At 10:17 AM 8/6/2012, Chemical Engineer wrote:
I have been following for a year and half but it is still very
confusing to me what the repeatable results are. To me the
anomalous heat could include anything from nanomagnetism, LENR,
CANR, ZPE, vacuum energy, Hawking Radiation (my theory), hydrinos,
fusion, beta decays to aliens farting through a wormhole.
CE, you haven't paid adequate attention. I'll say this much for you,
the literature can be confusing. I came into the study of cold fusion
in 2009, as a result of happening upon an abusive blacklisting (of
lenr-canr.org) on Wikipedia. It puzzled me. So, cold fusion was
fringe science, perhaps unreal. But why blacklist the major
repository of scientific papers on the subject?
I looked at the article and started to read the sources. I had the
background to understand why cold fusion was considered impossible.
That same background, my training in physics from Richard P. Feynman,
had led me, as well, to know that experiment was King. That if
experiment showed that, say, Newton's Laws of Motion were wrong, we'd
better be ready re-examine the Laws (not just the experiment!). I
knew from Feynman that we did not have the math to analyze the solid
state, it was way too complex. Still, the lack of progress in the
field (as I imagined from the lack of press coverage of progress),
had led me to think (from 1990 or so) that cold fusion was a dud.
Intrigued by what I found, I bought most of the major books on the
topic, including the skeptical ones, i.e, Huizenga, Taubes, Park,
etc. I bought Storms, Beaudette, Mizuno, and a figure in the field
was kind enough to donate a copy of the 2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook to me.
And I noticed something. Early on I figured out that the matter had
actually been iced, as to the reality of cold fusion, when Miles
found a correlation between the anomalous heat found so erratically
in palladium deuteride, and helium produced. I.e., the amount of heat
might be erratic, but then, regardless, helium was found in the
evolved gases at a particular ratio to the heat, consistent with a
hypothesis that the heat was the result of some kind of fusion
process, fusing deuterium to helium, with some of the helium
remaining trapped at least temporarily. *Rougly* half is released,
under that hypothesis.
This was very strong evidence that the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect
(FPHE) is nuclear in nature, and is very likely some kind of fusion.
Huizenga noticed this in the second edition of his book. Good thing I
bought that edition! He wrote that, if confirmed, this would solve a
major mystery of cold fusion, i.e., the ash. Before that, there was
total uncertainty about the ash, and it didn't seem there was one.
Some early efforts to find helium had looked in the palladium rod.
It's not found there, except for very near the surface, and they had
taken off the surface to avoid contamination from ambient helium! --
As I recall. One of Fleischmann's errors, God rest his soul, was a
belief that the reaction was taking place in the lattice, in the
bulk. I can understand why he thought that, but ... it wasn't so.
Huizenga expected that the result would not be confirmed. But it was.
There is actually no contrary experimental evidence, and plenty of
confirmation. If the field were being treated normally, the issue
would long ago have been considered resolved.
What I noticed, however, was that heat/helium wasn't emphasized in
the reviews and articles in the field *from those who accept the
reality of LENR.* I suspect that this may be that most were already
convinced by the calorimetry, and the level of pseudoskepticism
involved in the massive rejection of calorimetry as evidence was
indeed enormous and frustrating. Beaudette covers this very well.
Chemical Engineer, if you want a repeatable result, you would do this:
Set up and run a series of cells, as many as possible, using a
protocol known to *occasionally* produce excess heat, use the state
of the art for the electrolysis and calorimetry. Measure helium in
the evolved gas (or sample it from the cell if it's a closed cell;
for this purpose, though, it's a bit more efficient to use an open
cell, because the helium will then reflect the recent history of the
cell and you can take more and more meaningful samples from the cell.
But it's also worth considering using closed cells and thus measuring
total accumulated helium. You'll have to compensate for slow leakage
of helium out of the cells, if they are glass. Helium can leak through glass.)
Measure the helium blind, whoever is running the analysis should not
know the history of the cell from which it came. Sample from all
cells the same, whether or not they show heat.
Compare the excess energy, determined from calorimetry, with the
helium measurements, extrapolated back to evolution rates using
methods you work out in advance.
