The Nuclear Science Orthodoxy

Quote from Rob

where does this aversion to the idea of nuclear effects POSSIBLY being able to occur outside of plasma, come from?

Where did you get the idea that nuclear effects only happen in plasmas?

There are naturally occuring radioactive nuclides (eg U²³⁵) - which can be solid, or disolved as salts, or as gaseous compounds. Fission reactors usually use solid fuel.

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Edit: That's a bit unfair. I guess you think you are asking a sensible question, but don't know much about nuclear reactions - or the atom in general.

The answer, historically, is arguably 1932 - at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge) - under Ernest Rutherford. When Cockroft and Walton started using an accellerator. The rot probably started then.

Quote from Frogfall

Where did you get the idea that nuclear effects only happen in plasmas?

There are naturally occuring radioactive nuclides (eg U²³⁵) - which can be solid, or disolved as salts, or as gaseous compounds. Fission reactors usually use solid fuel.

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Edit: That's a bit unfair. I guess you think you are asking a sensible question, but don't know much about nuclear reactions - or the atom in general.

The answer, historically, is arguably 1932 - at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge) - under Ernest Rutherford. When Cockroft and Walton started using an accellerator. The rot probably started then.

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I think the first step in that directions was by Eddington in 1920, trying to explain how stars produced energy. There's where the whole idea of gravity causing high pressures and temperatures being the only way to fuse atoms arose. Rutherford was already working under those constraints.

Quote from Rob

Robert Laughlin, a CMP scientist at Stanford, is pretty staunchly critical of CF. Why?

I'm been reviewing what led Fleischmann to perform the research in the first place.

Quote

Question;

“can we find illustrations in Chemistry (especially Electrochemistry) of the need to invoke the Q.E.D. paradigm to explain the results obtained?

Martin Fleischmann summed up the Orthodoxy as this belief.

"We note that it is commonly believed that there is absolutely no way of influencing

Nuclear Processes by Chemical means"

The 1989 paper says otherwise.

Fleischmann, Martin (2003).

Cambridge, MA: World Scientific Publishing. ISBN 978-9812565648

This paper was presented at the 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion. It may be different from the version published by World Scientific, Inc (2003) in the official Proceedings of the conference.

ABSTRACT

Some of the background work which led to the decision to investigate the behaviour of D+ electrochemically compressed into Pd host lattices is outlined.The key features of such “Cold Fusion” systems are described.

1. BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH ON COLD FUSION

It appears to me that most scientists have the impression that my colleague Stanley Pons and I decided one day in late 1983 to go into the laboratory and to carry out the experiment best described by the statement,

“Gee-whiz, let’s go in the lab and charge some Pd cathodes with D+ and see what happens”.

It is, of course, perfectly true that this is what happened. However, the conclusion that this was an isolated example is incorrect as has been realised by a relatively small number of research workers (among whom I would number pre-eminently the late Giuliano Preparata and his colleague Emilio Del Giudice).

In fact, the decision to investigate the Pd/D system was preceded by a long period during which I asked the question:

“is it possible to develop electrochemical experiments which demonstrate the need to interpret the behaviour of condensed matter in terms of the Q.E.D.paradigm?”

"Background to Cold Fusion: the Genesis of a Concept" M. Fleischmann

Bury Lodge, Duck Street, Tisbury, Salisbury, Wilts., SP3 6LJ, U.K.

Source LENR CAN

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanbackground.pdf

Quote

The scheme of research which led to the start-up of the project now known as “Cold Fusion” is illustrated by Fig. 1.

We note that it is commonly believed that there is absolutely no way of influencing

Nuclear Processes by Chemical means:

therefore, any results that demonstrate

that this might be possible must be due to faulty experimentation, delusion, fraud etc.

However, any enquiry as to the experimental foundation of the first statement in Fig. 1 is normally met by

the response:

“because quantum mechanics, Q.M., shows that this is so”.

