My girlfriend Suzy Williams was performing a set (with Cold Fusion Now WordPress guru Humphrey on bass!) to introduce the candidate.
I went with our new t-shirt design honoring the godfathers of CF (not quite available publicly yet) to give to Ms. Barr, along with a challenge:
Would she start talking about cold fusion as part of a clean energy policy?
Well, Roseanne Barr is a comedienne who had a long-running TV sit-com Roseanne about a working class family and is now running for President of the United States, representing a third party that will garner only a fraction of the votes that our mainstream “democratic” political entities will rake in.
But Roseanne’s speech was deadly serious as she ran down the shopping list on the supposed elite that have exponentially amassed financial power at the expense of our planet and its people.
You didn’t have to be a registered Peace and Freedom Party member to be impressed by her sharp analysis.
During the question and answer portion of the talk, I alerted the candidate to a new energy science that is just now emerging as a technology called cold fusion, and a few in the crowd whooped it up!
Why, there was some support there!
Ms. Barr even said “I heard about that…”
When I asked her if she would support this solution to our energy problems, well I couldn’t have been more pleased with her reasoned reply.
To start off her investigation, I walked over to the front of the stage and handed her my card, a few stickers with our website address, and our new t-shirt (test model!).
Not realizing that I had breached security, her body guard ran over to mediate the exchange!
Kristie Austin (mistakenly identified as her associate Ruby Lexington), an independent radio hostess and activist, took phone video of the encounter.
As I got back to my “seat” (on the floor – the place was packed), I was approached by several individuals.
“Hey, can I get some materials on this?”
“Can I buy a t-shirt from you? My friend works on cold fusion.”
“Have you heard about that guy in Italy?”
It was a risk to say the word nuclear in this context. But I did it anyway, linked as it was to “No radioactive materials involved.”
Still, there was a bit of silence after that word.
Still, Roseanne Barr said “I want a world free of all nuclear anything”, not knowing that nuclear power does not equate to the deadly scourge of radioactive waste that pollutes our planet.
Nuclear means “tiny”.
Nuclear means “the central portion of an atom”.
There are many nuclear processes, and dirty and dangerous fission is only one of them – one that we want to get rid of.
It doesn’t matter if your politics are right or left, if you’re mainstream or fringe.
We all need to breathe clean air, have fresh water, and eat wholesome food.
And we all need to use energy.
I challenge everyone interested in changing to clean energy generated by cold fusion/LENR/LANR/quantum fusion to attend their city, county, state, and national meetings and put the question to those holding office, and those running for office:
“Will you choose a clean energy future
for your children?”
Do you have a coldfusionnow.org bumper sticker on your car?
I do. And I believe that having bumper stickers on your car which refer to something you believe in helps you be a more conscientious driver, not necessarily a better driver, but a more conscientious driver, aware that you and thus your cause is making a good impression, (or a bad impression), dependent on how your driving is. The world sometimes seems a little more rude, less aware these days, all those drivers on their cell phones. A few cheerful bumper stickers, however, can brighten someone’s day.
My Cold Fusion Now sticker reads, “This isn’t the nuclear power your mother told you about. www.coldfusionnow.org”.
With a second bumper sticker, one can start of with a little dialectic, play the two off each other, make the driver behind wonder what, say, your favorite political candidates or gun rights, or organic collectives have to do with cold fusion. Cold Fusion Now and Trout Unlimited would be a good combination. Think of it, with cold fusion we would need fewer hydro-electric dams: salmon runs would be restored, hot damn!
There are other strategies, one can work with multiple different bumper stickers either on the same theme or different ones. Emphasize different nuances of a topic, or just make them wonder. There are also the “fish wars” of the Jesus fish, the Darwin fish and so on. “My child is an honor’s student,” may be of little importance except to the parents and the child, but without that bumper sticker we wouldn’t get the ones saying “my Jack Russell Terrier is smarter than your honor’ student.” It is a little rude, and _probably_ not true, but it is legitimate commentary towards the bragging of the parents of the honor’s student.
