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Re: Challenging the laws of physics



Excitement caused by Ponn and Flishmann had a positive
effect on many minds; it triggered a debate, it triggered
experiments. I suspect that episodes of that nature, but not
of the same magnitude, are common among scientists and
engineers. As teachers we should look for such episodes
and make them known to students, when possible.

Can you remind us essential physics of "catalyzed fusion"
Leigh? Make it as simple as possible. Unfortunately, most
people remember only pseudoscience aspects of the claims
and not the ideas on which they were based. These ideas
were taken seriously by many, at least for a short time.
Ludwik Kowalski

Leigh Palmer wrote:

Jones's work on negative muon catalyzed fusion was sufficiently
well known that a Scientific American article completely revealing
it had already appeared several years before the Pons & Fleischmann
flap in 1989. (I can't find the article just now.) The process had
been seen earlier by Luis Alvarez. The earliest reference I can
find in my library is to a New York Times article dated 29 December
1956. It begins:

Atomic Energy Produced by New, Simpler Method
____________________________________________________
Coast Scientists Achieve Reaction Without Uranium or
Intense Heat - Practical Use Hinges on Further Tests
____________________________________________________
MONTEREY, Calif., Dec. 28 - A third and revolutionary
way to produce a nuclear reaction was described here
today. It does not involve uranium, as in the fission
reaction, or million-degree heat, as in the fusion
reaction.
The new process is called "catalyzed nuclear
reaction." It was discovered accidentally a few weeks
ago during routine work with the huge atom-smashing
bevatron at the University of California radiation
laboratory...*

There is also evidence that Sakharov had predicted the phenomenon
as early as 1948, but he did not publish.

Leigh

*Full article appears in "Discovering Alvarez", ed. by W. Peter
Trower, University of Chicago Press, p. 155. I was a student in
Alvarez's nuclear physics class at Cal when this article appeared.