Re: solution to the world's energy needs

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, John Mallinckrodt wrote:

> (and supplied copious historical anecdotes to support his position.)
>
> Bill,
>
> I won't try to counter your anecdotes; my knowledge of the relevant
> history is pretty clearly weaker than yours.

Be warned that my own knowledge is certainly not from primary sources, but
came from a variety of books over the years, including those with a major
"crackpot" bias.

>  Suffice it to say that I
> found your stories very interesting, even surprising, but I remain utterly
> unconvinced that they can be marshalled to support the thesis that we
> would have remained grounded absent the contributions of the Wrights. (Out
> of curiosity, since you think that even buzzing the White House might not
> have been noticed, just what *was* it that they finally did to overcome
> the ability of people not to see them flying?)

They took their craft to Paris, where 'weird things' are not uncommon, and
the minds of the Parisian public had been repeatedly jarred open over the
years.  (I find it hilarious that Pons and Fleichman took their Cold
Fusion lab to France in their quest for openminded acceptance.)

The Wrights shipped their disassembled flyers to France.  If I have the
timeline right, in Paris at the time there had been some yearly "inventors
conventions" where the flying-machine crackpots brought their steam-driven
flapping-batwing devices to display to the crowds at a horse track.  At
the time the Wrights arrived, some of these devices had achived
straight-line flight of hundreds of feet, but could not be steered in 3-D.

I guess the modern equivalent would be a "New Energy" convention where
some researchers are demonstrating inexplicable gravity-like forces, and
then in strolls a team of crackpots with a miniature gravity-drive UFO
device which flys around the room under remote control.  Within weeks they
would be feted before the crowned heads of wherever, as the Wrights were.


> Later you wrote:
>
> > (And, what if Cold Fusion in the end proves to be entirely
> > real?  How could anyone explain it's present status?  Mass-insanity on the
> > part of the physics community?  Yep.  Just like the mass-insanity which
> > very nearly suppressed the Wright Brothers.)
>
> I suppose that I should be embarrassed to admit that two of my colleagues
> in the physics department here at Cal Poly Pomona are still working on
> cold fusion (or, as it is generally referred to these days, "anomalous
> effects in hydrated metals.")  O.K., I guess I *am* a little embarrassed.

Or "Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions" (LENR) or "Chemically-assisted Nuclear
Reactions" (CANR).   Anything to duck under the sneer-ridden "CF" lable.


If CF never achieves "reality", then your embarassment is certainly
warranted.  But if somebody eventually starts selling a "CF-based"
product, then the shoe is on the other foot, and everyone *except* the
cold-fusion believers will need to feel intense embarassment.  (Dr.
Claytor at LANL is producing Tritium with a gas-discharge CF experiment,
but not in economic quantities.  Perhaps something like this will be the
first CF "product."  A-bomb triggers for the military.)


> As much as we all like them and support their right to choose the
> direction of their own research, it is, nevertheless, pretty clear that
> they have been a little too quick to believe what they want to believe.
> That, character trait doesn't help their credibility.

It all depends on whether they are fooling themselves, or if they instead
seeing small and hard-to-involk reactions.  If they are in the right, then
everyone else has a problem: being a little too quick to disbelieve what
they want to disbelieve.  (Yet 'skepticism' is supposed to be
scientifically acceptable, but being 'credulous' is not, therefore a
hate-filled intellectual bigotry can hide behind the 'skeptical' lable...
and anyone who still wants to give CF a chance had better keep quiet about
it, or at least go pursue a non-academic career, where "true belief" in
things like CF can only bring razzing, and not career-damage.)


I've heard one interesting tidbit about the long-term EPRI study of Cold
Fusion (the project where an investigator was killed when the pallidum
recombiner in a high-pressure CF cell failed and the thing went off like a
pipe bomb).  The final report said that no conventional (neutron/gamma-
producing) fusion was found, but that the devices produced large amounts
of inexplicable heat and proportional amounts of helium, and they
recommended that further research be done.  This certainly didn't make any
headlines.



