EXCLUSIONS

Appears to be real? Why am I still hedging?

Because it is not impossible for all four labs that observed the heat effect to have been fooled by the same systematic error. There has been only one experiment in which the calorimetry was done in a closed system, including the gases given off by the electrolysis. (Everybody else used the electrical input and the heat of the liquid as output.) This was done by Dr Hayden of the U. of British Columbia, and though he obtained no excess heat, he pointed out the strong temperature-dependence of the latent heat of vaporiza-tion that could conceivably have caused latent heat to masquerade as excess heat (see last month's issue where I happened to use this as an example of a possible systematic error)--but I would doubt that all three laboratories failed to take account of this.

In a letter to Nature (5/11), two scientists note that hydrogen accumulates in cracks, grain boundaries and dislocations of the crystal lattice of metals. If hydrogen has already diffused to the palladium sample before the experiment, fewer of these sites are available for deuterium atoms. Failure to purify the palladium to rid it of all hydrogen before the experiment might therefore explain the difficulty of replicating the F&P effect. (As noted above, careful recasting was done at Stanford, where the experi-ment was successful. Also, one of the authors of the letter is J. Bockris of Texas A&M, where the replication was successful, too.)

An interesting metallurgical effect has been proposed by Ali F. Abutaha, a consultant of the Florida Institute of Technology. When a metal rod is pulled apart, its deformation is accompanied by heat. When palladium (and some other metals) is loaded with hydrogen or deuterium, the metal is gradually embrittled and loses much of its tensile strength (this is among the causes of fatigue and structural failure of metal parts). After soaking palladium in deuterium, Abutaha found its tensile strength diminished from 60,000 to 19,000 psi. Embrittlement means that cracks open in the surface of the metal, and the cracks propagate much like a zip opens. Heat, claims Abutaha, is released in the process. However, two points cast doubt on this theory. Stress in metals involves the forces between molecules, and these, in turn, involve only the outer shell electrons, the same electrons as in chemical bonds. But the energies measured by F&P (but not those measured by others) exceed these energy levels. Nor is it clear that loss of tensile strength implies a decrease in energy.

The many teams who did not get excess heat proved no more than that their setups were the wrong way to do it, for they lacked a certain something that F&P had and they didn't; but what that cer-tain something is has not yet been identified by either F&P or anybody else.

We do not know the "if and only if" conditions for the F&P effect, and until we do, failure to produce the effect means failure to adhere to the unknown conditions of success, and no more.