This is a complete copy of the book:

Beaudette, C.G., Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed. 2002, Concord, NH: Oak
Grove Press.

LENR-CANR would like to thank the author, Charles Beaudette, for giving us permission to
upload this important book.

Rather than print the entire text, we recommend you purchase the book from:

Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967854830/

or

Infinite Energy Magazine

https://www.mv.com/ipusers/zeropoint/secure/FORMS/onlinestore.html
EXCESS HEAT
Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed
SECOND EDITION

Charles G. Beaudette

Foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE

Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Introduction by David J. Nagel, Ph.D.

The George Washington University

oak grove press, llc

South Bristol, Maine, USA
 Published by
Oak Grove Press, LLC
P.O. Box 120, South Bristol, Maine 04568, USA

Copyright © 2002 by Charles G. Beaudette

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and scientists for permission
to reproduce borrowed material. We regret any oversights that may have occurred and
will be pleased to rectify them in subsequent reprints of the work.

Distributed by Infinite Energy Press

P.O. Box 2816, Concord, NH 03302-2816
http://www.infinite-energy.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-130591

ISBN 0-9678548-0-6 Excess Heat, First Edition, Hard Cover

ISBN 0-9678548-1-4 Excess Heat, First Edition, Soft Cover
ISBN 0-9678548-2-2 Excess Heat, Second Edition, Hard Cover
ISBN 0-9678548-3-0 Excess Heat, Second Edition, Soft Cover

Cover design by Libby Barrett

Interior design by Martha Drury
Index by Edward J. Prucha
Composition by Technologies ’N Typography
Set in ten point Adobe Garamond
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in the United States of America
April 2002
Second Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 This book is dedicated
to my wife

Kate

without whom
it would not have been possible.
An investigative report prepared for the general reader to explain
how the most extraordinary claim made in the basic sciences
during the twentieth century was mistakenly dismissed
through errors of scientific protocol.
 Contents

List of Summations ix
List of Figures xi
List of Tables xv
Foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE xvii
Introduction by David J. Nagel, Ph.D. xix
Preface to the First Edition xxiii
Preface to the Second Edition xxvii

part one: anomalous power 1

1. The Significant Claim 3
2. The Overburden 20
3. The Enigma of Discovery 34
4. A Power Burst 45

part two: criticism 57

5. Baltimore 59
6. Four Press Conferences 77
7. The DOE Panel 91
8. The Critics: I 99
9. The Critics: II 112

part three: validation 127

10. Ramsey’s Way 129
11. Variety of Method 144
12. Protocols 160
13. Without Exception 177

vii
viii excess heat

14. Validation 185

15. Posthumous Heat 209

part four: low-energy nuclear reactions’

nuclear products 219
16. Helium-Four 221
17. Tritium and Helium-Three 245
18. Neutrons 255
19. Gamma Rays and Transmutation 263
20. Theoretical Musing 273

part five: resolution 285

21. Outlook 287
22. The Skeptics 303
23. Un Cri du Coeur 326
24. Resolution 337

Acknowledgments 355
Appendix 357
The Wilson Critique 357
Chronology 361
Glossary 365
Anomalous Power Citations 366
Books for Reference 369
Endnotes 372
Index 396
 Summations

The Settled Contention (c. 1994) 17

The Original Claims of March 1989 22
Langmuir’s Criteria for a Pathological Science 65
Charge to the DOE Panel on Cold Fusion 94
The Place of Failed Experiments 109
Fleischmann and Pons’s Errors of Protocol 124
Characteristics of the Scientific Skeptic 134
Validation by Independent Laboratories 205
The Conflict Between Data and Theory 300
Huizenga’s Cold Fusion Credo 306
Errors Made in Response to the Utah Claims 322
Skeptic’s Errors of Protocol 341

ix
 Figures

figure 1.1 Fleischmann offers a qualitative display of excess heat

power. When the cell voltage decreases, the cell input power de-
creases, but the cell temperature continues to increase. 7
figure 2.1 Ten items make up the overburden borne by the evidence
that supports the existence of anomalous power. The listing pro-
gresses from the general to the particular. 26
figure 3.1 A Fleischmann and Pons cell schematic layout. Its height
is foreshortened. 39
figure 4.1 Fleischmann reported the temperature of the cell’s elec-
trolyte liquid plotted against the number of days of continuous
electrical excitation. 47
figure 4.2 Fleischmann reported the energy flow rate after the start
of electrolysis as displayed for days 54 to 72. 47
figure 8.1 Illustration of the threshold effect on an otherwise
smooth probability distribution curve. 108
figure 8.2 Fleischmann reported that as the palladium cathode
stored more deuterium, its ability to generate anomalous power
changed from negative to positive. 111
figure 12.1 Variations of protocol for the evaluation of experiments
in the arts and sciences with some examples. 172
figure 14.1 Hansen, Utah State University, Logan, reported anoma-
lous power of 300 milliwatts with a 27 milliwatt reference pulse.
Data was taken from a set of Fleischmann and Pons cells. 187
figure 14.2 McKubre reports an experiment showing an excess heat
generating burst. 193
figure 14.3 Oriani, University of Minnesota, reported excess power
in a heavy water/palladium cell (dots inside circles) that achieved
3.6 watts for 150 minutes (top circle), or 106 W/cm3. 195

xi
xii excess heat

figure 14.4 Huggins, Stanford University, used a calorimeter with

two aluminum cylinders to carry heat away from the cell. 197
figure 14.5 Huggins reported anomalous power generation. Its value
is read from the left scale as power times 1/10 or as percent. The
peak power is 5.6 watts or 56%. 199
figure 14.6 Miles, Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California,
reported generation of anomalous power. “X” is excess power. It
is expressed as output-power/input-power. 200
figure 14.7 Arata, Osaka University, shows two versions of the spe-
cial double structured cathode he used. Its inside space holds
palladium black, a powder form of palladium. 201
figure 14.8 Arata shows power output as a function of input power.
At 125 watts input power, there is almost 250 watts of output
power. This calculates to 125 watts of power generated by the
experiment. 202
figure 15.1 Fleischmann and Pons let this cell boil dry thus inter-
rupting the current. It continued to generate heat for three more
hours. They refer to this effect as “heat after death.” 215
figure 15.2 Mengoli observed his cell, operating at 95C, to continue
to generate heat for 27 hours after the current circuit was inter-
rupted. 217
figure 16.1 Bush reported the energy level generated per each he-
lium atom detected from a cell exhibiting the excess heat phe-
nomenon. The 4,410 seconds is the time required to generate
500 ml of electrolytic gasses at a normalized electrolysis current
of 525 mA. 232
figure 16.2 Miles reports ten data points to show correlation of
helium-four with excess heat at a rate of approximately 23.8
MeV per atom. These points are taken from Tables 16.4 (▲)
and 16.5 (●). Power measurements limit the accuracy of these
points to one significant place. 233
figure 16.3 Arata shows the presence as well as the separation of He-
4 and D2 in a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS). 237
figure 16.4 Bressani reported the generation of He in Pd ribbon.
Upper tracing was taken before the experimental run; lower is af-
ter. The fine vertical lines mark He at 4.0026 amu and D2 at
4.028 amu. 240
 List of Figures xiii

figure 16.5 The Case experiment at McKubre’s laboratory showed

helium-four generation at eleven parts per million in 28 days,
then decreasing at about the same rate. 242
figure 16.6 A listing of those scientists who search for evidence of
helium-four atoms created by the reaction used to generate ex-
cess heat. The vertical dashed line marks when the portable
QMS became available. The triangles indicate cooperative ef-
forts. Drawing by the author, after Bressani. 243
figure 17.1 Storms, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reported
a clear signal of tritium generation in his cell number 73. The
fraction divides the tritium count of cell 73 by the background
count as shown in cell #70. 247
figure 17.2 Bockris reported (Lin, et al.) tritium activity levels from
cell 4 in its liquid and gas sectors. 248
figure 17.3 Claytor reported the generation of tritium in plasma run
number 3. Interruption of the plasma interrupted the tritium
generation process at two places. 249
figure 17.4 Scott, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reported a burst
of tritium in one of his cells. 250
figure 17.5Arata shows the presence and separation of He-3 and
HD in QMS. 253
figure 18.1 Fleischmann and Pons reported evidence for neutrons
emanating from power generating cells. Error magnitude was de-
picted by the vertical bars on the graph. The arrow marks the
time (205 days) when the cells were turned off. 256
figure 18.2 Scott, ORNL, reported anomalous power and neutrons.
Neutrons are depicted as their average value. Excess energy is
shown as the saw-tooth shaped tracing. 257
figure 18.3 Wolf, Texas A&M, detected neutron and gamma emis-
sions from Pd/LiOD cells. 258
figure 18.4 Takahashi, Osaka University, cycled the cell current up
and down and detected the neutron count following up and
down. 259
figure 18.5 Srinivasan, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, presented
neutron counts and neutron bursts in an electrolytic cell.
Changing the electrolyte from D2O to H2O caused the count to
fall away. 260
xiv excess heat

figure 18.6 Mizuno shows a typical neutron burst from the experi-
ment using deuterium followed by hydrogen electrolysis. More
than 100,000 neutrons were generated during the 200 second
burst. 261
figure 18.7 Mizuno lists his ten experiments to show that five gave
neutron bursts and five had null results. these reproducible re-
sults indicate that hydrogen (1H) is involved in the nuclear reac-
tion. 262
figure 19.1 Wolf (via T. Passell) reports a portion of the gamma
spectrum of one of his electrolyzed cathodes that covers the en-
ergy spectrum from 295 keV to 574 keV. The experiment
proved unreproducible. 265
figure 19.2 Karabut reports on the stable isotope “impurities” that
appear in a palladium cathode after a glow discharge experimen-
tal run. 266
figure 19.3 Mizuno, Hokkaido National University, reported that by
using x-ray spectroscopy, there appeared evolution of platinum
(PT), chromium (Cr), iron (Fe), and copper (Cu) present in the
“after” scan that were not present “before.” 267
figure 19.4 Miley (■), University of Illinois, and Mizuno (▲) re-
ported a rate of generation of the several elements. Mizuno’s
rates are arbitrarily normalized to Miley’s. Note the elements Si,
Cr, Fe, Zn, As, Cd, Sb, and Pb. 267
figure 20.1 Chambers, Naval Research Laboratory, reported that
4.99 MeV tritons produced this peak during multiple bursts
lasting over three minutes after deuterium irradiation had
ceased. 281
figure 20.2 Cecil, Colorado School of Mines, reported that the
peak at Channel 26 and 27 indicates a 3 MeV proton emission,
presumably the product of a fusion reaction. 282
figure 21.1 Nagel, Naval Research Laboratory, charted the increase
of anomalous power levels since 1989, including points A, B, C
by Fleischmann and Pons, and point D by Preparata. 301
figure 21.2 Nagel shows the relative sizes and power levels of several
types of nuclear power generators. 302
 Tables

table 16.1 Summary of Round-Robin Helium-Four Analysis 224

table 16.2 Helium-4 in Electrolyzed Palladium Cathodes 225
table 16.3 Helium-4 Gas Entrained, Series-I 229
table 16.4 Helium-4 Gas Entrained, Series-II 230
table 16.5 Helium-4 Gas Entrained, Series-III, (Miles) 231
table 17.1 Bush Helium-Three Data 251

