Twenty-three years ago on March 23, 1989 Dr. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made an announcement of their astounding discovery of a new form of energy then dubbed cold fusion.
One of the first scientific discoveries born of the modern mass media, the world buzzed with fax machines and satellite TV as scientists dropped what they were doing to try to reproduce their results. A deceptively simple apparatus was more difficult to handle than thought, and very brilliant people became brilliantly emotional at their inability to accomplish the Fleischmann-Pons Effect FPE.
Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons were since abandoned by their universities and disowned by their colleagues. They have yet to be recognized for their work by mainstream science even as, more than two decades later, independent labs are close to developing a commercial technology that could change the future of humanity.
We honor these two Lions of Science who had the courage to face the unknown with honesty and integrity. Sirs, you have no peers!
These videos are from the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour of that day, when the pair were interview by journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. They come compliments of the New Energy Foundation which provides direct support to new energy researchers and was founded by Eugene Mallove, an early defender intellectual honesty and a champion for those scientists who were shut out from the community they so loved.
Peruse the advertisements for hot water boilers from an old 1913 Architectural Digest. These conveniences were a new technology for the public as the century started. As this century begins, we may see the emergence of a new technology to last a millennium.
People in 1913 are exhilarated to have the convenience of gas-heated water in their homes. Cold fusion technology can take accommodation to a new level by offering the convenience of personal power production without any grid-ties.The Vapor Vacuum Heating Company prided themselves in their simple design - which came with a primer. The perplexing nature of the cold fusion reaction is in contrast to the relatively simple design of the technology based on hydrogen and small pieces of metal like nickel.Craig Boilers and Richardson Boilers - maximum service at minimum cost. Clean energy based on hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, makes cold fusion technology the viable alternative energy and the economical one.New designs are important for the Pierce Spence Water Boiler. Emergin cold fusion technology is in its infancy, and will go through many design changes throughout the decades, and centuries.The Kewanee Firebox Boiler highlights the safety of the design.Honeywell Heating provides dependable and economical heating service for apartment tenants. Cold fusion technology engenders a new economy allowing individuals new opportunities for living on Earth.
I am going to talk about ignorance, so that in the process of doing so, we will all become a little less ignorant of ignorance;)
One might say that there are three types of ignorance. Ordinary ignorace which is the ignorance of not knowing something. Ordinary ignorance can be answered with ordinary knowledge. This knowledge is factual and except in particular circumstances, usually trivial. By trivial, I mean that it is one thing to passively know something, it is another to turn that knowledge into action. Ordinary knowledge gives an answer for ordinary ignorance, what it does not do is give a heuristic with which individuals can discover things by themselves.
Galileo's telescope 1609
Willful ignorance is “a paradoxical condition in which we are aware there is something we do not know, but choose not to know it. It is assuming an ignorance when there is no ignorance.” Think of it as someone putting their fingers in their ears and yelling, “la, la, la, I can’t hear you.” But it also is exemplified by Galileo’s opponents who refused to look into the telescope, or when they did, proclaimed they saw nothing. With ordinary ignorance. people are unaware of a topic but can informed. Willful ignorance, however, is much more insidious. There is actually something (propaganda) blocking knowledge from forming. In Catholicism, “propaganda” is for the propagation of the faith and that is what propaganda does, propogates a faith, religious or political or maybe cultural. Propaganda is typical of a one party system. In the American political system we have a variant on the one party rule, we have two parties trading off with each other. We should not fool ourselves, American propaganda is as strong as any other system of modern propaganda and more subtle than most. The problem that cold fusion faces is not a matter of ordinary ignorance, although that is there too. It is a matter of willful ignorance in different degrees.
Internal thermos- sized cold fusion cell.
Some people do not have anything against cold fusion per se, they just don’t want to stick there heads up and get shot at. And who can really blame them, one has to pick one’s fights. Others bargain in bad faith, they presuppose the outcome of the investigation and want to stop it from ever happening. Our society likes to think that the truth cannot be suppressed (and perhaps in the long run it cannot), but then some people diabolically reverse this and say that therefore, if something is suppressed, then it must notbe “the truth.”
Of course, the opposite can happen, people can believe in something because it is suppressed. This usually traces a grand conspiracy back to the Templars/Illuminati/Trilateral commission etc. etc. In a truly liberal society, there would be no suppression, and one could weigh such a topic more fairly. With suppression, the issue can neither come to fruition, nor can it really show itself as empty. With propaganda blocking the way one cannot realize an issue, nor can one, if it is a bad idea, let it go. I tend to not believe in grand conspiracies. Small ‘c’ conspiracies, yes, pettiness, arrogance and just sheer meanness explain alot. Big ‘c’ conspiracies, not so much.
