Here are links to video presentations from Wednesday, July 24, 2013 at the 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-18) held at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
All currently available ICCF-18 papers and presentation .pdfs can be found on the University of Missouri conference archive.
Photo: Front row Abd ul-Rahman Lomax (L) and Charles Beaudette (R) author of Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Prevailed.
My apologies for no write-up of yesterday’s events. So much going on here in Columbia! I went to the tour of the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance, and got back late, missing some key lectures (though the tour was tremendous).
Watching Defkalion at ICCF-18Yesterday, the Defkalion demo was piped in on video, and the timing was somewhat off, as all the lectures here ran late, and it’s hard to stop a scientist on a roll. Alot of people missed the video stream entirely, as they were conferring together on scientific issues, or on one of the several pre-arranged tours.
The last part of the demo didn’t happen, as it was 1AM in Milan, and the Defkalion team was beat from flying from Vancouver, practically staying awake for two days, relayed Michael Melich, so he just announced the communique from Defkalion about the input of somewhere around 1.9 kilowatts, the output roughly 5.2 kilowatts, giving a COP somewhere around 2.5.
Good numbers, though the demo itself was somewhat anti-climactic, due to the time-shifts, late arrival of ICCF to watch, etc. I didn’t notice alot of discussion from scientists here about the demo, though I’m sure opinions were expressed in private.
For the most part, scientists in the CMNS community are not impressed by video, they want data. They want to be able to go and make measurements of key quantities, and only then will they accept any claim, not just from Defkalion, but any entity engaged in product development.
Nevertheless, the feeling was hopeful that all of these commercial ventures would be successful, as success for one, means success for the community. All will benefit when this technology is finally born unto the world.
Industry is here, looking around, and trying to catch up on the latest developments. Several participants in the conference are here at the behest of their employer tasked with writing reports on the field in order to determine whether or not they should get into the area.
Back to the Lectures
Wednesday morning started with Jirohta Kasagi who presented research on low-energy deuteron beam experiments.
He talked about electron screening and the effect that allows deuterium atoms to get closer together.
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ICCF-18 host University of Missouri scientist Peter Pfeifer is working from a Department of Energy grant on hydrogen storage in materials, currently using carbon nanotubes. Pfeifer is also associated with the Sidney Kimmel Institute of Nuclear Renaissance (SKINR). He showed data that boron-doped carbon film increases the density of adsorbed hydrogen.
They haven’t seen any excess heat from these high-surface-area carbon films during adsorption, but they are just beginning to experiment. They are also now loading hydrogen into palladium, showing data of 80% loading. They will continue to load the “SKINR palladium” beyond this and they expect to see anomalous heat generated at those levels.
Hanging out during break.
The ENEA Workshop featured several researchers highlighting the current work by the Italian agency. Research programs at ENEA have international collaborations sponsorship from ENEA, the University of Missouri, the Naval Research Lab, and SRI International.
Vittorio Violante gave an overview of research that has continued for over two-decades, and which has cooperated with the agencies in the U.S. for sixteen years. He is an expert in the materials science of palladium, and at one time, was “the only man in the world who could make palladium that worked”, according to Michael McKubre, who also presented during the two-hour workshop.
Electrochemical cells using palladium-deuterium elements are claimed to be clearly generating excess heat beyond chemical origin. The palladium needs loading in excess of 80% to produce excess heat.
Contaminants can affect the grain size and the grain boundary, which control stress and mass transfer in the material. Contaminants also can affect crystal orientation and surface morphology, which control kinetics and DL capacitance.
Samples that showed excess heat were revealed to have specific surface morphologies. Doping the palladium with platinum creates a much more varied surface, and these samples produced 50% excess power. Rhodium-doped palladium gave fast, high loading, and gave heat 50% excess over chemical reactions.
Main features associated with the excess heat effect are identified as:
A specific role of some contaminants has also been identified.
In short, for these Pd-D systems, materials science is the key to understand this reaction. The probability to succeed is directly proportional to the ability to produce the right material that will host the reaction.