Bumper stickers are best when they subtly tweak the nose of society. Vulgar bumper stickers should be avoided, but fortunately the nanny-state has not gotten to legislating them yet, unlike trans-fats, sugary drinks and cigarettes. In this small manner of free expression, individuals get to decide, for better or worse, what goes.
The ones that I like the most right now are the stickers representing the members of the family, as zombies.
And if you have more than five bumper stickers (not counting repeats of different kinds on the same themes), and an old car, then the question arises whether the bumper stickers are bumper stickers, or whether they are rust bandages. If you have an old rusted car, they transform into a variant of the handyman’s secret weapon, duct tape.
Bumper stickers can bring a smile to a stranger’s face, let them realize that there is something new out there, even if it is very old (a friend has a bumper sticker for his church, 2000 years of Orthodox Christianity). A good bumper sticker is new at least in its form (I bet you didn’t know Orthodox Christians had bumper stickers).
And it can nudge the viewer a little into a new direction, possibly even spurring them to check out something new and integrating it into their life. We need more people to think good thoughts about cold fusion, even if it is just to know we are out here and working towards a better future.
And who knows, maybe our angel of cold fusion (if she is not too busy already), will have some cold fusion stickers by Christmas, for all the boys and girls.
Cold Fusion Now website may be in and out of visibility as we work on changes to the program files and server. We also will be changing web hosting services to a more affordable and responsive company.
We continue to evolve and prepare for the next wave of interest that, in our opinion, will be even bigger than the Rossi Wave, the huge influx of people brought to new energy awareness by Andrea Rossi‘s public demonstrations of the E-Cat.
Economic failures, ecological collapse and the end of the oil age are converging in one big clusterfuck, and there is nowhere else to run.
Marshall McLuhan, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, taught that as much as we shape our tools, technology shapes our minds, and we believe that
the biggest changes in the human mental imprint will occur with a new energy technology that also has the power to free peoples around the world from the scourge of poverty, pollution and war.
It is our function to create the awareness that cold fusion/LENR/LANR/quantum fusion is not only real, but developing at an ever accelerating pace. Providing a platform for the voices of new energy scientists and speaking to the public about ultra-clean energy from cold fusion is our mission. I recently took a trip up to Northern California and here are some highlights.
I first stopped at Heinz Klostermann‘s lab in Palo Alto, California where he and his partner Tamerlane Sanchez are developing a version of the Papp engine. It was a full day tailing Mr. Klostermann here and there through the heart of Silicon Valley, finally getting a small demonstration of the engine that runs on air.
You read right – an engine that runs on air.
Look for that video in mid-October (after Iraj Parchamazad‘s interview of his work with zeolites).
After the Klostermann visit, I couldn’t leave Palo Alto without stopping by Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm of Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. You may remember Mark Andreessen as the young man who gave us Netscape back in the early nineties.
He and his pal Ben have lots of resources that they invest in forward-thinking projects, companies, and industries of the future. I had hoped to get an appointment with the pair and relay the many opportunities available in the field of condensed matter nuclear science.
Unfortunately, they were both out of the office on vacation, but I managed to get an email address for further contact, and left two envelopes containing my card and Cold Fusion Now stickers with the lovely secretary who said she’d deliver them personally.
I took a picture of the library in the Andreessen Horowitz lobby.
As a chronic bibliophile myself, I always like to see what others are reading. This happens to be Andreessen’s personal collection and not surprisingly, the contents are mostly about computers.
On the way out, I stopped at New Enterprise Associates to see if they really do “Dare to Dream Big”, and I dropped off a few Cold Fusion Now stickers to a bemused front desk clerk, as well as a somewhat eager fellow who happened to be standing by the door.
Everyone gets a sticker, ’cause you never know….
Leaving the Silicon Valley, I stopped off at the Silver Crest diner in San Francisco to meet with Gregory Goble, the Cold Fusion Now Poet-in-Residence, and Paul Maher, a cold fusion activist who enjoys emailing institutions and challenging their personnel on clean energy policy.