We are driven to the conclusion that this first statement is just part of the belief-system of Natural Scientists and we naturally also have to ask the question;

“what conclusion would we draw if we subject the statement to the dictates of Field Theory?”

In the 1960’s we started a series of research projects aimed at answering the

Question;

“can we find illustrations in Chemistry (especially Electrochemistry) of the need to invoke the Q.E.D. paradigm to explain the results obtained?” -endquotes

Rob

I admire your enthusiasm, but do avoid starting too many threads on closely related topics. It's sometimes called 'flooding' - not a term I am fond of but it gives you the picture I am sure. This forum has a tradition of very long threads on a general theme, which at least enables a reader to get an overview. Twitter we are not.

If this is to be a thread on semantics, rather than physics, then I would like to point to the work of Alfred Korzybski.

What I see on this forum is a lot of confusion between Map and Territory.

There are a few people here who appear to be "living in the map" - but "the map is not the territory". Maps can be incredibly useful, of course, and our lives would much more difficult without them. But nature is complex, and maps are always imperfect representations.

This interview touches on an area where Fleischmann feels a wrong turn was made wherein atomic or nuclear energy from an electrochemical cell... Defied Orthodoxy.

Fleischmann

...replacement of Quantum Mechanics by Quantum Field Theory is still very demanding.

Earlier I posted how in 1960 Fleischmann began with the Q.E.D. paradox. This led him to Raman Scattering in 1974 and the birth of plasmonics. If only I knew more than a layman... I do know this.

Since 1960 Condensed Matter Physics, QED, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, Plasmonics and Laser Coherence has changed our depth of understanding of multi body nano and femto scale energy systems.

I wish I could better comprehend what Martin discusses here... I do get the gist of it though...

An Interview with Professor Martin

Fleischmann

By Christopher P. Tinsley

Reprinted courtesy of and originally published in Infinite Energy Magazine Issue #11

An Interview with Professor Martin Fleischmann

November 1996

Page One

Fleischmann

Historically we went through various phases in the work and eventually worked on large sheets--very large sheets--of palladium.

Page Four

F: Maybe it will come back. I think that at some time we will want to talk about the general malaise of science.

T: John Bockris has suggested that science had become very rigidified in around 1972. Do you have any comment on that at all?

F: I think there was a very unfortunate development in the 70's, a sort of "anti-Francis Bacon development." People developed a view that a subject is not respectable unless it is dressed up

with a suitable overload of theory, and consequently we have had this "top dressing" of theory put on the subject which has tended to make the approach very rigid. Also, the theories are of

course written in terms of rather old-fashioned ideas.

T: But we have been seeing a shift in general public attitudes.

F: To science?

T: No. Specifically towards things like towards cold fusion. This may be a kind of pre-millennial tension or something of that kind, but we are finding that companies and individuals are taking the whole field of cold fusion very much more seriously and positively than they were doing even months ago.

A Wrong Turn? Page 5 and 6

T: Do you think that physics and chemistry took something of a wrong turning at some point in the last 150 years or so and started to perhaps head into something of a blind alley? That what we now are seeing -- perhaps with cold fusion, and so forth -- is that mistakes have been made? We have something that doesn't appear to fit comfortably.

F: I don't think so. You see, I am a very conventional scientist, really. Extremely. I always explain that -- I'm really very conventional. We arrived at this topic from various inputs to the subject and, in the end, we could pose a very simple question, namely: would the fusion cross-

section of deuterons compressed in a palladium lattice be different to the cross-section which you see in the vacuum? Now, I think that was a very simple question -- either yes or no.

The answer turned out to be different...

I should explain that what we said was, "Yes, it would be different, but we would still see nothing."

That was the starting point in 1983 or whatever, yes 1982-83. Of course, it would be different, but we will see nothing.

But it turned out to be radically different than that. Now, of course, you have to say,

"What do we do with such an observation?" Many people--as was shown subsequently and even though they were told what had happened--couldn't believe this and ignored their own experimental evidence. But that is not for us.

As for taking a wrong turning -- well it has in an organizational way.

