6 Replies to “2014 CF/LANR Colloquium Photo Gallery”
great to see so much good work being done on cold fusion. there does not seem to be(from the photos) many young researchers.
Thank you Ruby, much appreciated.
I love it. Clearly a bunch of radical people whom are tryong to scam the world. Look at them all smiles. I joke I of course. But in reality that’s what people, whom do not research cokd fusion, think of these people associated with cold fusion. I am very proud of these people and I hoped for them all much success.
As this event occurred at MIT. I wonder how many influential skeptic types attended to discover the field is reaching a date with destiny soon enough. The Government must be fully aware of all aspects of CF.
It would be nice if the redemption of CF came from MIT, because if MIT never existed the entire Pons/Fleiscmann debacle might have played differently in 1989, and we might already be driving LENR cars.
The truth is MIT might hold some responsibility for how CF was perceived 25 years ago, and despite it being a scientific institution, it might have hindered mankinds progress.
If we review the events, there was a lot of mistakes made by all parties to warrant shared blame.
Thank you for posting the pictures. I recognize many influential faces in them.
I am sure it would be hard to attend MIT nowadays and not be aware of LENR thanks to P. Hagelstein and his colleagues. Kudos.
Let us hope it opens a few more eyes.
It seems from more and more dat I have that the LENR denial fiasco is inspired
– by maybe no more than 5 unethical incompetent stubborn non-brillant skeptics (Lewis,Hansen,Taubes,Huizenga,Morisson)
– then by dozen of lazy Nobel who parroted those liars withour reading a line, too happy to hear their prejudice validated
– then hundreds of physicists who parroted those parrots too happy to hear their prejudice validated
– then thousands of scientists and editors and journalist who parrorted the parrot of the parrots, trusting Nobel, editors, journalist, physicist, wikipedia ans impossible to be wrong all togethor
– then millions of people trusting the consensus and wikipedia
“When a scientist writes about cold fusion, he should be held to more exacting standards. He must not dismiss or condemn cold fusion without reading the journal papers, and without presenting a credible, technical reason for doubting those papers. Society relies upon scientists, lawyers, ship captains, and other professionals to make unbiased, informed statements about their areas of expertise. It is unethical for a scientist to endorse or condemn a claim he has not carefully analyzed.
In rare cases, a few scientists have been guilty of even more unethical behavior. McKubre and other prominent cold fusion scientists have given copies of journal papers to prominent critics, including Douglas Morrison, Robert Park, and John Huizenga. The papers directly contradict assertions made by the critics regarding matters of fact, not opinion, such as the amount of energy produced by cells in continuous bursts, the percent of input versus output, or the amount of chemical energy that a mass 0.5 grams of palladium deuteride will release as it degasses. Morrison often claims the degassing can account for the heat produced during an experiment performed by Fleischmann and Pons. Fleischmann gave him a paper showing conclusively that he is mistaken by a factor of 1,700. Morrison has been told about this mistake countless times, at conferences, in writing, and in a formal reply published in Physics Letters A. Yet he recently contacted a Nobel laureate and repeated the same misinformation. Fortunately, the Nobel scientist contacted me, and I was able to give him the correct numbers.
Gary Taubes is another prominent critic. He made many misinformed claims in his book, on the radio, and in the mass media. He may not be qualified to read journal papers, because he does not appear to understand basic concepts such as electricity. He claims people sometimes measure electrolysis amperage alone and not voltage, and he thinks that regulated power supplies put out more electricity over the weekend because factories use less power. He thinks some researchers measure tritium once, after the experiment, without establishing a baseline or taking periodic samples. His book is filled with hundreds of similar errors. Perhaps the most mind-boggling one was his statement that a cell might have huge temperature gradients, “say fifty degrees hotter on one side than the other.” This is like asserting that you might stir a cup of coffee, drink from the right side and find it tepid, but when you turn the cup around and drink from the left side, it will be steaming hot.
Taubes wrote his book using the same methods employed by sensation-mongering reporters in 1912: he pieced together second-hand rumors and made wild guesses about a subject he does not understand. He described his methods in the introduction, footnotes, and appendices. The book is based upon interviews and telephone conversations with 257 people, listed in an appendix. He spoke with seventeen people who actually performed experiments. Four of the seventeen are implacable enemies of cold fusion, including the authors of the three famous “negative” experiments. Most of the remaining 240 are critics like Frank Close and William Happer, who deplore cold fusion, and have staked their reputations on its demise. They have attacked it in the mass media, the ERAB report, and in books. Although more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers were published by the time Taubes wrote the book, he did not reference a single one of them in the footnotes. His descriptions of the experiments are wildly at variance with the facts, in major and minor details, so it seems unlikely that he read a paper. Describing an experiment is an exacting task, even when you understand electricity, you read the paper, visit the lab, and ask the experimenter to review your description. When a scientifically illiterate person tries to imagine how an experiment works based on allegations made by people who despise the research, indescribable confusion and distortion result.