Violante stressed that demonstrating the reality of this reaction has been done, and attention must now focus on defining the reaction itself – and this effort must involve young people!
Violante’s work at ENEA was sponsored in part by National Instruments.
The Workshop continued with Emanuele Castagna discussing ENEA’s gas diffusion experiments using multi-layer membrane electrodes. Analysis of the membrane’s surface continued to focus on the importance of materials.
ENEA is also doing electrochemical deposition techniques, work sponsored in part by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Director of SKINR Graham Hubler continued the ENEA Workshop by talking about how to prepare cathodes. Hubler recently retired from the NRL, and palladium metallurgy was a focus when Hubler was there. He asked if impurities could have been responsible for the Fleischmann-Pons Effect (FPE).
Older lots of palladium that appeared to produce substantial heat, likely had only ONE source – Engelhard, and these samples have different impurity profiles than current palladium lots. Older lots appear to have recycled Pd from catalytic converters as rhodium and platinum are present.
Current lots are much purer in these elements, but have zirconium, yttrium, and hafnium present.
The NRL made their own alloys for a while, and Hubler says that SKINR will now start making their own alloys. Systematic studies of samples that produce excess heat and do not produce heat need to be undertaken to determine differences.
Michael McKubre continued by discussing some of the criteria for working with palladium-deuterium systems.
Flux is a huge component in generating excess heat. Initial loading of deuterium appears to respond to continued flux. However, high flux negates high loading in conventional electrochemistry. Yet the problem was solved by Irving Dardik‘s Superwave concept, and loading above 90% can be achieved accompanied by flux.
McKubre is now going back to earlier data to understand this “looping effect.” These systems are not DC (direct current), but they are coupled oscillators that “breathe”.
However, there are “an awful lot of things” that need to be controlled in these electrochemical systems, and much science to be done to learn how to do that.
Robert Duncan closed the ENEA Workshop by noting the valuable international cooperation on this topic, and the intellectual basis that is forming.
He speculated on three classes of experiments:
i) cmns and nuclear science is well understood, and investors should be glad to invest in these;
ii) fracto-fusion, and phenomenon like this are more complex;
iii) the excess heat effect is not well-understood at all.
Nuclear physics cannot ignore the condensed matter around it, as is stated in textbooks, when the particles are not in a vacuum; the Mossbauer Effect shows this. A hyperfine interaction is another example.
In strongly interactive systems driven far from equilibrium, there is no conformity to statistically normal modes. New effects from lightning in thunderstorms interests Duncan as an example of this.
Shifting to sociological aspects of this science, Duncan is impressed with the leadership in Europe and India who are now moving to support research.
He mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was big into exploration of the unknown, and he started the University of Virginia to do just that. Duncan sees the University of Missouri as established in that same vain.
Duncan made a special point to thank ENEA for their cooperation and outstanding program in materials science that is advancing the understanding of CMNS.
At that point Edmund Storms received a gift for his achievements, part of the Distinguished Science Award he received yesterday.
He was called up to the podium somewhat abruptly as he was leaving the auditorium, and startled, he muttered “Uh oh, what did I do now?” However, it was a lovely box with a bow that he got.
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After lunch, David J. Nagel speculated on a method to link reaction rates to transmutation products in order to support his analysis on whether or not LENR could effectively get rid of nuclear waste by transmutation, at the current level of development. He went through and listed some published experimental the theoretical reaction rates.
Here’s a selection of his slides:
His message: remediating dangerous radioactive waste to a benign material is one of the possible applications of LENT. To do this effectively, there needs to be much higher rates of transmutation than the maximum of what is reported now.
Thomas Barnard of Coolescence talked about the High Energy D2 Bond from Feynmann’s Integral Wave Equation.
He seemed to consider a different configuration of the electron bonded in molecular deuterium, a geometry that allows Coulomb barrier penetration, and the Three Miracles.
This was pretty much over my head, so forgive me if I skip that description.
