25th Anniversary of Cold Fusion at MIT Sees Major Progress Toward Real Energy Solutions

Find 2014 CF/LANR Colloquium at MIT up-to-date Full Coverage Here

cf-lanr-bannerHere we are at MIT for the 25th anniversary of the first public announcement of “cold fusion” by Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, and I must say that after sitting through the first 2 days of incredibly persuasive presentations from some of the most serious scientific minds ever to grace the field, that I find it extremely difficult to believe the skeptics’ claims that all these highly credible scientists have somehow been measuring their heat wrong, or unknowingly contaminating their samples for the past 25 years…

group-photo-large

This is the Sixth CF/LANR Colloquium that has been hosted at MIT, and it’s been an amazing weekend here in Boston, and it’s going to be a busy week editing down all the videos of the presentations and getting them posted to the ColdFusionNow YouTube Channel. We’ve been meeting and talking to so many amazing people all weekend we’ve hardly had time to sleep let alone post anything, so check back during the week for more updates on the events here at MIT this weekend. Photos, videos, and articles covering the colloquium will be posted throughout the upcoming days.

Thank you Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons for your integrity in science and dedication to discovery! We’ll see it through!

Rare audio outtakes of Sir Arthur C. Clarke on cold fusion

Video: Arthur C. Clarke excerpt from 1998 documentary film Fire From Water

Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote in support of cold fusion when mainstream publications refused to publish on the topic. Clarke also lent the authority of his voice to the film Fire From Water, the 1998 documentary film written by Eugene Mallove (creator) and Jed Rothwell and directed by Chris Toussaint.

Multiple takes of Sir Clarke discussing science, and scandal, are now available as an .mp3 and a transcript courtesy Infinite Energy Magazine via Jed Rothwell of lenr-canr.org. Eugene Mallove and Infinite Energy Magazine followed the science-fiction icon’s interest in new energy, publishing several articles by Clarke, and collaborating on advocacy within government.

Buy the DVD from Infinite Energy and support the New Energy Foundation, founded by Eugene Mallove.

Audio Player

 

STATEMENTS FROM SIR ARTHUR C. CLARKE FOR THE DOCUMENTARY COLD FUSION: FIRE FROM WATER AT CLARKE’S HOME IN SRI LANKA (AUGUST 1998)

http://lenr-canr.org/Collections/ClarkeInterviewTranscript.pdf

Take 1
When the original news of so-called “cold fusion” came out ten years ago, I was very
excited, like almost everybody else. But then when it seemed as though it was a mistake, I
more or less forgot about it, though I was very surprised that two world-class scientists
could have made such fools of themselves. However. . .

Take 2
Like everyone else, I was very excited when the so-called “cold fusion” announcement was
made. And then, again like everybody else, I became disappointed and forgot about the
whole thing when it seemed to be a mistake, though I was rather puzzled why two worldclass
scientists could have made such fools of themselves. Well, during the years that
followed, slowly, from time to time, there came news of other laboratories repeating the
experiment and getting positive results. And there has been a sort of groundswell, all over
the whole world, of new information. And during the course of the last five years or so, I’ve
slowly become convinced, from my original skepticism, to 99% certainty that it is for real.
The evidence now is really overwhelming, and I do think this is a major scandal.

There’s a curious parallel back at the beginning of the century, which people have
forgotten all about. When the Wright brothers first flew in 1903, no papers covered it at all,
because everybody was convinced—certainly the American press—that heavier-than-air
flight was totally impossible. All the top scientists said, “This is nonsense.” And editors
wouldn’t even bother to send journalists or photographers to interview the Wrights, or even
to take pictures of them flying in full public view. And it wasn’t for about five years that
eventually they realized, “My goodness, this is real! Heavier-than-air flight is possible.” And
I think a similar thing is going to happen with so-called “cold fusion”—although it’s seldom
cold and often isn’t fusion at all.

2
[PAUSE IN TAPE]
I believe it was Niels Bohr who once said that new theories don’t become accepted by
converting the opposition. You have to wait until the opponents die, and then the next
generation of scientists take the new theory for granted. Well I hope in this case it is not
necessary for too many people to die before everyone realizes that there is something
here. I don’t like the phrase “cold fusion,” because although that may exist there are
obviously, or almost certainly, other forms of energy production which have nothing
whatsoever to do with fusion. Some may depend on magnetic machines of some kind,
which tap some source of energies. There are many theories, in fact perhaps too many
theories, and that’s a problem in this area. I can quite understand the scientists saying,
“Well look, how does this work, if it’s for real?” I think it was Eddington who once said, “I
won’t accept any experimental fact until there’s a theory to account for it.” And that’s rather
an exaggeration, but it’s not a bad idea.

