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.

13 Replies to “Peter Hagelstein on the Fleischmann-Pons Experiment”

  1. Academic science community had an exam of logic an epistemology.
    The subject was:
    If one experiment is reproduced at least few times, and produce without doubt the evidence of a phenomenon, that is not explained by current theoreticians using current theories what should you do:

    The academic science answered :
    1- assume it is artifact, and ignore. No need to prove artifact.
    2- when it cannot be artifact assume it is fraud. No need to prove fraud.
    3- punish the people who claim there are evidence, because they are deluded, incompetent, or fraudsters.
    4- prevent publication of evidences, because it cannot be evidence

    They missed the exam, but they keep their position because they are the boss.

      1. Interesting paper. The data is great. If only he’d dropped the attitude.

        I wonder at what point will GE reenter the field? Or, are they experimenting again now???

        “Everyone makes mistakes – everyone. It’s how you handle your mistakes that makes the difference.” Morrison was sure right there!

      2. Charles beaudette talk of that critics as fully rebutted
        This book is a must to read:
        http://iccf9.global.tsinghua.edu.cn/lenr%20home%20page/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf

        “Dr. Morrison’s critique is not reviewed here as it was based upon a series
        of misunderstood and misinterpreted capabilities of the open cell. When these
        were set forth, he did not respond.”

        “The upshot of this conflict was that the scientific community failed to
        give anomalous heat the evaluation that was its due. Scientists of orthodox
        views, in the first six years of this episode, produced only four critical reviews
        of the two chemists’ calorimetry work. The first report came in 1989 (N. S.
        Lewis). It dismissed the Utah claim for anomalous power on grounds of faulty
        laboratory technique. A second review was produced in 1991 (W. N. Hansen)
        that strongly supported the claim. It was based on an independent analysis of
        cell data that was provided by the two chemists. An extensive review completed
        in 1992 (R. H. Wilson) was highly critical though not conclusive. But
        it did recognize the existence of anomalous power, which carried the implication
        that the Lewis dismissal was mistaken. A fourth review was produced in
        1994 (D. R. O. Morrison) which was itself unsatisfactory. It was rebutted
        strongly to the point of dismissal and correctly in my view. No defense was offered
        against the rebuttal. During those first six years, the community of orthodox
        scientists produced no report of a flaw in the heat measurements that

        other paragraph describing the man

        “Dr. D. R. O. Morrison, a physicist at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, declared
        that, “Cold fusion is best explained as an example of pathological
        science.”9 His arguments discussed the ratio of supporters to skeptics,
        Langmuir’s last consideration, and the ratio of successful to unsuccessful excess
        heat experiments, a criteria that was not a part of Langmuir’s method.
        He gave a paper at the Baltimore APS meeting on the “Status of Cold Fu-
        was subsequently sustained by other reports.
        sion.” He explained that he was studying the “mistakes” of science. One got
        the impression that he stayed deeply in the midst of cold fusion studies so he
        could say at some later time that he watched its failure from the inside and
        that he was in a position to know the authentic history of its rise and fall. It
        must have been discouraging for him to see his target topic continue to levitate
        year after year.
        Morrison mistakenly refers to the discrepancy between the amount of nuclear
        emissions and excess energy as a flaw that only the critics were sharp
        enough to spot. “But scientists quickly recognized a drastic discrepancy—for
        each watt of power there should be 1012 neutrons per second (a million millions)
        but only a few were observed . . .”10 It was Fleischmann who first described
        that discrepancy.
        Morrison’s view of cold fusion did not change. After another conference
        in December of 1993 he said, “. . . nothing at this conference changed [my]
        mind that [cold fusion] is pathological science.”11 Explaining himself at an
        earlier conference, he pointed out that, “In 1953 Irving Langmuir gave a delightful
        lecture on pathological science . . . where he discussed some cases such
        as N-Rays, where a number of good scientists reported wrong results.”12
        Morrison appears to have overlooked the first four items in Langmuir’s
        list that concern the claims of unusual scientific measurements. They do not
        fit Fleischmann and Pons’s claims. For example, Langmuir’s first specification
        requires an absence of proportionality between the experimental excitation
        and the anomalous power as claimed. Fleischmann and Pons show three successive
        electrical currents exciting the cell of 8, 64, and 512 milliamperes in
        their Preliminary Note. They claim the cell’s responses were 0.036, 0.493, and
        3.02 watts of excess power output. This progression of input and output is not
        evidence of an absence of proportionality. Whether these numbers were right
        or wrong is not the point either. It is the claim that was charged with being
        pathological. The claims as presented did not fit the Langmuir characteristic
        that called for an output value independent of the intensity of the input.
        What was the significance of the failed experiment? Morrison had made
        great hay with the topic. He seems to have found that it was equally as significant
        as the successful experiment. He lectured at Baltimore and at the
        University of Utah (September 1989) on the subject of the number of failed
        experiments as compared with the number of successful experiments. My investigation
        concluded that the counting of failed experiments conveys no
        diagnostic information with regard to the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon.
        This topic is developed more completely in Chapter 8, p. 106.
        Morrison is emblematic of the almost unlimited verbosity of e-mail type
        communications. E-mail networks carry not only unruly critiques, but often
        versions one, two, and three of the critique.13 It was as though the world had
        the time and interest to watch someone do their homework. The verbosity
        and ego-centricity of e-mail communications greatly curtailed its usefulness.
        Also, that characteristic of the medium seemed to be present in many other
        academic fields of study. I generally found that the study of print publication
        was more rewarding for the time committed.
        Morrison presented a request at Baltimore that was exemplary. He asked,
        “. . . for humility and sympathy for everyone,” involved in this mutual adventure.
        At that time, and in those circumstances, it was a profound offering. It
        still is.

