Foreword from The Rebirth of Cold Fusion -- by Sir Arthur C. Clarke

[Tace]

Foreword from The Rebirth of Cold Fusion
Copyright 2004 S.B. Krivit and N. Winocur

by Sir Arthur C. Clarke

In March 1989, two respected chemists, Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, hit the headlines in a way that few scientists do in an entire career.

They claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in certain metals saturated with deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen. Under these conditions, they reported, they were generating more energy than they had put into the system.

This claim caused a global sensation, and many laboratories tried to repeat the experiment. Almost all reported failure, and Pons and Fleischmann became known as charlatans. That was the last that anyone heard of them – for several years.

From the mid-1990s, however, an underground movement of scientists decided that these claims should be investigated more seriously. They developed experiments of their own, often in defiance of their employers. There have been several international conferences on so-called "cold fusion" which have been derided by sceptics as congregations of deluded disciples worshipping a false religion.

Some of the scepticism appeared valid: If Drs. Pons and Fleischmann had indeed produced nuclear fusion, they should have been dead! For where are the neutrons and gamma rays, the lethal emissions such a reaction should produce? Where are the nuclear "ashes" of tritium and helium? Well, later experiments confirmed the presence of tritium, which can result only from a nuclear reaction, though in quantities far too small to account for the energy liberated. However, numerous experiments also demonstrated findings of helium-4 in amounts which do account for the energy liberated. This is a monumental achievement in the understanding of cold fusion.

Clearly, the mysteries are dissolving, and understanding is coming into view. Recently, plausible theories have been proposed which explain the absence of radiation, through energy transfer to the microscopic surfaces of the palladium in the form of heat. A fully predictive theoretical basis for cold fusion remains a mystery, as was the energy produced by radioactivity and uranium fission, when they were first discovered.

The neglect of cold fusion is one of the biggest scandals in the history of science. As I wrote in Profiles of the Future (1962), “With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible – and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was scarcely dry from their pens. On careful analysis, it appears that these debacles fall into two classes, which I will call Failures of Nerve and Failures of Imagination.”

In 1989, the cold fusion controversy fitted into the second category, Failures of Imagination, which comes into play when all the available facts are appreciated and marshaled correctly but when the really vital facts are still undiscovered and the possibility of their existence is not even admitted.

Today, the cold fusion controversy falls into the first category, Failures of Nerve; many vital facts have been discovered, yet sceptics lack the courage to acknowledge them or their immense implications.

The Rebirth of Cold Fusion, by Steven B. Krivit and Nadine Winocur, takes a fresh look at this still unresolved debate. An unbiased reader finishing this book will sense that something strange and wonderful is happening at the "fringes" of science. Although hard-core physicists remain fond of intoning “pathological science” like a mantra, I cannot quite believe that hundreds of highly credentialed scientists working at laboratories around the world can all be deluding themselves for years.

As for the sceptics, I can do no better than to quote my own First Law, which I first expressed more than 40 years ago: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, (s)he is almost certainly right. But when (s)he says something is impossible, (s)he is very probably wrong.”

Perhaps the most disappointing outcome would be if cold fusion turns out to be merely a laboratory curiosity, of some theoretical interest but of no practical importance. But this seems unlikely; anything so novel would indicate a major breakthrough. The energy produced by the first uranium fission experiments was trivial, but everyone with any imagination knew what it would lead to.

Of course, the most exciting possibility would be if these anomalous energy results can be scaled up. That could terminate the era of fossil fuels, end worries about pollution and climate change, and alter the geopolitical structure of our world completely out of recognition.

In 1973, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries started to multiply oil prices, I rashly predicted, “The age of cheap power is over – the age of free power is still 50 years ahead.”

