Official NASA Langley Cold Fusion Video Now Online
Keith’s note: NASA LaRC now has its official cold fusion video online titled “Abundant Clean/Green Energy” which refers to a new form of “nuclear energy”. How do NASA’s Chief Technologist and Chief Scientist allow this stuff to be funded with taxpayer dollars without going through any of the agency’s standard peer review processes? Or do Rich Antcliff and Lesa Roe just fund this stuff with local center director’s discretionary slush funds and not tell HQ what they are doing?
– Quack Science: Why Are NASA Glenn and Langley Funding Cold Fusion Research?, earlier Post
– Why is NASA Langley Wasting Time on Cold Fusion Research?, earlier Post
Cowing has forgotten the case of Dr. Robert Goddard who published a paper called “A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitudes” where he suggested that liquid fueled rockets could actually reach the moon. The New York Times wrote a scathing editorial that pointed out that there’s “nothing to push against in the vacuum of space”. They closed the editorial by saying that Goddard lacked the mathematical understanding of a fourth grader. The New York Times apologized for this editorial blunder the day of the Apollo moon landing.
Researchers all over the world are seeing positive results with LENR reactors. The field is in it’s infancy, but there’s a good chance that Cowing will have to eat his words at some point. His criticisms are sounding quite a bit like the New York Times handling of Robert Goddard.
I have not forgotten Dr. Goddard’s paper. Indeed, I first learned of it as a young boy growing up in the 1960s. As a matter of fact I seem to recall seeing a copy in a glass case at the National Air & Space Museum. As for LENR (yawn) where’s the data?
Agreed. So far the LENR supporters have not publicly and openly demonstrated this works. Is Antcliff a technical person? Technical background or education? UNderstand the scientific method? How about believes in evolution, earth is round, etc.?
LaRC PAO simply refuses to answer any request on this topic. I wonder why.
I has been more than a week since my request to LaRC PAO. They are still working on it, so they tell me. Odd that there is not a simple fact sheet and accounting code for this research.
The charge that there are not verifiable, experimental results others have reproduced and verified is simply not true. There is in the basement of an MIT building a working LENR (cold fusion) experiment producing far more energy than can be explained by an current, generally accepted theory. It has been doing so since January. Dr. Hagelstien, whose lab hosts the device attests that his data is consistent and reliable. That is just one example, there are many others.
Perhaps, you have not followed the develpments in this area. If some of the promised devices and demonstrations and certifications materialize in the next year of so, as promised you will find it hard to ignore because it will affect every area oi our lives. This field or research can no longer be repressed, in any case. So, if the issue is to be joined. So be it let’s have that debate.
Where are the links to the published papers?
Dr. Peter L. Hagelstein has done LENR research sponsored by SRI International. A recent progress report to the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT is here:
http://www.rle.mit.edu/rleo…
“If some of the promised devices and demonstrations and certifications
materialize in the next year of so, as promised you will find it hard to
ignore because it will affect every area oi our lives.”
For more than 20 years I’ve been hearing that within the next year or so there will be demonstrations and our lives will all be changed. I’m fairly certain that 20 years from now someone will be saying exactly what you’re saying, that the demonstrations are coming within a year.
The fact that 100 years ago the NY Times said something stupid is not sufficient grounds to say, “We should never trust the scientific establishment and instead we should give every theory that the scientific establishment considers not to be well-founded the benefit of the doubt and we should spend taxpayer money on it.”
The New York Times is not a science journal. It wasn’t 100 years ago and it isn’t today. Goddard’s paper wasn’t ignored by the scientific community.
The scientific establishment is not perfect, and sometimes it makes mistakes. But far, far, far more often when the scientific establishment concludes there’s no reasonable basis for believing something, there really isn’t. The scientific establishment is a very robust system made up of many diverse parts with different viewpoints. It’s not some centralized authority. If there’s any serious doubt within the scientific community, research and debate on the topic is vigorously pursued.