Simulation of the nuclear Transmutation Effects in LENR was the subject of Norman Cook‘s presentation. Cook indicated that the nucleus of an atom has a lattice-like substructure. Apparently, Andrea Rossi is familiar with Cook’s work saying, “My work has gone well thanks to your book” referring to Models of the Atomic Nucleus. Rossi has his lab personnel read that book, too, says Cook.
Moving to transmutations, he looked at the finite number of hot spots on a cathode surface, and assumed that there was less palladium after the reaction, than before. Then, he showed Tadahiko Mizuno‘s data showing both positive and negative changes in palladium isotopes near those hotspots. Cook was able to simulate that strange data, suggesting that all isotopes of palladium are involved in the reaction.
Doing the same thing for Mizuno’s nickel data, it was found that Nickel 61 does not change in the depletion analysis, indicating the Mizuno and Defkalion’s mono-isotopic experiments are related.
Cook concludes saying don’t just look at depletion of isotopes, but look at the addition of isotopes, too.
Peter Hagelstein was up next with his talk Lattice-Induced Nuclear Excitation and Coherent Energy Exchange in the Karabut Experiment.
He started out saying, “I’ve had some luck lately, and I’d like to share that with you”, and boy was he beaming.
Hagelstein asks, “Can we up convert from vibrations to nuclear excitation?” To begin to answer, minimize the energy transferred (easier to transfer smaller amounts) and start from a stable nuclear ground state.
He tested this idea using a TeraHertz vibrational source and hit Mercury Hg201 with a directional beam.
Hagelstein remembered that Alexander Karabut showed up at ICCF10 reporting collimated x-rays from his cell experiments. Hagelstein sees diffuse emissions, dependent on voltage, from Karabut’s experiments, as well as collimated beam, associated with super-radiant emission dynamics.
He sees this experimental as an example of vibrational energy converting to nuclear energy. He’s struggled to model this particular experiment since 2012, and after several failures, feels confident he has a model that will work for all the reactions from different systems, and has successfully validated the idea on Karabut’s data.
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Here it is — Tah Dah!
I believe he said that he could take this new model, and derive his old lossy spin model from it (got to check that).
With this model, he can solve the constraints, and obtain self-consistent solutions. More importantly, there is agreement between maximum observed x-ray energy and maximum from model.
Hagelstein was clearly pleased with the achievement, after 300 previous theoretical attempts “buried in my backyard”, and it was nice to see him smiling. Who wouldn’t be happy, after all this time?
He handed the remainder of his time to Vladimir Vysotskii, whose poster upstairs at the conference discussed collimated x-rays, and gave Hagelstein some confirmation that this model was useful for these experiments.
Still, there remains work to do as he tests it, one-by-one for the plethora of cold fusion effects.
A break ensued, and I was able to interview Michael McKubre, Jed Rothwell, and David French.
Back in the auditorium at 6PM, Roger Stringham presented his talk on Conservation of Energy and Momentum, a Cavitation Heat Event.
He uses Megahertz frequencies to create a million cavitation bubbles per cycle, which then collapse, shooting jets that hit palladium foil, creating high heat events.
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Experimental extrapolated SEM ejecta site survey count at a 1.6 MHz produces 1013 ejecta/second at mc2 gives 60 +/-50 Qx watts.
Calculation of 107 mc2 events per one MHz cycle is 1013 events per second equals 38 Qx watts.
6:30PM was the last talk for the day, and it featured local SKINR post-doc stepping in for John Gaul to present Cross Section Measurements of Deuteron-induced Reactions. This is research involving accelerated deuterons towards a target of multi-layer foils, often titanium and palladium.
This seems closer to hot fusion than cold fusion, but perhaps the data would be useful to the CMNS crew.
The long day of science ended; my brain full, and my mind spinning.
The 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-18) started today with a special meet-and-greet reception. Robert Duncan, Physics Professor and Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Missouri began the event with just a few welcoming remarks. He then introduced a local Columbia City Councilman from the 2nd Ward Michael Trapp who was attending the event and spoke in support of the school’s research in this area of condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS).