This book strengthens my hope that this may not be too far from the truth.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Fellow, King’s College, London
Colombo, Sri Lanka
14 June 2004

http://www.newenergytimes.com/TRCF/foreword.HTM

©New Energy Times TM All Rights Reserved 2002-2003

[OneBlueSky]

1. Researchers Report Bubble Fusion Results Replicated

Physical Review E publishes paper on fusion experiment conducted with upgraded measurement system
Renselaer Polytechnic Institute
March 2, 2004

http://www.rpi.edu/web/News/press_releases/2004/lahey.htm#cool

TROY, N.Y. — Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement.

This approach, called bubble fusion, and the new experimental results are being published in an extensively peer-reviewed article titled “Additional Evidence of Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation,” which is scheduled to be posted on Physical Review E’s Web site and published in its journal this month.

The research team used a standing ultrasonic wave to help form and then implode the cavitation bubbles of deuterated acetone vapor. The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and inside the bubbles. Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin.

http://www.rpi.edu/web/News/press_releases/2004/lahey.htm#cool

[FM Arouet666]

2. Sir Arthur is simply incorrect

The cold fusion claims have been explored ad nauseum, and found to be in error. I enjoy the works of Mr Clarke, but I fail to understand the impetus of this article, save for a presentation of, yet another, conspiracy theory.

Yes, cold fusion would have been a remarkable accomplishment, had it been true. The tenor of the article suggests that the scientific community has neglected cold fusion in favor of big oil. Rubbish.

I would love to be incorrect and offer a retraction in favor of cold fusion as a future, renewable, energy source. But, the experiments of Pons and Fleischmann did not pass scientific scrutiny. One thing that the scientific community does not have is a "failures of nerve."
If that were true, the world would not have atomic bombs, computers, and stem cell research, just to name a few.

[NNadir]

3. Why are science fiction writers confused so often with scientists?

[Nihil]

4. Because sometimes people are both

Even if you don't like A.C.Clark, consider good old Carl Sagan as
another example of the genre.

[NNadir]

5. Although Clark has a degree in physics and proposed the geostationary

orbit for communications satellites, he has actually done very little science, and as far as I can tell zero nuclear science and zero electrochemistry.

An appeal to Arthur C. Clark to support cold fusion is therefore an example of the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority," in which one advances an argument by claiming that a person prominent in a particular specialty is equally competent to makes claims about another specialty about which he may know very little. I don't recall reading a single reference to Arthur C. Clark anywhere in nuclear physics or nuclear chemistry, and I happen to read quite a bit of both. Therefore I suspect he is, in fact, in this area just another layman.

I am not a fan of Carl Sagan's fiction by the way.

[RafterMan]

6. And yet

why is dismissing Clarke as a science fiction author not simply an example of an ad hominem attack?

The book, it seems, is a catalog of later experiments in the field. Surely it's value rests on those experiments, not Clarke's scientific abilities.

[NNadir]

10. On understanding logical fallacies...

One needs to understand what an ad hominem attack is in order to determine whether I have engaged in one on Arthur C. Clark.

I note that three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics were virulent racists. Now, if I claim that the Stark Effect cannot be true because Johannes Stark was an active Nazi, I am engaging in an ad hominem attack, because the existence of the Stark effect (which is experimentally verifiable) has nothing to do with its discoverer's politics and antisemitism.

Back in the 1970's the newspapers frequently reported that "Nobel Laureate" William Shockley believed that African Americans were genetically inferior in intelligence to Caucasian Americans. (His views were later further popularized by neocon racists Murray and Hernstein in "The Bell Curve.") The media implication was, as I recall, that Shockley's views on race needed to be taken seriously since he was a Nobel Laureate. This of course, is nonsense, since the ability to discover a transistor (for which the Nobel Prize was awarded), which is a physico-chemical device, implies no special knowledge of population genetics, the molecular biology of memory and reasoning, nor, indeed, what does and does not constitute "intelligence." Now when I state that Shockley was not competant to make judgements about the intellectual implications of race, I am not engaging in an ad hominem attack on Shockley; I am simply noting a fact. In noting this fact, I am not attempting to impeach his work on transistors, or in general, on every other subject. I am merely stating that there is no special reason to take his views on race more seriously than those of Nelson Mandela, who also won a Nobel Prize. If on the other hand, I made the statement that transistors do not work or that they are useless because William Shockley was a racist pig, then I am engaging in an ad hominem attack.