[PAUSE]

Take 1
There are some classic examples of earlier scientific scandals, which should make us think
that we aren’t always sure of what. . .

Take 2
I’d like to remind you of some earlier examples of scientific scandals. My favorite one
concerns meteorites—stones falling from the sky. And President Jefferson, who was one of
the most brilliant of all American presidents, once said, “I would sooner believe that two
Yankee professors lied than that stones fall from the sky.” Well, now we know that
mountains fall from the sky, and there is considerable interest in this particular subject of
meteor or asteroid impact on the earth. Atomic energy itself was a matter of great
skepticism. Rutherford—Lord Rutherford—who uncovered the secrets of the atom, once
said that the idea of getting energy from the atom was “utter moonshine.” In my own field
of interest—space travel—for most of my youth people thought the idea of leaving the
earth was “utter bilge” to quote a remark made by a certain Astronomer Royal. Well, again and again we have seen these new and revolutionary ideas proved, and then finally accepted and taken for granted.

[PAUSE]

Take 1
These two examples are probably unnecessary, but I’ll just give them to you, and you can
use them if you. . .They are relevant, but they’re rather long winded. . .

Take 2
Two of my favorite examples of scientific revolutions where a heretical idea has been
finally accepted are continental drift and the origin of lunar craters. Now, continental drift—
the idea that the continents moved around and that once the American and European
continents fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, and then drifted apart—was regarded as
absolutely ridiculous by probably 99% of geologists. In fact, someone once said that, “The
only time I ever saw a man literally foaming at the mouth was when I mentioned continental
drift to a distinguished geologist.” Well, now we know that continental drift does occur, and
that originally all the continents were stuck together and they have moved apart. So here is
a total revolution which occurred actually in the last couple of decades. The other one is. . .

Another revolution is in our ideas about the craters on the moon. They look slightly like
volcanoes and, until we went to the moon, most astronomers thought they were volcanic in
origin. The other theory was that they were created by huge meteors splashing into the
moon. But that idea was dismissed, at least in England, by most astronomers. And I am
fond of quoting one who said that, “The presence of central peaks completely rules out the
theory of meteor impact.” Well, now we know that when a meteor does impact, it does
create a central peak, and most lunar craters are in fact the result of meteor or asteroidal
impact. So there is a revolution in our ideas which has taken place in a very short time and
proved that old ideas, old concepts, were completely wrong.

I’m an old fashioned conservative, so I still believe in the law of the conservation of energy.
Energy doesn’t come from nowhere. So, if these various devices work, where do they get
the energy? Well, some of these electrolytic cells—the original Pons-Fleischmann cells and their derivatives—may be some kind of nuclear reaction: fusion of hydrogen, or deuterium,
or tritium, or whatever. Others may be tapping what’s known as zero point energy. Space
itself is a seething mass of energy, although we are not aware of it, luckily! But there are
tremendous energies in space, and one famous scientist, a Nobel Prize winner, once said,
“The energy contained in a volume of space equal to a coffee mug is enough to boil all the
oceans of the world.” And perhaps we are beginning to tap that. It’s a pretty scary idea. I’ve
often wondered if supernovae are industrial accidents.

Another possible source of energy is something called micro-cavitation. It’s a little known
fact that when ultrasonic waves—very high frequency sound—pass through a liquid, they
can produce bubbles. And if those bubbles collapse, preferably symmetrically, they can
produce temperatures of perhaps millions of degrees, and possibly some kind of reaction
may take place in ordinary water, or water enriched with deuterium or tritium, that may
produce some kind of fusion. I became interested in this as a result of some news I
received from Russia, which I’d like to talk about in a minute. [Potapov] Now there’s only
one more thing. . .

