The cold fusion horizon

I was open minded about Rossi and the 'E Cat' until I saw that video.

Like, where is the measuring equipment? He has a multimeter measuring the current coming out of the wall, but is not taking a simultaneous measurement of the voltage. Sure, OK, I guess we'll assume it's 220 V from the power company, and figure it's drawing about 750 W (about half the power of a full size microwave oven).

But then on the output side, he has a rubber hose with a tiny amount of steam coming out. Maybe even less that what you would expect from a 750W tea kettle. They have to hold it up against a tshirt to measure it. They have a thermometer on the input water reservoir but for some reason don't even bother measuring either the temperature or mass-flow rate of the output?

This video is not demonstrating the measurement techniques of a credible scientist. I would not let this guy service my home air conditioning unit.

Great article. I'm not going to defend Rossi, but what happened in 1989 was a travesty. Yes, Pons and Fleischmann were premature in their annnouncement. But they didn't deserve to be made pariahs, and there were others whose careers were destroyed for so much as publicly entertaining the possibility that cold fusion might be made to work. Edward Teller, on the other hand, was old enough not to care:

Around 1992, McKubre says, he was summoned for an audience with legendary physicist Edward Teller. "He asked probing questions, in better depth, I think, than anyone else on the planet. You could see what a giant intellect he must have been in his time. I was subjected to this interrogation for four hours. At the end of it Teller said that he did not think that cold fusion was a reality, but if it were, he could account for it with a very small change in the laws of physics as he understood them, and it would prove to be an example of nuclear catalysis at an interface. I still don't understand what he meant by that, but I'm quite willing to believe that it's correct." [0]

It really shows how political and, frankly, corrupt Big Science is. As this article points out, failure to replicate proves nothing. The charitable reading is that Pons and Fleischmann didn't even know for sure what properties of the alloy they were using were critical to the reaction, though they had some ideas. That possibility should have been considered.

[0] http://www.wired.com/1998/11/coldfusion/

But that would be interesting in itself.

P&N made the PR mistake of calling their process "cold fusion."

If they'd called it "unexpected heat we can't explain" they'd have encountered much less hostility.

Then the question wouldn't have been "Where are the neutrons?" but "Can this be replicated?" followed by "Can this be used for energy generation?"

Social taint my be true strong a description. But there's huge hostility in science to experimental effects that appear to challenge existing theories without also providing a completed new theory that makes predictions and can be falsified. The further away from the mainstream the effects appear, the more hostility they generate.

Which is why claiming to have found cold fusion as a result of unreliable experiments and a complete absence of a finished theory was professional suicide - even though there seems to be some kind of phenomenon there. Or at least enough of a phenomenon to be worth investigating.

Do you have a good link where I can read about this evidence?

What evidence is that?