We had a great conversation, and it was wonderful to meet these talented and committed individuals in person after so many Chip Body encounters (email messages).
Then, I headed north up to Eureka California, my old stomping grounds. I hoped the storage unit sheltering my thousand+ book collection was secure after a wet winter along the North Coast. What a relief to find everything dry and no mold anywhere. Whew.
While in Eureka, I took a long walk on the beach with my Geiger counter, taking radiation samples from seaweed, dead birds, crab shells, a decomposing seal, driftwood, and anything else I could test. I did not have the meter attachment I thought I ordered, so only the audio “beep” signal indicated a positive radiation measurement.
I was really happy to find the seaweed totally clean.
Only a few beeps now and then from lower portions of the dead birds, a few beeps from the decomposing seal. A few driftwood pieces had a little beep or two.
In no sample did I find an elevated, continuous beeping, the sign of higher-than-background radioactivity, which was extremely gratifying.
Of course, the reality of the early 21rst century is this could change at any moment. Whether it’s the thousands of nuclear weapons scattered about the planet on land and sea, or the nuclear power plants on the brink of failure, nuclear holocaust is a scenario much too possible to forget about.
On the beach I met a young man walking his dog who “had all the equipment in his lab” to do cold fusion, but he was skeptical.
I said “Get to it!” and told him to check out our website for more info. I hope he does, ’cause having some active cells in lovely Humboldt County would be a real plus.
On my way back to the Southland, where I’m house-sitting for my uncle in Los Angeles, California, I stopped for a hike in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, one of the most beautiful and precious stands of giant Redwoods trees on the west coast of the U.S.
I even stopped at the Park Visitor Center, where I was reminded that new energy science has a long and storied history, for here was a display of Charles Kellogg, naturalist and Renaissance man who purportedly put out a flame – on more than one occasion – using sound.
Here’s an NPR piece on Charles Kellogg and a bio from Mendocino Rail History.
Further south in Ukiah, California, I walked by WMEC radio station to drop off some stickers, and ran into two of the station people.
One of them, Govinda, said “Hey can you come back in fifteen minutes? I’ve got to interview somebody right now, but we’ll do you right after.”
“Sure!”, I said.
Within twenty minutes, I had the earphones on and was speaking into the mic about cold fusion. He even interrupted the Amy Goodman Democracy Now! special two-hour broadcast to put me on live.
The two fellows (and presumably all of Mendocino County!) were very interested to hear that cold fusion was alive and well. Apparently, the town of Willits, about twenty miles north of Ukiah, used to have an alternative energy fair where cold fusion scientists spoke!
“I have tapes of that somewhere”, he said.
I was dying to get my hands on those classic recordings. “Hoo boy, you better find em!”
Before I left, I thanked them for their open-mindedness. I have attempted to get environmentalist, Peak Oilers, the Green Party, and plenty of people who should know better, on board with the solution to our energy problems, with no success. Yet these two fellows at the Mendocino Environmental Center want more, and I am sure that I will be back there updating Mendo County again on the positive developments on cold fusion in the future.
So if the website goes in and out over the next week, you can rest assured that we have not been deterred from action. We are gearing up for more and better times to come.
I’m so lucky to be staying within a short 20-minute pedal to Venice Beach, California, where all the world mingles on the sands of the not-yet-too-radioactive Pacific coast.
Musicians, crafts people, campers, the homeless, sight-seers and tourists, families, soon-to-be-Hollywood stars, and artists galore line the Walk which, for me, begins at Muscle Beach and ends at the Santa Monica Pier Amusement Park.
I happened to still have the horrendous LATimes Obituary written by the lazy Thomas H. Maugh II for Martin Fleischmann in my backpack from the other day, when I showed a friend the thanks one gets for discovering the energy that could power Earth’s green technological future for tens of millions of years.
And then I met Winston.
Winston is a street artist who, for a donation of anywhere between $15 – $30 (you decide), will provide you with a portrait in 10 minutes.
