Talk:Cold fusion

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Only a "few"?

Are you sure that it's only a "few" people who take the position that it's pseudoscience? I've followed this whole thing fairly carefully since its inception (being at the time a semi-hard science-fiction writer who, like my friend Jack Vance and other S.F. writers of my acquaintance, was blown away by the possibilities) and it seems to me that except for a few die-hards, it's long since been pretty much discredited.

But I'll certainly admit that there is a vast difference between being an advocate of a "pseudoscience" and being an advocate of an unpopular position that is somewhat outside the mainstream without being pushed by nuts and fanatics.

So maybe this is just a question of semantics in the CZ article?

My own impression of the article as at least the opening now stands is that there is not enough emphasis on the general rejection of the idea by the mainstream. But I certainly don't want to get into an ideological battle over this....

Cheers! Hayford Peirce 11:28, 14 September 2008 (CDT)

It depends on how you define pseudoscience. I would say this was bad science but not necessarily pseudoscience. Chris Day 14:33, 14 September 2008 (CDT)

That's my own feeling. So that I think it should be rewritten accordingly to say that whereas a few people think it's pseudoscience, most mainstream people simply consider it to be bad science. Hayford Peirce 15:46, 14 September 2008 (CDT)

Let us please not cite "my own feelings" for this sort of thing. Please cite some evidence in support of these claims. It is obvious that many scientists and magazines oppose cold fusion, but on the other hand I have a public opinion poll of scientists in Japan, and I have comments from the DoE panel and from readers at LENR-CANR. Based on this data, I believe that scientists are sharply divided with regard to cold fusion, but there is no overwhelming majority on either side. Based on the Japanese survey and the DoE panel, scientists are about evenly divided.

Let us not put statements into this article which are not supported by objective evidence and sources.

- Jed

Have rewritten the Intro to give a more skeptical view

I'm not an expert in this field, but I remember the initial excitement and the subsequent letdown. The Intro should reflect this actuality.

The more that I reread the initial effort here, the more I see it as a fairly unvarnished point of view that cold fusion actually exists.... Maybe it does -- but almost no reputable scientist believes that it does. Hayford Peirce 15:56, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

You wrote:

but almost no reputable scientist believes that it does.

I have a list of 4,000 reputable scientist who believe that cold fusion is real. Most of them observed it themselves. They are all reputable, or they would not be on my list. They include, for example, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin; two Nobel laureates in physics; the director of BARC (India’s premier nuclear physics laboratory) and later chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission; Bockris, Fleischmann and other authors of the leading textbooks on electrochemistry; several Distinguished Professors and Fellows of the U.S. Navy, the Electrochemical Society, NATO and other prestigious organizations; three editors of major plasma fusion and physics journals, and a retired member of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

Four thousand scientists is not "almost none."

- Jed

And by the way, you can read 500 papers, including papers by all the researchers I listed above, at http://lenr-canr.org/.

I suggest that you review this literature carefully before making statements about the research, or about the researchers themselves.

- Jed

Discussion

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What is the importance of neutrons?

I just cut the following from the background section to try and rework it here:

Nuclear reactions are normally initiated using neutrons or high-energy elemental particles. The process taking place under these conditions is well known and is the basis for the field called nuclear physics.

Reactions involving neutrons can occur because these particles do not have a charge and can pass through the barrier. However, neutrons are not observed to form under conditions that produce the cold fusion reactions and they are not known to exist as free particles in ordinary materials.

Why are neutrons important, especially the first bit relating to fission? The only relevance to fusion I can see is that plasma fusion gives off neutrons whereas cold fusion does not. Above seems to implicate them as being important for the fusion event. Is that true? And if so, it needs to be rewritten to establish why neutrons are significant. If not, then why are we discussing neutrons with respect to fission and the columb barrier? Chris Day 16:23, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I suggest we include the section you deleted, as follows:

Reactions involving neutrons can occur because these particles do not have a charge and can pass through the barrier. However, neutrons are not observed to form under conditions that produce the cold fusion reactions and they are not known to exist as free particles in ordinary materials.