The third type of ignorance is learned or higher ignorance. Nicolas of Cusa states that,”every inquiry proceeds by way of a comparative relation, whether an easy or a difficult one. Hence, the infinite, qua infinite is unknown; for it escapes all comparative relation.” Higher ignorance whether it be towards God or creation must be learned. It has a sincerity to it, it is intellectually honest unlike willful ignorance. As Aristotle said, philosophy begins in wonder. Wonder is not an answer, but rather a question, the question, that uproots the self, along with everything else (aporeia). Socrates engaged in that kind of wonder, although he focused only on the human realm, and shirked natural philosophy (physical world).
Galileo, on the other hand, engaged in the physical world with such wonder. He formulated new questions where there previously had not been recognized topics of study. Galilean moons, the phases of Venus and sunspots. He saw them and asked about them before anyone else did. He blew the lid off of the order of things and in the process the Church lost control. He was not trying to make the Church lose control, he was just actively and openly looking at the world. It is amusing to think that the Catholic Church lost control, precisely because the Church thought it had control, and that if the Church had not thought that it was in control (and tried to enforce it on Galileo and a whole slew of astronomers on the one hand, and Martin Luther and a whole bunch of reformers on the other), then the Church would perhaps still have control. Like a song says, “if you hold on too tightly, you’re going to loose control.”
Pd-D cold fusion cell.
We not only have different kinds of knowledge (as I’ve said before) playing off of the topic of cold fusion, we have different types of ignorance as well. One type of ignorance, learned ignorance, allows the pure researcher to come up with new questions and thus also, explore new answers for cold fusion. This type in my ‘book’ is positive in nature. It is active and, ultimately, creative.
Another type, willful ignorance, blocks inquiry, trying to preserve an orthodoxy. It is negative. It is active, but rather than creating, it protects a rather limited vision of the status quo. It is like a conservatism for past that never really existed. It is reactionary and if we are honest with ourselves, we will recognize that to some degree, it is in us all.
Last of all, ordinary ignorance is the ignorance of the individual not involved and unconcerned. This type is neither positive nor negative in its nature because it is passive. If it becomes interested, it becomes interested in knowing “that,” rather than doing. Of course, there are all kinds of different degrees of involvement or openness inside these three types of ignorance, but you can figure out the different shade on your own if you desire.
Quotes and general background from James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief, (Penguin Press, NY, 2008), 12-15.
[latexpage]In 1989, Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced results of their largely self-financed research into palladium-deuterium electrolytic systems. In one of the early patent applications, they included a graph documenting the surprising increase in temperature of a cell over time.
As a scientist involved in this research since that very day back in 1989, Dr. McKubre described some of the main features of this graph.
“This result, by itself, with no more explanation really, is sufficient – if you believe Martin Fleischmann – to convince you that there is a real thermal heat effect in a deuterium-palladium system.” -Michael McKubre
Acknowledged as one of the greatest electro-chemists that ever lived, there was good reason to accept Dr. Fleischmann’s, and his partner Stanley Pons’, data.
In the graph, the temperature begins in the upper-50s$^{circ}$ C, and then begins to increase at a steady pace, represented by the slowly climbing line in the graph, as their electro-chemical cell is held at constant power.
“You see the little downward spikes in the rising areas”, said Dr. McKubre, “Fleischmann and Pons ran their electro-chemical cells open, that is, the products of electrolysis, in this case deuterium D2 gas and oxygen O2 gas, leave the cell, so they have to refill the cell every so often with the amount of heavy water that’s left. So these downward spikes are the times once each day when heavy water was added to the cell to make up for lost electrolytes.”
In their paper that circulated after the 1989 announcement, some of the early Fleischmann-Pons experiments that created excess heat were described.
… standard additions of 1 ml of the electrolyte were made following sampling. Losses of D2O due to electrolysis in these and all the other experiments recorded here were made up by using D2O alone. A record of the volume of D2O additions was made for all the experiments.
—Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium, J. Electroanal. Chem., 1989
The steady increase in temperature, punctuated by small, temporary drops, continues for days. Dr. McKubre relayed what happened next,
“All of a sudden, one day it goes down alot, and then it kicks up to a new level – it kicks up in temperature by 10 degrees or more. So all by itself, at constant input power, steady operating systems, the cell suddenly started to produce 15 degrees more temperature. There’s clear evidence of excess heat and it builds.
It builds up asymptoting at 100-degrees Centigrade, so it comes up very close to the boiling point, and then all by itself – and this all-by-itself is why its taken us twenty-two years to understand this thing – the cell switched off and went back to its initial trajectory.” -Michael McKubre
When the temperature “kicked-up”, the rate of change increased to about 6.4$^{circ}$ C higher each day, and rose parabolically as it got closer to boiling. After the big drop, the rate of temperature increase returned to about 2.2$^{circ}$ C each day.
What caused these sudden temperature increases, and temperature drops, has occupied scientists for the past 23 years.
