RE: Arthur C. Clarke on Cold Fusion

[William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com>]

On Wed, 1 Jul 1998, Shapiro, Mark wrote:

> At least some of the data upon which I base my opinion were obtained by
> colleagues at Caltech who were at least as skilled in electrochemistry
> as F&P, working in collaboration with some of the best nuclear
> physicists and nuclear astrophysicists in the world.  They looked for
> more than just the neutrons.  The bottom line is that there only a
> limited number of possible fusion reactions.  It's not hard to determine
> what the reaction products are going to be, and what their energies are
> going to be.

Ah, I see the problem.  At least, in hindsight it is clear.  P&F initially
detected heat, and then went looking for neutrons and gammas.  They
detected them, others did not.  Over the years, the neutron and gamma
reports have not been reproduced (there may have even been some funny
business with the gammas, where a spectrum peak was moved manually.)  Over
the years, the excess heat phenomenon has not gone away.

If by "cold fusion is disproved", we mean that fusion does not take place
in the P&F cell, then I agree.  Even without instruments, the issue is
clear: if fusion was causing the excess heating, then the harmful
radiation would not only be easily detected, it would be lethal.  If there
are no known "friendly" fusion pathways (wo/neutrons or gammas,) then the
P&F phenomenon is not anything like fusion.

The problem is clearly with the word "fusion".  Because the (supposed)
reaction is not part of known science, and since "fusion" is a well
explored area of physics, then "cold fusion" does not exist.  I agree.

The trouble is that the excess heat 1. Does not go away, 2. Has not been
explained with known chemical reactions, 3. When integrated over time,
shows that no chemical reaction could fuel such an output, 4. appears to
cause nuclear effects (such as creation of Tritium and other heavier
atoms.) 

> The Kellogg Radiation Lab people are laboratory nuclear astrophysicists.
> They are skilled at investigating nuclear reactions that have very small
> cross sections.  They had at their disposal a wide variety of neutron,
> particle and gamma-ray detection equipment.  All that they saw after
> looking very carefully was just background radiation.  Does this "prove"
> that CF doesn't "exist".  No, you can never prove a negative.  It does
> show that any effect has to be very small indeed.

I agree.  It shows that no known form of fusion is taking place.  The
"cold fusion" effect must be something else.  But, is it something
INTERESTING, such as an unknown nuclear process causing transmutation
which violates the coulomb barrier, or is it just some unusual chemical
reaction?  It is easy to show that it is not conventional fusion.  It is
less easy to show that nothing interesting is there. 

> The basic problem with CF is that for it to work, some very ordinary
> physics has to break down at distances where it works in essentially all
> other nuclear reactions....namely, the coulomb force.

I strongly agree.  If unexplanably large excess heat and unexplainable
presence of nuclear reaction products are being caused by an unknown
reaction, then that reaction flys in the face of very solid physics.
Yet nature speaks louder than theory, and if nature does something
"impossible", then theory must be revised.  But in this case, adherence to
theory is used to judge our clear view of Nature.  If we look and we find
"cold fusion", we must be incompetent.  If we look and we find nothing,
then our vision must be clear?

> Again as an old
> nuclear physicist, I can attest that literally thousands of experiments
> have been done that show no such break down.

I am suspicious of this argument because it is of the form: "If it could
occur, we would have seen it."  Such arguments have always been used to
dismiss reported anomalies, and not just in physics.  If the CF-ers
essentially say that something weird is happening at the surface of
palladium during electrochemistry, then isn't the proper response to look 
at that system?  I agree that if such things affected the results of
particle physics, they would have been seen.

Does the lack of "cold fusion" phenomena in conventional fusion
experiments constitute a negative replication of the Pons & Fleischman
claims?  Only God knows (literally!)  If I was omnicient, I would know
if "CF" physics only is significant across a narrow range of conditions,
and so is rarely seen.  Or, I might know that "CF" physics does not exist
at all, and that is why it is so rarely seen.  Analogy: if it should rain
at night, we would be advised to go under a streetlight, the better to see
the wet ground.  But if somebody should lose their keys in the darkness,
then walking over to the streetlight causes us to leave the only area
where the keys can be found.  If "CF" is more like the lost keys than like
the rain, then we should look only in the places where it was glimpsed.
If "CF" is more like the rain, then we are free to check under
the bright streetlight in order to verify any recent sprinkles.  Yet the
lack of keys under the streetlight does not imply that the missing keys no
longer exist.


> Also, other kinds of
> experiments have been done that show that it is incredibly difficult to
> do anything at the atomic scale that affects nuclear processes.  For
> example, people have done experiments to see if nuclear decay constants
> can be changed by changing the atomic environment.  By applying enormous
> pressures (thousands of atmospheres) you can observe very slight changes
> in decay constants.

What ever became of that paper a couple of years ago where somebody
discovered that the output of some radioactive material (tritium?) varied
with temperature?  There was even a peak in their graph.  I remember this
because that paper was "blasphemous", it went against the idea that decay
constants are nearly impossible to affect.  I never heard anything else
about it.  Did replications show nothing, or was the original report
simply ignored?  Did you ever encounter that paper, and the stir that it
breifly caused? 

> Given the data that weigh against CF, its up to F&P to demonstrate
> convincingly that it can be observed.  If its a real effect they ought
> to be able to provide a procedure that will allow others to reproduce
> the effect.  So far their papers have not done this.

I think that they themselves have thrown in the towel.  They don't know
how to make the process reliable.  For awhile the CETI company was
claiming a reliable heat-producer (based on palladium films on ceramic
beads), but more recently the CETI company is saying nothing.

> I have heard the argument made by some that one of the characteristics
> of CF is its lack of reproducibility.  Well I'm not willing to invest
> any of my hard earned money backing a process that is inherently
> nonreproducible, and anyone who does is a fool IMHO.

If you have no faith that the thing is real, then nobody should force you
to work on it.  But if you were to perform a peer review on somebody elses
investigation into "Low energy nuclear reactions during palladium
electrochemical processes", then it's no longer just a matter of your
opinion.  It becomes a thing resembling conspiracy.  Yet no one ever
conspired.  If common knowledge holds "CF" to be bogus, yet common
knowledge is mistaken, then the operation of peer review will act to
inhibit any researchers who do no share your negative opinion of "CF".

If the CF process is real, yet hard to reproduce, then it might be like a
deeply-buried treasure.  Obviously the "treasure" is far deeper than the
pro-CF people imagined.  It might be beyond reach, it might forever be a
laboratory curiosity.  In the end it might never be studied by academia,
and simply up as a secret Tritium-producing method for the DOE to use for
nuclear weapon stockpile maintenence.

Did you ever read the paper by Dr. T. Gold of Cornell astrophysics?  I
keep pushing its URL on phys-L, so you might have already seen it.  Don't
worry, Cold Fusion is not discussed.  It's about unconventional
discoveries in science, and the feedback forces present in science
culture:  http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/freenrg/newidea1.html

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