The established theory is that nuclear fusion reactions cannot be initiated without the input of significant energy because the charge barrier between nuclei, called the Coulomb barrier, cannot be overcome any other way. Cold fusion generated widespread publicity since it seemed defy these theoretical considerations and represented a potentially cheap and clean source of energy.

Please do not delete it again without a discussion and careful consideration. As I said, this is not Wikipedia. You don't just clobber paragraphs here. You modify them carefully.

Neutrons are important because they are neutral, and if there were large numbers of free neutrons or other neutral particles such as muons, there would be no argument about cold fusion. But there are not. That's a key reason why cold fusion is so surprising and controversial.

The other reason is that high energy input is not needed, but if you had muons or free neutrons, you would not need it.

This may seem obvious to a scientist but it is not obvious to the general reader.

- Jed

I'd suggest the way it was written was not even obvious to scientists. That was why i brought it to the talk page. It was not a random deletion I was trying to encourage you to discuss it (and above you do clarify what you were trying to explain in that paragraph). Some of your edit summaries are criticising your own work? I think you starting to see attacks where none exist. Chris Day 17:03, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I tweaked it a bit, and added muons. Perhaps that will only make it more confusing to the general reader. Anyway, let us try to explain it to the reader, rather than deleting it. I am confident that physicists on both sides of the debate consider this a major issue.

- Jed

No fanfare?

Jed, you wrote in in the subject for one edit that "There was no fanfare in announcement". I'm not sure what you mean here. How normal is it to have a press conference prior to publication? Pretty rare, I'd suggest. While I agree they probably did not have trumpets, literally, it is unusual to have a press conference to announce a scientific discovery. Fanfare or similar, in that context, is quite apt. Chris Day 16:57, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I meant there was no fanfare at U. Utah. There was a great deal of fanfare elsewhere, but not accompanying the announcement itself. I base this on 3 sources:

1. A video of the announcement on YouTube. It seems quite subdued to me.

2. Mallove's book "Fire from Ice."

3. My conversations with Fleischmann, Pons and others at U. Utah. They were not thrilled to be announcing this. In fact, they dreaded it, and expected the worst. They were forced to make an announcement several years earlier than they planned to. See also Beaudette's book.

In other words, the announcement was subdued because everyone there expected to lose their jobs -- which they soon did. That's what they told Beaudette and I.

- Jed

You should probably be a Topic Informant, as an acquaintance of Pons and Fleishmann. See CZ:Policy on Topic Informants. Anyone got any opinion on this? Also, please sign your comments using the signature button in the toolbar or the "Sign your username" four tilde link in the special characters panel. --Tom Morris 17:33, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Hmmm . . . It says the Topic Informant is one who has "unique and important experience of historical events, CEOs, politicians, judges, inventors, and others who are (or were) close to the subjects written about . . ." I guess I fall in the latter category with regard to cold fusion. I know a lot about it, I have read and edited hundreds of papers and three books, and I been in several labs watching experiments and so on.

But the role of the Topic Informant is unclear to me, at least as it would apply to a technical article. Shouldn't this be based entirely on peer-reviewed papers, and other information that anyone can confirm? That's the usual standard for technical reviews. All of the statements I made can be found in the literature. (I should perhaps add some more footnotes.) Many are in papers available on line at LENR-CANR. All the papers at LENR-CANR came from the libraries at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech. I have 3,000 other papers that I do not have permission to upload, regrettably, but I do quote from them. The point is, you can go to a university library and independently confirm everything I say. (Unless I got it wrong!)

If this were a biography of Martin Fleischmann perhaps you would need a Topic Informant, but I do not see how it would apply this article . . .

Incidents in the history of cold fusion are well documented by the late E. Mallove in his book, and by C. Beaudette in his book. Beaudette has donated his source materials to the special collection on cold fusion at the University of Utah, so you can go there and view the letters and listen to the audiotape interviews. (I spent a week there in the stacks this summer. My idea of a vacation.) The incident I described above is on p. 149 of his book. And the entire book is now available right here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf

One other issue is that I am 100% convinced that cold fusion is a real nuclear effect. I don't know how you want to deal with this. I do not pretend to be undecided or neutral, because I have seen data from thousands of experimental runs, some with very high s/n ratios, which is to say compelling experimental evidence. On thing you will not find is a person who has read many papers and seen lots of data and yet who does not believe that cold fusion exists. Except for one person: Prof. Deiter Britz. Every other electrochemist and nuclear scientist I know who is familiar with the literature is totally convinced, mainly because the ones I know measured the effect themselves, repeatedly. If they did not believe their own instruments and x-ray film, they wouldn't be experimentalists, would they?

