Cold Fusion Re-emergence into Public Discussion
Covered By Washington Post
Dear friends,
Dr.
Eugene Mallove was the Chief Science Writer at MIT when the cold fusion
story out of Utah broke in 1989. His story is quite
revealing. "One day while at MIT, I inadvertently was looking through
some piles of paper by physicists doing their repeat of the [cold fusion] experiment.
To my utter astonishment, I can remember sitting at my desk and seeing two
sheets of paper. The July 10 control experiment showed in the raw data
excess heat. But then, on July 13, it was shifted completely. It was altered.
Clear fraud—no question. I asked for a review at MIT. I got nowhere.
Yet today, MIT data is held up. There has been an extraordinary abrogation
of legal responsibility at the Patent Office and the Department of Energy
on the matter of cold fusion. See Dr. Mallove’s website and magazine http://www.infinite-energy.com
Cold
fusion has been systematically debunked by the establishment
ever since its discovery in 1989, despite the fact that hundreds of
researchers have continued to research with occasional amazing results.
The establishment does not take kindly to the idea of a
radical, cheap new source of energy which could disrupt the entire oil-based
global economy. So the fact that the Washington Post has just published
a long (five webpages) article on the supposedly dead cold fusion technology
is an amazing breakthrough! Excerpts of this long article and a link to
the original are provided below.
For
an excellent summaries of the energy cover-up and other reliable resources
on new energy, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinformation
For a fascinating documentary presenting impressive developments in the
field of cold fusion, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/resources#coldfusion
We are succeeding in slowly building a critical mass which is forcing these
issues to be covered. Thank you for your help in this, and you can help
to continue this process by forwarding this email to your friends an colleagues.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html
Warming Up to Cold Fusion
Peter Hagelstein is trying to revive hope for a future of clean,
inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. Fifteen years after the scientific embarrassment
of the century, is this the beginning of something?
By
Sharon Weinberger
Sunday,
November 21, 2004; Page W22
On
a quiet Monday in late August -- a time of year when much of the Washington
bureaucracy has gone to the beach -- a panel of scientists gathered at a
Doubletree Hotel set between the Congressional Plaza strip mall and a drab
concrete office building on Rockville Pike. They sat around a U-shaped table
decked with laptops, with three government officials at the front, ready to
hear about an idea that, if it worked, could change the world.
The
panel's charge was simple: to determine whether that idea had even a prayer
of a chance at working.
The Department of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting
from public view. No announcement, no reporters. None of the names of the
people attending that day was disclosed. The DOE made sure to inform the
panel's members that they were to provide their conclusions individually
rather than as a group, which under a loophole in federal law allowed the
agency to close the meeting to the public.
At
9:30 a.m., six presenters were invited in and instructed to sit in a row of
chairs along the wall. The group included a prominent MIT physicist, a Navy
researcher and four other scientists from Russia, Italy and the United
States. They had waited a long time for this opportunity and, one by one,
stood up to speak about a scientific idea they had been pursuing for more
than a decade.
All
the secrecy likely had little to do with national security and more to do
with avoiding possible embarrassment to the agency. To some, the meeting
would seem no less outrageous than if the DOE honchos had convened for a
seance to raise the dead -- and in a way, they had: Fifteen years ago, the
DOE held a very similar review of the very same idea.
It
was front-page news back in 1989. The subject was cold fusion, the claim that
nuclear energy could be released at room temperature, using little more than
a high school chemistry set. In one of the most infamous episodes of modern
science, two chemists at the University of Utah announced at a news
conference that they had harnessed the power of the sun in a test tube. It
was, if true, the holy grail of energy: pollution-free, cheap and virtually
unlimited.
If
it worked, cold fusion could supply the country's energy needs, with no more
smog, no more nuclear waste, no more depending on other countries for oil.
For a brief moment, an energy revolution seemed on the horizon.
But
when many laboratories tried and failed to reproduce the Utah results,
scientists began to line up against cold fusion. Less than a year after the
announcement, a DOE review found that none of the experiments had
demonstrated convincing evidence of cold fusion. Almost as quickly as they
had become famous, the scientists involved became the butt of comedians'
jokes. A Time magazine millennium poll ranked cold fusion among the
"worst ideas" of the century.