xv
 Foreword

I n March 1989, two respected chemists, Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stan-
ley Pons, claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in
certain metals saturated with deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen. Un-
der these conditions, they reported that they were obtaining more energy than
they had put into the system.
Naturally, this claim caused a worldwide sensation, and many laborato-
ries tried to repeat the experiment. Almost all reported failure, and Pons and
Fleischmann were laughed out of court. That was the last anyone heard of
them for several years.
From the mid-1990s however, there was an underground movement of
scientists who believed that these claims should be looked into more seriously,
and started experiments of their own—often in defiance of their employers.
There have now been several international conferences on so-called cold fu-
sion—derided by skeptics as congregations of deluded disciples worshiping a
false religion. Some of their criticism is very valid: if Drs Fleischmann and
Pons had indeed produced nuclear fusion, they should have been dead! For
where are the neutrons and gamma-rays and tritium and helium—the lethal
“ashes” such a reaction should produce? Well, later experiments claim to have
detected them, but in quantities far too small to account for the energy liber-
ated. A theoretical basis for cold fusion is therefore still a mystery—as was the
energy produced by radioactivity and uranium fission—when they were first
discovered. I am tempted to say, “It’s not fusion as we know it, Jim.” Luke-
warm fission perhaps?
To complicate matters still further, there are several reports of excess
(“over unity”) energy that apparently can have nothing to do with nuclear re-
actions. Some involve systems of magnets, which appear suspiciously like the
“perpetual motion” devices that have obsessed generations of inventors. More
convincing are machines—several now being manufactured on a commer-
cial scale—that depend upon liquids under extreme conditions, where it is
known that the phenomenon of micro-cavitation can produce million-degree
bubbles.
Whatever the final verdict on this whole affair—and despite all claims to

xvii
xviii excess heat

the contrary the jury is still out—it is almost certainly the biggest scandal in
the history of science. Charles Beaudette, an MIT graduate with thirty years
of engineering experience, has done a remarkable job in untangling and docu-
menting the whole story of cold fusion. Excess Heat is not only a superb record
of an extraordinary episode, but is also highly entertaining. The author does
not hesitate to apportion blame where it is deserved—and there is enough to
go around to satisfy everyone.
I do not believe any unbiased reader will put down this book without
feeling that something strange is happening at the fringes of physics. Although
skeptics are still fond of intoning “pathological science” like a mantram, the
wisest approach must surely be “wait and see.”
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 indi-
cate 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 will be if these anomalous energy
results can be scaled up. That could terminate the era of fossil fuels, end wor-
ries about pollution, and change the geopolitical structure of the world out of
recognition.
In 1973, when OPEC started to multiply the price of oil, I rashly pre-
dicted: “The age of cheap power is over—the age of free power is still fifty
years ahead.”
Excess Heat strengthens my hope that this may be not too far from the
truth, early in the new millennium.

Arthur C. Clarke
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Op 995
4 January 2000
 Introduction

T he topic called cold fusion has been dismissed, often derisively, by most
scientists and the general population as wrong, a good example of bad
science. The terms “pathological science” or “voodoo science” frequently fol-
low mention of the subject. Excess Heat deftly makes the case, in fashion rem-
iniscent of a legal brief, for serious attention to the subject. This book con-
cludes that there is no basis now for dismissing cold fusion. Each of the major
reasons that are offered for ignoring, or actively opposing, further research are
shown to be flawed. The persistent lack of a theoretical explanation and prob-
lems with experimental reproducibility are major legitimate concerns, but
they are not reasons to dismiss the topic.
The fact that cold fusion is without a satisfactory explanation at present
merely ranks it with other topics in science which await understanding. Most
of the time, the discoverers of a new scientific effect are able to explain its ori-
gin, many times in the initial report. However, the history of science has sev-
eral famous examples for which decades passed between an observation and
its elucidation or between development of an idea and its substantiation. Su-
perconductivity refers to the lossless and persistent circulation of electrical
current in some materials at low temperatures. It was discovered experimen-
tally in 1911 by Onnes, but not understood until development of the correct
quantum mechanical theory by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer in 1957. Plate
tectonics is the name given to the slow (few centimeters per year) relative mo-
tion of major sections of the earth’s crust. The idea was put forward in 1912
by Wegner, who was a meteorologist. However, the theory was not generally
accepted until the 1960s, when sea floor spreading and earthquake data made
clear the existence and motion of crustal plates. Einstein postulated stimulated
emission in 1925, but the maser was not demonstrated by Townes until 1954.
Other cases could be cited in which many years elapse between a laboratory
discovery and its explanation, or between an idea and its validation. The cur-
rent lack of an explanation, and the decade that has passed since the an-
nouncement of cold fusion, are not reasons to ignore it. Many of us wonder
how long, indeed, will it take to understand this particular scientific mystery.

xix
xx excess heat

The lack of reproducibility in cold fusion experiments leads some people

to believe that there is something wrong with the reported results. However,
this argument bothers many others. Again, there are instances in science in
which an effect was once dismissed, but turned out to be correct, reproduc-
ible, controllable, and even useful. Early experiments are often erratic and
hard to reproduce for various reasons. Understanding which variables exert
important effects and which can be ignored, is difficult in complex situations.
This is especially true where the measured effects are near threshold, a com-
mon situation in some new fields. Confusion over the critical variables is even
germane to the case where the effects seen are large, as is actually the case for
many cold fusion experiments. If it were easy to control an experiment and
make the associated measurements, it is likely that a discovery would already
have been made, or else would have to wait for the appropriate instrumenta-
tion to be developed.
Further points about reproducibility in science are relevant. Certainly,
recipe-style reproducibility is desirable, even in the absence of partial or
full understanding. This has been the case for many years in the area of
“high temperature” superconductivity in certain classes of complex ce-
ramic materials. However, some degree of reproducibility can exist even in
the absence of a reliable formulation. It is not uncommon for an experi-
ment to “work” only a fraction of the time when the relevant variables are
either not recognized or not controlled with sufficient sensitivity. This was
the case in the early days of silicon crystal growth for electronic devices.
Then, sodium was a critical—but not adequately controlled—impurity, and
it often killed the desired semiconductor effects. Impurities at the parts
per billion level, rarely analyzed for in cold fusion experiments, might ac-
count for the familiar experimental problems in the field. Experiments
in many laboratories have shown that proper materials are critical to attain-
ment of unusual cold fusion results. This book shows that there are numer-
ous cases in the published literature on cold fusion where a significant frac-
tion of the experimental trials in a particular laboratory yielded anomalous
results.
Reproducibility from laboratory to laboratory is certainly one of the de-
sirable characteristics of a scientific experiment. But, once again, its absence
does not render a reported observation wrong. In the case of cold fusion, there
have been several attempts to reproduce experiments done first in one labora-
tory which have indeed yielded large anomalous results in another laboratory.
Some have already been reported and others soon will be properly docu-
mented. By now, the cold fusion reproducibility question can itself be seri-
ously questioned.
The situation that currently exists can be summarized as follows. A few
 Introduction xxi

dozen competent scientists performed some similar and some very different
experiments, with proper equipment, careful calibrations, controls and other
thoughtful procedures, and observed anomalous effects that are many times
the noise floor of their experiments. Details of these experiments and their re-
sults are widely available. Prime among them is excess heat, which is some-
times over 100 times anything explicable by normal chemistry. This naturally
implicates some nuclear effect. And, indeed, nuclear products have been seen
in many experiments. However, they are not the products that are expected
from conventional fusion, those reactions that require high energies or tem-
peratures. This departure from accepted physics leads some to conclude that
the experiments are wrong. However, many of us take the disparity to indicate
that there is something new and not understood in the cold fusion observa-
tions. Very important, a correlation between the amount of observed excess
heat and the number of nuclear products has been found in a few experi-
ments. The entire body of experimental evidence points to some of the vari-
ables in cold fusion experiments that are important, and further, indicates
what numerical values must be achieved for these parameters, if anomalous ef-
fects are to be observed.
Excess Heat goes further to make the key point that a single observation of
an anomalous effect, such as those associated with cold fusion, by itself de-
serves attention. A stark way to reinforce this point is to recall the 1987 super-
nova. It is certainly not understood in detail, and it is clearly neither controlla-
ble nor reproducible. However, there seems to be no question in the scientific
community regarding its reality. Of course, supernovae are broadly consistent
with now-accepted physical theories. But consider the famous supernova of
1024. It was visible to a large fraction of humankind almost one millennium
before the emergence in the twentieth century of the theories of relativity and
quantum mechanics that are necessary to understand the basics of stellar ex-
plosions.
The field of cold fusion has been full of procedural and technical mis-
takes. The original press conference has been described by Fleischmann and
Pons themselves as a mistake. The large number of truly bad experiments re-
mains a problem for anyone interested in getting to the core of the situation.
The disconnects in communication between those doing cold fusion experi-
ments or following the field in detail on the one hand, and the scientific com-
munity and public on the other hand, also complicates the subject. Charles
Beaudette has penetrated this thicket of problems and clearly laid out the case
for not dismissing cold fusion. His work both undermines the reasons for dis-
missal of the topic and makes the case for continuing attention to the subject.
The book lays the needed foundation for a forward-looking plan to (1) put
the experimental situation on a firm basis, (2) arrive at the desired under-
xxii excess heat

standing, and (3) exploit the remarkable new effect(s) of cold fusion for the
good of humans and their planet.

David J. Nagel, Ph.D.

Research Professor
The George Washington University
Washington D.C.

Formerly Superintendent
Condensed Matter and Radiation Sciences Division
Naval Research Laboratory
Washington D.C.

Falls Church, Virginia

December 11, 1999
 Preface

T he field of study called cold fusion was born de novo. It did not emerge
from a recognized body of continuing scientific research. It was not an
extension of ongoing scholarship. No precursors puzzled the world’s scientific
laboratories. More dramatically, it threatened the canons of nuclear physics.
This birth will prove unique in the annals of science.
Nature guards its secrets with great jealousy. To discover those secrets, the
practice of science is in constant contest with nature’s elemental powers.
Scientific research aims to outwit nature’s lock: sometimes forcing a lock,
sometimes deciphering a combination, and hoping always to find a castle keep
that was left unguarded.
Some of nature’s most valuable secrets are the so-called laws of science.
These immutable physical laws are expressed as the formulae that govern the
behavior of matter and energy regardless of time or place. The formulae are
mutable when nature reveals more. Then they are modified accordingly.
Occasional modification of the physical law’s formulae is a well recog-
nized part of the process of scientific progress. That kind of change, or the
threat of it, usually causes severe turbulence in the world of science. Such is
the case at hand.
Change is a difficult burden. In his slim volume The Ordeal of Change,
the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer contemplated one of its elements:

Back in 1936 I spent a good part of the year picking peas. I started
out early in January in the Imperial Valley and drifted northward,
picking peas as they ripened, until I picked the last peas of the sea-
son, in June, near Tracy. Then I shifted all the way to Lake County,
where for the first time I was going to pick string beans. And I still
remember how hesitant I was that first morning as I was about to ad-
dress myself to the string bean vines. Would I be able to pick string
beans? Even the change from peas to string beans had in it elements
of fear.