Opening reception at ICCF-18Christy Frazier of Infinite Energy Magazine has a table with lots of stuff.
It seemed like less than 10 minutes, and then, everybody was free to get a plate of food and mingle.
ICCF-18 Opening Reception had delicious buffet.
The talent in the room was stunning. Major figures of research going back twenty-four years are all together to hash out the latest.
Dr. Michael McKubre and Dr. Francesco Celani are both presenting at ICCF-18 this week.
I went around the room introducing myself to the participants, telling them about our film we are making and asking them if they’d speak with me on camera about their work. We lined up alot of interviews, though most will be on-the-fly due to the super-tight schedule.
I chatted with Akito Takahashi and Akira Kitamura who will be presenting their work this week, both experimental and theoretical. I met Sunwon Park and Frank Gordon who organized last year’s ICCF-17.
It was a great pleasure to briefly meet Charles Beaudette, author Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, one of the great books on the field.
I cannot name all the people I met, so forgive me for leaving most of them out.
However, it was very exciting to also meet the crew of the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project’s (MFMP) Bob Greenyer and Robert Ellefson. Representatives of this ever-growing group are presenting their new cell design tomorrow (Monday), a design made by Ellefson, whom I had previously met at the San Jose screening of The Believers movie.
Here’s some great audio with these two passionate experimentalists and inventors.
We will be getting video of the lectures tomorrow, and lots more photos, too.
Original article by Nancy Moen on Mizzou News here.
A cool scientific mystery is drawing researchers worldwide to Mizzou for a week in July to investigate recent developments in understanding how nuclear fusion could occur at or near room temperature.
Scientists representing the U.S. and 18 countries internationally will gather July 21–27 at the International Conference on Condensed Nuclear Matter Science to share information on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) that could someday provide a new energy source.
The idea of usable low-energy nuclear reactions is compelling to countries worldwide. Participants of the ICCF-18 conference include distinguished nuclear physicists and related research specialists from countries such as Italy, China, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
The researchers are looking for the capability to eventually produce high-performance, inexpensive, clean energy with few or no emissions. Such a sustainable energy source could eliminate the problems of greenhouse gases and heavy air pollution.
For years, scientists have either experienced or read reports of unexplained substantial levels of excess heat thought to be caused by nuclear phenomena that deviate from what is expected.
The regularity of these anomalous heat occurrences — reported by scientific observation worldwide — continues to pique interest, and logical conclusions seem to indicate the existence of an entirely new nuclear reaction that could become a source of energy.
Global interest
While in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working toward a PhD in low-temperature physics, Robert Duncan designed liquid helium cells. The glass sphere is a sample of helium gas, which is how gasses were stored and transported long ago. Photo by Shane EppingLeading the conference is MU Vice Chancellor for Research Rob Duncan, who oversees MU’s research and facilities. Duncan says it has taken years for mainstream scientific communities to realize this science is valid and real.
“It has been undervalued and treated as a ‘pariah science’ in the past, but now the world is beginning to realize how important it is,” he says.
An expert in measuring energy, Duncan has published extensively in low-temperature physics. Among his $8 million of funded projects, Duncan developed ultra-sensitive measuring equipment — specifically the best thermometer made in its temperature range — for a proposed NASA experiment in space aboard the 2005 International Space Station.
At the request of CBS television’s 60-Minutes in 2009, Duncan served as an independent scientist to test the validity of research in low-energy nuclear reactions by examining the objective scientific methods used in the experiments.
How LENR works
The ingredients involved in a low-energy nuclear reaction can be quite simple: deuterium, which is a type of heavy hydrogen (found in ocean water), a palladium wire and an electric current.
Researchers become very excited when far more energy comes out of the apparatus than was put in. That’s anomalous heat. These levels of anomalous heat are often more than a thousand times greater than what could be produced by a chemical process.
In recent work, researchers have made advancements in understanding the physics and in developing small units capable of initiating low-energy reactions, but the mechanisms of the phenomena still pose many questions. Improved research methodology may be the key that unlocks the mysteries of a potentially limitless supply of energy for global use.
