Bob Park roasts cold fusion, again
In his Nov. 28 post, Bob Park wrote:
It's been almost 20 years since the March 23, 1989 announcement that cold fusion had been discovered by two chemists at the University of Utah. By June, cold fusion was an object of ridicule. A small band of embattled defenders retreated to holding annual conferences of like-minded scientists to which skeptics were not welcome. The story now seems to be entering a new chapter. Believers have begun showing a willingness to confront skeptics, submitting papers to open meetings of major scientific societies. They no longer use the term "cold fusion," preferring the less contentious "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) to describe their field; LENR more accurately describes what, if anything, is going on. However, the use of LENR has been undone by referring to "excess heat" as the Fleischmann-Pons effect. This only serves as a reminder of the outrageous conduct of the university administration and the incredibly sloppy research on which the claim was based. This year, there is great excitement over the work of Yoshiaki Arata, a respected professor at Osaka University. In May Arata demonstrated the production of excess heat to an audience of 80, but there have been many such claims over the years and until it is replicated by someone outside the LENR community and a plausible explanation is advanced, it will change few minds.
Steven B. Krivit reported on the Arata experiment on 22 May 2008.
A post at freerepublic made reference to the USPTO: El Baradei and his ilk guard the US Patent Office against even the remote possibility of this moving forward., presumably an allusion to the International Atomic Energy Commission's Mohammad El-Baradei. One doubts that anyone is "guarding" the USPTO.
***UPDATE.
In terms of the second comment, Exxon Corporate Researchers were hard at work studying the effect at the time, and LBE's potentiostat was commandeered. LBE does not recall a write-up from the Exxon work as detailed as the Amoco work. Note also one of LBE's advisors was Robert A. Huggins and LBE did visit the Stanford lab circa 1990.
It's been almost 20 years since the March 23, 1989 announcement that cold fusion had been discovered by two chemists at the University of Utah. By June, cold fusion was an object of ridicule. A small band of embattled defenders retreated to holding annual conferences of like-minded scientists to which skeptics were not welcome. The story now seems to be entering a new chapter. Believers have begun showing a willingness to confront skeptics, submitting papers to open meetings of major scientific societies. They no longer use the term "cold fusion," preferring the less contentious "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) to describe their field; LENR more accurately describes what, if anything, is going on. However, the use of LENR has been undone by referring to "excess heat" as the Fleischmann-Pons effect. This only serves as a reminder of the outrageous conduct of the university administration and the incredibly sloppy research on which the claim was based. This year, there is great excitement over the work of Yoshiaki Arata, a respected professor at Osaka University. In May Arata demonstrated the production of excess heat to an audience of 80, but there have been many such claims over the years and until it is replicated by someone outside the LENR community and a plausible explanation is advanced, it will change few minds.
Steven B. Krivit reported on the Arata experiment on 22 May 2008.
A post at freerepublic made reference to the USPTO: El Baradei and his ilk guard the US Patent Office against even the remote possibility of this moving forward., presumably an allusion to the International Atomic Energy Commission's Mohammad El-Baradei. One doubts that anyone is "guarding" the USPTO.
***UPDATE.
In terms of the second comment, Exxon Corporate Researchers were hard at work studying the effect at the time, and LBE's potentiostat was commandeered. LBE does not recall a write-up from the Exxon work as detailed as the Amoco work. Note also one of LBE's advisors was Robert A. Huggins and LBE did visit the Stanford lab circa 1990.
posted by Lawrence B. Ebert at 11:41 AM
2 Comments:
and the world shall receive its just rewards as it ignores and ridicules the
MESSENGER- watch the economy fail- watch your children go to war for
energy-you are a savage monkey worthy only of slavery as history as shown
Robert Park told me that he has never read a paper on cold fusion. I doubt that he has read anything, because in his many attacks on the subject, he has never once offered a technical argument against the experiments, but only ad hominem attacks against the researchers.
Since you worked at Exxon, perhaps you will be interested in this paper:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Lautzenhiscoldfusion.pdf
You will find a list of 3,000 other papers at this site, along with ~500 full text papers.
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
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