I always say that if you recall Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo holding a painting competition in the Town Hall in

Florence during the Renaissance then you cannot conceive of that happening in the present age.

The early development of science was really a dilettante type of aristocratic preoccupation...

T: Lavoisier and company?

F: Yes. You cannot imagine that somebody would now give a latter-day Faraday carte blanche to investigate the interaction of forces.

T: Mind you, for what he cost at the time, we could really afford it. It wasn't that expensive.

F: Nor is cold fusion expensive. One of my theme songs is that if you can't do it in a test tube, don't do it. It is not necessarily true that expensive experiments are not worthwhile doing but there are plenty of rather cheap experiments which are certainly worth doing. So if you haven't got the resources, do think a bit and try the cheap experiments.

So has science taken a wrong turning? Well, this is one instance where it has taken a wrong turning,

but, of course, there is also this whole overlay of Copenhagen-style quantum mechanics which we have not been able to shake off.

T: You feel that was a wrong turning?

F: Oh, that was a massive wrong turning.

Massive wrong-turning, although we have to give credit to Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school, for a great deal of valuable development of theory. However, that approach should have been abandoned a long time ago.

The problem is that replacement of Quantum Mechanics by Quantum Field Theory is still very demanding.

Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

An Interview with Professor Martin

Fleischmann

By Christopher P. Tinsley

On page 2 there was mention of ZETA. This was a massive embarrassment for Harwell, and the UK, at the end of the 1950s.

In later years some of the older staff could not even be persuaded to talk about the escapade - it was that painful. Just watch this newsreel, from 1958:

https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVAE9NNP6WUTXLCQMCBFY2MHCWEX-ENGLAND-THE-WONDERS-OF-ZETA-AT-HARWELL

21January1958 My most important date... I was born. Ha!

Rob if you didn't read the ZETA wikipedia piece (linked above), just have a read of this section of the article. It gives a bit of background as to why people assumed that a particular kinetic energy was required for D+D fusion.

That accelerator in Rutherford's lab provided the initial data.

How much of that data might be an artifact of shooting high velocity ionised particles at metal foil, is difficult to say.

(Whereas "cold deuterons", squeezed into the metal lattice, might behave differently)

Quote from Frogfall

(Whereas "cold deuterons", squeezed into the metal lattice, might behave differently)

Such heresy,,, there is plenty of heretical transmutation and energy release in this paper..ATOM Ecology

at 300C rather than 50 miilion K

more to come..

its a pity Rutherford ..died before "Ecology" graduated into the nuclear field

and isn't here to read it..

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356972251_A_new_experimental_path_to_nucleosynthesis

I wasn’t aware of the ZETA project, but I am aware, and have told the story many times already but is worth repeating here, about the Z Machine of Sandia Labs. In 2006 this machine produced what was the highest temperature achieved artificially (3,6 billion degrees Kelvin) and held that record for some years until CERN was fired up.

The thing is that these results were totally unexpected and left everyone involved in it scratching their heads. The factor of excess of output with respect of the net input was around 4X. Dr. Malcolm Haines published a paper with the results, sadly he passed away around 2013.

Back in 2006 some scientists led by French astrophysicist Jean Pierre Petit (our member fabrice DAVID knows him personally) campaigned for mass acknowledgment of the importance of these results and for the start of a program for the development of this system into an aneutronic fusion reactor of the inertial confinement type. Probably some of you haven’t heard of this ever, and this is intriguing on itself, given the importance of these results for classic fusion research.

Here is the link to a paper written by Petit for non scientists explaining the relevance of the Zeta Machine results.

http://ayuba.fr/pdf/comments_on_haines_paper.pdf

The paper of Haines is also analyzed in a more academic manner further into the report.

Coherent consideration.

Coherence matters.

I am beginning to understand a few papers by Fleischmann.

These three are far from the Science Orthodoxy of 1989. Do they shed light on Coherence in Condensed Matter Nuclear Science energy systems? They are examples that Martin Fleischmann considered Coherence in Condensed Matter... His main interest may not have been fusion.