In fact, it happens that the media, in broadly and sensationally discussing Shockley's views on race, was engaging in the logical fallacy that I am advancing against Arthur C. Clarke's credibility in the matter of cold fusion, "appeal to authority." If the media of that time had been more interested in advancing thinking rather than in selling newspapers, they would not have even reported Shockley's views on race, since they obviously derive no special credibility just because Shockley stated them.

Let's make the distinction about logical fallacy and logical argument even clearer by examining the present case.

Here are two true statements: 1) NNadir has not read any of Arthur C. Clarke's books. 2) NNadir often makes obnoxious statements.

If one wants to impeach NNadir's views on the merits of Arthur C. Clarke and one makes statement #1 in support of such impeachment, one is not employing a logical fallacy, but one is merely offering some evidence that calls NNadir's credibility on the matter into question. If on the other hand one uses statement #2 to contravene NNadir's views on Arthur C. Clark, one is engaging in an ad hominem attack on NNadir. In the first case, one is engaging in a reasonable and completely logical argument; the type of argument that is, for instance, acceptable in a court of law. On the other hand, an attorney would be completely in bounds to objecting to the second type of argument on the grounds of "irrelevance," and would likely be sustained by most judges.

Note that it does not follow that my remarks about Arthur C. Clarke's views on cold fusion are necessarily untrue simply because I have not read his book. I happen to have my own views on cold fusion that are informed by facts that have nothing to do with Arthur C. Clarke. I note, for instance, that no one has observed fusion of hydrogen without the simultaneous emission of gamma rays; neither Pons nor Fleishman nor any of their graduate students died in any of these experiments. I also note that fusion like effects have never been observed in Bose-Einstein condensates, even though the nuclear wave functions overlap under such circumstances. I also note probably thousands of experiments were performed over the years involving the well known diffusion of all isotopes of hydrogen through palladium metal. At no time were extraordinary heat effects or energetic effects noted. Therefore I am under no compulsion to read Arthur C. Clarke's book, unless one can demonstrate specific competence on the part of Clarke in this area. If were one to write that, "Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and author of several scientific papers on the structure of Palladium-Hydrogen phase systems, I might be compelled to read his book. Otherwise, I am, in my view, completely justified in assuming that his support for the possible existence of cold fusion is probably not worth reading.

It may be however, that through refinement of measurement, Pons and Fleishman, who by all accounts were very respectable electrochemists, actually did observe an anomalous heat effect. Even if they did, this does not imply the existence of "cold fusion." One needs to apply Occam's razor in this case, and scrupulously eliminate as many simpler explanations as is possible, solid phase effects, for instance. Only then might it be possible to make claims about fusion and the need to claim the existence of a previously unobserved type of fusion, one occurring without either gamma emissions at 0.82 MeV and 2.45 MeV neutrons and helium-3, or those occurring with the emission of 3 MeV protons and 1 MeV tritium nuclei, or those involving 23.5 Mev gamma rays and Helium-4 nuclei.

Of course, if one, even an authoritative electrochemist, were to make claims about fusion, he or she would be well advised to appeal to competent authority, a nuclear physicist, for support and verification. In this way, they would stand a better chance of eliminating possible errors in their reasoning. If my congressman, Rush Holt, who once was Assistant Director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab were to announce "cold fusion," in a paper published with Pons and Fleishman, this would be immediately more credible than having two electrochemical professors announce the same thing by themselves at a press conference. In the first case, the appeal would include competent authority, and thus logically less suspect. In the second case, the two electrochemists, no matter what their level of electrochemical sophistication, are not necessarily competent authorities in nuclear physics.

