Friday, March 15, 2013

Early History of Cold Fusion, Three Miracles and Three Marks.




1. What history teaches us (and what it doesn’t?)

I will ask the readers who love history to go directly to 2.
During my 75+ years of life I have developed a form of phobia from history, a fear that it will repeat what it was the worst of it, and I consider that trying too hard to use some historical data for problem solving, is actually delaying or killing the Solution. The bad memes of history never die.  The invisible strings with which the “leaders” are manipulating us are coming from the past. Thinking and feeling as somebody who lived in a small country: Geography is destiny, history is a prison” Thinking about many irrational things from the present: “The 21st Century is the 12th, resurrected” At least for and due to billions of human beings. The cult of History is used mainly for doing harm, for kindling the fires of hatred and violence, for demonstrating superiority above the enemies i.e. those who have an opposite view of the shared history or just are different...
Old books, old ideas, old stories have some value for solving the problems of the present/future but a rather limited value. Why? It is an unavoidable, cruel Law of Nature and of knowledge that says: NOT what we know, but what we don’t know is more important for solving the problem.” The validity of this law is proportional, not with the importance of the problem, but with the extent of damage made by NOT solving it. Surely, you will find examples for this rule in your own professional experience.
Plus, due to the world’s inherent interestingness, historical analogies are interesting but of limited use and persuasion power.
OK, if you still invest hopes in history instead of looking it with objectivity and with realistic sympathy and gratitude for some exceptional positive personalities who individually have failed but have contributed to the general progress- yes, in this case feel free to read and meditate upon these quotations:

2. The bad start of Cold fusion’s history.

The discovery of Cold Fusion that was announced on March 23, 1989 has happened in such bad circumstances that have justified a new word, miscovery, for it: http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2012/05/concept-of-miscovery-and-what-it-means.html

Its very existence was aggressively denied, on theoretical basis. One of Cold Fusion’s archenemies, Prof John Huizenga said about the Three Miracles necessary to be explained if Cold Fusion does exist: Coulomb barrier penetrated, no neutrons and no gammas or X-ray resulting from fusion. Obviously miracle is just a mild euphemism for impossible. Huizenga was unable to realize that Cold Fusion is different. History will pardon him because Cold Fusion, now LENR is very, very different from Hot Fusion- some of us have started just now to understand its newness.
Miracle was a euphemism, but so are the Three Marks of Cold Fusion. The field had an especially bad luck- it is about curses, stigmata, uninvited fairies. We have already told about two of these bad marks:
First, Cold Fusion was discovered by geniuses having perhaps the worst profession/specialty- electrochemists and actually electrochemistry actually has not much to do with these new phenomena
Second, Cold Fusion was discovered in the worst possible place, with such parents its cradle was an electrolytic cell, i.e a collection of impurities in water, working at low temperatures. The metal chosen, palladium is the one in which bulk and surface compete desperately for deuterium; I have written many negative CF odes to it.
Third - everybody knows that:”There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."  Victor Hugo CF has obtained a lot of interesting scientific results but nothing good for a technology, it can be characterized more by an antinomy of “powerful” I have seen tens of bright theories failing to explain LENR. Neither theory, nor experiments were able to make the process reproducible or to scale it up. I have learned from Piantelli about the decisive role of nanotechnology- that was not well developed in 1989. Defkalion has demonstrated the magnificent complexity of the useful (HENI) process. Recently, my friend Axil has revealed clearly the third bad mark- CF was discovered before its time, when both the understanding and the tools for solving its development problem were available.
Very soon we will get answers, hopefully positive to the two trillion dollars question: is LENR an idea whose time has come?
Let’s re-think the history of Cold Fusion and open a new, productive chapter of it.

Peter

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