Taubes’ book was recommended in enthusiastic blurbs by four Nobel laureates and the chairman of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. These people could not have actually read the book, or if they did, their judgment was skewed by animosity. This shows how easy it is to spread false information, and how careless distinguished scientists can be. It takes only a small group of people to poison the well of public opinion. There may be a few other active critics in the mass media, but most attacks originate from these four: Morrison, Park, Huizenga, and Taubes. They are not famous or influential. They succeed because many scientists bear a grudge against cold fusion, and are willing to believe the worst about it. When Robert Park attacked it with inflammatory ad hominem rhetoric, a room packed with hundreds of members of the American Physical Society (APS) applauded and cheered.
Mistakes Caused by Culture, Denial, and Psychology
One way to learn how to separate fact from fiction is to study the ways mistakes and disagreements arose in the first place, and why they remain in the historical record, seemingly impervious to correction.
”
Jed Rothwell
“Unfortunately, physicists did not generally claim expertise in calorimetry, the measurement of calories of heat energy. Nor did they countenance clever chemists declaring hypotheses about nuclear physics. Their outspoken commentary largely ignored the heat measurements along with the offer of an hypothesis about unknown nuclear processes. They did not acquaint themselves with the laboratory procedures that produced anomalous heat data. These attitudes held firm throughout the first decade, causing a sustained controversy.
The upshot of this conflict was that the scientific community failed to give anomalous heat the evaluation that was its due. Scientists of orthodox views, in the first six years of this episode, produced only four critical reviews of the two chemists’ calorimetry work. The first report came in 1989 (N. S. Lewis). It dismissed the Utah claim for anomalous power on grounds of faulty laboratory technique. A second review was produced in 1991 (W. N. Hansen) that strongly supported the claim. It was based on an independent analysis of cell data that was provided by the two chemists. An extensive review completed in 1992 (R. H. Wilson) was highly critical though not conclusive. But it did recognize the existence of anomalous power, which carried the implication that the Lewis dismissal was mistaken. A fourth review was produced in 1994 (D. R. O. Morrison) which was itself unsatisfactory. It was rebutted strongly to the point of dismissal and correctly in my view. No defense was offered against the rebuttal. During those first six years, the community of orthodox scientists produced no report of a flaw in the heat measurements that was subsequently sustained by other reports.
The community of scientists at large never saw or knew about this minimalist critique of the claim. It was buried in the avalanche of skepticism that issued forth in the first three months. This skepticism was buttressed by the failure of the two chemists’ nuclear measurements, the lack of a theoretical understanding of how their claim could work, a mistaken concern with the number of failed experiments, a wholly unrealistic expectation of the time and resource the evaluation would need, and the substantial ad hominem attacks on them. However, their original claim of measurement of the anomalous power remained unscathed during all of this furor. A decade later, it was not generally realized that this claim remained essentially unevaluated by the scientific community. Confusion necessarily arose when the skeptics refused without argument to recognize the heat measurement and its corresponding hypothesis of a nuclear source. As a consequence, the story of the excess heat phenomenon has never been told.
”
Charles Beaudette
”
Turmoil in the Solid State
…
In fact, says James L. Smith, director of the Center for Materials Science of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first two heavy-fermion superconductors discovered were originally reported as footnotes, because they were so unbelievable.
…
One day, he noticed that uranium beryllium 13 went superconducting at a certain temperature. But he was a very good materials guy-—he knew superconductors— and so he knew that was utter nonsense. You put an enormous magnetic field on it, and the critical temperature hardly changed. So he said that there must be something wrong with the sample, which he hadn’t prepared himself—some impurities at the grain
boundaries.
“At the time, that suspicion was very logical, and in a footnote to a paper
Bucher duly reported that the material had gone superconducting, and what he thought the problem was, allowing the whole thing to be forgotten.”
The second case of this kind ofaccidental discovery going unrecognized—- indeed, merely being footnoted—came in 1977. A group of researchers in Cologne, including a young scientist named Frank Steglich, were investigating cerium copper 2 silicon 2. It became a superconductor at low temperature. “And again,” says Smith, “that was complete nonsense. All of its properties were those of a conductor. The group reported what had happened in a footnote to their paper, but again said there was obviously something wrong becauseit just couldn’t be a superconductor.