[RafterMan]

11. Sound and fury

signifying nothing.

You dismissed the book out of hand because the preface was written by a mere science fiction author. You are attacking the reasoner, not the reasoning. Further, you can duck and dodge and say denigrating him as a sci-fi author is not the same as denigrating him as a racist, but I know a sharp elbow when I see one.

On the main point, since you clearly did not read the piece, I will quote it for you:

You say: "Only then might it be possible to make claims about fusion and the need to claim the existence of a previously unobserved type of fusion, those occurring without either gamma emissions at 0.82 MeV and 2.45 MeV neutrons and helium-3, or those occurring with the emission of 3 MeV protons and 1 MeV tritium nuclei, or those involving 23.5 Mev gamma rays and Helium-4 nuclei."

"Some of the scepticism appeared valid: If Drs. Pons and Fleischmann had indeed produced nuclear fusion, they should have been dead! For where are the neutrons and gamma rays, the lethal emissions such a reaction should produce? Where are the nuclear "ashes" of tritium and helium? Well, later experiments confirmed the presence of tritium, which can result only from a nuclear reaction, though in quantities far too small to account for the energy liberated. However, numerous experiments also demonstrated findings of helium-4 in amounts which do account for the energy liberated. This is a monumental achievement in the understanding of cold fusion."

Is it true? I don't know, I haven't sorted through all of the post-P/F experiments. But I do know that someone who has followed them -- even a science fiction author -- might be able to point out developments of which I was unaware.

[NNadir]

12. Really, 3.02 MeV tritium nuclei? Talk about sound and fury...

Slowing down a tritium nucleus that resulted from a nuclear reaction would result in some pretty powerful gamma rays. In fact in nuclear reactors this type of radiation, which is known as Cerenkov radiation, would be fatal to anyone exposed to it without shielding.

It happens that Tritium is widely distributed in the atmosphere as a result of reactions in the ionosphere, nuclear testing in the 1950's and 1960's, and production and release for and in medical and other tracer experiments. All of this Tritium did indeed result from "nuclear reactions," but not necessarily those occurring in "cold fusion" apparatus operating on commercially produced deuterium.

One can detect radioactive nuclei like tritium on an atom by atom basis, and the detection of tritium in any hydrogen source, especially a deuterium enriched source (where the same process that concentrates deuterium is even more effective for tritium) is hardly evidence of anything except maybe, a healthy dollop of wishful thinking. I note that the rate constant ratio for enrichment of tritium with respect to protium (H-1) is 60, whereas the enrichment ratio for deuterium with respect to hydrogen is 18. Therefore enrichment of tritium occurs more than three times faster than enrichment of deuterium. In fact the tritium/protium ratio is the highest for any two isotopes of the same element in the entire table of nuclides. Indeed, experiment has shown that isotope effects in Tritium would result in much greater toxicity of for this isotope than its radioactivity. Therefore it would be wholly unsurprising to find Tritium wherever one is also using deuterium. In fact, I very much doubt that I have ever held a deuterated compound that was not also detectably tritiated - if one goes looking for the tritium, which people seldom do. (See Van Hook, "Kinetic Isotope Effects" in Isotope Effects in Chemical Reactions, Collins and Bowman, Eds, ACS Monograph Series, Van Nostrand, 1970, Table 1-2, pg 16.)

BTW, the D+D -> He-4 reaction has a low probability except under extreme conditions such as those found on the sun. Almost all fusion reactions produced on earth, including those in thermonuclear weapons and Tokamak and other types of magnetic confinement fusion reactors, are D + T -> He-3 + n reactions.

I appreciate your effort to read Arthur C. Clarke to me in spite of my reservations involving logical fallacies that you find the need to address in impressive Shakespearean tones. I still find no reason to read this particular work on the subject. If I ever start to suspect that it's a serious matter, and I don't think it is, I can handle the scientific literature on my own without Mr. Clarke's help.

