Tag: Too Close to the Sun

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The Deep Reach of Martin Fleischmann

“So, the puzzle looks approaching the resolution now. The long lasting excess heat phenomena, currently being observed by several groups in Japan, Italy, USA, etc., will be understood in the extension of their research.

When we will trace inversely in time, we will find the original point of perspective in the Fleischmann-Pons work at 1989.” –Dr. Akito Takahashi

The passing of Martin Fleischmann has sounded throughout the noosphere, where lightspeed assisted in the collective and simultaneous mourning for a Lion of Science who dared follow truth, turning away from the insults of lesser minds without regret, and without reward.

The loss is felt strongly by his family, his friends, and fellow scientists who worked with him on over two-decades of cold fusion research where his intellect and integrity left an indelible mark on multiple programs around the world.

Indeed, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons created the field of condensed matter nuclear science. Without the public announcement of their discovery in 1989, we might not have the new generation of experimentalists and inventors working to bring this technology to fruition.

Andrea RossiAfter the recent news, Andrea Rossi, inventor of the Energy Catalyzer, a commercial steam generator now in development based on nickel-hydrogen exothermic reactions, an extension of the original electrolytic palladium-deuterium systems, noted that “Fleischmann and Pons were not the first to witness” these mercurial energy-producing reactions, but they “have been the pioneers to speak about the so called ‘Cold Fusion’.”

He said in a previous interview with James Martinez that ‘it was the announcement of their discovery in 1989 that was the “spark that ignited the fire”’ in his own research. [read]

“All their attempts failed to produce the real big energy, but the idea to pursue low-energy nuclear reactions has been further followed by many others, myself included“. –Andrea Rossi

Martin Fleischmann was born in Czechoslovakia in 1927, but fled the looming approach of war to Great Britain as a child. As an adult, he traveled the world creating several laboratories, consulting and collaborating with scientists on every continent.

Fleischmann’s influence was particularly felt in scientific circles in Japan where cold fusion science received unprecedented support from academia, business and government. The 1994 BBC documentary Too Close To The Sun features an historical perspective on that support which included that of Technova Corporation, a subsidiary of Toyota, which funded Drs. Fleischmann and Pons’ continued research at a laboratory in France, after U.S. scientists successfully pilloried the pair, forcing a re-location from the “freedom-loving” American continent to Europe.

Dr. Akito Takahashi has been involved in the early Japanese cold fusion research as part of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Osaka University. Now, also associated with Technova, Inc, he is speaking at the NIWeek 2012 conference beginning this week as well as the 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion ICCF-17.

Before his trip, Dr. Takahashi took a moment to share what Martin Fleischmann meant to the Japanese program of research:

“You know the NHE (New Hydrogen Energy) project 1994-1998 was funded by Japanese Government. To confirm the excess heat effect (EHE) by F-P’s D2O/Pd electrolysis was the target of NHE.

Fleischmann visited the NHE lab in Sapporo several times to lead and assist the Japanese team. Unfortunately, the NHE team could not firmly reproduce the F-P claim and the NHE project was terminated in 1998. However, a Japanese company, IMURA-Europe, Niece France, under the Toyota Motors, invited Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons to continue the ‘cold fusion’ research with Japanese researchers. The effort by the company was also terminated soon.

However Professor Fleischmann, as regarded by Japanese as the initiator of cold fusion research, gave a favorable impression to several tens of remaining JPN cold fusion researchers, especially in universities, and a small number of companies, who have found some positive, albeit irreproducible, data during the NHE and IMURA projects. The remained people have continued research works, both experiments extending to gas-loading method with nano-catalysts and theories on underlying physics, and have accumulated more and more concrete data. So, JPN researchers have sincere respect for Professor Martin Fleischmann to this day.”

In regards to being an influence in research, Dr. Takahashi wrote:

“Of course, Japanese researchers were inspired by the speculation that the dynamic behavior of deuterons fully/over-fully absorbed in metal lattice might cause ‘hither-to-unknown’ and ‘clean-radiation-less’ nuclear energy release. However, the NHE effort was still using the original F-P method (ICARUS device) and metallurgical performances of D(H)-absorption.

After the NHE project, a change of mind pursued ‘dynamic/transient’ adsorption/absorption conditions with nano-fabricated metal composite samples, after the original work by Arata-Zhang based on the idea of Emeritus Prof. Hiroshi Fujita expert of atom-clusters, Osaka University.