Steglich, however, continued to investigate the compound, because he
was not satisfied. There was no consistency; some samples went superconducting, some didn’t. It was really hairy. And the senior man of the group kept saying, ‘Frank, don’t work on this. You’ll spend five years of your life until you learn what’s going on and then it won’t even be interesting.'” But it took only two years—till 1979—for Steglich and some colleagues in Darmstadt to demonstrate convincingly that the peculiar
cerium compound was, in fact, a heavy-fermion superconductor. This
was the first to be so proven.
…
One long-time observer of the field, who wishes to avoid controversy and remain anonymous, says bluntly: “It’s a mess. It’s like the blind men and the elephant, except we don’t even now whether there is an elephant. There are no universally accepted explanations for heavy fermions. We can’t get any agreement on why they are heavy or on what the mechanism for their superconductivity-is. We can’t even get the same people to look at the same data and come to the same conclusions.”
You can add to those stories the one of Celani reported here
” (1983-1987). After the experience with silicon detectors (sensitivity of about 1e-/3.6eV energy released), I decided to study innovative detectors having an equivalent sensitivity thousand times larger. So I started to study Superconducting Tunnel Junctions (Ni-Pb; T=4.2K), in collaboration with Salerno University, having an intrinsic energy gap of only few meV. Found some quite intriguing results using thick junctions on 1985. One of these were contaminated (by chance) from several other elements and showed behaviour similar to superconductivity even at temperature as large as 77K (LN2). It was stated a multi-disciplinary Commission in order to clarify the origin of such signals. Unfortunately the results were rejected, a-priori, because in disagreement with the BCS model/theory (i.e. max temperature of superconductivity stated at 32K). One year later Bednorz and Muller (from IBM, Zurich), independently (and starting from different points of view), found similar results in Cuprate Oxides mixed with rare-hearts and got Nobel Prize.”
time to call the ICC for judging those repeated unpunished crimes against human condition improvement.
great to see so much good work being done on cold fusion. there does not seem to be(from the photos) many young researchers.
Thank you Ruby, much appreciated.
I love it. Clearly a bunch of radical people whom are tryong to scam the world. Look at them all smiles. I joke I of course. But in reality that’s what people, whom do not research cokd fusion, think of these people associated with cold fusion. I am very proud of these people and I hoped for them all much success.
As this event occurred at MIT. I wonder how many influential skeptic types attended to discover the field is reaching a date with destiny soon enough. The Government must be fully aware of all aspects of CF.
It would be nice if the redemption of CF came from MIT, because if MIT never existed the entire Pons/Fleiscmann debacle might have played differently in 1989, and we might already be driving LENR cars.
The truth is MIT might hold some responsibility for how CF was perceived 25 years ago, and despite it being a scientific institution, it might have hindered mankinds progress.
If we review the events, there was a lot of mistakes made by all parties to warrant shared blame.
Thank you for posting the pictures. I recognize many influential faces in them.
I am sure it would be hard to attend MIT nowadays and not be aware of LENR thanks to P. Hagelstein and his colleagues. Kudos.
Let us hope it opens a few more eyes.
It seems from more and more dat I have that the LENR denial fiasco is inspired
– by maybe no more than 5 unethical incompetent stubborn non-brillant skeptics (Lewis,Hansen,Taubes,Huizenga,Morisson)
– then by dozen of lazy Nobel who parroted those liars withour reading a line, too happy to hear their prejudice validated
– then hundreds of physicists who parroted those parrots too happy to hear their prejudice validated
– then thousands of scientists and editors and journalist who parrorted the parrot of the parrots, trusting Nobel, editors, journalist, physicist, wikipedia ans impossible to be wrong all togethor
– then millions of people trusting the consensus and wikipedia
you can see those two citation of two source
the titanic paper of jed
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf
the Excess Heat book of charles Beaudette
http://iccf9.global.tsinghua.edu.cn/lenr%20home%20page/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf
all taken together is coherent an ashaming
the last quotes are from a paper on high-temp super conduction, and talk of general science behavior.
http://www.mosaicsciencemagazine.org/pdf/m18_03_87_04.pdf
http://www.iccf17.org/popup/bio_5.htm
“When a scientist writes about cold fusion, he should be held to more exacting standards. He must not dismiss or condemn cold fusion without reading the journal papers, and without presenting a credible, technical reason for doubting those papers. Society relies upon scientists, lawyers, ship captains, and other professionals to make unbiased, informed statements about their areas of expertise. It is unethical for a scientist to endorse or condemn a claim he has not carefully analyzed.