The challenge is to determine the physical mechanisms causing excess thermal energy, the “whys” and “hows,” if you will. It’s not easy because measuring the input power is tricky, and the heat isn’t necessarily produced on demand. It can take days or even weeks for the heat to appear.
“We don’t fundamentally understand the process yet. In the past, only one in 10 or so attempts actually produced excess heat,” Duncan says. Excess heat is a comparison of the amount of heat produced to the amount of energy put in.
Experiments then and now
The first report of a possible low-energy nuclear reaction occurred in a 1926 test conducted in Germany by Austrian-born scientists Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters of the Berlin University Institute of Chemistry. The researchers were experimenting with palladium loaded with hydrogen. They reported that the process produced helium but later retracted their findings.
In 1989, electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah reported excess heat in their “cold fusion” experiments, but their work was later discredited when other researchers were unable to reproduce the results. “We understand now why these results were not immediately reproducible,” Duncan says.
Although the early experiments were difficult to replicate, other researchers through the years have observed similar anomalous heat effects in low-temperature nuclear research at several laboratories, including the Naval Research Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, ENEA (the national energy lab of Italy) and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay, India.
In 2009, when Duncan accompanied the 60 Minutes news team on an investigation of claims of LENR at Energetics Technologies in Israel, he was a good choice because he counted himself among the skeptics.
For two days on site, Duncan asked questions, measured, checked numbers and looked for errors and other explanations. What he found was repeatable results, leading him to conclude that “excess heat is quite real.” 60 Minutes broadcast his reports on a segment airing that year.
“In Israel, I found how important the research was. I think it surprised a lot of people when a main-street physicist found the research credible. Since then, there have been exciting new developments,” Duncan says.
Researchers working independently in 20 different laboratories have repeated the results, finding excess heat in low-temperature nuclear experiments, Duncan says. Some of those have been confirmed scientifically, making the study of LENR a new and real science.
Fascinating potential
Conference attendees will go into extreme depth of this phenomenon, which is just beginning to be understood. One of the major questions being considered is whether researchers can produce excess heat on demand.
In addition to serious scientific debate, there will be discussion of opportunities in research, engineering and the development of technology.
The many participants have a lot to share. Among them, Vittorio Violante, representing ENEA, the Italian Agency for Energy and Economic Development, will lead a panel on some of the best recent work in condensed matter nuclear science.
Electrochemist Michael McKubre, director of SRI International in California, will discuss a new technique he developed to perform a range of critically important experiments. McKubre is recognized internationally for his work in examining potential new energy sources and has been at the top of his field for the past 24 years. He also was featured in the 60 Minutes report on cold fusion.
Speakers include David Kidwell of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory; Professor Emeritus Jirohta Kasagi of Tohoku University in Japan; and Thomas Passell of TOP Consulting, a retired project manager for Electric Power Research Institute. Attendees are from top laboratories and research institutions such as the Hoover Institute, MIT and the Aerospace Corporations.
Visit the conference website for a list of conference attendees and the topics of their presentations. Members of the press are invited to register to attend.
MU’s nuclear research facilities
For the first time in 20 years, the ICCF conference is being held on a major research university campus, an achievement for MU and one that brings new opportunities, Duncan says.
Mizzou’s facilities offer a rich combination of ongoing research, and the university recently acquired a new, prestigious $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation specifically to investigate and apply neutron scattering, which has already begun.
Conference attendees will tour MU’s nuclear research facilities:
The MU Research Reactor is the nation’s largest university-operated research reactor, making possible advances in basic and applied sciences across multiple disciplines.
With seven collaborative scientific groups, the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance is dedicated to finding the origin of anomalous heat effects using a sound materials-science approach.
The Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute is becoming a global leader in nuclear– engineering education and research with a mission to offer degrees in nuclear engineering.
The International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine is dedicated to the discovery and application of fundamental and translational medical science based on previously unexplored chemistry combined with nanotechnology and the biosciences.