If these new sources of energy do turn out to be real—and, as I say, there are several
totally different varieties—the question is: What effect will this have on our society? On the
future? Well, it’s just possible they may be no more than laboratory curiosities, and can’t be
scaled up to commercial levels. I think that’s rather unlikely. Nuclear energy was once a
laboratory curiosity. So let’s assume that these devices can be developed. The future is
then almost unlimited. It could be the end of the fossil fuel age: the end of oil and coal. And
the end, incidentally, of many of our worries about global pollution and global warming. So
that’ll be a very good thing. If they can be made on a small scale, that could be the end of
electrical distribution. In other words, every house could be totally self-contained with its
power source. The automobile, belching carbon dioxide and other fumes, would be a clean
device. What an effect that would have on our cities! The oil companies will simply go out
of business, and the effect on the world’s politics, particularly in the East, will be. . .well,
staggering. And, in fact, one can imagine all sorts of unpleasant geopolitical scenarios. I
hope we have the wisdom to adapt to this new order, when we are certain that it is going to
come about.

[BACK TO POTAPOV]
This is one of the things that made me interested in this whole area of new energy. I hope I
can. . .(lifting device) oh, it’s quite a weight! This is the business end, or component, of
something called a Yusmar. About five years ago I heard there was a Russian inventor,
with the odd name of Potapov, who had a factory producing devices which produced more
energy than went into them. They work on this principle: He has a powerful electric pump
which squirts water through this thing, which he calls a vortex tube, and something
happens in here. The water becomes very hot, or even steam, and apparently, about 20%
more energy comes out in heat than goes in in electricity. Well, this man has had a factory
running for years now, and it has produced thousands of these units, including very large
ones which can heat whole apartment houses. So I sent a friend, an engineer named Chris
Tinsley, who unfortunately is now dead, into Russia with a video camera and he filmed the
whole operation: hundreds of these units, big units, going up for sale. And Potapov is
advertising really large units now, in the megawatt range. We are still not quite certain if
they do produce excess energy, but if they do, they probably depend on micro-cavitation—
making bubbles which collapse and then produce tremendous temperatures. Another thing
that made me take this fairly seriously is that two independent firms in the United States
are producing similar devices, and selling them. Some of them don’t claim to produce
excess energy; they may be very, very efficient ways of turning electricity into heat. But
there is some evidence that occasionally, at any rate, these things produce a little more
energy going out than comes in. This is not enough to revolutionize the world as some of
the other devices would. Some of the devices being advertised and even sold produce tens
or hundreds of times more energy than goes into them. But these claims still remain to be
completely substantiated, though I do take them seriously enough to wish that people
would investigate them more carefully.

Okay . . . [Discussion of quotes for voice-overs.]

It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and
engineers can miss the mark when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are
investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well informed men become
blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them.

To predict the future we need logic; but we also need faith and imagination, which can
sometimes defy logic itself.

It has been said that the art of living lies in knowing where to stop, and going a little further.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost
certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
That’s one of Clarke’s laws. But my favorite Clarke law is the third, which is. . .
I’d like to give you the three Clarke’s laws.

The first one: The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them,
into the impossible.

Second law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The third law is my favorite, and perhaps the most quoted: Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic.

. . .If you doubt that, look at your compact disks; look at your pocket computers. They
would have been pure magic only a few decades ago.

Read and rate: “Cold Fusion May Have Revolutionary Potential” by Jed Rothwell


Rate this essay on cold fusion submitted to the Foundational Questions Institute, and give new energy your vote!

Cold Fusion May Have Revolutionary Potential by Jed Rothwell of LENR-CANR.org was submitted to the FQXi How Should Humanity Steer the Future? 2014 Essay Contest. Open to entries until April 18, 2014.

Go to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2000 to read the essay and comment.

Essay Abstract

Cold fusion is a form of nuclear energy produced in metals saturated with hydrogen or heavy hydrogen (deuterium). It has been replicated in hundreds of major laboratories, and these replications have been published in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. This literature shows that cold fusion can generate heat at temperatures and power density equivalent to a fission reactor core. It has sometimes produced high power, 20 to 100 watts, in reactions that produced roughly 100,000 times more energy than any chemical fuel.

Download Cold Fusion May Have Revolutionary Potential [.pdf]

Author Bio

BA Cornell U. 1976 in Japanese language and literature Programmer and technical writer. Librarian at lenr-canr.org, an on-line library of 1,200 full text documents and a bibliography 3,500 items. Rothwell edited many cold fusion papers, especially for several ICCF conference proceedings. He translated several papers and one book from Japanese into English.

“The Cold Fusion Revolution is Here – Time to Change the World”

The MIT IAP Cold Fusion 101 course taught by Dr. Peter Hagelstein and Dr. Mitchell Swartz was attended by Cold Fusion Now’s Jeremy Rys of Alien Scientist and all five days of science lectures are posted on the Cold Fusion Now Youtube channel.

