MOTTOS
Scientists study the world
as it is; engineers create the world that has never been. (Theodore von Kármán)
Cold Fusion was discovered in a form, place, and time generating
severe inborn problems to it. To solve these problems, it has to be re-invented. (Peter Gluck)
This is not a Motto; however I
think that the optimal mode to learn from good and smart people is when and by
disagreeing with them. Really, many errors are made by mixing differing things
as friendship and admiration for somebody with not using critical, independent
thinking – mercilessly, for his ideas. Obviously to be fair, you have to accept
the same brutal treatment for your own, dearest ideas. If ideas are valuable
and true, they will eventually win. Perhaps, sometimes after a painful process
of evolution.
information I got, it seems
that the Igari-Mizuno paper has no conclusions of the good sort, neither
positive (telling what you have to do) nor negative (justifying deep
desperation)
However my friends are trying
to help me. Their ideas and suggestions are diverse- but have in common the
very stimulating
feature that I disagree
actually with all. I have a simple explanation
for this situation- I consider
they judge the situation from the side of the Problem, while I am already on
the side of the Solution as promised for 2014. The name of solution is
Engineering. It would be naivety
thinking they see it in the same way, but time will judge.
Hideo Kozima whom I consider as
a brother after his visit at us in
I would like to give you
my opinion on the problem of reproducibility in the cold fusion phenomenon
(CFP).
In my opinion, the CFP is a phenomenon of complexity and has no quantitative
reproducibility but a qualitative reproducibility like the earthquake, typhoon,
and so forth. It is enough to have a qualitative reproducibility to investigate
a phenomenon. Your have to remember that almost all nuclear reactions in
nuclear physics have only qualitative reproducibility. The simplest example of
them is the alpha decay; we do not know which Ra nucleus decays at what time but
we know the statistical law of alpha decay.
It is
my pleasure if this letter is useful for your consideration of the problem of
the reproducibility in the CFP. Complexity is the key word in the CFP.
Hideo
is a scientist; if I translate his message
in the language of technology- it says CFP cannot give anything of practical
use. Qualitative reproducibility is, IMHO, a partial oxymoron. It is reproduced
but when, how, if something occult, unknowable wishes.
I wouldn’t enjoy explaining this paradoxical concept to
students.
Cold Fusion is and isn’t a natural phenomenon. In its
potentially useful form it is man-made and has to be controlled, developed and
used by humans. Earthquakes are studied not because they are interesting per
se, but because they do a lot of harm to people and their assets. I dislike
this association for CFP. In Romania we have a major catastrophic earthquake approximately
each 40 years – the most recent ones being in 1977 and 1940. Time to be
worried.
Hideo says complexity is the keyword in CFP. Very true
but it has to be a complexity of the bad sort, a very chaotic one. Why should
CFP be of so much higher complexity than many similar phenomena in Materials Science?
I have concluded long time ago that cold fusion’s complexity is a toxic one,
the presence of any gases that compete with deuterium/hydrogen is the cause of
bad quality reproducibility. This simplistic, dirty idea was not accepted by my
scientist friends because it is not scientific enough.
Then Ed Storms who was so helpful and generous during my
visit at LANL in 1995 and who is trying so hard to explain the very basics of
LENR up to now- Ed has also joined the discussion.
Cold fusion will be completely reproducible
once it is understood. This is a phenomenon of nature that we presently do not
understand. In addition, this understanding requires knowledge about both
chemistry and physics, which is an unusual combination of skills. People
with a chemical background ignore basic rules of nuclear physics and the
physicists ignore the basic rules of chemistry. A time will come when
properly trained people have the incentive to read the extensive literature and
put the pieces together in a proper way. Only then will the effect be
reproducible. Hopefully once Rossi puts a generator on the market, the system
will wake up and give people the incentive to properly study the effect.
Now even if I well know Ed’s
great merits and achievement and wisdom in the field, I also have almost formed
a habit to –as respectfully as possible- to disagree with his ideas aimed to be
part of solution.
As regarding his first sentence here, the
reverse is also true, cold fusion must be made reproducible before it is
completely understood. If cold fusion takes place in cracks as Ed tries to convince
us then CF depends on a destructive process by definition, it is possible it
can be understood quite well but not really controlled.
CF is too complex a matter for both physicists
and chemists because the Solution is based on many engineering disciplines.
Ed calls cold fusion a “phenomenon of nature”
however for us it is a human creation; take in consideration that Nature has
only Solutions while we, humans have Problems too and these have to be solved,
I agree with Ed that only a commercial energy
generator on the market can give back the lost reputation to CF and lead to the
renaissance of the field. However I have strong doubts that Pd based wet
systems will be ever more than a lab curiosity.
(Hideo and Ed have then started a discussion
about reproducibility and statistics, a bit apart from the main line of this
discussion.)
