Wired Coverage of the MIT "Cold Fusion" Conference

I've been attending conferences on Cold Fusion (also called Low Energy Nuclear Reactions and Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions) since the 10th International Conference (ICCF10) held in Cambridge, MA in 2003.

Wired online has published an article by Mark Anderson providing a very high level overview of last weekend's 2007 LANR (CF) Colloquium at MIT hosted by MIT Professor Peter Hagelstein and Dr. Mitchell Swartz of JET Thermal Products and Cold Fusion Times. I'm quoted towards the end of Anderson's article.

From last weekend's presentations and conversations with several participants, I believe that the LANR community has now identified the principal conditions and operating parameters under which cold fusion reactions take place. These conditions were either largely unknown to Pons and Fleischman or they failed to communicate sufficient details in 1989 to enable easier replication by others. LANR has been replicated now in many labs in many countries.

As noted in these pages recently, Paul Saffo has called attention to the long incubation time required to bring novel technologies to market. I call this the long left tail of commercialization. At the inflection point, people typically forget how long it took to get there. 20 years is not uncommon. So we're getting there.

If harnessed, Cold Fusion can be productized in any number of directions. Product ideas include home water heaters, electric power generation, desalinization, and transportation. The work done to date has largely been on the basic underlying science. What's needed next are concerted efforts to do the practical engineering work that leads to products. Such a multidisciplinary effort would include engineers with backgrounds in solid state physics, metallurgy, calorimetry and instrumentation, fabrication and manufacturing, failure analysis, and quality control, among other disciplines.

Comments

[Wladimir Guglinski]

The stronger reason why the scientific community neglects cold fusion is because its occurrence requires a neutron model n=p+e formed by proton and electron. However such theoretical model violates the Fermi-Diract statistics.

A model of neutron n=p+e that does not violate Fermi-Diract statistics is proposed in the book QUANTUM RING THEORY (QRT).

Two papers on the neutron new model n=p+e of QRT are available in the Internet.
They are:

1) ANOMALOUS MASS OF THE NEUTRON
2) NEW MODEL OF NEUTRON

Before to post here the two links, I would like to give some enlightenment on the paper NEW MODEL OF NEUTRON, as follows:

1) When we analyze the mass of pions according to the current Standard Model, we arrive to contradictory conclusions about the mass M(d) of the quark down and the mass M(u) of the quark up.
In the paper NEW MODEL OF NEUTRON it is shown that we arrive to the following two conclusions:

CONCLUSION 1: M(d) > M(u)

CONCLUSION 2: M(d) < M(u)

2) Look at the chemical reaction Na+Cl->NaCl

QUESTION: what is the matematical formalism underlying such a chemical reaction?

ANSWER: No one. The chemical reactions have not been established through the mathematical formalism.

The chemical reactions have been established based on the LOGIC, and such a procedure was viable because the chemists had the help of a property of the chemical reactions: the mass of the reagent elements does not change after the reactions. For instance, the mass of Na is the same in the two sides of the equation Na+Cl->NaCl.

In the case of the high energy nuclear reactions the discovery of the equations became very complicated, for two reasons:

1) Either particles can desintegrate by discharging energy, or particles can be created, by the transformation of energy to matter.

2) In the model adopted by the theorists, the addition of spins is applied to all the reactons.

However in the beta decay the addtion of spins cannot be applied (but there is conservation of the total angular momentun, because in the reactions there is creation of neutrinos and antineutrinos).

Such anomaly in the addition of spins in the beta decay made the situation to be very bad, and the theorists could not apply the LOGIC for the discovering of the mechanic of high energy reactions, as the chemists made in the Chemistry.

That’s why the theorists tried to solve the problems by the mathematical formalism, through the Lie symetries as SU(2), SU(3), etc.
But the result was unsatisfactory, as one can understand easily. There are particles that does not fit to the theory, and that’s why Murray Gell-Mann felt the need of proposing ad hoc bandages, like the Strangeness.

As the theorists did not discover the true cause of the beta decay anomaly, they impute to other cause the occurrency of that anomaly: they state that the parity is not kept in the beta decay.

By addopting the “spin-fusion” hypothesis proposed in QUANTUM RING THEORY, it is explained the anomaly of the beta decay, and from such a way the high energy reactions can be explained through the LOGIC, in the same way as occurred in Chemistry for the establishment of the chemical reactions.

The two links are:

NEW MODEL OF THE NEUTRON:
http://www.geocities.com/ciencia2mil/NewMODELneutron.html

ANOMALOUS MASS OF THE NEUTRON:
http://www.geocities.com/ciencia2mil/NEUTRONmodel.html

[Peter]

There is a new book out on cold fusion that may interest some readers of this site. Quantum Ring Theory: Foundations for Cold Fusion by Wladimir Guglinski offers several new theoretical insights into how cold fusion might be achieved, if ever. It has garnered some praise already, and I believe some of its theoretical ideas readers will find quite intriguing.

[Jed Rothwell]

In the previous message, I should have made it clear that my book is an e-book, available for free on-line at the URL I listed. You can read it in English, Portuguese or Japanese.

I mentioned Arthur C. Clarke. He has written several papers about cold fusion, one of which is available at LENR-CANR. He covered the subject in more detail in the Millennium Edition of Profiles of the Future. We have papers by many other distinguished scientists (and I definitely count Clarke as a scientist!) including:

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.

Cold fusion is more widely researched and recognized than most people realize.

- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org

[Jed Rothwell]

You wrote:

"These conditions were either largely unknown to Pons and Fleischman or they failed to communicate sufficient details in 1989 to enable easier replication by others."

In 1989 Fleischmann and Bockris both showed that Fleischmann and Pons did not have sufficient information to replicate easily.

For that matter, cold fusion is still difficult to replicate. It requires expert skills and a great deal of money to replicate 100% of the time. For example, the Mitsubishi experiment works 100% of the time, but it requires millions of dollars worth of equipment. This does not mean that cold fusion devices will be expensive. The machines used to make cathodes resemble semiconductor fabrication equipment: the individual fabrication machines are expensive but in the future they may produce billions of cheap cold fusion cathodes.

"If harnessed, Cold Fusion can be productized in any number of directions. Product ideas include home water heaters, electric power generation, desalinization, and transportation."

I wrote a book about that subject, which has been recommended by Arthur C. Clarke, Bockris and others. See:

http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm

(I hope this comes out on the screen as a hyperlink.)

You can find lots information about cold fusion at our web site, including a bibliography of 3,500 papers and 600 full text papers from conference proceedings and mainstream peer-reviewed journals. See:

http://lenr-canr.org

- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org