A physics professor, who played a public role in this episode, as we were

quietly reminiscing about the spring of 1989, suddenly made a somewhat vio-

xxiii
xxiv excess heat

lent, sweeping gesture with one arm waving it at his wall of books, and de-
clared, “If cold fusion is true, then all of this is wrong.” Such was the element
of fear in our topic.
Fear of harm was the source of much of the public and private antago-
nism that marked the subject at its beginning. Revolutions, even nascent ones
in science, always hit hard and they hurt. The notion that somehow—if only
things were handled better—the deep divisions could have been avoided is not
a realistic sentiment.
This book is the story of a journalistic investigation into a field of scien-
tific activity. It is not about the sociology of science or the philosophy of sci-
ence although, inevitably, there are passages that touch upon those topics.
That demarcation is important because there exists a cultural divide between
science and the sociology of science, if not the philosophy of science. This
book resides within the culture of science. It is a book of and about science.
The field was investigated largely by working with published technical re-
ports of the laboratory research. Hundreds were reviewed and scores were di-
gested in full. Out of that study came an explanation of the substance of the
controversy and why the field developed to its continuing level of activity de-
spite events of the first months.
Although the book contains much that was selected from the technical
literature, it was especially planned to allow a full comprehension of the story
by nontechnical readers. Much of the technical information presented serves
to assuage the intellectual demands of those who have considerable scientific
background and therefore deserve further argument.
It is organized in the usual rhetorical manner to support the primary ar-
gument about its findings. A result is that several important topics are treated
in more than one place in the text. Each of the twelve Summations brings to-
gether its topic in concise format. Because these are not chapter summations
but topic summations, they are to be read separately from the chapter text.
They are placed generally within the chapter that contains their principal sub-
ject matter.
In this episode, there was the sibling rivalry between physics and chemis-
try. There was more to that than rivalry, however. The disciplines of nuclear
physics and electrochemistry had different ways of developing scientific
knowledge. The membership of the two disciplines had different tempera-
ments. It is remarkable that two early books about the field were written by
nuclear physicists and that no early books were written on the subject by elec-
trochemists or by chemists for that matter. Most important, in some instances
the fields of nuclear physics and chemistry used different protocols to define
what was or was not within the discourse of science. My hope was that by fol-
lowing those that were well established, fear and divisiveness would be allayed
sufficiently to permit a measured evaluation of the field.
 Preface to the First Edition xxv

One conclusion that followed directly from the investigation emerged as

a failure of the skeptics to follow established protocol. In the early years, as re-
ports of well-measured excess heat multiplied, the scientific community failed
to undertake an evaluation of the phenomenon in the manner customary with
experimental science.
At its tenth anniversary, March 1999, this subject involved a multitude of
technologies, publications, and countries. Its story could no longer be con-
tained within one book. It was necessary to be quite selective in choosing what
to include if the story was to be manageable. The knowledgeable reader must
inevitably be disappointed by my many omissions.
It was on a lark that I attended the fifth international conference on cold
fusion in April 1995. As a retired electrical engineer, MIT 1952, I was looking
for something new to hold my interest. At the conference, I saw that those in
attendance were competent scientists doing serious research. I reached that
conclusion simply by noting the quality of their technical presentations, by
participating in discussions with them, and by watching them extend sharply
pointed criticisms to one another’s work. At the very least, the best half of
them were so. Many had been honored by their associated institutions. Profes-
sional meetings often have their Saturday morning sessions for topics irrever-
ently referred to as nuts and fruits. The cold fusion conferences were no ex-
ception to this rule.
Where much of the investigation involved the technical literature, I was
pleasantly surprised to find that its best technical papers were up to the stan-
dard that I was accustomed to from my days in engineering. The talk of lax
peer-review proved to be rumor-mongering. I could find no commentary or
analysis of such a lack in the literature. That condition allowed at least a pre-
liminary conclusion that they would provide useful insights into the field.
Several outspoken nuclear physicists played an important role in dispar-
aging the field at its start and their effect was still dominant ten years later.
This account necessarily refers to them often, but that should not be seen as a
prejudice towards those who practice nuclear physics. My concern is only with
those who were loud and strident in their castigation of our subject. Also, my
arguments will certainly be seen by many as an apologia for the two chemists
who started it all. The abuse that was heaped upon them during the early
months, and the ridicule that continues, insures that no reasonable exposition
of their surviving claims could be seen differently in the United States.
Two decisions came from that conference and my subsequent overview of
the topic: to make a modest financial investment in a firm active in the field
and to write a book on the subject (although at the time it was by no means
clear what kind of a book it would be). What resulted was an investigation
that was undertaken to determine why there was so much confusion in the
subject and to find out whether a new science did exist.
xxvi excess heat

The term cold fusion predated the cold fusion episode by several decades
and came to include a mélange of topics. It became a misleading term in many
ways. For that reason, the statements “cold fusion is true,” or “cold fusion is
false,” carried no unambiguous meaning. For example, if one said, “cold fu-
sion is false,” did that mean there was no real excess heat? And if so, on what
argument was the excess heat data to be dismissed? Literal reference to a cold
fusion event required the use of a more specific nomenclature than the phrase
“cold fusion,” such as deuterium–deuterium fusion. The term cold fusion was
adopted for this book as the name of the field of study and research simply be-
cause most references during that period used the term exclusively. I found no
substitute for it that the reader would not have considered prejudicial to the
inquiry.
My hope is that the reader will come to see the cold fusion contention
laid out in an orderly fashion, much as the writer happened upon his own un-
derstanding of it, sometimes fortuitously, in the unfathomable depths of indi-
vidual comprehension. This is a story of test and contest, of science and poli-
tics, challenge and response, integrity and cowardice, of accomplishment and
of destruction.

Charles G. Beaudette
Cumberland, Maine
January 9, 2000
 Preface to the Second Edition

T he publication of a second edition provides not only to meet the continu-

ing demand for this book but permits it to include new data as well.
A new Chapter 15 reports experiments that generate anomalous power with-
out the presence of applied excitation power. Reorganized Chapters 16–20
present evidence for several nuclear products. These two areas of addition
allow the critical reader to make an increasingly substantial evaluation of the
field of cold fusion research.

C. G. B.
Cumberland, Maine
January 9, 2002

xxvii
 Pa r t On e

ANOMALOUS POWER
 c h a p t e r o n e

The Significant Claim

T he French Academy printed a brief report by Pierre Curie and his collab-
orator Albert Laborde in 1903 to announce that the newly recognized
metal radium was always a little warmer than its surroundings.1 The metal
gave off heat continuously without suffering apparent change. In a later mem-
oir, Marie Curie, Pierre’s widow, offered her appraisal.

More striking still was the discovery of the discharge of heat from ra-
dium. Without any alteration of appearance this substance releases
each hour a quantity of heat sufficient to melt its own weight of ice.
This defied all contemporary scientific experience.2

In 1989, a certain chemistry experiment, by its claim to run a little too

warm, “defied all contemporary scientific experience.” Two reputable chemists
at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in March of that year, claimed that
an electrochemistry experiment generated a large amount of power in the
form of an excess of heat, an amount of power that could not be accounted for
by science. This phenomenon happened in an experiment consisting of a wa-
ter solution in a flask with two metal electrodes immersed in it such that when
a considerable electric current was made to flow between the electrodes, gas
formed on them and bubbled to the surface. They also set forth an hypothesis
that the observed energy came from an unrecognized or unknown nuclear
process, one that did not emit dangerous radiation.
Evidence for anomalous power emerged from their heat measurements
and established a scientific observation not unlike that made by Pierre Curie,

3
4 anomalous power

whose report was accepted even though the source of the warmth was not
known to science and certainly there could be no understanding of it at that
early date. The two Utah chemists presented their experimental observation of
excess heat to the scientific community that it might be recognized and evalu-
ated in the same way.
These two chemists also claimed achievement of sustained nuclear fusion
in their experimental flask. That announcement flew in the face of the world’s
hot fusion physicists. The scientific community reacted in a frenzied and
skeptical manner. Shortly, knowledgeable scientists declared that their mea-
surement of nuclear activity was severely flawed and did so with good reason.
The scientists properly dismissed the measurement as a mistake.
That evaluation of the nuclear fusion claim followed proper protocol
(formal procedure) in that it was evaluated simply as a measurement. Obser-
vational science offers a cosmic supernova (exploding star) or the phenomena
of electrical superconductivity (electrical conductivity with zero resistance).
These interest science enormously, even if their cause or mechanism is un-
known. For example, the 1911 discovery of superconductivity presented a sci-
entific question: How was it possible for a metal to conduct electricity with
zero resistance? The claim to have discovered anomalous heat power presented
the question: What was a possible origin of the heat power? The first question,
about superconductivity, was not answered for forty-six years.
How many years of scientific study must pass before the source of anoma-
lous heat has been determined? The process of validating a thermal measure-
ment is properly held completely separate from its consequent questions. This
separation enables the scientific community to do an evaluation in accordance
with historically established procedures.
In that manner, conventional protocol calls for the scientific community
to accept each well-measured observation as a stand-alone datum. Each, after
validation, is admitted into science to begin a new field of study. Science will
elucidate afterwards, as its raison d’etre, the underlying mechanism thus en-
gendering further understanding of matter and energy. Scientists will bend
their backs to answer the questions: what causes a supernova, and what en-
ables superconductivity. When the process of answering the causal questions
has been completed, something that may take a generation or more, science
will have acquired the understanding that was missing at the first observation
or discovery. In this way, the routine procedures of science provide for that un-
derstanding which is often missing at the moment of discovery.
Over the years 1989–1994, meticulous measurements were made of
anomalous power. That was done with a wide variety of experimental arrange-
ments and instrumentation, and it was done in many different laboratories.
The measurements continued for a decade and were essentially without scien-
tific challenge. They were reported in more than one hundred full-length
 The Significant Claim 5

technical articles in a number of scientific journals and constituted the field’s

source of intellectual motivation for the first decade.
Unfortunately, physicists did not generally claim expertise in calorime-
try, the measurement of calories of heat energy. Nor did they countenance
clever chemists declaring hypotheses about nuclear physics. Their outspoken
commentary largely ignored the heat measurements along with the offer of
an hypothesis about unknown nuclear processes. They did not acquaint them-
selves with the laboratory procedures that produced anomalous heat data.
These attitudes held firm throughout the first decade, causing a sustained con-
troversy.
The upshot of this conflict was that the scientific community failed to
give anomalous heat the evaluation that was its due. Scientists of orthodox
views, in the first six years of this episode, produced only four critical reviews
of the two chemists’ calorimetry work. The first report came in 1989 (N. S.
Lewis). It dismissed the Utah claim for anomalous power on grounds of faulty
laboratory technique. A second review was produced in 1991 (W. N. Hansen)
that strongly supported the claim. It was based on an independent analysis of
cell data that was provided by the two chemists. An extensive review com-
pleted in 1992 (R. H. Wilson) was highly critical though not conclusive. But
it did recognize the existence of anomalous power, which carried the implica-
tion that the Lewis dismissal was mistaken. A fourth review was produced in
1994 (D. R. O. Morrison) which was itself unsatisfactory. It was rebutted
strongly to the point of dismissal and correctly in my view. No defense was of-
fered against the rebuttal. During those first six years, the community of or-
thodox scientists produced no report of a flaw in the heat measurements that
was subsequently sustained by other reports.
The community of scientists at large never saw or knew about this mini-
malist critique of the claim. It was buried in the avalanche of skepticism that
issued forth in the first three months. This skepticism was buttressed by the
failure of the two chemists’ nuclear measurements, the lack of a theoretical un-
derstanding of how their claim could work, a mistaken concern with the num-
ber of failed experiments, a wholly unrealistic expectation of the time and re-
source the evaluation would need, and the substantial ad hominem attacks on
them. However, their original claim of measurement of the anomalous power
remained unscathed during all of this furor. A decade later, it was not gener-
ally realized that this claim remained essentially unevaluated by the scientific
community. Confusion necessarily arose when the skeptics refused without ar-
gument to recognize the heat measurement and its corresponding hypothesis
of a nuclear source. As a consequence, the story of the excess heat phenome-
non has never been told.
A few basic notions about the atom are needed if the components used in
cold fusion experiments are to be recognized. The atom’s center is the nucleus,
6 anomalous power

a tiny object relative to the atom, that may hold two kinds of objects, the pro-
ton with a positive electric charge and the neutron with no charge. Hydrogen
gas is the lightest element with one proton in its nucleus and one electron or-
biting about it. It has three forms (isotopes) each of sufficient importance to
have its own name. Hydrogen (H), the most common type, has no neutrons,
deuterium (D) has one neutron, and tritium (T) has two neutrons. Because
most of the atom’s weight is in the nucleus, deuterium with its two particles
has twice the weight of hydrogen. When water consists of deuterium instead
of hydrogen, as in D2O, it is about 10 percent heavier than ordinary water and
is referred to as heavy water.
The two Utah chemists were Martin Fleischmann, electrochemist and
Fellow of the Royal Society, and Stanley Pons, Chairman of the Chemistry
Department at the University of Utah. By March 1989, they had been experi-
menting with the generation of anomalous (unaccountable) heat power for
about five years.
Their experiment in its most general form is familiar to chemistry stu-
dents. The cell, as the apparatus is called, is tightly configured. The glass flask
itself has a Dewar, double walled (thermos), construction with a hard vacuum
between the walls. Its content consists of heavy water (D2O) with lithium dis-
solved in it to form an electrolyte (an electrically conductive solution) that fills
the flask up to its neck. Inside the flask, immersed and centered near the bot-
tom, is the cathode electrode, a palladium metal rod. Wrapped against the in-
side wall of the flask is the anode electrode, a platinum wire. The flask is usu-
ally submerged to its neck in a cooler bath of temperature controlled (plain)
water for heat measuring purposes.
To operate the cell, a direct current is passed between the two electrodes
from an external power supply. The electric current causes the water to break
down into its constituent parts. Oxygen gas bubbles off at the anode (+) and
deuterium gas bubbles off from the cathode (−). Some of the deuterium at-
oms enter directly into the body of the palladium. The temperature of the
cell’s liquid electrolyte, and the voltage across the two electrodes are the two
measurements that tell an experimenter what the cell is doing. Because the
electrolyte is slowly bubbling away, it has to be replenished at regular intervals.