Something like this has been done many times. The results are always
the same, the variation is within what would be expected from varying
conditions resulting in varying levels of retained helium. Some work
has taken steps to capture as much as possible of the helium. If you
want to improve knowledge in the field, go all-out to do this.
You will find, from what's been found before, that the energy is
within experimental error of 23.8 MeV/He-4, the theoretical value for
dueterium fusion. (Or for any fusion reaction that starts with
deuterium and ends with helium, such as Takahashi's 4D Tetrahedral
Symmetric Condensate fusion, that produces Be-8 which decays to two
helium nuclei.)
This is a "single reproducible experiment."
What so many demanded for so long, a *reliable* experiment, always
producing the same heat, may not be possible, not until we actually
understand the effect and can control it more effectively. (There are
some gas-loaded results that might be reliable in this way, but I
consider the jury out on that. Inadequate replication.)
Many have confused the unreliability with inclarity of result.
Sometimes results have been close to noise, but the FPHE was not
established by such experiments. When the effect happens, it is often
far above noise. The example I point to is SRI P13/P14. There is an
image of part of the results from these, done in about 1991, that was
part of the Hagelstein review paper for the 2004 DoE review.
To understand that image, you need to know that this was the third
current excursion. P13 was a light water control cell, in series with
P14 electrically, so the current through both was the same. Both
cells had been loaded to over 90% (and SRI monitored loading, a
crucial condition). The first two attenpts with the same current
profile, both cells showed the same result, i.e., what P13 showed in
the third run. No excess heat to speak of, some increase in noise
from the increased activity, bubbling, etc. But with P14, the excess
heat tracks the current. Far above noise.
That might seem normal, until you realize that heating from the
current has been subtracted from the total heat being evolved, what
is plotted is the *excess.* The first two runs and the control cell
show that the calorimetry is working. There is only one known
difference between the third try with P14 and the first two: the
cathode had "experience." Palladium can be loaded with deuterium, but
high loading, expecially, stresses the lattice, the material expands,
and may start to crack.
If the cracks get too large, the material deloads, the necessary high
loading is lost. It apparently must be *just right*.
The way I've described this is that the cold fusion chimera walked
into the lab and licked McKubre in the face. Then sauntered out. From
then on, McKubre knew that this was real. He later did the crucial
helium confirmation work, obtaining the most accurate measurement to date.
It's possible to challenge details, still, but the basic conclusion
is now overwhelming, and really has been for more than a decade.
But it was being neglected. So I suggested that Dr. Storms look at
it. I think he was already on this track himself. He asked me to look
at a paper, and I did. He submitted the paper, and the editor came
back and asked him to write a full review of the field instead. So he did.
That became Edmund Storms, "Status of cold fusion (2010),"
Naturwissenschaften, October, 2010. This is, to my knowledge, the
most comprehensive review of cold fusion ever written for a
peer-reviewed journal, and Naturwissenschaften is Springer-Verlag's
"flagship multidisciplinary journal," founded in 1913. Einstein
published in it.
Some physicists have complained that they haven't read about cold
fusion in physics journals. Well, there is a reason for that! They
should talk to the editors! (Or they could read European Physics
Journal - Applied Physics, but there are only some experimental
papers there.) If any physicist is dissatisfied with the Storms
review, they could certainly write a critique of it, but most
physicists really don't know enough about the field to be ready to
write such and have it pass peer review. Most of them have their
heads stuck in a place that is 20 years old. Or somewhere else.
At some point the physics community will wake up and realize that
this is a major unsolved problem in physics. How could this be
happening? What they did in 1989, some of them, was sit back and take
on the pseudoskeptical hypothesis that "there must be some error."
The term "pseudoskeptic" was invented for behavior like that. It was
fine to remain unconvinced, but what actually happened was that the
community developed an almost violent rejection, a *belief* that cold
fusion was pseudoscience, Bad Science (Taubes' title). It's hard to
back down from something like that!
There were physicists who knew that cold fusion wasn't, as claimed,
"impossible." Julian Schwinger, Nobel-Prize winner in Physics, wrote
a paper proposing a theory. When it was rejected out of hand by the
Journal of the American Physical Society, he resigned. Normal Ramsey
supported cold fusion research, when he served as co-chair of the
ERAB panel. He demanded that neutral language be used in the report,
instead of what would almost have certainly been very harsh rejection
had Huizenga been able to control the report. Ramsey apparently
threatened to noisily resign if his language wasn't used. That
language made it very clear that cold fusion wasn't being found to be
bogus, merely that the evidence, at a point only a few months after
the announcement, wasn't convincing. And, really, at that point, it
wasn't. It took a few more months! And a few years, two or three, to
become overwhelming.