Now, Jeremy has put together a video summarizing the state of the field with a historical background for the non-scientist to enjoy.

Watch: “The Cold Fusion Revolution is Here at MIT 2014 – Time To Change the Worldhere!

Peter Hagelstein on the Fleischmann-Pons Experiment


SeriousScience.org has posted a video of Dr. Peter Hagelstein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discussing the Pons & Fleischmann Experiment and its implications for nuclear physics.

Hagelstein will be conducting an IAP course Cold Fusion 101 on the MIT campus beginning January 27-31 with collaborator Dr. Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy, developer of the NANOR technology. More information here.

From the original article (transcript):

What was the main problem of nuclear physics for the last 25 years? How did the scientific community split into two broad camps? Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Peter Hagelstein explains his view on the cold fusion experiments.

“Cold fusion started in March of 1989 with the announcement of the observational facts by Fleischmann and Pons. The claim was stunning. Energy of nuclear origin, a lot of it, in a test tube, palladium electrode, heavy water: simple current, and there you have it. If true — it’s a big deal. It’s unlocking source of clean nuclear energy. All you have to do is doing some electrochemistry, and you can get clean nuclear energy. That’s magic at that time I was interested surely in. What happened next was not much fun. People tried to replicate it, and more than a hundred laboratories reported negative results. People scratched their head and they thought about how the science could work. And came to the conclusion that based on a lots of physics, and nuclear physics there was no basis for the existence of such an effect.”

“I was interested in why it’s impossible, and the role of experiment in terms of trying to sort out what’s real and what’s not real. The basic issue is that in nuclear physics people have studied nuclear reactions for many years. If you make energy in a nuclear reaction, the energy is made and the energy is carried away. That’s a consequence of fundamental laws of conservation of energy in momentum on a microscopic scale. In Fleischmann and Pons experiment the thing that was amazing is energy was being produced was nuclear, but there was no energetic nuclear emission coming off. That’s hard to understand.”

“Now we have experiments confirming the basic effect, we have experiments showing that energy is produced, that the energetic reaction products aren’t there, and the question is what to do about it. Actually, we should be very interested in these experiments. We should be interested, because we have experimental results which by now have been confirmed a great number of times. We learned about nature from doing experiments. So, here are experimental results. Can we, should we pay attention to them? Follow them up, see, where they lead? Today, sadly, the experiments in the cold fusion business are nor considered to be part of science. And that’s the resolution that we have come to as the scientific community. From my perspective, having been in labs, having seen the results, having talked to experimentalists, having looked at the data, having spent great time on it, it looks like pretty much these experiments are real. They need to be taken seriously.”

Watch the 13-minute video on Youtube here.

Cold Fusion to usher in second Earthrise for “grand oasis”

Video: Earthrise: The 45th Anniversary NASA Goddard

A new and powerful energy technology based on cold fusion will offer humanity a chance for a green technological future, one where all lifekind shares in the freedom of existence and Earth becomes the greatest work of art ever wrought.

Our “grand oasis” is fated for a renaissance in culture as all systems re-boot to accommodate the off-grid, ultra-clean, power generated by the hydrogen in water.

New mental imprints have already initiated Homo sapiens 2.0, and a distinct service environment is forming. After twenty-five years, and heartache aplenty, there is much reason to rejoice.

It’s only a matter of time until the most significant scientific question of our time is solved, and a revolution in life ensues.

christmas-tree-in-woods

Happy Holidays
and

Cold Fusion Now!

From NASA Goddard:

In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth.

Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.

The visualization draws on numerous historical sources, including the actual cloud pattern on Earth from the ESSA-7 satellite and dozens of photographs taken by Apollo 8, and it reveals new, historically significant information about the Earthrise photographs. It has not been widely known, for example, that the spacecraft was rolling when the photos were taken, and that it was this roll that brought the Earth into view. The visualization establishes the precise timing of the roll and, for the first time ever, identifies which window each photograph was taken from.

The key to the new work is a set of vertical stereo photographs taken by a camera mounted in the Command Module’s rendezvous window and pointing straight down onto the lunar surface. It automatically photographed the surface every 20 seconds. By registering each photograph to a model of the terrain based on LRO data, the orientation of the spacecraft can be precisely determined.Earthrise Earth Observatory
Earthrise_CFN