Anomalous Power
Figure 1.1 is an advantageous starting point for an introduction to anomalous
power.3 The illustration is taken from an informal article Fleischmann wrote
for an electrochemical society journal. In it he shows qualitative evidence for
the existence of anomalous power. The drawing has two tracings, (the central
 The Significant Claim 7

figure 1.1 Fleischmann offers a qualitative display of excess heat power. When the cell
voltage decreases, the cell input power decreases, but the cell temperature continues to in-
crease.

lines in the graphs): A is a sequence of cell electrolyte temperature measure-

ments and B is a sequence of cell electrode voltage measurements.
Tracing A shows temperature in degrees Celsius (Centigrade) as marked
on the vertical axis. It is shown for one cell operating during days three
through six, after the electrical current from an external power supply was
turned on. The temperature climbs continuously during each 24 hour inter-
val. A precipitous temperature drop occurs when the cell’s liquid level is re-
plenished. The temperature also increases from one day to the next. After re-
plenishment on day three, the temperature is just under 39.00 degrees.* At
the end of the subsequent 24 hour period, the temperature has climbed up to
39.75C. At replenishment, it drops to 39.20C and starts to rise again.

* The temperature and voltage numbers come from the experiment’s database that was used to
draw the tracings in Figure 1.1.
8 anomalous power

Tracing B shows electrical voltage as plotted on the vertical axis. The volt-
age across the cell electrodes decreases during each of these daily intervals and
also decreases from day to day. At day three, the potential starts at about 5.08
volts, and decreases to 4.98 in 24 hours. With replenishment, the voltage
jumps to 5.05 volts, and begins to descend again. Since the cell operates with
a constant current from its power supply, the voltage decrease means a de-
crease of power delivered into the cell.*
After each addition of water, the cell ought to achieve an equilibrium
temperature in ten hours, which would result in the temperature and voltage
traces leveling into horizontal lines until the next electrolyte addition. How is
it possible for the temperature to get hotter while the electrical input power is
reduced? The experiment displays no attainment of equilibrium.
Fleischmann states, “The conclusion that there is excess enthalpy [heat
power] generation is inescapable and we note that this conclusion is indepen-
dent of any method of calibration which may be adopted to put the study on
a quantitative basis.”4 The data demonstrate qualitatively that there is within
the cell a hidden source of additional energy that causes the temperature to
rise even as the input power decreases.
It is possible at this point to see how some scientists came to the conclu-
sion that within the cell there was a source of anomalous heat generation that
was unrecognized or unknown to science. Their source of motivation during
the first ten years was to confirm and explore this now well-measured, anoma-
lous-heat observation. The esteemed hot fusion physicist Franco Scaramuzzi
states from his own laboratory experience that, “It is my conviction that some
of the phenomena known with the name of CF [cold fusion] are real, in par-
ticular, the production of excess heat and its nuclear origin.”5
Evaluation of a measurement (observation) claim proceeds in ways that
might at first seem strange, or at least counter-intuitive. The protocols of sci-
ence† require that the scientific community evaluate a significant measure-
ment claim. If the two chemists’ claim is sustained, then the community will
be obliged to study that phenomenon until an understanding of it is achieved,
no matter how long that might take.

* For the experiment of Figure 1.1, details include a solution of lithium sulfate (Li2SO4) in
heavy water, the cell current was 0.4 amperes, the Faradaic efficiency was virtually 100% (there
was no significant amount of recombination), and the coefficient of heat transfer from the cell
(using a Dewar flask with a hard vacuum) was independent of time. The rate of power genera-
tion at the end of each day was reported as 45, 66, 86, and 115 milliwatts for days 3 through 6
respectively. (These calculations allow for the energy used in separating the water molecule
into the two gases that then leave the cell.)
Fleischmann’s cells usually have a relaxation time of about ninety minutes (with nine hours
allowed to realize equilibrium), a silvered top/neck area to mask liquid level changes, and 95%
radiant cooling (5% conduction cooling) to the water bath.
† Protocol means an explicit step-by-step procedure. A doctor follows the appropriate protocol
in the treatment of a patient for a disease.
 The Significant Claim 9

The Orthodox Response

Orthodox scientists by and large did not look at the heat data. Instead they
demanded that the chemists show evidence of the nuclear products pro-
duced by a nuclear reaction. And, furthermore, the quantity of those prod-
ucts must be concomitant with the amount of energy measured. In demand-
ing this, they had in mind those nuclear products generated by known fusion
reactions.*,6 Such products were relatively easy to find if they existed, be-
cause they were highly energetic and well known, e.g., neutrons and gamma-
rays.
These scientists, however, in their public statements, refused to recognize
the existence of the hypothesis about unknown nuclear reactions. They did so
on grounds that there was no evidence that a new nuclear reaction had been
discovered. They did not consider the measurement of large amounts of unac-
countable energy to be such evidence. Lacking nuclear products, they assumed
the heat measurements to be completely wrong even though they knew of no
procedural error in the experiment. A few years later that attitude continued
unabated even after there was available corroborated evidence that helium was
the nuclear product.
In 1989, the two chemists were unable to provide evidence of nuclear
products. However, finding the nuclear products of an unknown process
could be a prodigious undertaking, a consideration the orthodox scientists
would not allow.
Immediately then, with this orthodox response, confusion ensued. Exper-
imenters were measuring what appeared to be a new source of energy, and
critics were demanding evidence of conventional nuclear fusion reactions. The
debate was sterile because the two sides were talking past each other.
The laboratory work of those engaged in the new field called cold fusion
research was ignored without reason. The orthodox physicists argued that
there was an unidentified error in the experimental procedure that, if cor-
rected, would reduce the measured anomalous power to zero. With that, there
would be no aspect of the experiment that was of interest to science thus
bringing the cold fusion episode to an end. This response was not based upon
an analysis of the experiment or its calorimetry. They saw no reason to enter
the laboratory and participate in the experimental work and point out the sus-
pected source of error. Their confidence was based on nuclear theory. To put it
quite simply, they assumed and asserted that the nuclear behavior of matter
could not offer-up energy under the conditions of the experiment. Their posi-

* The journal Nature stated, “. . . the Utah group requires that there should be 1012
[1,000,000,000,000] fusion reactions a second . . . to account for the rate at which heat is pro-
duced.”
10 anomalous power

tion was that theory takes precedence over data. This error of scientific proto-
col provided the basis for their rejection of the excess heat claim.*
To demand nuclear products proved to be a serious distraction, because it
directed attention to a lack, a lack of any known source for the power claimed.
It incurred what might be called a “broken-wing” strategy: the successful ex-
cess-heat experimenter was asked, where are the nuclear products? In the man-
ner of a mother bird feigning a broken wing, it distracted the inquirer from
the claim. If a similar protocol had been imposed upon Pierre Curie in 1903,
he would have gone unacknowledged as the discoverer of radium’s self-heating
phenomenon. A proper adherence to established procedure obliged the ortho-
dox scientists to be concerned with the validity of the heat measurements.
At the announcement, the two Utah scientists pointed out that the quan-
tity of evident nuclear products from their experiment was smaller by a factor
of one billion than would ordinarily be expected for the amount of heat mea-
sured. The excess of heat defied all contemporary scientific experience: it had
no recognized source. They put forth an hypothesis of a source, or cause, in
accordance with normal procedure: they hypothesized that the heat came
from an unknown nuclear process. This was done that the hypothesis might
be explored by those who enjoyed the appropriate training and facilities for
such work.
Almost all parties on both sides of the controversy recognized that if
the heat came from a nuclear process, then there must be some elemental
changes at the nuclear level (nuclear ash) that resulted from the process. These
changes, orthodoxy said, would constitute proof of the heat claims. However,
any such nuclear process was inaccessible to both parties because it was either
unrecognized or unknown. To find an unknown process one might have to
measure the quantity of every atomic isotope† before and after an experiment,
an impossible demand. Asking two chemists for their nuclear products under
these circumstances was demagoguery.
The principal skeptics were nuclear physicists. Their criticisms and refer-
ences to nuclear matters at every point in the episode keep the nuclear aspect
of the field always present. But this story at its beginning, nevertheless, is
about the claims and corroboration of excess heat.‡
At the same time, there was no reason for cold fusion scientists to post-

* This phenomenon of anomalous (unaccountable) power is widely referred to as excess heat

(flow). I use the term excess heat from time to time for stylistic variation. In either case, the de-
scription is of the flow of energy, that is, of power. Power is the flow of energy. Although both
are of interest, power is the prime interest. Chapter 4 offers a further discussion of their rele-
vant importance starting on page 51.
† The core of the atom is the nucleus with its two kinds of constituents: the proton with a posi-
tive electrical charge and the neutron with no charge. Isotopes are atoms with the same num-
ber of protons and different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. The three kinds of hydro-
gen—-hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium—-are isotopes of hydrogen.
 The Significant Claim 11

pone exploration of possible sources of the measured power. Nor was there
any reason not to begin work on finding such a source if an individual
scientist or laboratory was so inclined. Separation of the heat and nuclear is-
sues mattered greatly, but only concerning the need to follow a valid evalua-
tion protocol. Finding laboratory evidence for nuclear activity in the Fleisch-
mann and Pons cell was an important research objective. It was properly
undertaken by some scientists from the beginning.
It should be possible for the reader to follow this narrative free of anguish
over the fact that, during the first decade, the origin of the anomalous energy
was unknown. The exploration of that unknown reaction was not ignored. It
was correctly left to the future obligations of the scientific community. In
adopting that method, my account insists that conventional methodology be
followed to see if the claim of discovery of anomalous heat power is a well-
measured, scientific observation.*
The literature does identify a source of error in heat measurements (calo-
rimetry) called recombination. Recombination goes with electrolytic chemis-
try as smoke goes with fire; it has no particular relationship to cold fusion re-
search. Recombination is the propensity under limited circumstances of the
hydrogen and oxygen gas, that bubbles from the anode and cathode, to come
together and re-form water molecules. The re-forming of water releases energy
that might mistakenly appear as a part of the measured anomalous power.
Given the magnitude of the controversy, one would have expected to hear this
argument shouted from the housetops. It was only heard as a last resort, and
even then in subdued tones. The issue can be eliminated by using a closed cell,
in which all the gasses are deliberately recombined back into water. Chapter
14 includes an outstanding example of such a cell starting on page 190. Also,
control experiments are subject to the same recombination effects and they do
not demonstrate anomalous power.