CE, Huizenga called the cold fusion episode the "scientific fiasco of
the century." He didn't know the half of it! He called it a fiasco
because it was fresh in his mind that practically the entire U.S.
research establishment, anyone in a position to investigate cold
fusion, dropped everything to attempt to replicate. That was all
vastly premature, insufficient information was released, so a lot of
time and effort -- and money -- was wasted. Apparently Pons and
Fleishmann didn't know quite a number of important things about their
own experiment. The palladium material was crucial. Had it been
normal palladium, very likely they'd have seen nothing. When they ran
out, they got more, and for a time, they could not replicate their
own experiment. It took time to work around all these issues.
Cal Tech attempted replication and used cells much larger than the
Pons and Fleischmann cells. They found a calorimetry error, some
cells seemd to have excess heat. They found that when they stirred
the cell, the apparent heat disappeared. They concluded that Pons and
Fleischmann were incompetent, and announced that at a major physics
conference. However, the Pons and Fleischmann design was self-stirred
by the bubbling. Their error (and correction) showed the hazards of
incautious calorimetry, but the calorimetry of Pons and Fleischmann
was later found to be quite accurate.
A basic rule of replication was ignored: replicate the work, *then*
find possible artifacts. I can see that they thought they had done
that, but ... they hadn't. They had not set up the effect at all. MIT
may have had some small level of excess heat, concealed when someone
thought the chart looked a bit messy and cleaned it up by shifting
the baseline a little. But they didn't find helium, and probably
didn't get any excess heat either, to speak of. These were
*replication failures.* They were treated as if they were
refutations, a very obvious error, in hindsight.
It was a huge mess, involving many people, and leaving behind trails
of bitterness, rancour, and confusion. The protocols and courtesies
of science broke down. It's not particularly surprising: hot fusion
research was consuming hundreds of millions of dollars per year in
research funding, with no breakeven in sight. Entire institutions,
and many careers were dependent upon this. Cold fusion appeared to
threaten that. Even if it turned out to be impractical, for some
reason, governments might, meanwhile, become a bit less eager to
shell out vast funding for projects that -- even today -- are not
predicted to be commercially practical until 2050.
It's not surprising, then, that those in specialties which would be
economically hit if cold fusion research were to replace hot fusion
research (i.e, nuclear physicists, particle physicists, specialists
in plasma physics, etc.) might be, shall we say, unfriendly? It's
really normal politics, and the cold fusion community played the game
very badly.
(They were scientists! Not public relations agents! They were naive,
initially, they assumed that normal scientific courtesty and
processes would work things out. Yes. Eventually. It really didn't
start to happen until around 2004, with the second DoE review. The
shift is apparent then, the field had come a vast distance from the
first review. It just wasn't over yet. It's still not *entirely*
over, but the two largest scientific publishers in the world are now
routinely publishing about cold fusion, and the largest scientific
society in the world, the American Chemical Society, has been
sponsoring cold fusion events and publications. I can imagine the
consternation among some physicists. Don't these idiots know it's
impossible? But that's by far not all physicists. There are hot
fusion physicists who have turned their talents to the problem of
cold fusion theory, that would include Takahashi. And, of course, the
peer reviewers at Naturwissenschaften passed that comment in the
abstract.... I'd say the corner has definitely been turned, and it's
time for the cold fusion community stop the hang-dog, boo-hoo, they
are so unfair!, attitude.)
We need to take a hint from Beaudette's title: Excess Heat, Why Cold
Fusion Research Prevailed. And we need to start acting consistently
with it having prevailed. The truth came out. It's over, except, of
course, for the real work: characterising the reaction, exploring the
parameter space, and beginning to engineer more efficient and more
reliable applications. This is not Get Rich Quick, Free Energy. Not
yet, anyway!
Beware of those who pretend that this is easy, until and unless
that's been proven and confirmed.
Any questions, CE?