I shall now try four tildes.

Jed Rothwell 20:42, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

One thing I think should be clarified in this article is exactly what happened at the march press conference in 1989. Certainly I remember it as being a fanfare with respect to it being widely reported, stop press news in professional journals and popular media. I also remember, could be wrong, the initial reports being positive. It was only later that the more skeptical reports starting coming. What needs to be clarified is who called the press conference and under what circumstances. This seems to be an important part of the cold fusion story. Jed, from your position you seem to be saying that Fleischmann and Pons were forced to give a press conference. i find that very unusual. Who forced them, what is the back story here? Chris Day 21:04, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Certainly it made the cover of Time and all the TV shows talked about it incessantly for a while. Hayford Peirce 21:11, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

This from WP:

The grant proposal was turned over for peer review, and one of the reviewers was Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University. Jones had worked on muon-catalyzed fusion for some time, and had written an article on the topic entitled "Cold nuclear fusion" that had been published in Scientific American in July 1987. Fleischmann and Pons and co-workers met with Jones and co-workers on occasion in Utah to share research and techniques. During this time, Fleischmann and Pons described their experiments as generating considerable "excess energy", in the sense that it could not be explained by chemical reactions alone. They felt that such a discovery could bear significant commercial value and would be entitled to patent protection. Jones, however, was measuring neutron flux, which was not of commercial interest. In order to avoid problems in the future, the teams appeared to agree to simultaneously publish their results, although their accounts of their March 6 meeting differ. In mid-March, both research teams were ready to publish their findings, and Fleischmann and Jones had agreed to meet at an airport on March 24 to send their papers to Nature via FedEx. Fleischmann and Pons, however, broke their apparent agreement, submitting their paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry on March 11, and disclosing their work via a press conference on March 23. Jones, upset, faxed in his paper to Nature after the press conference.

Hayford Peirce 21:11, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

You wrote:

One thing I think should be clarified in this article is exactly what happened at the march press conference in 1989. Certainly I remember it as being a fanfare with respect to it being widely reported, stop press news in professional journals and popular media.

. . .Fleischmann and Pons, however, broke their apparent agreement, submitting their paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry . . .

I recommend -- I STRONGLY recommend -- that you put that in another article, such as "History of cold fusion." That has nothing to do with the science of cold fusion. It cannot be verified. Frankly, it seems unimportant to me, especially compared to the physics. When you start adding stuff like this to a cold fusion article, it displaces the scientific content. There are countless fight about academic priority in other fields, such as the invention of FM radio, transistors, AIDS, cloning or bubble fusion, but encyclopedia articles do not dwell on these fights.

Jones made various claims, Fleischmann and Pons made other claims. You would have to have a time machine to sort out who did what to whom. There were misunderstandings and miscommunication. I know all three of them well, and I read their correspondence in the U. Utah library special collection. So I have some opinions about who is really at fault. But I think it is best not to let this kind of drama drown out the science. We can look up peer-reviewed papers and learn exactly how someone measured heat or tritium or neutrons, but we cannot measure emotions or academic priority or who betrayed whom, so let's keep the two s-e-p-a-r-a-t-e.

Jed Rothwell 21:26, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Sure, I agree that there might well be a separate article -- BUT, you have to remember that here at CZ we are writing for the general reader, albeit a reasonably well-educated one. I feel absolutely confident in saying that if the general reader comes to the "Cold fusion" article, he/she will want something more than just a scientific article about its specs. He/she will want to have IN ONE ARTICLE at least some of the extraordinary news events connected with it. So at least *some* mention of this stuff has a legitimate place here. Hayford Peirce 22:29, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Hayford Peirce wrote:

"Certainly it made the cover of Time and all the TV shows talked about it incessantly for a while."