My Epiphany
Immediately upon starting this investigation, I surfaced a credo for the cold
fusion episode as formulated by one of the field’s most ardent skeptics. It

‡ This approach may irritate those nuclear physicists who strongly prefer to dismiss the seem-
ingly amorphous and unquestionably difficult matter of heat measurement. They would
greatly prefer that we move straightaway to the more tangible business of counting particles. I
offer my sincere apologies to them. Only by anchoring this book in the area where there is
abundant data and substantial analysis available can the confusion be dissipated.
* An “observation,” as used in this story, does not refer to looking or seeing in the usual sense. It
means to record scientific data, even though the oversight of an experiment by the scientist
continues to be important. This recording or storing of data is done by instruments in most
cases.
12 anomalous power

showed that during the first four years (to closure of his manuscript), this out-
spoken physicist had not examined the laboratory processes and procedures
upon which professional activity in cold fusion studies was founded and moti-
vated. That fact was not remedied in subsequent years. Furthermore, the same
lack was true for other outspoken skeptics of cold fusion research.
In the immediate aftermath of the announcement many laboratories
jumped into the activity of trying to replicate Fleischmann and Pons’s experi-
ment. In the course of several months, four prestigious laboratories reportedly
failed to replicate the anomalous power claim. This topic, that of the many,
many failed experiments, is explored in Chapter 8, starting on page 106, and
found to offer no guidance for our investigation. A related topic, that of the
reproducibility of the experiment, which involves exploring the variety of sci-
entific methodologies, especially the particularly narrow methodology adhered
to in the discipline of nuclear physics (with its strict criterion), is developed
and analyzed in Chapters 10 through 13. The reproducibility of the two
chemists’s experiment compares favorably with that of newly tried experi-
ments in other disciplines.
Another consideration often raised by orthodox critics is whether the
electrolytic cell itself constitutes a useful energy-generating device. In the ex-
periment, which lasts three months, the total energy balance of the cell may be
positive or negative. This book is about science and scientific methodology. Its
proper interest is in the ability of the Fleischmann and Pons cell to give a sliver
of insight into the workings of nature. Does a new science exist in their experi-
ment? If so, then a later interest will explore whether there is a useful technol-
ogy that can be derived from that science. In turn, from that technology
would come a useful energy generating device if such is possible. But to get
there one usually has to travel a long and rocky road. A comparison of the to-
tal amount of energy put into the cell with the total amount that comes out is
of only passing interest. The electrolytic cell may well prove itself overall to be
an energy inefficient instrument for these scientific studies.

Circumstances
The field of cold fusion studies was surprisingly vital after ten years, despite its
quick and categorical dismissal in 1989. At the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a tenured professor continued in his
attempt to explain a nuclear source for the anomalous power. He was not
working alone. Over 150 scientists working in the field participated in the
eighth International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-8), May 2000, in
Lerici, Italy. A Wall Street financier displayed a thick dossier that was within a
few weeks of being current on developments in the field. Three small enter-
prises in the United States had raised more than a million dollars each to
 The Significant Claim 13

finance new product development during the previous two years. A few major
American corporations had carefully watched these developments and in-
vested token amounts of venture capital with the fledgling companies. Re-
search continued on cold fusion topics in academic and national laboratories
in America, Japan, China, Italy, India, Russia, Belarus, and France. More than
1,000 full-length technical reports of cold fusion research had been published,
and they continued to be published at the rate of approximately fifty a year.
The twentieth century had not previously experienced a dichotomy in the ba-
sic sciences as great as that which existed in the 1990s between orthodox sci-
ence and the heterodox research called cold fusion.
It is much easier to describe orthodoxy than heresy when writing about
this controversy. The orthodox argument in many instances can often be set
forth in one sentence. Simply because it is orthodox, the writer can expect im-
mediate recognition and appreciation of the argument. The task of presenting
an heretical position often proves laborious. It needs more space, as there is
much to be explained and in considerable detail if it is to be equally persua-
sive. The reader should not assume that the orthodox presentation is lax sim-
ply because of the smaller amount of space devoted to it.
It is well recognized that there is not just one scientific method or proto-
col. Rather there are a variety of methods whereby science elucidates the phys-
ical world. My investigation repeatedly came upon striking differences of
protocol within the contentions that had racked the field. The differences
were not simply between physics and chemistry. There were significant differ-
ences of method between the protocols of nuclear physics and the rest of sci-
ence, including other disciplines in physics. Those differences were at the
heart of the disagreements, and they would have been severe obstacles to mu-
tual understanding even if there had been strictly rational behavior on all
sides.
In particular, this book is concerned with the methodologies of nuclear
physics and those of surface chemistry.* To help put them into perspective, ex-
amples are taken from solid-state (condensed matter) physics, geology, astron-
omy, and biology as well. One of the methodologies that is universally re-
spected asserts that discovery claims are corroborated by replication in an
independent laboratory. This rule appears to be acceptable to the various dis-
ciplines of interest (except that of nuclear physics). The well recognized rush
to be second, to be the one to corroborate an announced discovery, is an ex-
pression of this protocol.
By whatever methodology, orthodox science insisted that there was noth-
ing of interest in cold fusion studies, nor was there anything that might be
commercially useful. It said so emphatically in 1989, both in professional

* The term surface chemistry refers to chemical reactions that take place on the surface interface
between a solid electrode and, in this case, a liquid.
14 anomalous power

meetings and in a government sponsored study of the field, and it continued

with that opinion twelve years later. After 1989, physicists, chemists, and the
scientific community as a whole paid little attention to further developments.
Research reports that would ordinarily be of wide interest were not reported,
or were mentioned and dismissed as probably mistaken. Twelve years after its
beginning, the status of its research was unknown to the scientific community.
During these years, the several technologies that had become a part of
cold fusion research promised a benign environmental impact if they could be
exploited. This is an important consideration if their initial use will be in low
technology societies, as seems likely. There, a source of energy that does not
strip the countryside bare of wood fiber growth, for example, is advantageous.
At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a vigorous concern with
the relationship between experiment and theory in the core sciences of chem-
istry and physics. The general conclusion was that science was best advanced
when experiment and theory mutually supported each other in giving direc-
tion to research. A half-century later, instrumentation joined them as a third
component enabling the advancement of science. To a considerable extent,
this principle guides the development of this story. Galileo discovered the
moons of Jupiter largely because he knew how to grind the best lenses of his
day. This story recognizes the Fleischmann and Pons Dewar flask, with its
hard vacuum, silvered upper section, and resting in a water bath, to be a can-
didate for recognition as a significant advance in calorimetric instrumentation.

Proof
Scientists on all sides desire a final resolution of this matter. The wish for
proof is universally enticing.* Consider for a moment that atomic and sub-
atomic particles are intrinsically perfect. Experiments with them were often
done in a high-vacuum chamber where the environment was also quite simple
and even perfect. This level of perfection in the experimental system enabled
the devising of definitive experiments that forced nature to reveal some of her
innermost secrets. Nuclear physicists became accustomed to achieving proof.
In fact, they demanded much more than proof, as is shown in the strict crite-
rion of Chapter 11, p. 155. Mathematicians working with perfect numbers,
perfect geometry, and perfect logic likewise learned to routinely require proof.
Most scientists, however, made progress with mere experimental out-
comes, devoid of clear-cut proof. For much of science, proof appeared over
time as an overwhelming aggregation of evidence. In this narrative, the ques-
tion to be answered was whether anomalous power existed in the Fleischmann
* By proof, I mean measurements that to a chemist or physicist are irrefutable.
 The Significant Claim 15

and Pons experiment. The answer was sought after, even though it may not
have been available then through an absolute proof. If no method of proof was
accessible at the time, an insistence on proof would serve only to force a false-
negative result.* That possibility needed to be limited in the same way that the
likelihood of reaching a false-positive conclusion was also deliberately limited.
Mere evidence would have to do if the possibility of a false-negative outcome
were to be constrained.
I examined the body of research papers on anomalous power. Surpris-
ingly, the presentation of it to the public was uncharted territory considering
the books that had been written on the cold fusion episode. The well-charted
part consisted of nuclear physics as expressed in several critical books that were
devoted almost entirely to that subject. They included no examples of excess
heat data, and, astonishingly enough, no bibliography leading to such exam-
ples. A principal theme of this narrative is that the several arguments offered
against the significance of anomalous power measurements were either unsup-
ported by data, contained mistaken assumptions, or involved a corruption of
protocol.

The First Six Years

Within one year the scientific community had stopped following technical
developments in the field. During an interview in 1997, I mentioned Dr.
Oriani’s experimental results to one scientist who participated in the frenzy of
1989. He replied that he was too busy to follow developments in Italy. I then
gently mentioned that Professor Richard A. Oriani is a professor emeritus
at the University of Minnesota. This same academic scientist went on to
talk about cold fusion events as though the events of 1989 had happened just
the previous year.
During the second year, the divide between cold fusion research and or-
thodox science became quite complete in the United States. The New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal, and two of the four broad-audience scientific
journals, Scientific American, and Nature (London) were adopting the position
of giving no recognition to its scientific reports. Science (published by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science) and Chemical & Engi-
neering News (published by the American Chemical Society) report snippets,
with the latter’s reports often accompanied by dismissal or ridicule. As a con-
sequence of this disconnect, most American scientists still viewed cold fusion
research as it was described to them during the spring of 1989, when confu-
sion reigned and the subject was dismissed absolutely.
* “False negative” means a negative answer that is at the same time a wrong answer.
16 anomalous power

The phenomena which scientists referred to as pathological science is “the

science of that which is not so.” Charlatans get tossed into that bin. The topic
unfolds with sufficient detail in Chapter 5, p. 62, to clearly demarcate its posi-
tion relative to cold fusion studies. The polywater episode of the 1970s is also
reviewed there for purposes of comparison.
The nearly six years from March 1989 through the end of 1994 provide
the needed perspective. That longer view offered the explanation of why there
were some hundred or more scientists working in the field, and why so many
full-length technical papers continued to be published. Skeptics asserted that
the claims required miracles and that the participants were believers. In gen-
eral, the field was populated by scientists who had carefully examined the evi-
dence for anomalous power and found it persuasive: there were no “believers.”
The fact that a number of scientists had found the evidence for anomalous
power compelling will be seen to be most reasonable, even if other equally
competent scientists had chosen to disagree with them. Furthermore, if the
source of the anomalous power is someday registered in physics textbooks,
those textbooks will contain no miracles, just as contemporary physics text-
books have in them no miracles.

An Orthodox Article
The scientific community quickly dismissed the claims advanced at the Utah
announcement. A prominent physicist, writing five years later, described cor-
rectly how orthodox science in America “. . . a mere five weeks after it began
. . . cast cold fusion right out of the arena of mainstream science.”7 That was
accomplished in the biblical forty days and forty nights after the original dis-
closure in the London Financial Times. At a meeting in Baltimore of the Amer-
ican Physical Society, two scientists declared that the cold fusion experiment
did nothing unusual, that on theoretical grounds it could not do anything un-
usual, and that the two founding chemists were incompetent and possibly de-
lusional. With that event on May 1, 1989, orthodox science in America set its
shoulder against cold fusion research. Within the same year, the two chemists
were the subject of easy ridicule, and within one more year most sources of
further funding for them had disappeared. After Baltimore, any scientist in
the American academy who evinced professional interest in pursuing cold fu-
sion science placed his career in some jeopardy. Aspersions about cold fusion
as a pathological science continued to have their impact twelve years later and
helped greatly to turn science away from its duty to study the claims.
The article about cold fusion studies that was quoted above was pub-
lished in The American Scholar, autumn 1994. It deserves special attention for
 The Significant Claim 17