The vast majority of the most highly-respected parts of the physics community consider most of the claims of LENR to be unfounded. Time and again, LENR-related claims have proven to be due to either errors in measurement or deliberate fabrication of data. None has yet turned out to be repeatable by any mainstream physicists.
We should always be open to new ideas. But LENR is not a new idea. It is a set of ideas that have repeatedly failed to find supporting evidence. It’s like Bigfoot. We should continue to be open to someone coming up with evidence, but until then, after having seen many, many cases where claimed results weren’t supported by the real data, it doesn’t make sense to spend taxpayer money on more of the same when there are other fields that show more promise of scientific discovery.
“How do NASA’s Chief Technologist and Chief Scientist allow this stuff to be funded with taxpayer dollars without going through any of the agency’s standard peer review processes?“
Keith,
Just so I’m clear on where you stand, is it just the omission of peer review that you are objecting to, or are you also objecting to the fact that NASA is doing research on cold fusion (or whatever you want to call it)? In one of the earlier posts that you’ve included, your note includes the terms “goofy fringe science” and “this wacky stuff.” Similar terms are in your note with the other earlier post. I would be disappointed if someone with your scientific background was dismissing it out of hand simply because that has been the general attitude to date.
If neither NASA PAO nor anyone from NASA HQ has had anything to say on this topic, perhaps it’s simply because they don’t understand it. Mark Gibbs in the Forbes article in one of the previous posts said, “I’d love to read a simple explanation of the difference between LENR and cold fusion that doesn’t use explanations that themselves require further, and equally complex, explanations.” This stuff can be more confusing that rocket science, since it’s almost entirely conjecture. I can’t help but assume that most people don’t understand anything about cold fusion, or any of the other processes that have been (rightly or wrongly) tied to that label. For all that I’ve read on this subject, I can’t begin to form an opinion on the final outcome of the on again/off again research (I’ll gladly leave that to smart people).
In a situation like this one, I’d think it more prudent to take a let’s wait and see attitude, since the history of science is full of things that were dismissed by the majority and/or the powerful as nonsense, but later on developed into accepted and even important discoveries. 100 years ago there were maybe a handful of people on the planet who you might have convinced to give serious consideration to the theories that make up quantum mechanics, yet today it is the underlying explanation for things that occur in every aspect of our lives. But, I also don’t dismiss the possibility that 100 years from now it may be shown that quantum mechanics was all wrong and another generation will smile at the silly things that we once believed.
I certainly am not trying to tell you, or anyone else, either what the truth is or what you should think, but I encourage people not to discourage research into cold fusion or any other “better” energy sources. It may well turn out in the long run to be complete nonsense (there’s no free lunch), but then again, if one of these “goofy fringe” energy sources should happen to be the real deal, then the world would be a much changed and much better place if we know about it and we’re using it. It would certainly be the all-time number-one item on the NASA Spin-offs list.
Steve
Where’s the data?
“Where’s the data?“
Keith,
I guess that’s a rejection of cold fusion possibilities on your part. To be honest, I’m somewhat disappointed in your reply. I know you don’t have time to answer every question put to you, but I think Where’s the data? is an unrealistic dismissal that, I suppose, you could apply to just about any question you don’t want to answer. Do you think for a moment that anybody who has relevant, convincing data on a discovery that might possibly be worth an unimaginable amount of money is going to show us the data?
Steve
Just to be clear, I am not saying that cold fusion is for real. I’m saying that I think people should encourage the research being done. Consider how much money is spent on research for frivolous things with no possible potential every year.
Steve
I think a fair statement is that LENR research is worthwhile. It does not violate any laws of physics.
However, something titled “Abundant Clean/Green Energy” is ahead of itself. There may be some processes there that we don’t understand. I don’t think we know enough to be THAT optimistic.
Where’s the data? If you have some, post URLs otherwise you have made your point. Next.
Research is the process of gathering data. Maybe they don’t have any data yet, but are in the process of gathering it. No data exists a priori. It takes work to gather. Often, you can’t be really sure about your data, perhaps they are inconclusive.
Everything takes time.
How is asking for data a rejection of cold fusion possibilities?