Yes. We said this in the first paragraph: "The report of their results was widely publicized amidst worldwide excitement . . ." That's all you need to say here, I think. As I said, move the details to a history article, or you will end up with a confused mess.

The issue that triggered this discussion, in this section, was the assertion that the announcement itself at U. Utah was accompanied by "fanfare." It was not, in my opinion. It sure wasn't meant to be. The principals all told me they were trying to keep a lid on it, although they knew that was impossible.

Jed Rothwell 21:36, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

That press conference was a very significant event in cold fusion despite it not being about the science. If they really did scoop Jones, it is no wonder they were a sheepish at the press conference. But who called the press conference? There may not have been fanfare from the scientists involved but there was from the people that called the press conference. Presumably the university patent office. I still think fanfare is an apt description. How much science makes it to the cover of Time, someone at Utah was pushing it for all it was worth. Chris Day 21:43, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Chris Day wrote:

That press conference was a very significant event in cold fusion despite it not being about the science.

Perhaps it was significant. Although I know of dozens of other events that I consider more significant that are not mentioned here, such as the first 10 replications, or the explosion that almost killed my friend Mizuno. But my point is, the press conference is about the HISTORY of cold fusion -- the human drama, or melodrama if you will. And when people mix that drama together with a technical discussion, it invites dispute and confusion and bad feelings. Believe me, I have read dozens of review articles in English and Japanese where this press conference showed up in the middle of a discussion of neutrons or helium, where it does not belong! That kind of claim cannot be confirmed or disputed by the rules of scientific discourse. Historians and electrochemists have different standards and methods -- both are valuable, but they are different.

Why not start a history article? That solves the problem completely. It keeps this article on a strictly technical, science basis, and puts the history in an article written by the standards of history books. As you say, the history is important. There are lots of books and dozens of boxes of unpublished source material on it at U. Utah. Go for it!

Also, by the way, I don't mean to quibble but the history of cold fusion began in 1927, and the effect was observed in the 1930s and early 1980s, as Fleischmann and others have pointed out. Priority gets harder and harder to establish the closer you look and the more you know. Someone here wrote that it "began spectacularly in 1989" but strictly speaking that is not the case. If you want to make a strictly accurate article, you have to be very careful what you say. You may not want to throw in words like "began spectacularly" without first reading some cold fusion history books, especially Mallove. We can cover the "spectacular" part in another sentence, but if you want to nit-pick (and you can be sure I do -- I am a programmer, after all) then you want to take that out of the first sentence.

Jed Rothwell 22:08, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I don't endorse "began spectacularly". I see no reason why some history cannot be covered in this article, although, i understand that complete coverage requires a more comprehensive treatment. I have not seen Britannica or equivalent version but are you saying they do not cover anything but the science? I still don't see what is controversial about mentioning that there was massive press coverage for this phenomena in 1989. It was almost unprecedented in science. Chris Day 22:27, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Not "began spectacularly" -- can you name me any scientific event since the first news reports of the first Atomic bombs in 1945 or Sputnik in 1957 that received the coverage that this did? If that isn't spectacular, I don't know what the word means. Hayford Peirce 22:33, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I think the point here is that it was not the beginning but a breakthrough. Chris Day 22:36, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Hayford Peirce wrote:

Not "began spectacularly" -- can you name me any scientific event since the first news reports of the first Atomic bombs in 1945 or Sputnik in 1957 . . .

As I mentioned below, HTSC and cloning got as much coverage as cold fusion. But my point is that it began in the 1920s with no coverage at all. Chris Day correctly points out that the 1989 announcement was a breakthrough that brought it to the attention of a much wider audience. But as Mizuno pointed out, any electrochemist knew there was fragmentary evidence for nuclear effects in deuterides.

Jed Rothwell 22:45, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Of course we should have a fairly lengthy and substantial section of the article about the coverage and ensuing public controversy. That is a legitimate and important aspect of the topic. Just as, for example the discovery of how to make stem cells without fetuses, much more recently, is a legitimate and important aspect of that topic (don't expect me to remember what the process is called). And heck...if I remember it as being a big deal, and it happened in science, then it was a big deal, because the closest I come to following science is subscribing to National Geographic and Astronomy, occasionally. --Larry Sanger 22:37, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Larry Sanger wrote:

Of course we should have a fairly lengthy and substantial section of the article about the coverage and ensuing public controversy.