“This is an electrode being electrolyzed in a heavy-water electrolyte”, said McKunbre, “a palladium cathode, the negative electrode. The line is rising, the temperature is going up in the cell at constant power. Now, electro-chemical cells will generally rise in voltage, so that’s not necessarily surprising or interesting.”
Continuing,
“All you need to do is wrap a calorimeter around that and measure the amount of heat to determine whether this is possible by any chemical scheme or not. And the answer is it’s absolutely not possible by any chemical scheme. This amount of heat is 100 or 1000 times more than you could get from the sum of all possible chemical reactions in that particular experiment.” -Michael McKubre
In his 2007 summary of cold fusion research The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, Dr. Edmund Storms described one early FP experiment using a 1-cm cube of palladium which “melted through the beaker and bench after an explosion stopped the current.” [p 128] In their initial paper, the Fleischmann-Pons team wrote “WARNING! IGNITION?” for that particular run. Had they experienced “heat after death”, a phenomenon whereby the cell keeps on generating heat energy even after it’s been unplugged, and the current to drive electrolysis is no longer applied?
The control of this particular reaction leads directly to “self-sustain mode” in the newer nickel-hydrogen gas-loading steam generators, leading to huge thermal energy returns that are safe and clean.
“This [early data] was available for discussion and interrogation”, said Dr. McKubre. “Thoughtful people looked at it and said, ‘My god, how can that possibly happen?'”
Unfortunately, for various reasons, some of which Dr. McKubre discusses in the lecture, many bright scientists did not reproduce the results. Dr. Edmund Storms related the irrationality of the broader scientific community in accepting their negative conclusions over the positive results.
“Accepting these negative studies as evidence against anomalous power being real would be like having many groups each collect random rocks from a beach, have the sample carefully tested for diamonds, and then when only a few diamonds are found, conclude that diamonds do not exist anywhere in nature because the observations could not be reproduced when other random rocks were examined. Such an approach would be considered absurd in any other field of study, yet it was applied to claims of Fleischmann and Pons.” Edmund Storms The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction [p 52]
This early data “was preliminary, as Fleischmann and Pons readily acknowledged”, and they had not at the time intended to make it public. Yet, it was this early data and graph that “triggered” all the work in the newly created field of condensed matter nuclear science since.
Dr. Storms wrote,
“Nevertheless, the excessive response encouraged intense studies in many laboratories and a willingness of a few scientists to acknowledge anomalous results. Without this over-reaction, such unexpected behavior would have been completely ignored as error. Instead, people were encouraged to report behavior thought to be impossible-behavior that now has been witnessed hundreds of times in dozens of laboratories.” Edmund Storms The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction [p 62]
This Early Data graph was dismissed by the mainstream science minds of the day. The small group of researchers around the world who continued to investigate the anomalous heat generated by these simple electrolytic chemical cells have done so despite isolation and derision from their less-than-curious peers. Now, major advances in this field are leading to commercial products which hold the promise of changing all planetary systems, social, economic, and ecological.
As this field develops from an obscure science to a worldwide technology, this graph represents a turning point, when humanity was given a second chance for a peaceful future, with clean, abundant energy for all, even if nobody knows it yet.
The first commercial cold fusion technology is emerging as a hot-water boiler to make useful steam and hot water.
An old Architectural Record from December 1925, with no cover but otherwise in tact, contained eight advertisements for hot water boilers and a lone oil heater for domestic use in the US.
It’s amazing that, despite the technological advances, some things will never change. Hot water and steam are beloved by humans.
Imagine this cold fusion technology network.This unit consumed 18 tons of coal over a heating season, compared with their neighbors 25 tons of coal. I can't wait to write my testimonial - for one gram of nickle powder every six months!Let's leave this technology in the last century. Look at all that CO2!Cold fusion hot water boilers don't need to be connected to a grid giving privacy, independence, and freedomSmall amounts of nickel transmute to copper in a Rossi E-Cat.What will the next 31 years bring? Will cold fusion be the energy in the year 2043?Multiple single cells in one unit. Now where have I seen that before?Can Mr. Rossi rollback prices this low? Go Conchie!
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. –John 1:1 Holy Bible
The name cold fusion describes the biggest technological advance in energy since humans tamed fire. It also continues to generate intense emotional responses, both positive and negative.
Such is the Power of Word.
Michael McKubre presents “What happened to cold fusion?”In his presentation at Cafe Scientifique, Dr. Michael McKubre discussed the various names that have been given to the Fleischmann-Pons Effect of excess heat, as well as the myriad of subsequent phenomenon since discovered that confirm nuclear reactions when hydrogen infuses certain types of metals.
In this presentation slide below, he notes the vocabulary characterizing various aspects of condensed matter nuclear science. Dr. McKubre described a few of the terms during the introduction of the lecture.