“the history of science is full of things that were dismissed by the
majority and/or the powerful as nonsense, but later on developed into
accepted and even important discoveries”
Most of these cases were in the distant past, when the scientific method was struggling to take hold. Galileo, for example, was forced to recant not by a modern peer-review system but by a pope.
In more modern cases, there have been ideas that were initially considered wrong by the majority, but the proponents of these ideas presented evidence for them. As the evidence was considered, the new ideas quickly became accepted.
I challenge you to name a single case in the last 50 years where the worldwide scientific community was presented with valid evidence for a new theory and still rejected it.
LENR proponents have yet to provide any verifiable evidence of their core claims to the scientific community. If and when they do, I have no doubt the scientific community will embrace this evidence.
By “evidence” I mean evidence that stands up to scientific scrutiny — that can be repeated by others, and that doesn’t have alternate explanations for the data due to poor experimental controls.
OK Gentlemen, I surrender. You condemn this research as not worth doing because you want data; but the only way to get data is by doing the research. It’s a work in progress and nobody smart is going to publish before achieving a reasonable level of completion, but you want data that proves the end result.
Steve
This research was not peer reviewed before it was started – unlike the process whereby everything else NASA does is supposed to be considered. WHy won’t NASA release the proposal? Why won’t NASA even discuss this?
This may not have been peer-reviewed by NASA but US Navy SPAWAR San Diego has 23 peer-reviewed papers on the technology. Whatever NASA is doing is most likely an extension of 20+ years of research at SPAWAR.
You imply that no research has been done. This stuff isn’t new. How many decades of… I’ll be kind… observer-depended results are we supposed to smile politely through before we are allowed to say, “You know, this might be bullshit”?
Paul,
You can certainly say, “You know, this might be bullshit” any time you like; all the difference is in the word “might.” I’ve said myself that some or all of it might well be nonsense on many occasions. The point is that I don’t know for certain that it’s not valid, and neither does anybody else who has posted on NASA Watch. You may think it’s garbage (an opinion), or someone else may have convinced you of their opinion that it’s garbage, but you (and they) don’t know for certain.
You wrote, “This stuff isn’t new,” which is, to me, an ambiguous statement. You seem to be saying that nothing new has been learned since the first controversial ideas related to cold fusion were presented, which is clearly not true, unless you are suggesting that all of the cold fusion researchers are either lying or have done absolutely nothing in their labs all this time. To suggest that there’s nothing new could be interpreted to mean that you are simply unaware of what has been done, which would make sense if you have been rejecting cold fusion research instead of following it.
Did you see the post by Jed Rothwell in this thread? He has collected and reviewed an awful lot of papers on the subject (and uploaded more than 1,000 papers for all to see). And he is certainly not the only one to have done so. It would appear to me that the balance of professional opinion says that it is not bullshit, and have remarked favorably on the possibility that it may turn out to be of great value; the jury is still out.
So, when I put it all together, I can’t help but conclude, without hesitation, that everybody here who has rejected the possibility (politely or otherwise) that cold fusion may pan out, is expressing an unsupported opinion, and nothing else. And further, most of those opinions, I’d be willing to bet, were not opinions that these posters have evolved based on their own investigations, but rather are opinions adopted from the writings of one or more other people. I have been expressing my own opinion (and I have presented it as nothing else but an opinion from the start) that the possibility of cold fusion research giving us something valuable has not been invalidated or disproved, and if there is any chance of realizing the potential that many knowledgeable people have written about (the potential!), then it is worth further research, in my opinion. If others see it differently, fine, that’s their opinion, and I accept it. What I myself reject out of hand are those statements where opinions are presented (often in an insulting manner) as if they were facts — that, more than anything else in these discussions, is not science. To tell you the truth, I have a suspicion in the back of my mind that this will turn out like some of the other nuclear issues — the energy is there, but we have no way to harness it for our use. But I/we don’t know.
Steve
The Quasicrystal (which was the subject of 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) was contended for 2 years in the 80s before it was finally published (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…. That’s the first one that comes to mind, at least.