The 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-18) will be held at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, U.S. July 21-27 where Vice Chancellor of Research Dr. Robert Duncan has led the creation of a world-class research program based on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).
Since his appearance on the CBS network’s 60 minutes program in 2009, Duncan has brought international researchers to the university’s business incubator park and helped to establish a new facility specifically devoted to the science.
The Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance (SKNIR) is named after philanthropist Sidney Kimmel who funded the project. An overview of the facility will be presented by Director of the Institute and Former Navy Research Lab (NRL) nuclear physicist Dr. Graham Hubler on the first day of the week-long conference. Fellow NRL scientist Dr. David Kidwell will give the Keynote speech.
ICCF-18 brings together some of the top scientists in the world to report on their research. This year’s program “Applying the Scientific Method to Understanding Anomalous Heat Effects: Opportunities and Challenges” has been published and is accessible here.
Researchers will speak on multiple types of systems, both palladium-deuterium Pd-D and nickel-hydrogen Ni-H. Most talks will focus on experimental results regarding excess heat and transmutations, but theorists will present several models of the reaction as well.
Included are panel discussions on diverse topics of Tritium, and Emerging Career Opportunities.
A panel on Entrepreneurship and Innovation chaired by Mr. Matt Trevithick features former-Navy SEAL and new-energy entrepreneur Douglas Moorhead along with materials scientist and ARPA-E GRIDS program director Mark Johnson.
Dr. Mahadeva Srinivasan, head of the Organizing Committee for ICCF-16, will chair Condensed Matter Nuclear Science – The Way Forward Panel that includes researchers from multiple countries.
A workshop held by Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) will be led by Dr. Vittorio Violante, and include Dr. Michael McKubre of SRI International, Dr. Robert Duncan of University of Missouri, Dr. Graham Hubler of SKINR, and Dr. Emanuele Castagna of ENEA.
A Transmutations in Biological and Chemical Systems Panel chaired by Dr. Jean-Paul Biberian will include Dr. Mahadeva Srinivasan and Dr. Vladimir Vysotskii, whose research has reportedly revealed transmutations by biological systems that have turned radioactive isotopes into benign material, a process which may lead to the ability to rid the planet of radioactive waste.
Cold Fusion Now author and patent expert David J. French will also present time TBD. Ruby Carat will attend to conduct video interviews and provide news updates throughout the week.
“Since 1926 there have been over 200 observations of intense heat release in palladium when it is loaded well beyond its equilibrium limit with deuterium. Very careful work at two national laboratories, namely the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States, and at ENEA, the National Energy Laboratory of Italy, and at many other laboratories around the world, clearly indicate that these extreme ‘excess’ heat releases are in fact real, despite earlier claims to the contrary, and I will discuss why these experiments have proven to be so difficult to repeat. These heat releases are anomalous, since we do not yet have a clear understanding of the physical process that is responsible for these often extreme levels of heat release. These effects have been referred to as ‘cold fusion’ and ‘low-energy nuclear reactions’ in the past, but these names imply an understanding of the physical origin of these anomalous effects that in fact does not yet exist. Hence the term ‘Anomalous Heat Effect (AHE).
View this video to see Dr. Robert Duncan discussing a series of experiments that we are conducting within the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance at the University of Missouri that are designed to elucidate the physical mechanism that is responsible for the AHE.
Looks like alot of young people in the audience, too!
Quotes from Robert Duncan in The Mystery of Cold Fusion:
“I like to call it AHE Anomalous Heat Effect.”
From a typical 0.3 gram palladium cathode, there was regularly “heat release of about 50,000 Joules, and occasionally heat releases of over one megajoule. This clearly cannot be described by conventional chemical origins.”
“If you think that the excess heat effect is not real, you’re being oblivious to data.”
“But, I have no idea, conclusively, what’s causing it. Some propose it’s fusion. Some propose it’s a low energy nuclear reaction involving electron-weak electron capture, or something like that. There’ve been other proposals that are even broader.”