“All of these terms in red are used to describe what was announced on March 1989 as cold fusion. The term cold fusion actually came from previous work in hot fusion – muon catalyzed hot fusion.
The term stuck, it’s unfortunate, it irritated the physicists. I think the physicists would have been irritated anyway, but this didn’t help.
In attempts to soften the blow we’ve called it low energy nuclear reactions or lattice assisted nuclear reactions – LENR/LANR. Those terms are not very good. Low is subjective and pejorative – you know we don’t really want to produce low energy.
And nuclear is always a bad word. We took the nuclear out of nuclear magnetic resonance and called it magnetic resonance imaging because sociologically, nuclear is not a good term.
Chemically assisted nuclear reactions. A whole slew of things.
The Japanese rather coyly called it new hydrogen energy which really conceals a wealth under that phrase.
If we’re talking about the Fleischmann-Pons Effect, the effect that Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced to the world on March 23 which was the electrolytic production of excess energy from a cell containing heavy water D20 and a palladium cathode, then the Fleischmann-Pons Effect is an accurate descriptor.
But the field has expanded vastly beyond that, and we now have an overall terminology condensed matter nuclear science attempting to distinguish what we do from what physicists do with high-energy particles or high-temperature plasmas.” –Michael McKubre
Each name expresses a particular aspect of a highly elusive process that has defied explanation for more than two decades.
As long as there is no definitive theory and scientists are still not sure how this special excess heat effect is initiated, or what the Nuclear Active Environment really is, there will be no definitive name.
The element Helium is correlated with excess heat from the consumption of the hydrogen isotope Deuterium.
One reason the moniker ‘cold fusion’ has “stuck” is that, as the Palladium-Deuterium Pd-D systems have shown, deuterium in can give rise to measurements of Helium out.
In this slide from Dr. McKubre’s presentation, we see excess heat is positively correlated with the production of Helium. The slope of the line represents the rate of change of energy per helium measured and is close to 31 MeV, +/- the error.
Assuming two deuterium nuclei pair up to form a helium nuclei, the measure of the heat generated, or Q-value, would be 24 MeV. Dr. McKubre believes that the observed higher bias may be due to experimental design elements, and that a value closer to the expected 24 MeV Q-value is possible.
These models are based on last century's hot fusion theory of nuclear reactions and do not occur the same way in cold fusion. High-energy particles and dangerous radiation, by-products of hot fusion, are not seen in cold fusion.
In Pd-D systems, two deuterium nuclei are somehow ending up to form a Helium nuclei, which is the essence of fusion, but not fusion as we know it now.
That can’t be all that’s going on either, for the excess heat effect is also generated from Nickel-Hydrogen Ni-H systems, which do not use a fuel of deuterium, but the simplest form of hydrogen, protium.
And because elements not originally present in a cell can be created during the process, there is also a transmutation effect, which could be from either fusion or fission inside the atomic matrix, or, some other new nuclear process.
For these outcomes to occur in different systems, creating multiple different effects, implies nuclear reactions occurring beyond conventionally known theories from 20th century physics.
Nevertheless, the name cold fusion reflects this idea of fusion occurring in “cold” circumstances, i.e. not hot plasmas.
“The future of the future is the present.” Marshall McLuhan
In ancient times, before science, words were magic. Uttering a name gave power and dominion over that thing. Saying a word could bring whole universes into existence.
It will be remembered that Thoth is called the “scribe of the gods,” the “lord of writing,” the “master of papyrus,” the maker of the palette and the ink jar,” the “lord of divine words,” i.e., the holy writings or scriptures, and as he was the lord of books and master of the power of speech, he was considered to be the possessor of all knowledge both human and divine.
Ancient Egyptian god Thoth was a master of words of power.
At the creation of the world it was he who reduced to words the will of the unseen and unknown creative Power, and who uttered them in such ways that the universe came into being, and it was he who proved himself by the exercise of his knowledge to be the protector and friend of Osiris, and of Isis, and of their son Horus. From the evidence of the texts we know that it was not by physical might that Thoth helped these three gods, but by giving them words of power and instructing them how to use them.
–E. Wallis Budge Egyptian Magic 1901
What we choose to call this transformational new energy technology will continue to evolve, until the secret formula is unlocked. In an instant, the simple, clear, perfect vision of our clean energy future will be summoned by a new and powerful Name. Scientists in every basement lab and every DOE office will be able to relax for a bit, and then get down to the hard work of implementing a revolution across the globe.
But the kids won’t care. They make up their own names. Change nouns to verbs, verbs to nouns, mess up the plural, create their own magic.
For this year, we’ll stick with Cold Fusion Now, not just cause we mean it, because it fits – and the kids dig it too!
Related Links
SRI International: “What happened to cold fusion?” video lecture with Michael McKubre at Cafe Scientifique by Ruby Carat November 21, 2011