Did you read more than the introduction to the Wikipedia article? While the introduction suggests that the two year delay in publication was due to having to convince the scientific community, the footnote for that paragraph does not support that assertion — it simply cites the 1984 paper that reports the results. In the “History” section of the Wikipedia article you cite, it says, “Shechtman first observed tenfold electron diffraction patterns in 1982, as described in his notebook.
These results were not published until two years later when Ilan Blech,
using computer simulation, suggested that the diffraction patterns
resulted from an aperiodic structure.” There’s no suggestion here of anyone trying to block publication — instead, it appears that one author made an observation in his notebook in 1982, then worked out a theory to explain it with his co-author over the next two years and waited to publish until they had both data and a theoretical model to explain the data.
The Wikipedia article also mentions that prior to the 1984 paper several articles were published reporting data that didn’t fit the current theory and that we now know fit the quasicrystal theory. Far from being rejected, these results were published even though nobody had a theory yet to explain them.
Sorry, but you’ve failed to give an example of the scientific establishment resisting a new idea. You’ve given an example of the scientific establishment working exactly as it should, with scientists taking some care to come up with good data and theory that fit, then submitting a paper and having it published.
What a fairy story.
Sorry, but in 2012, one can’t just sweep the complete corpus of nuclear physics under the rug. There is not one but two liens against LENR. The first is requirement to being two nuclei in close enough proximity that strong-force interactions take place. The second issue is that LENR seems to want to massively suppress the reaction channels that do occur once conditions of proximity are satisfied. At the time of the initial CF results of P&F in the 80s, a colleague of mine noted that the best evidence that they didn’t do anything was that they were alive – the neutron flux from even the modest energy production that they claimed should have completely zorched them. Some may allow speculative research to invoke the tooth fairy once, but twice is beyond the pale…
It’s been what some ~25 years since this stuff came up, and it hasn’t gotten any better. This is a classic discriminant between real and pseudo-science. If you have a weak signal this year, it has to be stronger next year.
Todd,
By your criteria (“25 years since this stuff came up, and it hasn’t gotten any better”), it would seem that most types of cancer research aren’t “real science” either. I believe that generalizations have no place in science, or the discussion of science.
Steve
Well, I first heard this criterion in a class taught by Richard Feynman, so take it for what it’s worth…
“If you have a weak signal this year, it has to be stronger next year.” – Kindly support the assertion that the “signal” has not become “stronger” over the years. I think you will find yourself unable to do so. AFAIK progress has been made in that reproducibility has been greatly improved. Instead of calling pseudoscience at something you have only an outdated summary judgement about, kindly consider the possibility that your views and beliefs are not based on fact but on hearsay.
You think cancer research hasn’t discovered anything new in 25 years? Seriously?
LENR is a field riddled with cranks and frauds. While there are proper scientists who have spent time on it, the fact that it is riddled with cranks and frauds is a reason to demand the highest possible scientific standards when you approach it. (And to have your bullshit filter turned up to max.)
There are companies claiming to have LENR products, Blacklight Power, Rossi’s e-cat, Defkalion, Brillouin. Note: not just bench-top experiments, but actual marketable products. And yet none of them have reactions that can be reproduced by skeptics. And they’ve all got theories that explain their magic boxes, theories which have almost no connect to any outside science.
And if you’ve spent time with other fringe fields (ufology, alt.health, cars that run on water, etc), it all feels very familiar.
Paul,
I said “most” types of cancer research. There are a lot of different types of cancer and cancer research that have become subjects of scientific study in the last 25-plus years, in which, unfortunately, no progress has been made. But I would still consider them “science,” despite the fact that Todd’s adopted criteria would seem to say they’re not.