But
now, at the Doubletree in Rockville, it seemed all that could change. For the
scientists who had risked ostracism to persist in studying cold fusion, the
very fact that the Energy Department was reviewing their work this summer
seemed like a breakthrough. True, according to two of the presenters who were
there, the meeting began with harsh questions. But at 5 p.m., the presenters
were ordered to leave the room, and when they returned, the mood had visibly
lifted. At the end, the scientists presenting the idea and those reviewing it
all shook hands. The reviewers stayed on to discuss the material. The cold
fusionists went to a barbecue, feeling celebratory. No one had told them if
the presentation had convinced anyone that cold fusion was real. But it was
nice, they said, after so many years, just to be treated with respect.
[SRI
International chemist Michael] McKubre claims that when an experiment works,
scientists can measure fleeting bursts of excess heat released in the process
-- at times, up to 30 percent more energy comes out than went in. In some
experiments, McKubre has detected byproducts, such as helium and tritium,
that often accompany nuclear reactions. He says both phenomena are clear
proof that fusion has occurred.
Since
1989, hundreds of scientists working in dozens of labs around the world
have claimed similar results. Supporters point to the written literature
-- more than 3,000 papers -- as proof of the effect. But the most credible
cold fusion advocates concede that the vast majority of those papers are
of poor quality; one supporter called the collection "mixed
toxic waste."
Research
money has dried up. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has refused to grant
a patent on any invention claiming cold fusion. According to Esther
Kepplinger, the deputy commissioner of patents, this is for the same reason
it wouldn't give one for a perpetual motion machine: It doesn't work.
These
problems are all tied to the 1989 DOE review. While the report's language was
measured, pointing out the lack of experimental evidence, "it was
absolutely the intention of most of the framers of that document to kill cold
fusion," McKubre says. "Cold fusion," he writes in an
e-mail, "has the potential to replace all sources of energy and power,
indefinitely."
"Brilliant,"
"genius" and "reclusive" were words used to describe
[SRI scientist Peter] Hagelstein 20 years ago, when he rose to prominence
as one of the young scientists behind President Ronald Reagan's plans to
build a missile shield in outer space. He made his mark designing the X-ray
laser that was to be the centerpiece of Reagan's "Star Wars" anti-ballistic
missile system.
Hagelstein
describes the mainstream scientific community as "mafias" that
promote and publish their friends' work, unwilling to accept new ideas. As
Hagelstein explains it, leading physicists came out swiftly and prematurely
against cold fusion.
Hagelstein
says his acceptance of cold fusion was by no means immediate. "Sometimes
I was pretty sure that it was real, and sometimes I was convinced that it
was all junk," he writes in an e-mail. It took several years before
he was convinced. "At this point, there are far too many results, of
many different types, that constitute an argument that is very strong. There
is no going back."
As
cold fusion research limped forward, Hagelstein faced a series of personal
reverses. He has tenure at MIT, but he never made full professor. When his
funding ran out, he eventually lost his lab space, his secretary, even his
office. He has suffered from depression, which he attributes to his
experience with cold fusion, but also downplays it. "What's more important,"
he asks, "me taking a little grief or if, by my actions, I could make a
difference in the world?"
Hagelstein
today remains the best-known name in the cold fusion community. And that's
why in April 2003, he wrote directly to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to
request a new review. By November, the DOE had decided to do it, agreeing
that after 15 years it was reasonable to review the progress of work in the
field. The August review was limited to a single question, according to
McKubre: Is the work surrounding cold fusion legitimate science? A positive
answer -- even short of a ringing endorsement -- would finally lift the
stigma, McKubre has said. It would also "loosen the purse strings"
among potential funders. As of last month, the Department of Energy was
saying that the review would be released by the end of the year.
McKubre
often speaks about a company in Israel, Energetics Technologies, that has
received a couple of million dollars a year in private support to research
cold fusion and has achieved "startling results," producing much
higher levels of power and heat than his own experiments. McKubre has visited
the lab. "It's the first clear indication that something practical might
come out of all this effort," he says.
Hagelstein
says, he has seen enough cold fusion data to convince him that the science
is clearly real. The field's acceptance, he maintains, will be simply a
matter of the scientific community's looking at the improved experimental
results in the future and coming to understand them.
Note: Dr. Eugene Mallove was killed in a bizarre dispute with a
neighbor in May of this year. For more on this, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/eugenemallove
For Results of the DOE Study: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/science/02fusion.html?oref=login
Your tax-deductible donations, however large or small, help greatly to support this important work.
To make a secure donation: http://www.wanttoknow.info/donationswtk
Cold Fusion