> Having said that, I will stipulate that my personal opinion about the
> merits of this research counts for precious little.  I haven't tried to do
> the experiments myself and I'm not likely ever to do so.  Accordingly I
> must rely on the weight of the evidence from others.  At this point that
> weight is pretty overwhelming.  Large numbers of accomplished
> experimenters have failed to reproduce the effect and there are no
> commercial reactors on the market despite the early predictions that this
> would happen very quickly.

The pro-CF books say that large numbers of accomplished researchers didn't
attempt replication.  Obviously many people messed around with the
Pons/Fleichman claims, but who knows exactly how many actually contacted
P&F to find out all of the techniques required to make the phenomenon
appear?

One thing that stands out in all of the controversy was a need for
specific conditions which were not discussed during the big bruhaha:
selection of particular lots of Palladium from particular suppliers (as if
some palladium contains an unidentified 'poison' which quenches the
reaction), vacuum-recasting of the palladium to drive out the normal
hydrogen, weeks or months of slow electrolysis to drive the deuterium in
the PdD up to 100%, and clean-room conditions (as little contamination in
the cell as possible.)  If these were all semi-secret in the year after
the original discovery (or if independant researchers simply never
contacted P&F to ask for detailed information), then actual replications
would have been rare.

When everyone dismisses CF on the grounds that huge numbers of failed
replications exist, the pro-CF people say "show that these replications
are not mythical!", and the anti-CF people usually become silent and
change the subject.


In my own observations of the whole CF history, I see that Pons/Fleichman
were somewhat secretive (dollar-signs in the eyes!) and didn't go
overboard to make certain that any attempted replications were done right.
Scientific opinion then broke symmetry, with the concensus decision
favoring an instance of pathological science.  If only then Pons/Fleichman
decided to tell all, then it was far too late, and nobody would trust
anything they might claim.  Their later years of research didn't produce
any reliable devices, and their flakey phenomenon could never sway a
disbeliever.


> My attitude toward cold fusion is precisely the same as my attitude toward
> powered flight: I simply do not find it very likely that an advance of
> such enormous consequences could be hidden from public view for any
> appreciable amount of time if it were on view, working everyday in
> laboratories around the world.

It's not hidden.  It's out in the open, and those who don't believe it
can simply "stare at the ground as the Wright Flyer goes overhead."
There are many hundreds of papers written on CF, with more every year, and
yearly symposia still occuring (and even branching out into "chemical
transmutation" meetings, versus the original CF meetings).  We can ignore
these, and declare that pathological science is extremely infectious but
then an effect like this might be working:

   I won't believe the CF claims until a team besides Pons/Fleichman
   can replicate them.

   (A fair number of replications occur)

   That doesn't matter, since all of those researchers are deluded
   (after all, they are seeing impossible events take place.)
   I won't believe in CF until a major US laboratory says its real.

   (EPRI says that inexplicable heat/helium is being produced)

   That doesn't matter.  All those researchers were paid to find an
   effect, so it's not suprising that they fooled themselves and
   found one.  I won't believe in CF until somebody comes up with
   a device which reliably produces hundreds of watts.

   (Patterson demonstrates a heat-producing device at a (Nuclear
   Society?) meeting, based on electrolysis with Pd-coated ceramic beads.
   It puts out hundreds of watts with a few watts input.  Later
   batches of beads don't give the same effect.  Patterson's CETI
   company goes silent.)

   That was some kind of fluke.  Or a hoax.  Or something.  It
   couldn't have been real.  I won't believe in CF until somebody
   builds a CF-driven car and drives it across the USA without gasoline.

We're still waiting.  But I'm led to wonder, what would have happened to
the original discoveries in particle physics if funding and publication
was withheld until somebody managed to build a nuclear-powered car and
drive it across the country?



>  You say the Wrights' work was "very nearly
> suppressed."  I guess I simply don't know what that means.  In any event,
> history clearly shows that it wasn't.

If CF is real, then I think we can agree that it is "very nearly
suppressed" at the moment.  If CF reactions are real, yet no useful
products come out of CF research, then the field will probably be entirely
suppressed (by disbelief, not by any conspiracy)  as older researchers
give up, and no new ones enter the field.  If things went differently in
the early days of powered flight (if the Wrights had stuck to bicycle
R&D), conceivably it would have followed the course of cold fusion.  There
would be no airplanes, and everyone would know that it is inconceivable
that airplanes are possible, after all, if they were possible, hundreds of
scientists would hotly pursue them, yet they don't, therefor airplanes
remain forever taboo.