As for the other subject, I have not been talking specifically about LENR, but rather about the whole collection of “subjects” that have been loosely grouped under the label cold fusion (whether they are or not). Obviously some of these are in exactly the class that you’ve put them and are a waste of time, but for others it is not so clear cut. People seem to be forgetting that while skepticism is a key element of the scientific method, so is objective detachment. A lot of people with relevant knowledge and experience have completely dismissed these supposed alternative energy sources, either a specific “source” or the group of them as a whole. However, there have also been a significant number of people, who also possess relevant knowledge and experience, who do not dismiss them out of hand just because they didn’t observe first-hand a working system. And let’s be honest, most of us don’t have anywhere near the relevant knowledge and experience to make an informed decision for ourselves on the matter, but rather we have adopted the judgment of one or more authorities.
“And they’ve all got theories that explain their magic boxes, theories which have almost no connect to any outside science.“
You may be absolutely right, but have you attempted, yourself, to replicate their work and test its claims, or are you simply believing what others are telling you? And what first-hand experience do those others have? I haven’t myself done or observed any experiments on this matter, but that just makes my stand equally valid to everybody else who is armed only with an opinion.
“And if you’ve spent time with other fringe fields (ufology, alt.health, cars that run on water, etc), it all feels very familiar.“
I won’t ask for your definition of “fringe,” but it sounds like you’re bordering on sarcasm, which I don’t think accomplishes anything in a debate about what is science and what isn’t. It may feel “familiar” to you, but not to me, since I don’t spend time or effort on the examples you give, and I don’t consider them relevant to our discussion — perpetual motion-type propositions are of absolutely no potential value, in my opinion, and address no pressing needs; the slightest possibility of developing a clean, abundant energy source has great potential value and addresses an immediate and future need that only deniers and fools would argue we don’t need.
I don’t much care if we chose not to call it science or not, but I have seen more than enough documentation by reputable scientist in the field to consider further research into cold fusion (and some of the loosely associated subjects) a valid pursuit. There are respected scientists who have said cold fusion is theoretically possible, and to date nobody has disproved them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and we won’t progress toward either proof or disproof without further research. And that has been my whole argument — until disproved (a hard thing to do), research into cold fusion is a valid investment. And, I would ask people to consider that in science and technology anything new rarely works or is universally accepted at the outset; it takes a lot of trial and error, fail and correct and try again; and the more complicate the pursuit, the longer the learning curve (remember the Vanguard?, the A-4/V-2?, the R-7?). Do we allow testing, revising and retesting for launch vehicles only?
Steve
Maybe to you it does. It doesn’t to others with the same range of experience, who are used to distinguishing ideas that have some kind of factual basis (UFO investigation, for example, certainly does) from those that have none, and those like LENR that seem on the verge of paradigm-busting success from those that are just keeping a placemarker in a history book that is about to be rendered obsolete.
The question is whether *you* can tell the difference.
Well put, Steve.
Better yet, why hasn’t the NASA IG not looked into this? Another glaring waste of taxpayer money.
I think that even if there is a remote possibility, a few hundred $K isn’t too much to have a look. I don’t mind very small amounts going to fringe research. We just don’t know what will come of it.
I admit that looking at the video and hearing about ‘finding neutrons’ made my BS detectors come alive. Still. Let’s see how this develops.
(And BTW: Galileo never recanted the science. He was persecuted for interpreting the Bible and that he did recant). Just saying’.
Michael Spencer
If there is no merit in LENR, why did DARPA reverse its opinion and many countries start to fund LENR?
http://www.lenr-canr.org/ac…
“Although no one theory currently exists to explain all the observed LENR phenomena, some scientists now believe these nuclear reactions may be small-scale deuterium fusion occurring in a palladium metal lattice.”
Note the yellow experiment box, which describes how early experiments did not produce results, then explains how pulsating electric fields, then placement of palladium atoms enabled the phenomena.
Is there a more recent paper which provides data that indicates otherwise?
Silly question: why is NASA funding energy research (leaving aside its scientific merit for a moment)? Surely that’s DOE’s job?
Robert,
If I recall correctly, President Obama did assign some responsibility for energy research to NASA and did, at one point, ask Congress for NASA funding (not a whole lot) for energy research. If you watched the video, he did say that clean, renewable energy was relevant to NASA pursuits.