s u m m at i o n
The Settled Contention (c. 1994): Orthodox and Heterodox Positions
1. The orthodox position of the scientific community insisted that cold fusion
was not proved: in 1989 there was no such thing as cold fusion in the
Fleischmann and Pons experiment. That condition still held six years later.
2. The heterodox position was held by those working in the cold fusion re-
search community. It insisted that claims for the generation of anomalous
power in amounts well beyond what was possible through chemistry were
well validated by varieties of replication and instrumentation in independent
laboratories.
3. a. The orthodox retort to 2 (above) said that each and every experiment,
without exception, purporting to demonstrate anomalous power was
somehow fatally flawed, and that if the flaw were removed, the measured
anomalous power would become zero.
b. Occasionally, the orthodox retort to 2 (above) said that each and every
report, without exception, purporting to describe anomalous power was
somehow poorly peer-reviewed, and that if the report were adequately
reviewed, the declared anomalous power would become zero.
c. Occasionally, the orthodox retort to 2 (above) said that each and every
experimenter, without exception, purporting to have demonstrated anom-
alous power was somehow mentally ailing, and that if the ailment were
cured, the measured anomalous power would become zero.
Example:
An illustration of statements 1, 2, and 3 rolled together was the statement by
Robert L. Park (American Physical Society spokesman) made in September,
1996, “There has been not one iota of progress in seven years.”*
4. Statement 1 (above) was conditionally true. It was true only (1) if the term
cold fusion was taken literally to mean a nuclear fusion process as recognized
in contemporary physics, and only (2) if one overlooked its implied denial
of anomalous power measurements.
5. Statement 2 (above) was true. Statement 2 retained conventional scientific
protocol by asserting nothing about the energy source, whose identification
was properly left to the future obligations of science.
6. Statement 3 (above) was false. Statement 3 was without support in the peer-
reviewed literature, without support in laboratory experience, and without
theoretical hypothesis.
Example:
In March 1989, the University of Utah announced that two chemists had found
a certain electrochemical experiment that ran warmer than could be explained
by all contemporary scientific experience.
* Park, Richard L., Private communication, Sept. 26, 1996.
18 anomalous power

four reasons: for what may be called pride of place, for its provenance, its con-
tent, and its timing. Its place is that of the only dispassionate article written by
an (orthodox) scientist in the decade after 1990; its provenance derives from
the author being a senior member of that institution which contributed much
to the early anathematization of the field; its content exemplifies and amplifies
some of the principal thrusts that constitute the design of this book; its timing
was almost exactly when one might first have perceived that the original mea-
surement of anomalous power had become well validated. The article’s pur-
pose, apparently, was to open a dialog on the legitimacy of cold fusion re-
search within the orthodox community. If that was its purpose, the endeavor
failed. The article is given further consideration in Chapter 23.

The New Discipline

The pervasive question during the first decade was whether or not a new sci-
ence or a new physics was born. My answer to that question involved what
might be seen at a glance as a substantial digression. The investigation exam-
ined anomalous power’s validity by looking at scientific method or protocol.
To appreciate the process of validation required examination of prevailing
methodology. There are several sources in the scientific literature from which
to obtain whatever wisdom was to be found there. Quotes from well recog-
nized sources were not used simply to ornament chapter headings; they illus-
trate the considerable variety of application and discipline that exist in scien-
tific methodology.
It has been said that the quality of papers in cold fusion studies was lax.
These complaints usually came from those who would like to see nothing
printed on the subject. Others of the same ilk wanted only one topic printed:
was there deuterium-deuterium fusion or not? The assertion that the papers
are of poor quality is not supported by an analysis. After four years of studying
the principal papers that pertain to anomalous power and the published criti-
cisms of those papers, I do not perceive any systematic weaknesses in them.
The Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry did not suffer for its role as a princi-
pal outlet for the Fleischmann and Pons papers. Fusion Technology, a promi-
nent publication for cold fusion papers, was castigated by a few for editing
them to special rules, though the rules maintained the integrity of the content.
Some members of its board of editors say that it ruined the publication, but
their arguments were without supportive data.
The most rapid and efficient means of communication was publication of
technical reports in the proceedings of the International Conference on Cold
Fusion (ICCF) meetings held about every sixteen months. I saw a level of crit-
ical commentary directed at presentations that was not unlike what I had seen
 The Significant Claim 19

at conferences on other topics. There were individuals who looked only for ev-
idence of deuterium-deuterium fusion, especially at the early conferences.
When that was lacking, they announced to the press that they had seen noth-
ing new to change their conclusion that cold fusion research was pathological
science. There were also those with outlandish interpretations of the experi-
ments. These were as politely ignored by the conference as they would be at
any professional society meeting.
In all this give and take, the part played by the skeptic is quite separate
from that of the critic. The skeptic’s perspective was located at a considerable
psychological distance from that of the critic. In my text, the two are delin-
eated from one another. The critic is placed in Chapters 5–9 and the skeptic
in Chapter 22.
In 1993, four years after the initial press conference in Utah, the book
Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, by Gary Taubes,
enjoyed considerable success. It soon became clear, though, that, “The Short
Life . . .” was not going to be so short. Nine years later, in 2001, that life con-
tinued with some considerable vigor. The question must be asked, What is go-
ing on there? Answering that question is one of the primary purposes of this
book. We continue with an overview of the rubble.
 c h a p t e r t w o

The Overburden

A t one o’clock on Thursday afternoon, March 23, 1989, a press conference

convened at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Several hundred
people assembled there including university trustees, senior faculty, and mem-
bers of the chemistry department, along with a sizable contingent of the
American national press. Dr. Chase N. Peterson, President of the University,
James Brophy, Vice-President for Research, and Robert Nesbit, Dean, Faculty
of Science and professor of geology, University of Southampton, England
were on the dais. At the center was Dr. B. Stanley Pons, research professor of
chemistry and Chairman of the Department of Chemistry, University of
Utah. Beside him was Dr. Martin Fleischmann, research professor of chemis-
try, University of Utah, research professor of electrochemistry, University of
Southampton, and Fellow of the Royal Society.
A press release was available from the university public relations office.
Peterson and Brophy made statements of a general nature pointing out that
the experimental claims to be announced will have to be evaluated over the
next several months and years by the scientific community.
Dr. Pons was then invited to speak. He explained how he and Dr.
Fleischmann developed an electrochemical experiment in which a deuterium-
deuterium type of nuclear fusion reaction was sustained at room temperature.
Fleischmann followed with his affirmation that a sustained fusion reaction
had been achieved, and he held up for viewing the special type of “test tube”
they used. It was a double walled, Dewar flask that permitted them to measure
the evolving heat.
Questions were invited from the press and they prompted some memora-
ble answers. Fleischmann responded to a question that suggested their experi-

20
 The Overburden 21

ment was “kitchen chemistry,” saying, “It’s a pretty big kitchen.” To another
question, he commented that the neutron particle radiation observed was, “[a
factor of ] a billion times less than what is experienced with the nuclear reac-
tions of physics. So we have a relatively low rate of production of neutrons.”1
It is of some interest that Pons seemed quite enamored of the specific fusion
claim, while Fleischmann appeared sure-footed in going well beyond it to ar-
ticulate the hypothesis of an unknown nuclear process.
The formal conference was followed by a tour of the small laboratory.
The guests saw several cells, each in its Dewar flask. Each cell (flask) was filled
nearly to the top with an electrically conductive liquid (electrolyte). Sub-
merged in it were the two metal electrodes of platinum and palladium. Plastic
tubes and insulated wires led from the cell tops to an array of electronic equip-
ment supported in steel frames behind the baths. The press conference ended
less than two hours after it had begun.
The press release2 staked out a number of claims. A principal one con-
cerned the source of the energy:

[They] have . . . created a sustained nuclear fusion reaction . . . This

generation of heat continues over long periods, and is so large that it
can only be attributed to a nuclear process . . . reactions lead to the
generation of neutrons and tritium . . . The device . . . produces an
energy output higher than the energy input.

The release offered no specific numbers for heat output or for power gain.
Prior to the announcement, the University of Utah filed several patent
applications on the work of Fleischmann and Pons.
Unfortunately, the technical paper that Fleischmann and Pons had com-
pleted and that was accepted for publication the previous day was not avail-
able for distribution. The omission constituted a breach of protocol, as did
their failure to brief their colleagues in the chemistry and physics departments
beforehand.
Their paper, in the form of a Preliminary Note, was published in the
Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry on April 10.3 Its length was severely re-
stricted as the purpose of the note format was to obtain rapid publication. It
described the results of four kinds of experiments that they had conducted
over the previous five years. It apparently was completed with great haste as it
had many errors. The authors soon circulated an errata sheet, which the Jour-
nal published on May 10.*
It was correct to say that, by this experiment, Fleischmann and Pons

* The errors included leaving off the name of Marvin Hawkins as the paper’s third author. They
somehow managed to include his name in endnote five, where the future, unpublished, full-
length article was referenced.
22 anomalous power

s u m m at i o n
The Original Claims of March 1989
It is worthwhile to list Fleischmann and Pons’s original claims announced in the
press release and in the press conference.
1. They had achieved a sustained deuterium-deuterium fusion at room temper-
ature in a bench-top chemical experiment.
2. In tests lasting many hours, more excess heat output was detected than could
be accounted for by known chemical properties.
3. Observed neutron radiation was [a factor of ] a billion times too small for
conventional fusion to be the source of the heat energy.*
4. They had achieved twenty watts of heat generation per cubic centimeter
(cm3) of metal cathode (palladium).
5. A tritium buildup was measured (using a Beckman scintillation counter).
6. A gamma-ray spectrum† was measured emanating from the water bath in
which the experimental cell was immersed.
The Preliminary Note contained further details on the extent of their work. Its
claims were as follows.
1. They had achieved more than ten watts of continuous heat generation per
cubic centimeter of palladium cathode during an experiment lasting for
more than 120 hours.‡
2. The accumulated anomalous energy was in excess of one kilowatt-hour for
each cubic centimeter (cm3) of palladium cathode.
3. Neutron emission from the cell was identified by the gamma-rays that the
neutrons generated in the water bath.
4. The intensity of radiation was about 40,000 neutron particles per second for
one of the cells.
5. Tritium accumulated in the electrolyte to the amount of 100 radioactive
counts per milliliter per minute.
6. Since little of the heat energy came from known nuclear reactions, the hy-
pothesis was offered that other nuclear processes were involved.
* Nuclear reactions often emit radiation consisting of neutron particles moving at high velocity.
† High-energy gamma-rays are sometimes emitted from nuclear reactions. The implication of this
claim is that the cell is emitting neutrons that interact with the water, thus generating the gamma radi-
ation. The spectrum is the distribution of energies in the radiation.
‡ For comparison purposes, the smallest burner on many electric stoves in the Unites States operates
at a maximum (glowing orange) heating level of 1,500 watts. The author estimates the burner element
as having approximately 24 cubic centimeters of volume, giving a heat level of 62 watts per cm3. So the
claimed heat (for each cubic centimeter) of cathode rod is about one-sixth that of a stove burner run-
ning at full heat.
 The Overburden 23

claimed to be the first to discover anomalous power, continuous cold D-D fu-
sion, and the profound matter of nine orders of magnitude inconsistency be-
tween the two.* They resolved that inconsistency by advancing the hypothesis
that the heat was the product of an unknown nuclear process.
The claim presented in the Preliminary Note that neutrons had been
measured was discarded by the scientific community within a few months.
Certainly Fleischmann and Pons were wrong to attempt to defend it as they
did. They should have formally disowned that part of the note. They went on
to make a new set of measurements during the remainder of 1989 and again
claimed the detection of neutrons, but at an exceedingly low level.
Their helium-four† measurements were done in the winter of 1989 as a
limited experiment without the controls and documentation required for pub-
lication. As a result, it was of benefit only to them, and could not be presented
to the scientific community for evaluation. Claims for the evolution of tritium
were done quickly in the few weeks prior to the announcement and, also, were
not adequately documented for publication. Fleischmann and Pons did no
more research to detect tritium. They looked unsuccessfully for helium for
several more months before leaving that search to others.

