Archive for the ‘Cold fusion’ Category

Can cold fusion research survive pioneer’s death?

Published in New Scientist, 22 Aug 2012

Martin Fleishmann kick-started cold fusion controversy and faced decades of hostility. His colleague Michael McKubre ponders the future of the field

Science advances one funeral at a time, said Max Planck. Now Martin Fleischmann is gone, what’s in store for cold fusion research?
I like that quote. It implies you’ve got to wait for the stubborn old bastards to die before you can make progress. But that wasn’t Planck’s intention: what he meant was that people refuse to even consider unorthodox arguments while their authors are still alive. Once they die, the argument becomes depersonalised. I do think there is an opportunity here. The hostility might abate because Martin is gone.

Fleischmann faced a backlash in 1989 when he and Stanley Pons said they had achieved fusion – the process that powers stars – in a lab. A bold claim that brought scorn for years.
They didn’t really claim that. They claimed to have observed an anomalous excess of heat in a tabletop experiment – a palladium electrode loaded with heavy hydrogen, or deuterium. That heat was too great to be explained by chemistry. When Martin and Stan first wrote their paper, they had a question mark after the word fusion. That question mark was removed, apparently, in the review and editing process. [...]

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Fusion in a cold climate

Published in New Scientist, 15 Jul 2009

For most researchers, any mention of cold fusion brings back memories of a shameful period in modern science. Now, 20 years after Martin Fleischmann instigated this field, he tells Jon Cartwright that he could not have done anything differently, and that if we cannot get fusion of some sort to work on a large scale soon, we’re doomed

Martin Fleischmann (Image: Jon Cartwright)

(c) 2009 Jon Cartwright

Martin Fleischmann can still remember the morning he entered his lab and saw the terrific hole in the workbench. It was about the size of a dinner plate. Beneath, nestled in a shallow crater in the concrete floor, were the remains of a chemistry experiment that had been fizzing idly for several months without incident. “It had obliterated itself!” he recalls.

It happened overnight, so no one witnessed the meltdown that took place in a basement lab at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1985. But for Fleischmann and his longtime colleague Stanley Pons, there could be only one cause: room-temperature or ”cold” fusion. If they were right, the chemists had made a reaction that nuclear physicists had thought next to impossible, one that potentially held the key to almost limitless clean energy. Yet four years later, and just weeks after they had announced their discovery at a now infamous press conference on 23 March 1989, their work was dismissed from mainstream science. Cold fusion became a pariah field, and Fleischmann and Pons fell under the shadow of disrepute. [...]

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Cold-fusion television show angers APS

Published in Physics World, 1 Jun 2009

Cold fusion has been controversial since its inception on 23 March 1989, when chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah in the US announced that they had achieved a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. Two decades on, a US television documentary about the field has stirred up fresh debate after it linked the American Physical Society (APS) to an evaluation of some cold-fusion results by Robert Duncan, a physicist and vice chancellor of the University of Missouri.

The story began when Duncan was invited by the news show 60 Minutes to investigate whether certain electrochemical experiments can give off more energy in the form of heat than is supplied via an electric current. Those in the cold-fusion community take such excess heat as evidence of nuclear fusion because it cannot be explained by chemical reactions alone. [...]

For the rest of this article, please contact Jon Cartwright for a pdf.

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Cold fusion: The ghost of free energy

Published on GroundReport, 23 Mar 2009

Two decades ago a pair of eminent chemists claimed to find the secret of almost limitless energy, only to have their results dismissed several weeks later. Today many scientists think there was truth in the claims but, as Jon Cartwright discovers, few are still listening

The late writer Arthur C Clarke had a knack for anticipating great developments in science. In the mid 1940s, more than a decade before the formation of NASA, he said that man would walk on the moon before the century was up. Around the same time he wrote a paper in which he suggested that satellites in special geostationary orbits would be ideal for worldwide radio communications, an idea that was realized some 25 years later. And in 1993, he wrote a letter to the new vice-president of the US, Al Gore, with another of his nagging hunches. “Dear Mr. Gore,” it read. “I am happy to learn that you are being briefed on the above — perhaps misnamed — subject, as it is impossible to imagine anything of greater potential importance from both the economic and geopolitical points of view.” The subject reference at the top of the letter was “cold fusion”. (more…)

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