What better way to turn this sad embarrassment (for the author) – into a positive tribute, adding to the ongoing special salutations Cold Fusion Now has featured all week, and ongoing through Tuesday August 21.
As I sat with Winston for that 10 minutes (OK, to be honest it was 16…!), I told him the story of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons and their amazing discovery and about what it could mean for all the planet.
He worked on the drawing all the while.
When he was finished, I couldn’t have been more pleased.
Thank you Winston.
Winston has no contact information.
If you want to see him for a portrait, you have to go to Venice Beach.
You’ll see him on the Walk, just north of Windward Avenue.
Left: Euthydemos II – c.190-171 BC – Nickel didrachm 24mm diameter, 7g. Apollo bust / tripod monogram to left “Of King Euthydemos” Right: Agathokles – c.171-160 BC – Nickel drachm 19mm diameter, 3.3g. Dionysos bust / Panther touching vine monogram behind “Of King Agathokles” [Source]
Three rulers in the Bactrian kingdom were first to issue nickel coins in the first century AD. Two of the coins are pictured at the top. The coins were 25% nickel and 75% copper alloy, just like today’s U.S. nickel coin. The source of the ancient nickel is unknown.
Let’s surrender our Nickels to our Senators and Representatives, sending a message regarding the coming shift in the energy paradigm. —Paul Maher
Send a link to your reps along with coin image to Cold Fusion Now for posting.
Print a few coins to a page saying
1.25 grams of nickel can make energy equivalent to 5 barrels of oil!
LENR/Cold Fusion Works!
to post on bulletin boards around your neighborhood.
Cold Fusion Now has a particular interest in numismatics. Author John Francisco is an ancient coin collector whose specialty is the Pythagorean coins of Magna Graecia. His research on ancient coins is regularly published in The Celator magazine. [visit]
Personally, my favorite is the ancient electrum from Lydia and Ionia, some of the first coins ever minted, but more recently, I’ve been snagging nickels.
While in Florida last winter, I met Steve Schor at the Hollywood Coin Club. [visit] Steve is a huge resource on coins from every age. His breadth of knowledge commands the whole club be asking him “What’s up with this coin?”
Of course I give him the cold fusion now rundown – and he goes for it!
I had a table at a coin show last October 2011 in Hollywood, Florida, and here’s a photo showing the portion dedicated to clean energy. Notice Edmund Storms‘ The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, .pdfs of the 2011 MIT CF/LANR Colloquium, and Cold Fusion Now stickers.
Steve borrowed my copy of Storms’ The Science of, but luckily, I got it back.
Cold Fusion Now represents at the Hollywood Coin Show in Hollywood, Florida last October 2011.
Yes, there are plenty of coin collectors in the South Florida area who will not be surprised when technology is released thanks to this event.
Steve Schor, former engineer and coin collector, just compiled a list of “all nickel” coins. I can’t believe how many there have been. If you’ve got any of these coins, take a picture and send it to me, cause I collect pictures of nickels, too!
Schor’s file has been re-formatted and v.2 of Pure Nickel Coins is available as Excel spreadsheet [.xls] or exported to [.pdf]. Note: weight is in grams.
Look at all that power – in your pocket!
If you have any questions about these coins, email Steve here.
First published by Infinite Energy IE24 in 1999, the MIT and Cold Fusion Special Report [.pdf] by Eugene Mallove featured a detailed history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) investigation into the claims made of cold fusion technology. The brief episode of research was undertaken by the MIT Plasma Fusion Center (PFC) in 1989 while Mallove was the school’s News Office Chief Science Writer. Mallove’s report on the hot-fusion scientist’s findings is fully documented with an analysis that shows a discrepancy between the original lab data and the data published in their final evaluation.
Drs. Pons and Fleischmann with cold fusion energy cells in 1989.In that year 1989, two scientists Drs. Fleischmann and Pons working out of the University of Utah Salt Lake City Chemistry department announced the discovery of what was called cold fusion, a clean and powerful form of energy generated in a small test-tube of heavy water. The cell made excess heat, which means more heat comes out of the cell than goes in. And it was alot of heat, the kind of heat that could be developed into an energy-dense technology to provide clean, abundant power for the entire world. It was an astounding declaration.