Orthodox Reaction
Reactions to the announcement were of two kinds. The general reaction was
one of wonderment within the scientific community. Unconditional disbelief
was openly expressed by many scientists, particularly by nuclear physicists.
Most other scientists did not offer judgements. Their comments were of the
wait and see variety.
Professor H. W. Lewis (a physicist at the University of California at Santa
Barbara) immediately published a brief article that insisted “It was against the
laws of nature,” and “we poor mortals can do nothing about that.”4 Within
days, Dr. John A. Wheeler, a prestigious American nuclear theorist, compared
the Utah claims with those of a turn of the century French scientist whose
claims were found to be entirely the result of self-deception.5 A physicist at the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, California, said quite
simply, “It’s bull—.”6 And so it went with a number of physicists expressing

* In the phrase anomalous power, anomalous means that the measured heat power is beyond the
current experience of science. Use of the term power indicates that the flow of heat, as well as
the heat per se, is of special interest.
† There are two isotopes of helium that are of interest. Helium-three has two protons and only
one neutron. Helium-four has two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus. These are written
as 3He and 4He respectively. Helium-four is the common type that is present in air in slight
quantities and is used to fill balloons.
24 anomalous power

quick, absolute judgements. Those opinions were mostly based upon a con-
sideration of the precepts of nuclear science, where the release of heat was ac-
companied by prodigious particle radiation that was lethal at the level of a
fraction of a watt of power.
The plasma (hot fusion) physicists naturally dominated the response to
the claim of nuclear fusion. Hot fusion occurs when the deuterium and tri-
tium forms of hydrogen were confined at extremely high temperatures. Fu-
sion, as they understood it, occurred only with the availability of highly ener-
getic (hot) particles. The claim of fusion at room temperature was referred to
as cold fusion. Use of the word fusion placed the Utah announcement in their
area of expertise. The broad-audience scientific journals chose physicists to
conduct their response. To a considerable extent, the die was cast during these
first days. Eight years later, Scientific American magazine was still calling upon
fusion physicists to interpret research in the field of cold fusion studies.7
During the spring of 1989, response to the published paper included the
complaint that no control experiments were performed. John Maddox, editor
of Nature complained in the April 27, 1989, issue, “. . . the Utah group . . .
had [not], before seeking publication, carried out the rudimentary control ex-
periment of running their electrolytic cells with ordinary (light) rather than
heavy water.”8 Contrarily, Fleischmann was enticed by the evidence for large
amounts of unaccountable power in the form of heat without radiation, rather
than by low level fusion. He suggested replacing the palladium electrode with
an exhausted one or with a platinum rod for a control experiment, rather than
changing the type of water.* As evaluation of the claims began, the first pro-
found misunderstanding was established in this subtle way. This topic war-
rants more detail in Chapter 9, p. 112, but the confusion between the two ap-
plications of control experiments was never resolved.
At MIT, Professor R. D. Petrasso examined Fleischmann and Pons’s paper
carefully because the displayed spectrum for neutron evidence did not seem to
be an allowable shape. He presented his doubts to the science community and
Fleischmann and Pons had to back down. This undoing over the nuclear mea-
surements hurt their scientific credibility enormously. The matter is developed
more fully in Chapter 8, starting on page 102.
By the summer of 1989, with Fleischmann and Pons openly ridiculed,
the many failed heat experiments, and the dismissal of their nuclear measure-
ments, the two chemists were wholly on the defensive. Yet to come was an
official government report setting government policy to rule out their work
and claims, and a coup de grâce in the form of a long lampoon about them in

* Fleischmann says that when Nature magazine complained that no control experiments were
made, he wrote to them about this particular experiment, but the magazine never published
his letter.
 The Overburden 25

the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The orthodox scientific establishment
assumed with good cause that the episode would disappear in a few months to
become a footnote in the annals of science.
But that was not the end. During the summer, laboratories in Menlo
Park, California, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, finished anomalous heat ex-
periments that corroborated those of Fleischmann and Pons. More such suc-
cessful experiments continued to be reported over the ensuing months and
years to sustain the most enormous conflict in basic science of the twentieth
century.

The Overburden
One result of this large public conflict was an overburden of debris, a terminal
moraine from the avalanche of failure and skepticism. This overburden, Fig-
ure 2.1, consisted of ten layers of debris piled high upon the evidence for the
claim of anomalous power. The order of the ten items moves from the most
distant in generality to the most immediate.
The name “cold fusion” stuck to the Fleischmann and Pons experiment
from the first instant even though excess heat and the lack of dangerous radia-
tion were the phenomena of social and scientific importance. The term reso-
nated in the public domain because of its familiarity to the public and to sci-
ence buffs and reporters. “Pathological science,” as a second name, also stuck
because it answered to the fears of professional scientists. It mattered not at all
that it did not follow Langmuir’s stated criteria. Finally, in the public domain,
superficial evaluation by a government panel nearly buried this emerging new
field of study.
At the level of scientific analysis, things did not go much better. Normal
scientific protocols were distorted beyond recognition. As a substitute for eval-
uation of the heat measurements to see if they could withstand examination
for procedural error by experts, a cry went up that the heat measurement did
not correspond with the nuclear measurements. Twelve years later the scien-
tific community is silent. Those well-made heat measurements have not been
examined and reported to the scientific community. Meanwhile, two measure-
ments showing an exceedingly rapid expansion of the universe has set the cos-
mologist’s house on a roar.
It has been argued that the experiment is not sufficiently repeatable, while
during these same years the science community proudly displayed the first
cloning of a mammal in an experiment that produced one success out of 227
tries and a wait of eighteen months for confirmation in an independent labo-
ratory.
The publication of Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetry in peer-reviewed
26 anomalous power

figure 2.1 Ten items make up the overburden borne by the evidence that supports the ex-
istence of anomalous power. The listing progresses from the general to the particular.

journals greatly dismayed the skeptics because peer review was supposed to be
the gateway to scientific respectability. They pointedly ignored such presenta-
tion and abrogated professional standards by rumor-mongering the notion
that the peer review was lax. Never did they bring a proper professional re-
sponse to these published articles by pointing out evident error in an article
which was then submitted for itself to pass peer review and publication.
The combination, at Baltimore, of outrageous personal attack with the
false insinuation that the Utah experiment had been reconstructed at Caltech
and thereby found lacking in rigorous design, added up to the heaviest part of
the overburden. The ten items constitute a partial table of contents for this
book. Those were the principal matters that must be understood if the field
 The Overburden 27

was to be sorted out and appreciated. Only when the rubble has been moved
out can the anomalous power evidence take its proper place.
After the debris was removed and our subject uncovered, anomalous
power provided three topics for those in the field to pursue. These three mat-
ters were to find a more efficient experiment for scientists to work with, one
that was faster to respond and more easily replicable. Next, there was the need
to determine the extent of the phenomenon (i.e., did the process occur in bio-
logical systems), and finally, there was the intellectual obligation to find the
source of the heat energy.
By way of scientific introduction, a few words about the atom are appro-
priate. The atom is the basic building block of all materials. From high school
science, recall that the atom has a tiny core called the nucleus and orbiting
electrons at a great distance from that core. The proton has a positive charge,
and the orbiting electron has an equal and negative electrical charge. The
atom normally contains an equal number of protons and electrons so that it is
electrically neutral.
There are about one hundred different atomic types as elements. This ac-
count of the cold fusion episode will have an interest in only the first two, hy-
drogen and helium plus the heavy precious metal palladium. As was men-
tioned earlier, there are three isotopic forms of hydrogen. They are named
hydrogen (H), deuterium (D), and tritium (T). A nuclear reaction, called fu-
sion, occurs when two deuterium atoms combine to form a helium atom, and
a great deal of energy is released.*
As radium was discovered to be warmer than the ambient temperature, so
Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment runs warmer than it ought to run. The
measurement was difficult—an MIT scientist swore it was more difficult than
plasma physics—so our first look was a qualitative one. The key to a successful
measurements claim resided in a precise design of the instrument or cell,
which was configured not so much to enhance anomalous power production
as it was to make possible its precise measurement. The Fleischmann and Pons
cell may reasonably be thought of as a newly designed heat measuring instru-
ment or calorimeter.

B. Stanley Pons
The cold fusion episode was an enormous heresy. No matter which way you
look at it, a lot of people were confused. What sort of persons were B. Stanley

* This statement is sufficient for the technical depth of this story in matters that are nuclear. In
more detail, deuterium-deuterium fusion produces tiny amounts of helium-four (a rare prod-
uct), and large and equal amounts of helium-three and tritium plus protons.
28 anomalous power

Pons and Martin Fleischmann to bring this controversy upon science, and
America, not to mention themselves?
They first met in 1975 when Pons arrived at the University of
Southampton in England, where Fleischmann was head of the Department of
Chemistry. Pons had come to evaluate it as a place to reenter academia by
working for his doctoral degree after eight years in the world of business man-
agement. It was a large department, so Fleischmann did not have much time
to give to Pons, and did not work with him while he was there. Fleischmann
introduced him to Professor Alan Bewick, who was his teacher, mentor, and
thesis advisor.
Pons grew up in the rural town of Valdese, North Carolina. The town
had a population of about 4,000 and had been settled at the turn of the
twentieth century by Waldensian immigrants from northern Italy. In the
United States, the Waldensians were affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.
In northern Italy, their sect was seven centuries old. Their communities were
mostly located in the Italian Piedmont and in the valleys of the Cottian Alps.
The sect originated during the twelfth century as a reformation movement
against the Catholic Church. At an early point, eighty of its members were
burned at the stake for their heresy. The Waldensians acquired permanent al-
lies with the emergence of the religious reformation movement in the six-
teenth century. In the early nineteenth century, Victor Emmanuel II tried to
drive them out of Italy, but they found protection under Charles Emmanuel
where they survived bloody persecutions and emerged into the modern cli-
mate of somewhat greater religious tolerance. This heritage seems to have be-
queathed to Pons a fierce tenacity to stand his ground when confronted.
The young Pons graduated from Wake Forest University in 1965. He
continued in the academic world with graduate studies at the University of
Michigan for two years. Sensibly enough, he left his graduate studies and
moved into the family business, Pons Enterprises, a textile manufacturing
conglomerate. After eight years of business management, he was restless for a
more intellectually demanding pursuit. He decided to return to academia to
get an advanced degree in chemistry. By going to an English university, he
could avoid the extra step of obtaining a masters degree before starting on his
Ph.D. studies. Besides, Southampton was reported to have the best electro-
chemistry department in Europe if not in the world.
When Pons entered the chemistry building at Southampton, he saw that
they were clearing a corridor of people, so that it could be used for an experi-
ment. A crossbow was set up at one end, and a target of straw bales at the
other. Attached to the arrow was a narrow tube of glass called a capillary that
was heated to a red glow. The purpose of the corridor-long exercise was to
make a micro-capillary tube. Firing the bow would cause the glass tube to be
stretched narrow and thin before it cooled. Fast stretching was needed, and
 The Overburden 29

the crossbow could do just that.9 With that unconventional initiation into
the Southampton practice of “chemistry,” Pons was persuaded to stay. Being
much older than the other students, and independently wealthy, he was an
unusual student.
At Southampton, his thesis work was a mixture of sub-disciplines. He
started with some organic electrochemistry, some spectroscopy on electrode
surfaces, and went on to do (Fourier) transform spectroscopy, these being
methods to measure chemical reaction processes on electrode surfaces. After
receiving his doctorate degree in 1978, he went back to Michigan at Ann Ar-
bor and shortly moved on to a position in Edmonton, Canada. In 1983, he
moved again, this time to the University of Utah where he achieved the title of
full professor in 1986, and department head in 1988.