In rare cases, a few scientists have been guilty of even more unethical behavior. McKubre and other prominent cold fusion scientists have given copies of journal papers to prominent critics, including Douglas Morrison, Robert Park, and John Huizenga. The papers directly contradict assertions made by the critics regarding matters of fact, not opinion, such as the amount of energy produced by cells in continuous bursts, the percent of input versus output, or the amount of chemical energy that a mass 0.5 grams of palladium deuteride will release as it degasses. Morrison often claims the degassing can account for the heat produced during an experiment performed by Fleischmann and Pons. Fleischmann gave him a paper showing conclusively that he is mistaken by a factor of 1,700. Morrison has been told about this mistake countless times, at conferences, in writing, and in a formal reply published in Physics Letters A. Yet he recently contacted a Nobel laureate and repeated the same misinformation. Fortunately, the Nobel scientist contacted me, and I was able to give him the correct numbers.
Gary Taubes is another prominent critic. He made many misinformed claims in his book, on the radio, and in the mass media. He may not be qualified to read journal papers, because he does not appear to understand basic concepts such as electricity. He claims people sometimes measure electrolysis amperage alone and not voltage, and he thinks that regulated power supplies put out more electricity over the weekend because factories use less power. He thinks some researchers measure tritium once, after the experiment, without establishing a baseline or taking periodic samples. His book is filled with hundreds of similar errors. Perhaps the most mind-boggling one was his statement that a cell might have huge temperature gradients, “say fifty degrees hotter on one side than the other.” This is like asserting that you might stir a cup of coffee, drink from the right side and find it tepid, but when you turn the cup around and drink from the left side, it will be steaming hot.
Taubes wrote his book using the same methods employed by sensation-mongering reporters in 1912: he pieced together second-hand rumors and made wild guesses about a subject he does not understand. He described his methods in the introduction, footnotes, and appendices. The book is based upon interviews and telephone conversations with 257 people, listed in an appendix. He spoke with seventeen people who actually performed experiments. Four of the seventeen are implacable enemies of cold fusion, including the authors of the three famous “negative” experiments. Most of the remaining 240 are critics like Frank Close and William Happer, who deplore cold fusion, and have staked their reputations on its demise. They have attacked it in the mass media, the ERAB report, and in books. Although more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers were published by the time Taubes wrote the book, he did not reference a single one of them in the footnotes. His descriptions of the experiments are wildly at variance with the facts, in major and minor details, so it seems unlikely that he read a paper. Describing an experiment is an exacting task, even when you understand electricity, you read the paper, visit the lab, and ask the experimenter to review your description. When a scientifically illiterate person tries to imagine how an experiment works based on allegations made by people who despise the research, indescribable confusion and distortion result.
Taubes’ book was recommended in enthusiastic blurbs by four Nobel laureates and the chairman of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. These people could not have actually read the book, or if they did, their judgment was skewed by animosity. This shows how easy it is to spread false information, and how careless distinguished scientists can be. It takes only a small group of people to poison the well of public opinion. There may be a few other active critics in the mass media, but most attacks originate from these four: Morrison, Park, Huizenga, and Taubes. They are not famous or influential. They succeed because many scientists bear a grudge against cold fusion, and are willing to believe the worst about it. When Robert Park attacked it with inflammatory ad hominem rhetoric, a room packed with hundreds of members of the American Physical Society (APS) applauded and cheered.
Mistakes Caused by Culture, Denial, and Psychology
One way to learn how to separate fact from fiction is to study the ways mistakes and disagreements arose in the first place, and why they remain in the historical record, seemingly impervious to correction.
”
Jed Rothwell
“Unfortunately, physicists did not generally claim expertise in calorimetry, the measurement of calories of heat energy. Nor did they countenance clever chemists declaring hypotheses about nuclear physics. Their outspoken commentary largely ignored the heat measurements along with the offer of an hypothesis about unknown nuclear processes. They did not acquaint themselves with the laboratory procedures that produced anomalous heat data. These attitudes held firm throughout the first decade, causing a sustained controversy.