Steve
Let me look in my life for a benefit from DOE… still looking… looking more… ah, NASA did alternate fuels in the early 80’s, and NASA did the Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine in the late 70’s … ah found it, DOE did an algae pilot plant in the late 1990’s!
Let me correct some of the misunderstandings in the discussion below:
LENR is another name for cold fusion. There is no difference between them. It is also called the Fleischmann-Pons effect, and CANR.
Cold fusion has been replicated thousands of times in over 200 laboratories. These replications have been described in roughly 3,000 papers, including roughly 900 in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. I have a collection 1,200 peer-reviewed papers on cold fusion (including theory and other non-experimental ones) copied from the library at Los Alamos. A few are negative, but most are positive reports of replications.
I have uploaded a bibliography and 1,300 papers on this subject here:http://lenr-canr.org/
Jed,
Thanks for the link and your comments. There’s a lot of stuff listed there that I’ve never have never seen referenced.
Steve
There is a mountain of stuff about cold fusion. Thousands of papers. A lot of them are me-too papers, or substandard, but that is true of any field. You can’t have good research without a lot of dross. There is a core of about a hundred rock solid studies, some of them superb.
McKubre recently summarized the field in a paper I highly recommend:
http://lenr-canr.org/acroba…
Cold fusion is complicated. Many aspect of it are difficult to understand. You have to read many papers and do your homework to grasp it. Many of the comments here are misinformed. They are made by smart people who have not done their homework and who do not understand the claims or the technical issues, so they have no merit.
Cold fusion is also tangled up in academic politics. There is a great deal of irrational opposition to the field. The early history was controversial. People claimed — and still claim — that the effect could not be reproduced. That is incorrect. The peer-reviewed literature shows 20 failed attempts to replicate through early 1990, and 92 successes. (There may have been other failures and successes but they did not publish or attend the NSF Conference in 1989, so Fritz Will and I never heard about them.)
It turned out that the top three failures were actually ambivalent and may have been marginally positive. They were inconclusive at best. I recently wrote a paper about one of them:
http://lenr-canr.org/acroba…
I received this from Keith Belvin, the new Chief Technologist at LaRC:
“NASA center Chief Technologists (CTOs) may choose to allow work on cutting-edge technology and innovation through their Center Innovation Fund (CIF), as Langley (and my predecessor, Rich Antcliff) has done with Joe’s basic research in the area of LENR. Researchers at the centers propose to the Chief Technologist for funds under CIF and the CTOs try to make sure we invest in areas where NASA’s experts might be able to move the ball forward in maturing a technology who’s payoff would be of great benefit to the agency and the nation.
Center Innovation Fund projects are early-stage foundational research efforts that may or may not result in scientific breakthroughs. If significant progress is made on Low Technology Readiness Level concepts, the researchers may then choose to apply for funding to NASA Headquarters through existing programs and solicitation processes. Reports on progress tend to be informal, but when progress is made we share that news via workshops, professional papers and proposals to more formally align the research with NASA programs.
I don’t know offhand the dollar amount for the funding of Joe’s research, but we can try and get that for you. It being Friday before a long weekend, we will need to wait until next week to get you that number.
I’ve spoken with OCT at Headquarters — there is no official agency program for LENR and NASA does not have a LENR program planned. The agency has no budget for LENR research, though researchers are welcome to propose LENR research through NASA’s solicitation processes for competitive review and consideration. If Joe’s research is able to demonstrate reproducible laboratory results using the scientific method and appropriate control groups, he may then choose to pursue agency-level funding through NASA’s regular solicitation process. For now, his work is supporting early-stage TRL foundational research into an elusive energy source concept where sound scientific investigation in the lab may be the best way to prove, or disprove, the LENR hypothesis.”
Where does the money to pay for these studies come from? This is a real question – I don’t know for sure where the money comes from. Is there some pot that is available to do research from or is it coming from overhead? If it is CM&O, is it really a good use for a fund source that is small and getting rapidly smaller? Was this project funded from some competition like CIF where it has to go head to head with a bunch of other proposals?