Upon learning of this breakthrough discovery, scientists around the world dropped what they were doing and attempted to reproduce the Fleischmann-Pons Effect (FPE). Brilliant individuals and talented researchers from a variety of disciplines, including hot fusion and plasma scientists, threw electro-chemical cells together using materials on hand, and attached a battery.
Unfortunately, for all the groups that attempted the experiment, there was only about a 15% success rate.
Most of the attempts to reproduce the effect failed, and many of the researchers saw nothing out of the ordinary happen.
Within months after the announcement, two of the top science institutes in the United States, with the power to shape policy at the highest levels, had declared cold fusion a ridiculous hoax.
More than any other factor, it was the negative reports by MIT on the east coast, and CalTech on the west, that influenced the U.S. federal policy of excluding cold fusion from the energy portfolio.
Federal agencies cited the recommendations from MIT and CalTech as a basis for their policy.
PFC Director Ronald Parker and professor Dr. Richard Petrasso wrote the MIT final report, making the claim that the Utah scientists had “misinterpreted” their results.
Quoting Mallove’s account, scientists at MIT claimed that “tritium detection in cold fusion experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratory should be ignored because it had been done by ‘third-rate scientists'”. They were of course talking about Dr. Edmund Storms and Dr. Carol Talcott, specialists on tritium and metal-hydrides who were measuring “significant amounts of tritium” along with others teams at the national lab.
MIT and CalTech expert opinions were broadcast through the TV/satellite peak of power, just as the Internet was first emerging in the civilian sphere. The message was total. In a story to the press, Parker characterized the work of Fleischmann and Pons as “scientific schlock” and “possible fraud”.
Though he first denied saying anything of the kind, an audio tape made by the reporter confirmed his particular language. The same vocabulary was unleashed on May 1, 1989 at the Baltimore meeting of the American Physical Society with an emotional vehemence uncharacteristic of scientific objectivity.
While Director Parker was meeting with Boston Herald reporter Nick Tate, he took a phone call from NBC-TV news Science Reporter Robert Bazell during the interview. The press eventually ran the message that cold fusion was a big mistake. Since then, virtually no coverage of cold fusion breakthroughs have been broadcast, with the exception the 2009 CBS 60mins report Cold Fusion More Than Junk Science.
During the Herald interview, Parker also took a phone call from Richard Garwin, Chief Science Researcher at IBM Corporation and a member of the Energy Research Advisory Board tasked by then-Secretary of Energy James Watkins with determining the federal response to cold fusion. The ERAB ultimately decided there was no need to investigate the phenomenon further.
In the years that followed, then-President of MIT Charles M. Vest was also on a federal panel that advised President Bill Clinton’s administration to increase funding for hot fusion. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has refused to even acknowledge the existence of cold fusion, resulting in no research funding for over twenty-years, including their $29 billion 2012 budget.
These reports were cited by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to justify diverting cold fusion patents out of the normal processing stream. Mallove stated that the MIT report effectively “killed the Pons and Fleischmann patent, which happened in the Fall of 1997”.
The meme created by MIT and CalTech in 1989 remains in scientific and political circles to this day: that cold fusion is a phenomenon imagined in the minds of lesser scientists.
Dr. Vesco Noninski was first to be curious about the MIT cold fusion experimental data. A subsequent analysis performed by MIT alumnus Dr. Mitchell Swartz, now of JET Energy, confirmed discrepancies between the original lab data and the reported data. The MIT reported data appears to be shifted downward, indicating that excess heat may have been measured, as represented by the higher-temperature lab data.
Swartz detailed his findings in three papers which can be found in the Proceedings of ICCF-4 prepared by the Electric Power Research Institute in 1993: “Re-Examination of a Key Cold Fusion Experiment: ‘Phase-II’ Calorimetry by the MIT Plasma Fusion Center“, “A Method to Improve Algorithms Used to Detect Steady State Excess Enthalpy” and “Some Lessons from Optical Examination of the PFC Phase-II Calorimetric Curves“. [download .pdf]
But the damage had been done. Administrators were not interested in re-visiting an already dismissed claim.
