Thank you Mark for this article. It is good to keep "Cold Fusion" in the minds of the financial community. If Cold Fusion pans out, it could be the single largest business on the planet 10 years after the introduction of the first practical product. It could be $5T-10T/year - so what if the probability is 0.1% - the risk-reward would still be extremely favorable.
Regarding the "cold fusion" name... I believe it is kept largely for sentimental reasons. As Dr. Storms mentioned, there are various different effects that all collectively fall under the "cold fusion" super-category. When I discuss the technology with friends and say LENR or Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, they usually don't get it until I say "cold fusion". Dr. Duncan of MU who will be hosting ICCF-18, seems to prefer "anomalous heat effect, AHE", but any description like that is bound to be temporary. The effect is only anomalous until it is understood. There is ample evidence that the Fleischmann-Pons effect is nuclear and is fusion. It deserves the moniker of cold fusion. The second part of your article discussed that the name may be part of the problem of acceptance of the technology within the physics community. I don't really think so. The problem of acceptance at the moment is one of ignorance of the science that has followed the original 1989 controversy. I don't think cold fusion researchers consider themselves "under seige", but the community does suffer from lack of respect of the good science being done by the ignorant in the academic infrastructure. This is not a new problem. Science advances in spurts when something or someone turns conventional science on its head. The scientific community has a history ~100 year cycles of believing that everything is nearly known except for a few minor constants - a chutzpah developed from lack of their finding any new phenomenon. There is horrible resistance to upset by those who had advanced science to its present state of "know-it-all". Sometimes, getting past this requires "science advancing one death at a time". I am reminded of the history of orbital modeling. Kepler found a solution for 2 bodies in orbit - a neat elliptical solution. Then prominent scientists of the time went on to solve the 3-body problem of sun-earth-moon. Newton worked on this problem, as did many. Finally, Poincare found that the 3-body problem has no closed form solution - it is nearly infinitely complex. This has left 3- (or more)-body solutions to be based upon simplifying approximations that may or may not apply in a given case. I bring this up because the plasma physics understanding of hot (plasma) D-D fusion is well likened to the 2-body problem. By the time these plasma nuclei are interacting to fuse, it is only the two nuclei that are influencing each other. This is clearly different for fusion within a solid. Solids, by their very nature of being solid, are a large ensemble of highly coupled nuclei. Not only is cold fusion no longer a 2-body problem like simpler hot plasma fusion, but it is a multi-body problem that is infinitely more complex to model. This explains why cold fusion has not just "popped out" of the equations and why the answer is not necessarily intuitive to one who understands the 2-body case. Would someone who understood 2-body orbits envision the complexity of a 3-body problem that could cause 1 of the 3 bodies to be whipped out of orbit never to return? Cold fusion is new physics, but not necessarily new principles. It requires modeling approximations that can only be made if you understand where it is OK to approximate. Advancing the science will require genius, or Edisonian luck to guess a mechanism, make modeling approximations to realize a multi-body solution, and then test the solution against all of the experimentally determined phenomena. In my opinion, the physicists that are ignorant of the state of cold fusion science and yet are nay-sayers, are holding back science. Maybe they are also afraid that they are not up to the challenge of developing an understanding of why nature behaves this way. There is a Nobel prize for the scientist that reveals this understanding. I am outright calling these nay-sayer physicists "chicken". Regards, Bob Higgins On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Mark Gibbs <[email protected]> wrote: > > http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/07/15/why-cold-fusion-has-to-die/ > > [mg] >
