes otherwise presumably responsible journalists on science magazines behave as they have done over cold fusion. I've heard a lot of criticism of American magazines, but I doubt if any of them can hold a candle to our own dear Nature, or latterly New Scientist. Perhaps we can look a little more closely at this fine example of science journalism. The magazine is weekly, it has various articles by scientists and science writers. It also has news, reviews, and several comment columns. I would recommend it. Well, maybe I wouldn't do that any morel Its reporting of cold fusion largely ended with articles by Profs Close and Bockris arguing the matter in January 1991. Since then, it has made only passing reference to the subject, falling into line with most of the press by rubbishing any mention of the subject in the usual way; by getting one of the noted opponents to make scathing comments on work they obviously had not read. But on May 1, 1993, they ran an article about the paper by Fleischmann and Pons in Physics Letters A. By the simple expedient of discussing only the first few hours of an experiment which ran for weeks, they were able to get quotes about how marginal the results were. There was even a graph taken from the paper to make the point that only about 2Watts/cc at most were being produced in the palladium. But the paper had another graph - next to that one - which showed that through the bulk of the experiment ten times as much energy were produced, ending with a spectacular 3700 Watts/cc! After a few minutes at that rate of power the cell had boiled dry, melted the heat-resistant plastic inside and left the dry cell at boiling point for about three hours. This was later explained by one of the scientists quoted in the magazine as being due to the oxidation of the gas trapped in the palladium. The fact that such oxidation could only have produced enough energy to warm 50 m1 of water by three degrees centigrade would seem to bother this man not at all! All this sort of thing is a complete mystery to me. Why do apparently normal people behave like this? It is a little easier to explain why other, seemingly normal folk are promoting cold fusion. At least they seem to be able to do simple arithmetic. The only possible explanation I can offer for the behaviour of the opponents is that they are afraid. But afraid of what? That someone will take away their huge accelerators and tokamaks and send them back to the benches? That real science might be going on in the basements of wild-eyed amateur and professional scientists, or in pokey corners of labs, disguised as something innocent like anthrax culture vessels? This would, I suppose, reduce the status of Real Scientists. Nobody who has taken an interest in this subject can have failed to indulge in a a little armchair theorising. It's fun, it's cheap, and might even have some purpose. But I guess that it may lead to some highly misleading answers! The big danger is that of being reasonable, and there's nothing reasonable about cold fusion. Take the original idea, the one about closely packed deuterium atoms in a palladium lattice being able to fuse. Just by how many orders of magnitude the chance of fusion is below that required I don't know exactly, but it's quite a few. So in this case - assuming that the excess energy comes from fusion - armchair theorising beat conventional theory by a long chalk! But, although there clearly are nuclear transformations going on in these cells, they are certainly not conventional fusion, That would make the labs lethal. Had it been ordinary fusion, then, since lots of work has been done with palladium in the past, the flood of radiation from even the slightest effect would probably have been seen before. And yet the reasonableness of the idea has led people (including me) to be very suspicious of the Mills effect. That is a reasonable attitude to take, but it is not a rational one. We should try to do experiments based on any idea, no matter how whacky it sounds, and examine the results. If they happen, then great! But they do not prove the theory, they just support it. As one incapable of counting above ten with my socks on, the mysterious work of theoreticians - real ones - is a closed world to me. But there seem to me to be problems here. Most of the theories I have seen will only address a few of the results. While I would like to see as many new ideas as possible coming in, I don't think that the field is yet big or secure enough to support any quarreling, though others might argue that such quarrels are a healthy sign. Perhaps the solid and even some of the not-so-solid results should be allowed for by anyone who has a theory. A few of them are listed here, without judgement: 1. Excess energy from F&P cells. 2. Helium and tritium and neutrons from F&P cells. 3. Lack of high-energy particles from such cells - of enough, anyway. 4. Excess energy from Mills cells. 5. Tritium and weak X-rays from Mills cells. 6. Reports that Mills cells work with sodium salts. 7. Reports that Mills cells do not work with sodium salts. 8. Similar yes-they-do-no-they-don't transmutation reports from them. 9. Reports of enough/not enough Helium from F&P cells. 10. Reports of in-cathode metal transmutations. 11. Sound-triggered cold fusion in palladium and stainless steel. 12. Glow-discharge and heat-triggered CF in palladium. 13. 'Cold Fission'. The carbon-arc-under-water-giving-iron results. And, if that lot were not enough, how about considering the totally weird end of the subject? After four years of increasingly strange results, perhaps the idea that plants can produce elements they lack could be checked - that sounds crazy, but easy to test. Apart from its curious determination not to have its territory extended - to refuse to accept the existence of any phenomena which don't quite fit into current theory - physics has another big weakness: it seems to be incapable of explaining many solid-state effects, like high temperature superconductivity or conducting polymers. If we are going to have practical cold fusion, it would be a real help to know how it works! To close these random maunderings, perhaps we could look at one small cloud on the horizon. Every silver lining has one of these, and the wonderful home of the future - free from fuel and electricity bills has one too. Such a home could of course recycle much of its own water (yuck), and the fun there would be if that particular gadget failed is almost beyond imagination. But there is a more alarming threat to the home's central power generator itself. I don't know what it is like in the land of the free, but here anyone who is 'plumbingly challenged' is under threat from the rapacity of the 24-hour Mr Fixit. Doubtless he will soon be able to extend his activities into this new field, the busted cold fusion power generator. "You know that there's a call-out charge, that's payable before we touch anything." (With shaking of the head) "I've not seen one of these for years." "It'll all have to come out." And the final blow: "Take weeks to get a spare for this ... but I've got a friend who might be willing to part with one." Think ahead, you designers, and at least offer a tandem system for sale!