Except for the PR-disaster that Langley produced with his steam-driven
craft launched into the Potomac, I see that powered-flight research was
avoided by anyone with any standing in academia.  Huge numbers of
crackpots pursued it, but they screwed it up almost every time.  The
Wrights succeeded by behaving as careful scientists rather than
starry-eyed true believers (yet only a true believer would be motivated to
do research in a crackpot field like Powered Flight in the first place.)



> I am willing to believe that the cold fusion story has not yet been fully
> written; that there just might be some new physics; *even* that the
> effect, if real, might be exploitable.

Yet CF certainly is suppressed.  If it is unreal, then it is rightly
suppressed.  If it "just might be" real, then something is terribly
terribly wrong with modern science.  Until recently, US patents in CF
technology were automatically rejected.  Funding requests draw laughter,
and research must be performed on the sly, or at home.  No reputable
journal will publish any CF papers (and so several "disreputable" CF-only
journals have sprung up, but nobody outside the CF arena knows that they
exist.)  If CF just might be real, then it shows that science as a whole
is profoundly sick all the way to its core.  (Or if CF is a delusion, then
it shows that science performs efficient "triage" on crackpottery.)  Only
time will tell, but even time cannot supply the answer, should CF be real
yet all research is permanently abandoned.



>  I do *not*, however, believe that
> the effect is as readily and prodigiously observable as was claimed by the
> early researchers.  If it were, I have NO doubt (read "< 0.0001 doubt")
> that we would all know by now.

The story is that it was prodigiously observed, but extremely difficult to
trigger. If only Pons/Fleichman (and Arata, Bockris, McKubre,Miles,Mills,
Mizuno,Stringham,Storms) figured out how to trigger the effect, then the
rest of the scientific community can state that the effect was never
replicated by a reliable outside laboratory.  (Could it be that anyone who
managed to produce the effect magically became an "unreliable" true
believer?)

I'm reminded of the Scientific American quote of my previous message.
What if all newspaper reporters everywhere declare that the Wright
Brothers' claims are a hoax, on the grounds that if they were real, the
story would be in all of the *OTHER* newspapers already?  See the problem?

If we ignore the fact that concensus decisions are taking place, and if we
ignore the fact that *everyone else* might be in exactly the same position
as we are regarding belief/disbelief, then we will be in trouble if we
look to others for leadership in making a decision.  This is the "sheep
herd" effect discussed by Dr. Thomas Gold in his NEW IDEAS IN SCIENCE
paper.  If all scientists everywhere declare that they will accept CF as
soon as all of their colleagues accept CF, then we are stuck, because a
concensus decision has emerged from the group-mind of science, but without
anyone having to go and dirty their hands by actually examining the
evidence.  That many scientists cannot be wrong?  This is like the R.
Feynman parable about the chinese population guessing at the size of the
emperor's nose.  That many guesses can't be wrong, and if averaged, we
know exactly how long the Emperor's nose is, even if nobody has ever seen
the Emperor.

If Powered Flight (or any other unorthodox claim) was real, then everyone
else would accept it, and then finally *we* would accept it.
Unfortunately the scientific community is composed of numerous "we"-units,
and there is no "everyone else" at all.  And that many scientists couldn't
possibly be wrong!

:)


A brief overview of CF is on the Scientific American website

  Pro and Con C.F. viewpoints  Schaffer/Morrison/Heeter
  http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics6.html


There is also a recent pro-CF overview paper by E. Storms on the SSE
journal site (peer-reviewed unorthodox science papers)

  Review of the "Cold Fusion" effect
  http://www.jse.com/storms/1.html


And as usual, here's Dr. Gold's paper on group-think, delta-function-izing
forces, and cumulative feedback effects produced by repeated iterations of
the peer review process.

  New Ideas in Science   Thomas Gold
  http://www.amasci.com/freenrg/newidea1.html

And a few more links to Cold Fusion CANR/LENR articles

  http://www.amasci.com/weird/wcf.html


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