        The same thing could be said about Morrison. He tried his hand at writing
        a peer-reviewed critique of Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetry papers of
        1989 to 1992.14 The two chemists replied with a comprehensive display of the
        fine details that must be accommodated for successful calorimetry. Morrison
        apparently then abandoned the field.

        he abandonned the field…

        like nearly all, except Shanahan who still defend his CCS theory, with accusaion again LENr mainstream that match what I hear from anti-LENR mainstream.

        Too bad, Beaudette cannot review Shanahan work…
        Today, LENR reviewer rebuted his claims, and mainstream magazine refuse to cover the subject.

        1. Hi Ruby and Alain:
          I was just thinking that if in retrospect you wanted to rank the universities Morrison referred to in 1990, you could just take the inverse of what he said.

  2. The Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment inspired me to propose the experiment to be repeated in gas-phase.
    Therefor I drafted three Belgian patent applications matured into patents BE1002780, BE1002781 and
    BE1003296 to be read in English on E-Cat Site in the articles “”Belgian LANR Patents” and “LANR by Coulomb Explosion”. Said BE-patents have been blocked from publication for 2 years by the Belgian Ministry of Defense without commentary. The first patent contains a theory about orbital broadening and fusion of protons in the presence of a surplus of electrons at the cathode analogously to “electrostatic wetting”. BE1002781 contains a theory about the calculation of the mass of the proton whefrom follows that
    the product of mass of a spinning elementary particle with its spin radius is constant (invariant) being the reason for the trembing effect encountered in elementary particles with spin (Fermi-particles). See graphs sent to John Maguire .
    Another BE-patent worthwile to be considered based on vortex-fusion is BE904719 to be found with the help of ESPACENET (European patent data bank). Herein you will find a modified Schrödinger equation for
    a standing wave representing a free spinning electron having a most probable spin-radius half of the orbital Bohr-radius of the H-atom. Good luck.

  3. Ah yes. The Law of the Conservation of Energy; how we cling to it. If that goes our models go too.
    But consider-the law must have been broken at least once, at the begining of time, for there to be any Universe for us to observe.
    Seeing that the proof of the Law is proof by induction (All swans are white) and there was one black swan at the beginning of time- does that not prove that the Law is false?
    And if it is false are there not many little black signets all along the time-line? Is the “Law” not being broken all the time, but we are happy to ignore these small transgressions because it makes our maths easy?
    I am talking about Virtual Particles, of cause.
    Perhaps we mistake a Proclivity for a Law.

    1. the law of conservation of energy, of momentum, of charge, are linked with important symmetries, and cannot be broken without redesigning all the structure of physics…

      anyway I wan’t to remind people here, that LENR is simply a nearly classic nuclear energy… as far as experiments shows… it seems a complex process consuming hydrogen to produce helium, tritium, maybe some light element, and some transmutations…

      what seems impossible to some is that the reaction happen so easily, and does not produce usual ashes linked to few body reactions…
      anyway there are complex situation in QM that may let some uncommon reaction.
      think about collective behaviors in superconductors, superfluids, Bose-Einstein condensates… about nucleus gamma to phonon coupling in mossbauer effects… all that does not explain, but make honest people modest about ruling out LENR reactions.

  4. The Fleischmann and Pons experiment operating by electrolysis in heavy water (D2O) using a palladium cathode is one thing, but atom transmutation using nickel and hydrogen in gas phase is quite different. About the latter I should like to see quantitative analysis proving that copper is formed, e.g.spectographically (green emission line of copper). Further I should like to rceive a reaction to my article “Cold Fusion Catalyst” disclosed on the former e-Cat Site. The use of hydrogen anions (H-) is there the key to overcome Coulomb repulsion with the positively charged nickel nuclei of the nickel clusters or nano-particles. Thank you. By the way “trembing” must be “trembling” (see formerly posted blog). “Trembling” refers to “Zitterbewegung in German.

  5. I’m doing a research paper over Cold Fusion, could you give me any tips to make it better? This is a complex subject for high school. And the paper is over the conspiracy if it has happened or not.

    1. Hi Thomas, Excellent idea, though it is a complicated subject for “adults” as well. You can read this article for a little background on the controversy.

      https://coldfusionnow.org/remove-institutional-blocks-at-mit-and-caltech-fund-cold-fusion-programs-now/

      At the end is a link for a BBC documentary which gives good background, too:

      https://coldfusionnow.org/1994-bbc-doc-profiles-early-history-of-cold-fusion-underground/

      Also, watching the first video linked here:

      https://coldfusionnow.org/melvin-miles-on-calorimetry/

      you will hear a Naval researcher’s experience with his replication work.

      Good luck, and send your paper along to me. I would love to read it!

  6. To Thomas,
    Have look at e-Cat Site the articles: “Belgian LANR Patents”, LANR by Coulomb Explosion” and “Cold Fusion Catalyst” and make your conclusions about conspirancy.

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