“I know it’s real. I know I don’t understand it. And that fascinates me.”
“When you see something that defies everything you think you know, that should be very motivating.”
“You don’t say, ‘I can’t study it because I don’t understand it’, you study it because you want to understand it.”
“You have to be sensitive to empirical surprise. That’s the only thing that’s improved science through history. That’s the only thing that continues to improve science today.”
The Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance is planning neutron scattering experiments for the hydrogen and deuterium system, and x-ray scattering experiments in the palladium lattice; doing both simultaneously.
“Are these anomalous effects happening in the lattice itself, or is this an effect occurring say, in the voids, that may have concentrated packets of material?”
They are trying anything that will help them understand the anomalous heat effect and understand what’s going on.
“I love the saying here: National Instruments doesn’t judge, they measure.”
“A nanogram of conclusive data is worth a ton of conjecture.”
“Superconductivity above room-temperature should be considered as empirical evidence that our understanding of physics remains incomplete. It is simply too convenient and scientifically counter-productive to dismiss all claims that don’t agree with what we currently think.”
“The scientific method is the only thing we have, and the only thing we need; that’s what got us from the Wright flyer to Apollo 11 in just sixty-six years.”
“Julian Schwinger shared the Nobel prize with Richard Feynman and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), and he had a theory that this was proton-deuterium fusion, not DD fusion, but since he was pursuing something that had been pronounced a pariah science – watch out when all the scientists in the world agree on something – but since his ideas were being forwarded after they had been so thoroughly discredited at the end of 1989, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) refused to review his [Julian Schwinger] papers for publication.”
“Now it’s certainly fair to accept his paper, review it, and if you find tragic flaws or real problems in the paper, in logic or in data analysis, to reject it. Journalists do that all the time. That’s what journalists should do. I referee for Physical Review Letters, that’s the way it should be. But the fact that the AIP said this is in an area that we are so thoroughly convinced that this is wrong, we won’t even review it, was in my opinion, wrong.”
“That infuriated Julian Schwinger, and he resigned from the American Physical Society because of that.”
“These empirical results that don’t fit our current picture of the way we think things should be, are an opportunity to challenge the way we think, not a reason to object it as bad, junk science.”
“There exists a huge gap exists between a new scientific discovery and useful engineered systems.”
“We should not speculate wildly, in my opinion, we should manage expectations.”
“Science is the tool to understand.”
“I don’t know if this will have any impact on energy production, I think it has the potential to. In fact, maybe within a year or two, these other engineered systems that are being promoted in Greece and Italy may show that there is a viable energy opportunity, maybe not.”
“When people ask me about Rossi’s work from Italy, or this company in Greece, that are saying that they’re going to put out HVAC units based on low-energy nuclear reactions, they ask me my opinion, I say, the beauty of it is, my opinion in insignificant.”
“They are saying they are going to put this on the market. There is even talk of selling them through major retailers. If they provide products to the market, and it doesn’t work as advertised, it’s all going to be damaged goods and returned stock.”
“The point is, my opinion doesn’t matter. If they hit the market within the next year or so, let’s see whether they work. If they work as advertised, that’s significant, and if they don’t, well that’s significant too.”
“I don’t really need to take a scientific position in something that’s at the endgame of market delivery, as they claim to be.”
“Research funding needs to become much less dependent on common assumptions and common wisdom.”
“…become much more courageous in general I am certainly delighted to see really visionary places, like many universities, many national labs, many industries like National Instruments taking that objective view …”
“If we ever get to the point where we’re told it’s a pariah science and we can’t go there, that’s very detrimental to the future of science.”
Speaking about cold fusion, he said “It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.”
Q&A follows, with many more GREAT quotes, though the audio goes in and out. The video ends abruptly, in mid-sentence.
Related Links
Robert Duncan interview on Ca$h Flow: “Public investment means public ownership” by Ruby Carat February 6, 2011
Political Support for Cold Fusion in an Election Year by Ruby Carat May 6, 2012
