Also one year ago, Fleischman and Pons (F&P) claimed to have achieved fusion in a bottle, and the National Cold Fusion Institute was founded at the U. of Utah. On March 29 - 31, it held its first annual conference, attended by some 200 scientists. Anyone could attend, but no taping was allowed, and there were no critics among the speakers. The press was not directly admitted and reports were garbled, mainly by confusing the undisputed Jones type fusion and F&P production of excess heat. Proceedings will not be published for several months, but readers who have access to the Usenet or Bitnet computer nets will find good and reasonably detailed reports by scientists who attended.
In essence, the problem itself stands almost unchanged at the point where I stopped reporting on it regularly; the main change has not been one of progress in substance, but some gain of credi-bility for the process yielding excess heat and a corresponding loss of ground by the doubters, many of whom have by now turned into scoffers. The latter have the support of the popular press, which seems annoyed at the lack of mind-boggling developments. This has been to some extent mirrored in the professional press, par-ticularly Nature (London), which may yet damage its own standing as an international scientific weekly.
The experiment with the accompanying bursts of unexplained heat has now been repeated by at least 13 labs in the US and abroad, including some prestigious ones such as Stanford U., Los Alamos NL, and two independent teams at Oak Ridge, so that self-deception, wishful thinking, mass psychosis or even fraud (as has on occasion been suggested) is not very likely, especially now that the excess heat bursts appear to have been measured by reli-able calorimetry. The fact that there are more labs that have not succeeded in replicating the experiment is not a refutation, but merely a confirmation of the successful workers' admitted inability to control or reliably repeat, let alone understand, the pheno-menon. The Japanese and Indians have invested some $100 million in the field, and though the US DoE has recommended against investing funds, US private industry, including General Electric, is briskly working in the field.
In criticizing the F&P results and their repetitions, many physicists continue to approach their science in the spirit of politics, ridiculing the F&P effect because it is not explainable by presently accepted nuclear physics. They seem to have little ground left in disputing the phenomenon itself, though they do have a point in doubting that it is nuclear, since the only argument is negative: What else could it be? (The energy of chemical reac-tions is determined by the outer electrons in an atom, which cannot supply the observed energies.) On the other hand, if accepted physics really fails to explain the phenomenon, how do we know which part of physics
¾or chemistry¾has failed?I wish I had harder facts, but we can only wait and see.
|
|
Vol. 17, No. 9
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 17, No. 9 Date: December 01, 2004 03:38 PM Title: Seabrook goes on line
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|