Re: cold fusion

[Rondo Jeffery <RJEFFERY@WEBER.EDU>]

Stefan Jeglinski (jeglin@4PI.COM) has a few things just a little confused about Steve Jones' experiments at the time of the P&F press conference.  He was at that time doing 'table-top experiments' that were similar to those of P&F, though not identical.  When he received a copy of their proposal to the DoE to review, and saw how similar their work was to his own work, he asked for permission from the DoE to contact them directly and see if they could work together. They even visited each others labs, if I understand correctly.  The big difference, as has been pointed out, is that Jones did not think there would be the energy-producing outcome that would make it practical, but was interested in the science of seeing if any fusion could occur at all.

> PF got wind of an upcoming publication of Jones (not his first, IIRC)
> on the subject, and thought they were going to get scooped. In fact,
> nothing of the sort would have happened, as Jones was not seriously
> considering a practical table-top energy demonstration.

The BYU and UU groups had struck an agreement that they would make simultaneous announcement of their separate works, and submit papers to an agreed-on journal (Science, I believe) on the same day.  A day before the appointed time, P&F called their now-famous press conference, catching Jones completely by surprise.  The biggest surprise of all came when a reporter asked if there were similar work going on anywhere else, and they said Not that they were aware of.

 When the administrations of the two universities got involved, and undoubtedly the lawyers, then dollar signs started to cloud the thinking.

> But enter a
> paranoid Pons, and a gullible university administration who came to
> see it as something they could not afford to not "protect," and the
> press-conference was born. Had anyone in the physics department been
> consulted (it was a *complete* surprise to the Utah physics
> department), there would have been a chance to avoid the press
> conference. Granted, most in the physics department would likely have
> dismissed it summarily, but there were a few who did show interest
> and would have likely volunteered to collaborate to try and answer
> just a few loose questions. That department has a lot of expertise in
> nuclear detection and they would have been as good a partner as one
> might hope for.

Here Stefan is off just a bit.  The fact of the matter is that members of the U of U physics department *did* go to the president of the university, and tried to warn him that the  effect P & F were claiming did not add up.  In other words, if there were as much energy being produced as they claimed, and it were coming from fusion, then there would have to be massive amounts of radiation coming out, which was not seen.  (It's like the old joke at the time, that there being no dead graduate students proved it wasn't fusion.)  The university president, Chase Peterson, chose to ignore the warnings of the physicists and go with the dollar signs.  They convinced the governor, then the legislature of Utah, that the science was all there, and all they needed was seed money to develop the technology.  They said they could have a prototype water heater ready to demonstrate the techology within 6 months.  They were awarded 5 million dollars to fund their work.  Now, you might argue that if it had really paid off, the
5 million would have been a good investment compared with the billions that would have resulted from harnessing fusion.  But it didn't.  At the first conference on cold fusion (billed as the "first annual" international conference) Jones asked Pons how they were coming on their water heater.  Pons was so mad he could hardly speak.  They, of course, had no water heater to present yet, and still haven't, more than a decade later.

> Pons' real legacy was
> being the only person who could really stop it, and did not.

There is one other person that I blame for this, even more than Pons.  That is James Borphy, now deceased.  He was a physicist and at the time was vice president of research at the University of Utah.  He became the biggest 'cheerleader' of the CF team.  But I'd like to think that, as a physicist, he should have been more critical of the claims.

Leigh Palmer has already addressed the next part of Stefan's remarks.  I.e., it is not the *atom* that is made smaller by the muon, but the hydrogen (really, deuterium) *molecule* that is made smaller by substituting a muon for an electron.  That brings the two deuterons close enough together that there is a finite overlap of their wavefunctions and fusion can occur.  It is not  a 'kT' effect at all.  In fact, even in hot fusion, the temperature is only a means of giving the deuterons enough kinetic energy to overcome the Coulomb repulsion and bring the particles close enough for long enough to increase the probability of fusion taking place.  Muon-catalyzed fusion is actually better in this regard, because it keeps the deuterons in place close to each other, so the probability of fusion is quite high.

> Very
> roughly speaking, the idea was that a muonic hydrogenic atom (with a
> heavier muon in orbit instead of an electron), would have a much
> smaller atomic radius (allowing closer approach in a gas or tighter
> packing in a lattice), thereby increasing the chances that
> room-temperature kT could cause fusion that was *measurable*, instead
> of the kT associated with hot fusion. Naturally, "measureable" here
> is not synonymous with "practical." The muonic form of hydrogen could
> in principle make room-temperature kT fusion cross a threshold from
> "truly vanishing" to "barely measureable."

A footnote to the CF experience at Utah is what happened to their president.  Chase Peterson was ousted a couple of years later, after a run-in with the Faculty Senate over an attempt to reorganize the administration and not include faculty representation.  He also tried to rename the Medical School after a large donor.  Those three things--cold fusion, governance, and "selling" the Medical School--were what forced him to resign rather than receive the threatened vote of no confidence from the faculty.

Rondo Jeffery
Weber State University
Ogden, UT 84408-2508
rjeffery@weber.edu