To each his or her own, though.

[RafterMan]

13. Well

you did spend four paragraphs elaborately explaining that your cheap poke was not a cheap poke.

I'm not trying to convince you that cold fusion is real. But there does seem to be some experimental evidence out there that shows the P/F effect is perseistently, if not consistently, interesting.

[Maven]

8. I think you may be missing the point.

Clark is not claiming to be an authority on nuclear physics or chemistry. He is speaking merely as a longtime observer of the scientific community as a whole. Most lay people think that intricate experiments are conducted on a whim--they have no idea about board approval, funding, or the politics of peer review. This is actually the subject of his foreward. What Clarke is saying is that we'll never get any answers if the only people interested are marginalized as wackjobs. He's talking about the social dynamics of science, if you will. I haven't read the book, but I'm guessing it has less to do with the technical nitty-gritty of cold fusion than with its reemergence as a "legitimate" topic within the scientific community. Even if Fleischmann and Pons were wrong, until there is definitive evidence that cold fusion is absolutely impossible, I'm inclined to agree with Clark.

Remember, there's a reason it's so difficult to prove a negative.

[pmbryant]

7. Sagan only wrote one fiction book

Although it is a very good one: "Contact". Virtually all of Sagan's writing is non-fiction.

Clarke's writings, on the other hand, are dominantly fiction. (At least the stuff everyone knows about.)

So I wouldn't put those two in the same category.

--Peter

[Nihil]

15. Clarke wrote a significant amount of non-fiction too

Arthur C. Clarke bibliography:
http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.Bibliography.html
(~35 non-fiction, more fiction)

Carl Sagan bibliography:
http://home.pacific.net.hk/~paulchui/sagan.html
(~18 ... including "Contact")

I was being generous in putting Sagan into Clarke's "category" ...
:P

[amazona]

9. yeah whatever

Clarke hasn't done his own writing in many a year so I'm curious who he paid to write this piece for him even though it was only a few paragraphs. (On edit--let me rephrase that-- I'm actually wondering who paid HIM to package these words as his own.)

Very cynical on the topic of Arthur C. Clarke, I'm afraid. I advise taking "his" words with a big grain of sodium chloride.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[struggle4progress]

14. Warming Up to Cold Fusion (WP Nov 04)

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

<snip> 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. <snip>

Normally, nuclear fusion occurs in the sun or in thermonuclear weapons, where intense heat and pressure allow the nuclei of atoms to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse, producing an astounding amount of energy. But fusion takes place at temperatures equivalent to those of the sun -- millions of degrees. So imagine the staggering advance cold fusion would represent, if real. It would mean that fusion could occur at room temperature, potentially making energy production cheap and easy. But even among cold fusion proponents, there is no accepted theory of how this could happen -- one reason why mainstream science has never taken cold fusion seriously. <snip>

Most nuclear physicists are even more pessimistic about cold fusion. Richard Garwin, 76, is a fellow emeritus at IBM's Watson Research Center and a member of the Jasons. He was on the original DOE review panel, and as a young man did critical design work for Teller's hydrogen bomb. His annoyance with cold fusion is based on visits to various labs. What he finds, in some, are basic mistakes, and in others, the potential for mistakes. "People who can't do a good sophomore experiment are suddenly free to suggest that the discrepancies in their results come from unexplained, basic, earth-shaking, heat-producing phenomena," Garwin gripes in an e-mail about one French lab he visited in 2002. <snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html


If there were any credible experimental evidence, you can bet labs would be racing each other for the Nobel Prize. And if any theoreticians could imagine a mechanism for "cold fusion," they'd be knocking each other down to produce estimates for cosmological signatures that the astrophysicists could use. But there's not much evidence and there's no real theory.

If there's really a session on cold fusion at the March APS meeting, perhaps an informed DUer could eventually report back.