I recommend you think twice about that. Perhaps that is what you do with other topics, but cold fusion is a highly emotional subject to many people, and the history is particularly emotional and disputed.

Of course it is "legitimate and important" but when you mix it in with a technical discussion, all hell breaks loose, and pretty soon people insert "historical notes" into the technical discussion that have no basis in fact and no business in a technical paper. Mention neutrons and suddenly arguments break out over whether Jones discovered them first, or whether Fleischmann measured them incorrectly (no and yes -- Mizuno discovered them before Jones, and probably people in the 1930s did before he did, and Martin definitely measured them wrong, he says). It is a can of worms!

I urge you to limit this article to assertions about physics that can be confirmed or disproved by reading electrochemistry or physics papers. Just touch on the history here, and move the discussion into the next room. Let the historians duke it out there.

Jed Rothwell 22:55, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Chris Day wrote:

I see no reason why some history cannot be covered in this article . . . I still don't see what is controversial about mentioning that there was massive press coverage for this phenomena in 1989.

We did mention that! It is right in the first paragraph, the first three sentences. It is the most prominent part of the article, albeit not the most detailed.

What's the problem?

I don't endorse "began spectacularly".

I don't know where that came from. Perhaps we should cut it.

It was almost unprecedented in science.

Not a all. You should have seen the circus surrounding high temperature superconductors and cloning sheep, or landing on Mars. Scientists do this kind of thing all the time. Every time they run a Tokamak they call a press conference, sometimes months before they publish a paper.

Jed Rothwell 22:45, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

For sustained coverage by the mass media over a long period of time, none of them held a candle to cold fusion. Hayford Peirce 23:05, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

That's why i said "almost". Certainly Dolly is up there along side. I don't recall super conductors getting so much press. Obviously scientist are often calling press conferences but that is not the point. Its not about calling the press conference as compared to the amount of coverage one gets after calling the press conference. My only issue was you had a problem with fanfare. I actually think that does accurately describe the reception and probably the intent of the those that called the press conference, even if not the scientists themselves. Chris Day 22:52, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

In retrospect, I guess we could write something along the lines of "much fanfare from the press"? Chris Day 22:56, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Chris Day wrote:

I guess we could write something along the lines of "much fanfare from the press . . ."

Well, why not say what we said? "The report of their results was widely publicized amidst worldwide excitement, briefly raising hopes that a cheap and abundant source of energy had been found." That seems accurate to me. (Except, of course, the hope remains very much alive -- but that's another story.)

"Fanfare" means blowing trumpets loudly to attract attention to an announcement. Actual or figurative trumpets -- I have heard some actual ones in trade shows. It is what the people making the announcement do. I don't mean to quibble, but when other people make a fuss, that's not fanfare, that's wide publicity or excitement.

Jed Rothwell 23:02, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Should be moved

...to cold fusion.

Behave, now, folks. :-) --Larry Sanger 18:16, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Surely you mean Cold fusion? Hayford Peirce 18:54, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Both cold fusion and Cold fusion link to the same page, which is different from Cold Fusion. --Larry Sanger 18:56, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

The deed is done. Hayford Peirce 19:14, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

But what was the net difference in heat caused by your fusing them? Howard C. Berkowitz 19:32, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

When Mr. Klein returned home from a visit to his friend Teitelbaum, in the psychiatric ward, Mrs. Klein bombarded him with questions.

"Poor Teitelbaum," sighed Mr. Klein. "Sick in the head. He rants, he raves, he talks mishegas'"

"So how could you even talk to him?"

"I tried to bring him down to earth. I talked of simple, everyday things: the weather; did he need warm clothes; the ten dollars he owes us....

"Aha! Did he remember?"

"That meshuge he isn't," said Klein

"Oedipus schmedipus, as long as a boy loves his mother." Howard C. Berkowitz 19:54, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Jed, please sign your comments correctly

Jed, PLEASE sign your comments by simply writing ~~~~. That will sign your full user name, leave a link to your Talk page and it will also date and time stamp your comments. Thanks, Milton Beychok 20:48, 15 September 2008 (CDT)