Scientific American has published a piece of typing on cold fusion that would have founder Rufus Porter rolling in his grave with its glaring, unsagacious bias.
After twenty-three years of research confirming the phenomenon, in-the-dark and over-40-somethings continue to type the same old myths they once heard about twenty-years ago, and this author from a Scientific American-sponsored blog is no exception.
Jennifer Ouelette‘s assemblage Genie in a Bottle: The Case Against Cold Fusion is a sad collision of two-decades old gossip, Hollywood scripts, and misinformation, which she has casually repeated without batting a false eyelash. She claims to “well remember the controversy” when it first erupted, and has “followed it on and off” since then.
Or, perhaps it was from her CalTech physicist husband Sean Carroll‘s colleagues that she obtained such errant perspective. (This is innuendo with intent to gossip.)
CalTech was one of the labs to emotionally denounce the discovery, and the persons, after they failed to reproduce the effect. (This isn’t gossip.)
The article claims recycled twenty-year-old statements, twenty-years-ago refuted. None of the last two decades of increasingly advanced results were considered.
Who doesn’t like fun, light science? But this is no ordinary “Bad Moon Rising: The Science of Werewolves”, her next follow-up post for Halloween night. This is representing Scientific American on one of the greatest discoveries since fire.
Ouelette types “.. wanting something to be true isn’t the same as something actually being true in the rigorous experimental sense of the word.” We suggest Ouelette, whose avatar shows a woman having a cocktail, imbibe a few more before pontificating on this topic again. Seeing straight, she might encounter the catalog of scientists in the field speaking about their research.
Remove Institutional Blocks at MIT and CalTech; Fund cold fusion programs now by Ruby Carat
How Nature Refused to Look at the CalTech Calorimetry by Jed Rothwell [.pdf]
MIT Special Report by Eugene Mallove [.pdf]
U.S. Naval researcher Melvin Miles has spent twenty years successfully reproducing the experiments and analyzing early flawed data from CalTech and MIT showing clear mistakes in their hasty attempts to emulate the effect.
Critical comments to the article were deleted, including those by former Los Alamos National Lab nuclear chemist Edmund Storms, who has been researching cold fusion, also called low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), lattice-assisted nuclear reactions (LANR), and quantum fusion for two decades.
Jed Rothwell, longtime researcher and writer wrote a response on his science archive site lenr.org and we reproduce that here.
Scientific American censors discussion of cold fusion, including statements by its own editors
–October 31, 2012 by Jed Rothwell
The Scientific American published another attack on cold fusion, Ouellette, J., Genie in a Bottle: The Case Against Cold Fusion, in Scientific American 2012. The author ignores the scientific literature and looks instead at movies, popular culture and mythology surrounding the 1989 announcement. She concludes that cold fusion does not exist.
In the on-line discussion of this article, the author allowed only skeptical arguments against cold fusion. She erased all rebuttals, and all messages supporting it, including: proof that many scientists support the research; that the effect has been widely replicated; and that over a thousand peer-reviewed papers on the subject have been published in mainstream journals. Finally, she erased messages quoting the editors of the Scientific American, and a message saying that peer-reviewed replicated experiments are the standard of truth in experimental science, which cited the Chairman of the Indian AEC and other distinguished scientists.
To paraphrase Marx, the opposition to cold fusion began as a tragedy and it is ending as a farce.
Edmund Storms wrote this response to this column:
The scientific proof supporting the claims made by Fleischmann and Pons is now overwhelming. This is not the opinion of a “handful of diehard supporters” but of several major universities and corporations. The information is easily obtained at LENR.org and in many books written about the history and the science. We are no longer in 1990 when the claims were in doubt and many people attempted to replicate them, some with success. Many of the reasons for success and failure are now known. An explanation for the phenomenon is being developed and claims are being demonstrated for commercial-level power. Surely a writer for a magazine as important as Scientific American would know these facts and not continue using the myth that was created before the facts were known.
The author first erased it, but later restored it, adding, “With all due respect to Dr. Storms, I stand by my post.” She erased several messages from many different contributors. Here are two by Jed Rothwell:
“If you are going to quote Robert Park, it seems to me you owe it to your audience to quote him when he brags publicly that he has never read a single paper. That is what he has said, repeatedly. He said it to a large crowd of people at the APS. If you do not believe me, ask him yourself. It is misleading to quote him as some sort of expert when he brags about the fact that he knows nothing.
The editors of the Scientific American also told me that they have read no papers on this subject, because ‘reading papers is not our job.’ Their assertions about cold fusion are also technically wrong. I published their comments here: http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?p=294 ”
Further quoting Rothwell:
[Quoting a skeptical attack] Cude wrote: “I’m not aware of a single major university that has expressed the opinion that evidence for the claims of P&F is overwhelming.”
Professors at universities and at other institutions express that opinion. For example, the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission said that, as did the world’s top expert in tritium at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (NSF p. 13-3). In 1991, The Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin wrote: “. . . there is now undoubtedly overwhelming indications that nuclear processes take place in the metal alloys.”
Hundreds of other distinguished experts in nuclear physics and other related disciplines have said they are certain cold fusion is real. They know this because they have conducted experiments and detected the reaction at high signal to noise ratios, and their experiments have survived rigorous peer-review. That is the only way anyone ever knows anything for sure in science. Replicated, high sigma experiments are the only standard of truth.
Original article by Jed Rothwell here.
Jennifer Ouelette, you might never have dreamed repeating someone else’s twenty-year-old claims would hurt so much!
As our planet careens towards resource wars, ecocide, and economic collapse, the stakes for a clean, powerful, new source of energy are as high as they can be. Cold fusion offers a solution, so total, it’s hard to imagine.
Contact me! Let’s go for a cocktail, and you will be surprised at what has transpired over the last two-decades, and why the cold fusion myth persists today. I’ll meet you at your favorite haunt.
Till then, here’s Dr. Edmund Storms discussing how the myth got started.
WATCH What is Cold Fusion and Why Should You Care? by Edmund Storms.
Cold Fusion Now!