What is more confusing to me than cold fusion is the “transparency” issue. How can this country keep a leading edge, or even hopes of one, if everything the government (operating in the best interest of the taxpayer) expects to do is displayed on the internet?
Try looking at the research done over the last two decades. It’s not just NASA folks, it’s Dod and DARPA. Get educated http://www.lenr.org.
*You
can lead a man to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.*
Dec.
12, 2011, Steven Krivit wrote: “Hi Keith, we spoke briefly [on the phone] a
few hours ago and agreed to reconvene on Weds afternoon.”
Dec. 12, 2011, Keith Cowing wrote: “…this is a topic outside my normal
realm of coverage – or expertise…”
Dec. 12, 2011, Steven Krivit wrote: “Yes. This is very obvious to all of us who know about the field. I want
to offer you some help so you are more effective with your critique. I’ll
give you a call about 1300 on 12/14?
Dec.
14, 2011, Steven Krivit wrote: “Hi Keith, I never got a response from you on this. I
called you today at 1300 and left you a voice message. If I don’t hear back
from you today I will assume that you are not interested in learning about
LENR.”
Senior Editor, New Energy Times
Editor-In-Chief, Wiley Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia
Author: “Development of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Research,” Wiley Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia (Print and online)
Co-Editor: “Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions and New Energy Technologies Sourcebook Vol. 2, American Chemical Society/Oxford University Press (Print and online)
Author: “Cold Fusion: History,” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources (Print and online)
Author: “”Cold Fusion – Precursor to Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions,” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources (Print and online)
Author: “A New Look at Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research,” Journal of Environmental Monitoring (Print and online)
Author: “Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction Research – Global Scenario,” Current Science (Print and online)
Just because you have written definitions in books with the word “Encyclopedia” in the title doesn’t mean it is science – or that what you have written is accurate. To be honest, based on some Googling, I really was not interested in listening to another Cold Fusion rant.
It is very irresponsible to dismiss the reality of controlled electron-capture or neutron synthesis systems (aka “cold fusion”) based on a cursory reading of initial reports and simple minded objections that arose 23 years ago. (Not 25 as you lazily claim.) In fact over 12 million dollars of private money has gone in to a number of private companies and universities to study LENR in the last 6 months.
The reality of the basic reaction is described in hundreds of respectable published papers. The repeat-ability of experiments has been poor until this year, when an unexpected pattern of success emerged.
SRI now has perfect repetition of the basic reaction. Creating commercial systems is a matter of engineering. Check out http://lenr-canr.org/ for a well organized list of respectable evidence. MIT’s Dr. Peter Hagelstein, who wrote the quantum mechanics textbook, is pretty close to a theoretical explanation of why gamma rays are suppressed, and how the energy levels (.783 MeV) required to enable electron capture can occur.
“To good to be true” is not a law of science.
Sometimes Peer Review is Peer Pressure and keeps people from pursuing promising leads. New knowledge never comes from Mathematical Physicists. Even Einstein was following lab data to establish special relativity. Mother nature doesn’t back down. Excess heat without gamma rays or high energy particles (but measurable transmutation of metals and helium production) is reality. Deal with it.
Excellent comment, sue.jonez.
Bravo. Well said.
To answer Keiths original question of how NASA chief scientist can be funding this research, I think the explanation by Dennis Bushnell chief scientist from LaRC is enlightening.
http://futureinnovation.lar…
This effort is funded by the Center Innovation Fund: “The purpose of the Center Innovation Fund is to stimulate and encourage
creativity and innovation within the NASA Centers in addressing the
technology needs of NASA and the nation.”
If you could distance yourself for just a moment from the view that LENR is quack, suddenly you might see that it is a perfect legitimate effort to look into this matter.
So instead of “this is quack, why does NASA fund this”, the question should be: “NASA funds this, what do they know about this topic that I don’t”
Download the PDF and see how wide spread the development is for LENR. An awful lot has transpired during the last 6 years
http://www.anthropoceneinst…