The gas-loading method with nano-fabricated samples of pure-Pd, Pd-Ni binary and then Cu-Ni binary nano-particles dispersed in ceramics supporters (ZrO2, SiO2, etc.) have finally provided the present on-going experiments with very reproducible excess heat release and interesting D(H)-isotopic effects probably indicating the nuclear origin of heat evolution. As the electrolysis method, done by the Energetics-SRI-ENEA collaboration, is getting to the similar condition of nano-fractal surface of Pd-metal for meeting ‘large excess heat’, the original F-P cell might have had nano-fractal conditions, albeit accidentally conditioned in uncontrolled way.

So, the puzzle looks to be approaching the resolution now. The long lasting excess heat phenomena, currently being observed by several groups in JPN, Italy, USA, etc., will be understood in the extension of such research line.

When we will trace inversely in time, we will find the original point of perspective in the Fleischmann-Pons work at 1989.” –Dr. Akito Takahashi

After the U.S. had kicked the discoverers of our future energy source out of the country, money from the Toyota empire built them a new laboratory in France. Ironically, Drs. Fleischmann and Pons were interviewed on Good Morning America – from France – in 1994.

Dr. Jean-Paul Biberian, a cold fusion scientist based in Marseilles, France and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, wrote of the influence of Martin Fleischmann on French research:

“Martin Fleischmann played a major role at the beginning of Cold Fusion in France. Georges Lonchampt, who was then working at the French Atomic Energy Commission in Grenoble met him and Stanley Pons several times when they were working at IMRA in Sophia Antipolis. Fleischmann gave him full details of the experimental procedure, and even gave him two of their ICARUS 2 cells. Thanks to his help, Longchampt and his colleagues managed to duplicate, at least partly, the original work. Lonchampt was one of the very few who duplicated exactly the Fleischmann and Pons experiment.

Without his help there is no doubt that the initial program started in France in 1989 would have ended quickly after.”

Martin Fleischmann’s influence has not yet been assessed. But as the world turns towards this viable alternative, there will be alot of looking back, and human eyes will see what they want to see.

Martin Fleischmann still lives. I can see him lecture, hear him speak, read his words, and see his face, just as much as I could before Friday August 3, 2012 when he reportedly left the physical world for a freer, larger existence. 0s and 1s dart about the network, framing his presence in the digital space that exists as an external double of our consciousness.

While a virtual visit to Mars is not the same as physically being there, robotic cameras give millions the opportunity to experience a form of space travel to another world. Millions more will meet Martin Fleischmann through his legacy of work, too, as documented by his true peers in the cold fusion community, and available for as long as human civilization exists.

Related Links

NIWeek 2012 Homepage

ICCF-17 Homepage

Watch: Too Close to the Sun 1994 BBC Doc profiles early history of cold fusion underground by Ruby Carat June 7, 2012

Watch: 1994 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons interviewed on Good Morning America – from France! by Ruby Carat June 19, 2012

Media Dopplers by Chad Scoville C-theory.net

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Too Close To The Sun: 1994 BBC doc profiles early history of “cold fusion underground”

“If it had been anything else, we would have said, ‘Oh, people don’t want us to do it, forget it, just leave it alone.’ But this is not in that category. This is interesting science, new science.

If you’ve got any integrity, you don’t give it up.” — Martin Fleischmann

Too Close to The Sun from BBC Horizon recounts the story of cold fusion from the initial announcement in 1989 through developments in 1994 when the video was released. Multiple interviews with major players include Eugene Mallove speaking on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s bungling of cold fusion data, misrepresenting the actual creation of excess heat from their test cell by claiming they saw nothing. A later analysis by Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy revealed the blunder, though it was never corrected.

“The cold fusion episode will be looked upon as one of the greatest travesties against justice and understanding that has ever occurred in the history of science,” says Mallove.

Also profiled is Michael McKubre, whose Menlo Park lab SRI reported “up to 500 times excess heat” and Randall Mills then of Thermacore, now of Blacklight Power, “claimed 1000% excess heat” from light-water and nickel cells. At the time, that news prompted another “senior scientist at a national laboratory” to begin work on the phenomenon. In the film, that scientist remains unknown, speaking in the shadows, due to the stigma of this field and the backlash that clean cold fusion research brings.