Now a third friend, Mitchell Swartz enters the
discussion. I have met Mitch in 1998 at Cambridge, Mass at a cold fusion
meeting and I am reading with pleasure his excellent Cold Fusion Times. However,
what he does say here happens to be for me like the red color for the bull:
Alleged 'non-reproducibility'
is not applicable to cold fusion for several reasons.
First, the heart of the issue is that
"reproducibility" is nothing but a euphemism for failure, used by those who are against the 25 year
successful science and engineering of cold fusion.
Second, for cold fusion,
reproducibility obviously exists. As but one example, there were three (3)
demonstrations of cold fusion at ICCF10 by John Dash, Dennis Cravens and Letts,
and myself. Three groups independently
elected to begin experiments at a specified time (Tuesday)
at MIT in 2003, and all got successful results. That is reproducibility. Q.E.D.
Third, another problem is that this
is more complicated because reproducibility depends upon who does it and how.
Consider the art of glass making, or making
cat-whiskers, or souffles, or bearnase or baked alaska.
Not everyone can do it. Are they reproducible?
It depends who does it, and how
much experience they have.
How about a kidney transplant? or curing
even an early Stage Hodgkin's disease by ionizing penetrating radiation.
Does anyone really believe that any and all readers of CMNS would get the same
success for their attempting a kidney transplant into the pelvis of a 12 year
old? or that they would achieve the same 20 year disease-free survival if
they had access to the machines (6
MeV linacs and the like) to treat the tumor cited above (which requires
licensing and certification, of course, therefore).
Fourth, analysis of 'reproducibility' is
even more interesting showing how illogical it is, as a 'straw man' argument.
Consider that as regards 'reproducibility' there
is even a possibly spatially varying activity for some systems.
As an example, penicillin VK (an
antibiotic used since WW1 against gram + bacteraciae when it replaced
proflavine)
works successfully outside of the hospitals
today in about 96 of every 100 infections.
It is very curative, whereas the untreated infections
might have killed many of the patients as they did when they were the major
cause of death in the early 1900's.
There is much clinical significance
because each of these cures are very significant to the people involved.
But it is not completely reproducible at
~96%. [ So is there utility? I say yes. ]
But consider, inside hospitals where
nosocomial infections today are "winning" all too often, penicillin
VK may only be effective against a very small fraction (maybe 1 in 3 or less),
and at those locations infected patients die if
not given superlative therapy(ies) to PVK.
In one location, the antibiotic's effect
is almost reproducible (although 'not completely' is it?), and elsewhere, in
the hospitals festooned with nosocomial drug insensitive strains, it is a failure
and not reproducible.
So the drug's effectiveness is --->
spatially varying with respect to 'reproduciblility'.
In summary, allegations of
non-reproducibility in cold fusion (lattice assisted nuclear reactions) are today not logical, and are
disingenuous because reproducibility has already long existed
in several types of cold fusion systems
(using probably similar types of CFP) for years.
I am completely unable to accept Mitch’s arguments or to
synchronize with his mode of thinking; my impression is that he tries to kill
the problem before and instead of solving it.
First he says (very correctly) that non-reproducibility is
just an other name for failed experiments – and adds that this is just a
hostile action of those (bad and stupid people) who are able to ignore the great
and valuable achievements of cold fusion from its 25 years glorious history.
How should call a correct, faithful CF researcher the same situation, say a
series of experiments with 5 to 20% reproducibility? What is the connection
between blaming the others and genuine failure?
It happened that Don Giovanni was faithful to a woman for
three days, but if cold fusion can be called reproducible due to some short
episodes of reproducibility, than Don Giovanni is really faithful, I
think. As “winning” in the well known quotation by Vince Lombardi,
reproducibility is not a sometimes thing, it is an all-time thing.
Third, reproducibility seems to be very subjective, needs
special skills- OK, the truth is that even very most skilled people cannot
achieve real reproducibility. The many examples from the medical domain are
interesting but of no use, as long as experimental geniuses have not achieved
high reproducibility
And fourth, an argument far over my head, variable
reproducibility is not true reproducibility and the numerous examples from
medicine have not much to do with the cases of cold fusion. Why should the
demand for reproducibility be illogical today? We want good heaters working reproducibly.
It is not polite and not productive to just negate others’
ideas.
It is not the first time and hopefully not the last time when
I state
that engineering is the key to usable/useful cold fusion. Take
in consideration that during this process of development it will be transformed
in such an extent and deepness that the name of the field will change.
Hideo will be right then: complexity- just smartly organized
will be
the keyword.
Ed will be right then, the phenomena will be well understood
and controlled in a perfectly reproducible way.
Mitch will be also right then it will be illogical and unjust
to call the phenomena irreproducible.
I bet with you that after the triumph of engineering in our
field the ab ovo erronated name of cold fusion will evanesce surprisingly fast.
Peter
PS This paper was published on my Blog with the explicit
approval
of two of my co/counter-authors and lack of protest of the
third. My gratitude- the dialogs come from a closed Forum.