If it were not for that lucky 15%, we would not have known anything different, and prospects for a clean energy future would indeed be gloomy.
It is now known that for the types of palladium-deuterium electrolytic cells that they were experimenting with, significantly long times are needed to “load” the deuterium into the palladium. Weeks, or even months, could go by before excess heat would be produced. Turning on the cell in the morning, and expecting the effect to occur by dinner, was unreasonable.
In addition, scientists who were experts in their own field were not necessarily skilled in the complex art of electro-chemical cells. Measuring heat, a science in itself called calorimetry, is difficult for an experienced electro-chemist, let alone a novice. Experiments done by both MIT and CalTech were plagued with poor calorimetry.
Swartz’ examinations of MIT data twenty-years ago were recently appended when Melvin Miles and Peter Hagelstein re-visited the PFC’s experimental procedures of calorimetry. Miles and Hagelstein published their analysis in the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Volume 8 2012 pages 132-138 [download .pdf]
Miles is a retired Professor and Navy researcher who is an expert in measuring heat. Hagelstein is MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering who has theorized on the nature of the cold fusion reaction. Hagelstein has collaborated with Mitchell Swartz over the years on several IAP short courses and public demonstrations of active cells on the MIT campus without the official support of MIT. The most recent cold fusion cell continues to produce excess heat for six months now.
The summary of the Miles and Hagelstein calorimetry analysis is reproduced here:
The 1989 report from MIT remains flawed with unjustified shifts of temperature plots and poor calorimetry procedures. Yet this report, along with the CalTech conclusions, established the baseline for all academic and federal policy over two decades.
Twenty-years ago, Dr. Charles McCutchen of the National Institute of Health (NIH) responding to Eugene Mallove’s request to examine the MIT PFC data, asked MIT President Vest:
“For its own good, and to restore some civility to a contentious field, MIT should look into (1) how its scientists came to perform and publish such a poor experiment, (2) why they either misdescribed their results, making them seem more meaningful than they were or used a subtle correcting procedure without describing exactly what it was, (3) how it came about that data from calorimeters with a claimed sensitivity of 40 mw converged, between drafts, after completion of the experiments, to within perhaps 5 mw of the result that hot fusion people would prefer to see. It might have been chance, but it might not.” –Charles McCutchen NIH 1992
In light of the problems that characterized the Plasma Fusion Center’s experiments over those few months in 1989, and in light of the twenty-three years of research confirming without a doubt the existence of a form of energy that is dense, safe and ultra-clean, both MIT and CalTech have two choices: implement Dr. McCutchen’s recommendations, or, remove any long-standing institutional blocks that have kept research on cold fusion out of the most prestigious science schools in the U.S., and begin again by instituting a serious program to understand and develop what is now called condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS).
Both MIT and CalTech have refused donor money for cold fusion research. Most recently, an “MIT physicist” denied a group’s ability to fund Hagelstein’s research by actually returning the dollars. Meanwhile, the University of Missouri increases its support for new-energy company Energetics Technologies with private donations over $5 million. For elite science schools like MIT and CalTech to ignore the reality of cold fusion is not only a threat to the integrity of our institutions of science, but a threat to our planet.
There is alot of catching up to do in order to develop the myriad of technologies that will allow humankind a second chance at living a technological future, in peace, on a green planet Earth, and we need our most talented and creative minds to do it.
New-Energy Program begins tomorrow!
Opening party starts at 4PM.
Related Links
How Nature refused to re-examine the 1989 CalTech experiment by Jed Rothwell [.pdf]
JET Energy NANOR device at MIT continues to operate months later by Ruby CaratMay 22, 2012
1994 BBC doc profiles early history of cold fusion underground by Ruby CaratJune 7, 2012
International Society of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Publications