Professor David Williams describes an early and earnest effort by Harwell Laboratory in Britain which found no effect from the experiments. He revealed his frustration on camera. “At first you assume it’s because you’re not smart enough, or not going long enough, or not doing things quite right, so you try yet more variations, and all the time all these claims are coming in from all sorts of people saying Oh they could do the first time around! You know, you feel like a right bird! Here are all these people saying they switched this cell on and bang, it works…..and we found nothing.”

Caltech commemorates perhaps their biggest scientific failure with this T-shirt.
John Huizenga was Co-Chairman of the Energy Research Advisory Board ERAB that reviewed the evidence for the U.S. Department of Energy and issued a rushed report just months after Drs. Fleischmann and Pons’ announcement that effectively barred cold fusion research from any funding for over two decades, dropping clean energy in favor of expensive hot fusion and dangerous nuclear power plants that use radioactive fuel. The Department of Energy’s current $29 billion dollar budget has $0 for developing this revolutionary science.

The ERAB panel selectively chose what evidence to allow by claiming that anything that didn’t fit their conventional theory of nuclear science was impossible. “We wrote a very negative report and concluded that the results that were being presented to us were contrary to everything we had found out about nuclear physics over the last fifty years”, Huizenga said.

He authored the book Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century claiming an untruth that defined the misinformation campaign’s motto to this day: “There’s no experimental evidence at this point that any nuclear reaction products have been formed. Therefore the claim that cold fusion is a nuclear reaction process without a commensurate amount of nuclear reaction products is simply pathological science.”

Though he attended several cold fusion conferences, and eventually went to a lab with a working cell at Cal Poly Pomona where Professors Robert Bush and Robert Eagleton were researching the effect, Huizenga refused to look at the data showing excess heat, first claiming he was “retired”. Then, after an invitation to stay a while and examine the cell with all his newly freed time, he hemmed, saying he had some “consulting” work to do.

Selectively ignoring data was rampant among the so-called “objective” science community. John Maddox, editor of science journal Nature had decided one year later that cold fusion was over. “I think it will turn out, after two, three years more investigation, that this is just spurious and just unconnected with anything that you would call nuclear fusion. I think that broadly speaking it is dead and it will remain dead for a very long time.”

Speaking on those early days in the U.S., when members’ vitriol stained the American Physical Society, Stanley Pons recalls, “You forget things in time. I can remember that was extremely bitter at that time. I thought we’d been treated extremely unjustly, which I still do. I think the critics were not operating in the bounds of sanity, and I think we were victimized in that respect. So I was quite bitter at the time and I’ve just chose to ignore it and just go on. I really don’t have any feelings about it anymore; it’s just a non-issue now.

“I think you become numb,” added Martin Fleischmann.

“You become numb to it, yeah.”

Keiji Kunimatsu, a former student of Martin Fleischmann persuaded Minoru Toyota, of the famed Toyoto car corporation, to fund the pair’s research, setting them up in a lab in the south of France near Nice. Toyota had already been learning about what cold fusion was. Kunimatsu had learned from Fleischmann that “Scientists must do something new which nobody has done before. That way is the spirit of science.”

Fleischman said, “It was a relief to get away from the terrible atmosphere in the United States and to have the opportunity to work totally without public attention for a period of time.”

Although reproducibility of this mercurial reaction continues to plague many labs to this day, a handful of researchers have made huge advances; a few to the point of developing a commercial technology. For these few labs, the clean energy of cold fusion is available on-demand: turn it on when you want, turn it off when you want. When the engineering of these devices finally produces a product, the over two decades of smug pontifications of an errant orthodoxy by the conventional scientific community will at last end.

In 1993, twenty Japanese corporations including Toyota, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi, financed the New Hydrogen Energy Laboratory for a five-year program called Icarus. Martin Fleischmann consulted on the new project.

In celebration of the inauguration of this project, he toasted “To Icarus One, and all the other Icarus’s to follow. And don’t forget, our wings are stuck on with superglue.”

Early T-shirt design by Al Kemme and Associates reveals greater truth.

Thank you Martin Fleischmann.
Thank you Stanley Pons.
Thank you Eugene Mallove.

Thanks to you, we will have Cold Fusion Now!

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