On the “unreasonable” effects of ELF magnetic fields upon a system of ions

• E. Giudice, M. Fleischmann, G. Preparata, G. Talpo
• Physics Bioelectromagnetics
• 1 October 2002

TLDR

Water molecules in the liquid and solute ions are involved in their ground state in coherent ordered configurations and ions are able to move without collisions among themselves in the interstices between water coherence domains because of coherence.

Abstract

A recent experiment on a physical, nonbiological system of ions at room temperature has proved that microscopic ion currents can be induced by applying simultaneously two parallel magnetic fields, one rather weak static field, $\vec B_0$ and one much weaker alternating field, $\vec B_{ac}$, [Bac ∼ 10−3 B0] whose frequency coincides with the cyclotron frequency $v\, = \,qB_0 /2{\pi}m$ of the selected ion. As a result, ionic bursts lasting up to 20 s and with amplitude up to 10 nA arise. The much larger exchanges of energy induced by thermal agitation (the “kT‐problem”) appear to play no role whatsoever. We have analyzed this problem in the framework of coherent quantum electrodynamics, reaching the following conclusions: (a) as has been shown in previous articles, water molecules in the liquid and solute ions are involved in their ground state in coherent ordered configurations; (b) ions are able to move without collisions among themselves in the interstices between water coherence domains; (c) because of coherence, ions can follow classical orbits in the magnetic fields. A full quantitative understanding of the experiments is thus reached.

Coherent Quantum Electrodynamics in Living Matter

• E. del Giudice, A. De Ninno, M. Fleischmann, G. Mengoli, M. Milani, G. Talpo, G. Vitiello less
• Physics
• 1 January 2005

Living systems cannot be thermal systems, but instead are coherent systems. The dynamic origin of coherence is discussed in the case of electromagnetically coupled particles. Permanent nonvanishing electromagnetic fields are shown to be present but trapped in the coherent systems. The dynamics of enzymes is sketched as an outcome of the coherent electromagnetic structure of living matter. The emergence of bound water is analyzed. Circulation of ions is shown to be driven by the Josephson effect. Ion cyclotron resonance briefly is discussed.

Dynamics of the ion cyclotron resonance effect on amino acids adsorbed at the interfaces

• N. Comisso, E. del Giudice, A. De Ninno, M. Fleischmann, L. Giuliani, G. Mengoli, F. Merlo, G. Talpo
• Physics Bioelectromagnetics
• 1 January 2006

In this study we show a reproduction of the Zhadin experiment, which consists of the transient increase of the electrolytic current flow across an aqueous solution of L‐arginine and L‐glutamic acid induced by a proper low frequency alternating magnetic field superimposed to a static magnetic field of higher strength. We have identified the mechanisms that were at the origin of the so‐far poor reproducibility of the above effect: the state of polarization of the electrode turned out to be a key parameter. The electrochemical investigation of the system shows that the observed phenomenon involves the transitory activation of the anode due to ion cyclotron frequency effect, followed again by anode passivation due to the adsorption of amino acid and its oxidation products. The likely occurrence of similar ion cyclotron resonance (ICR) phenomena at biological membranes, the implications on ion circulation in living matter, and the consequent biological impact of environmental magnetic fields are eventually discussed.

Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

1January1958 My most important date... I was born. Ha!

productive fusion result

Quote from Rob

The thread topic is history, not present day experiments.

Trying to figure out where in the past the idea first appeared and how it became established orthodoxy that fusion can only occur in a plasma.

Some of these replies have been really helpful toward that goal, thank you! I’m hoping the thread will stay on topic so I don’t have to filter out a lot of tangents and digressions.

The science is mostly statistics (based on empirical experiments) which shows that almost every reaction that can be envisioned actually can and does at some point actually occur, but the rates are also so vanishingly small for most reactions that getting anything out of them worth the effort put into it is the hill that most new fusion ideas die on.