The upshot of this conflict was that the scientific community failed to give anomalous heat the evaluation that was its due. Scientists of orthodox views, in the first six years of this episode, produced only four critical reviews of the two chemists’ calorimetry work. The first report came in 1989 (N. S. Lewis). It dismissed the Utah claim for anomalous power on grounds of faulty laboratory technique. A second review was produced in 1991 (W. N. Hansen) that strongly supported the claim. It was based on an independent analysis of cell data that was provided by the two chemists. An extensive review completed in 1992 (R. H. Wilson) was highly critical though not conclusive. But it did recognize the existence of anomalous power, which carried the implication that the Lewis dismissal was mistaken. A fourth review was produced in 1994 (D. R. O. Morrison) which was itself unsatisfactory. It was rebutted strongly to the point of dismissal and correctly in my view. No defense was offered against the rebuttal. During those first six years, the community of orthodox scientists produced no report of a flaw in the heat measurements that was subsequently sustained by other reports.
The community of scientists at large never saw or knew about this minimalist critique of the claim. It was buried in the avalanche of skepticism that issued forth in the first three months. This skepticism was buttressed by the failure of the two chemists’ nuclear measurements, the lack of a theoretical understanding of how their claim could work, a mistaken concern with the number of failed experiments, a wholly unrealistic expectation of the time and resource the evaluation would need, and the substantial ad hominem attacks on them. However, their original claim of measurement of the anomalous power remained unscathed during all of this furor. A decade later, it was not generally realized that this claim remained essentially unevaluated by the scientific community. Confusion necessarily arose when the skeptics refused without argument to recognize the heat measurement and its corresponding hypothesis of a nuclear source. As a consequence, the story of the excess heat phenomenon has never been told.
”
Charles Beaudette
”
Turmoil in the Solid State
…
In fact, says James L. Smith, director of the Center for Materials Science of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first two heavy-fermion superconductors discovered were originally reported as footnotes, because they were so unbelievable.
…
One day, he noticed that uranium beryllium 13 went superconducting at a certain temperature. But he was a very good materials guy-—he knew superconductors— and so he knew that was utter nonsense. You put an enormous magnetic field on it, and the critical temperature hardly changed. So he said that there must be something wrong with the sample, which he hadn’t prepared himself—some impurities at the grain
boundaries.
“At the time, that suspicion was very logical, and in a footnote to a paper
Bucher duly reported that the material had gone superconducting, and what he thought the problem was, allowing the whole thing to be forgotten.”
The second case of this kind ofaccidental discovery going unrecognized—- indeed, merely being footnoted—came in 1977. A group of researchers in Cologne, including a young scientist named Frank Steglich, were investigating cerium copper 2 silicon 2. It became a superconductor at low temperature. “And again,” says Smith, “that was complete nonsense. All of its properties were those of a conductor. The group reported what had happened in a footnote to their paper, but again said there was obviously something wrong becauseit just couldn’t be a superconductor.
Steglich, however, continued to investigate the compound, because he
was not satisfied. There was no consistency; some samples went superconducting, some didn’t. It was really hairy. And the senior man of the group kept saying, ‘Frank, don’t work on this. You’ll spend five years of your life until you learn what’s going on and then it won’t even be interesting.'” But it took only two years—till 1979—for Steglich and some colleagues in Darmstadt to demonstrate convincingly that the peculiar
cerium compound was, in fact, a heavy-fermion superconductor. This
was the first to be so proven.
…
One long-time observer of the field, who wishes to avoid controversy and remain anonymous, says bluntly: “It’s a mess. It’s like the blind men and the elephant, except we don’t even now whether there is an elephant. There are no universally accepted explanations for heavy fermions. We can’t get any agreement on why they are heavy or on what the mechanism for their superconductivity-is. We can’t even get the same people to look at the same data and come to the same conclusions.”
You can add to those stories the one of Celani reported here
http://www.iccf17.org/popup/bio_5.htm
” (1983-1987). After the experience with silicon detectors (sensitivity of about 1e-/3.6eV energy released), I decided to study innovative detectors having an equivalent sensitivity thousand times larger. So I started to study Superconducting Tunnel Junctions (Ni-Pb; T=4.2K), in collaboration with Salerno University, having an intrinsic energy gap of only few meV. Found some quite intriguing results using thick junctions on 1985. One of these were contaminated (by chance) from several other elements and showed behaviour similar to superconductivity even at temperature as large as 77K (LN2). It was stated a multi-disciplinary Commission in order to clarify the origin of such signals. Unfortunately the results were rejected, a-priori, because in disagreement with the BCS model/theory (i.e. max temperature of superconductivity stated at 32K). One year later Bednorz and Muller (from IBM, Zurich), independently (and starting from different points of view), found similar results in Cuprate Oxides mixed with rare-hearts and got Nobel Prize.”
time to call the ICC for judging those repeated unpunished crimes against human condition improvement.