Martin Fleischmann
Martin Fleischmann spent much of his professional life at the center of scien-
tific controversies of his own making. He was accomplished in the practice of
surface catalyzed electrochemistry, a particularly difficult field due to the recal-
citrance of catalytic processes.
He was born in Carlsbad, in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, on March
29, 1927, and was raised as a nominal Roman Catholic. He grew up in pre-
World War II Czechoslovakia with middle class parents, themselves cultural
remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During the 1930s and 1940s, his
family clan was split asunder, politically. His family connections in Czechoslo-
vakia were thoroughly disrupted by the German occupation followed by the
subsequent Soviet occupation.
The Gestapo arrested Martin at the age of eleven. His father, a hero dur-
ing World War I and later an attorney, was abused by the Gestapo to the point
of disablement during those years. After the occupation of the Sudetenland in
October 1938, the family (mother, father, Martin, and older sister, Suzanne),
were rescued by a WWI comrade of his father’s. They escaped in a taxi to
the unoccupied part of Czechoslovakia before the “protection” of Slovakia was
accomplished by its occupation. During that brief interregnum, it was ar-
ranged in a fashion not uncommon in those times for Martin to be adopted
by an English bachelor. His sister was adopted by another person. This ma-
neuver enabled the family to move to England in March of 1939, just before
the deluge.
Martin had been well educated as a child, and entered the British school
system at Worthing. After graduation from secondary school, he competed for
and obtained a place at the Imperial College of the University of London. He
obtained his baccalaureate in 1948, and entered the graduate school. After just
30 anomalous power

two years, he completed his requirements for a Doctorate in Chemistry in

1950.
As a student, he brought a strong overlay of mathematics to his chemis-
try, an unusual characteristic for a chemist, and one that was to remain typical
of his work during his career. Distinguished Professor of Electrochemistry at
Texas A&M University John O’M. Bockris tells the tale from their days at
Imperial College of Fleischmann’s propensity for mathematics. When visitors
stayed overly long, Bockris offered to help them with their questions by
calling in one of the school’s students to further clarify the discussion.
Fleischmann, by way of explanation, gladly covered the chalkboard with dif-
ferential equations and such, until the visitors allowed as how it was necessary
for them to be on their way. Fleischmann’s skill with mathematics would play
an important part in the cold fusion episode.
For his thesis, Fleischmann studied the transport of hydrogen gas
through a thin platinum metal foil. This was also prescient of the controversy.
He was recognized as an intellectually expansive scientist. Bockris, who was
two years ahead of him, was his lecturer in only one course. The two of them
were looked upon as just a little intellectually wild, but they were also seen as
especially promising products of the school.
After graduation, Fleischmann married Sheila Flinn, whom he had met
three years earlier. They had three children, and by 1995 the family had ex-
panded to a count of seven grandchildren.
One of Fleischmann’s most noticeable traits dating from his school days
is his ability to extemporaneously articulate what needs to be said even under
the most trying of circumstances. This trait indicates an awareness of his
larger circumstances as others see them, a rare gift. In the adversity that fol-
lowed the Utah announcement, a single cross word never emerged from his
lips; never did he slur those who would drive him out of America. He was an
invited guest lecturer for the British Association for the Advancement of Sci-
ence in August 1992, at Southampton. During this lecture, he was able to
speak of the events of the previous three and a half years without rancor.
From Imperial College, Fleischmann went to Durham University.* His
impact on the school was considerable. When he arrived, most electrochemis-
try was done by measuring the current and voltage applied to the electrolytic
cell. Fleischmann brought to the laboratory much more in the way of
instrumentation. This improvement was widely recognized, and led to a
rejuvenation of the field. All in all, he distinguished himself during those
years.

* Durham had two campuses in those days. The north campus was at Newcastle and the south
campus was at Durham. Each had its own (independent) chemistry department. His assign-
ment was at the Newcastle campus, and he recalls that he visited the Durham campus only
once. These are separate schools today; the Newcastle campus has become Newcastle Univer-
sity.
 The Overburden 31

At Southampton University, Sir Graham Hills, chairman of the depart-

ment of chemistry, had the task before him of building up the chemistry de-
partment. He was looking for an outstanding leader for the electrochemistry
position. He cobbled together a named chair and an annual sum of research
funds sufficient to the purpose. He made an offer to Bockris, his first choice.
By that time, Bockris had moved to the University of Pennsylvania in Phila-
delphia and declined the offer.
In 1967, Hills invited Fleischmann to accept the position of Faraday Pro-
fessor of Electrochemistry. Fleischmann accepted. His charge, when he arrived
at Southampton, was to build a world class electrochemistry group. Eight
years later, an American named B. Stanley Pons would select Southampton for
his postgraduate studies for exactly that reason, and he would be followed two
years later by a New Zealander named Mike McKubre, who had also selected
the school for that reason.
Fleischmann received many major awards that were available in the field
during his years at Southampton. From 1970 to 1972, he was president of the
International Society of Electrochemists. In 1985, while no longer employed
at the University, though he continued to carry the title of professor, he be-
came a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the most prestigious honor for
a scientist that England had to offer.
When financial support to the University was reduced by the government
in 1983, Fleischmann took early retirement. However, his research did not let
up. He maintained an active professional life consulting with his peers at
Harwell, England (the British nuclear research facility), and at the University
of Utah, Salt Lake City, with Pons.
The credentials of Fleischmann and Pons as electrochemists were excel-
lent. Stanley Pons was a prolific author and head of the Department of Chem-
istry at the University of Utah. He enjoyed the recognition and respect of his
peers. Martin Fleischmann achieved world recognition within his profession
for his own contributions and for the high caliber of electrochemistry research
at the University of Southampton.
An old topic with Fleischmann was that of loading deuterium into palla-
dium to an extreme degree to see what might happen inside the lattice. It
was one that he had been pondering for more than a decade before he first vis-
ited Utah. Each of the two chemists had done extensive work in surface cata-
lyzed electrochemistry during their careers. It would be hard to select two sci-
entists more qualified than they to try their cold fusion experiment. Their
sophisticated development of the necessary calorimetry, along with modern
data reduction techniques, gave them a surprisingly good control of their ex-
periment. They prevailed when heat proved to be the principal signature of
the experiment.
They published eight major papers on their measurements of anomalous
power in scientific journals between July 1990 and 1995, and these have easily
32 anomalous power

withstood the published criticism. These publications stand as a definitive

statement describing the experiment they announced at the University of
Utah in March 1989. With that, their initial experimental work in cold fusion
research undertaken at the University of Utah was complete. In 1995, Martin
Fleischmann, sixty-eight-years old, retired to his home in Tisbury, England,
for a second time. In 1998, Stanley Pons retired to a farm in Provence, France.
Professionally, Fleischmann and Pons were dissimilar in many ways.
Fleischmann, besides being a bit older, had about him a grandfatherly de-
meanor towards his graduate and postgraduate school students that they
found enchanting. Also, he was singular, not only in the many honors he had
acquired, but in his broad command of the several fields of his specialties. In
discussions with associates, he usually offered the summation that moved the
subject matter to where it should go next. He was the one to lay out the par-
ticulars of a research program to be undertaken. When it was time to decide
what the next step would be, he usually carried the day.
Fleischmann and Pons were quite similar in one aspect. Each had learned
from his patrimony how to contend with adversity.

Conventional Science
For Fleischmann, the topics of electrolysis and of hydrogen dissolved in metal
were old ones. He was well aware that chemists had studied the nature of elec-
trically conductive solutions for more than one hundred years. Even then,
these electrolytic solutions were the subject of global, scientific controversy.
He had used electrolytic cells throughout his career.
The cells use two metal electrodes in a liquid solution. Of the two, it is
the cathode, or negative terminal that is of most interest. It is there that elec-
trons emerge from the electrode and participate in chemical reactions on its
surface. One of these reactions breaks down the water to make hydrogen,
some of which enters the electrode, but most of it forms bubbles that rise to
the surface of the electrolyte and escape. Certain useful chemical reactions can
only happen on the surface of a cathode, where the electrons move out from
the cathode surface and attach themselves to an atomic structure that is mo-
bile. (Batteries are one form of this type of cell, using various metals and elec-
trolytes.) Fleischmann and Pons’s cold fusion cell was one more variation on
an old theme for them. In this respect, their experiment consisted of the most
conventional sort of well established laboratory technology.
The ability of particular metals to hold, or dissolve, enormous quantities
of hydrogen was well known for a long time. This property was used industri-
ally to purify hydrogen by separating it from other gasses that do not dissolve
in those metals. The science of hydrogen in palladium goes back to 1870.
 The Overburden 33

Two German experimenters, Dr. Fritz Paneth and Dr. Kurt Peters,10 ex-
perimented with hydrogen in palladium in 1926 and ultimately detected he-
lium that they believed had come from a fusing together of the nuclei of two
hydrogen atoms. Their research techniques were sophisticated and ingenious.
Within a year, however, they concluded that the helium atoms they detected
came not from fusion, but had emerged from the inside surface of their glass
containers. The helium they detected was merely contamination. The labora-
tory glass had absorbed helium from the air prior to the experiment and re-
leased it into the experiment.
After WWII, Paneth worked at the Durham campus of the University of
Durham, England at the same time that Fleischmann started his career at the
University’s Newcastle campus. Fleischmann never met Paneth.
In 1927, John Tandberg, chief engineer at the Electrolux Corp. in Swe-
den, read of Paneth’s work. He made a similar claim of fusion with an experi-
ment involving an electrolytic solution and palladium metal, a direct historical
precursor of the Fleischmann and Pons work. Tandberg believed he had
achieved the creation of helium by means of hydrogen fusion, and filed a pat-
ent claim on it. The patent was refused, and nothing came of his work though
he persisted in playing with it for several decades.
Fleischmann’s interest in the peculiar properties of hydrogen dissolved in
palladium was piqued in 1947 when he came across a 1929 paper that re-
ported a fascinating experiment by Alfred Cöhn, professor of physics at the
University at Göttingen, Germany.11 Cöhn saturated one end of a palladium
wire with hydrogen gas. He found that under the influence of a voltage placed
end to end on the wire, the hydrogen inside the wire migrated along the
length of the wire.
Cöhn surmised that, inside the metal, the hydrogen atom’s one electron
must drift away to join the other electrons that move about freely. The nu-
cleus was left “bare,” so to speak, a proton without an orbiting electron to give
it atomic structure. The proton nucleus of that hydrogen atom was a thou-
sand times smaller than the atom it had previously been part of and it carried
a positive charge. When Cöhn placed a voltage across the ends of the wire, the
positively charged proton migrated towards the wire end that was attached to
the negative terminal of the battery. Cöhn concluded that when the hydrogen
dissolved into the wire, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom was present as a
proton.
To the young Fleischmann, it was a wonder. What possibilities might
there be in manipulating the nuclei of hydrogen atoms inside palladium
metal?
 c h a p t e r t h r e e

The Enigma of Discovery

I t is no longer certain whether it was a fall day in 1983, or a spring day in

1984 when Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons talked shop while they
hiked up Millcreek Canyon, a rocky gully that climbs into the foothills of the
Wasatch mountains east of Salt Lake City, Utah. Fleischmann was retired
from Southampton University, and had started to visit Pons regularly. He was
granted the title of research professor in the chemistry department, University
of Utah, as a visiting scholar. The relationship between them was both profes-
sional and personal. Fleischmann resided in the Pons’s house for weeks at a
time where they shared interests in skiing, hiking, and cooking. They co-
authored dozens of papers on a wide variety of subjects while working to-
gether during those years.
Fleischmann’s doctoral thesis addressed itself to the topic of hydrogen
transport through platinum. His career involved measurement of surface
chemical reactions in electrolytic experiments. At Southampton, he had gath-
ered together the components for an experiment in the early 1970s wherein
hydrogen gas would be loaded into palladium metal in extreme amount. He
had chosen the deuterium form of hydrogen for this experiment to see if
nuclear fusion might be triggered. His early attempt at the experiment was
abandoned before it began for lack of time and attention. After 1983, Fleisch-
mann once again had the opportunity to try it in his pretense of retirement.
He and Pons had discussed this experiment earlier. Now, while they
climbed the barren canyon to its upper end, they started to define its parame-
ters. As Fleischmann explains it, he first understood in 1947 that when one

34
 The Enigma of Discovery 35

of the three isotopes of hydrogen dissolves into a metal lattice*, it ceases to be

a normal atom. Unlike other atomic elements, it becomes just a nucleus.1
This characteristic does not tell you what will happen, but it does give the
experimentalist something to play with.
The discussion lasted during the hike, and through the following night in
the Pons’s kitchen. Fleischmann identified four experimental systems that
might be tried and some of these had sub-system variations. In one of them, a
potential was placed across a metal loaded with hydrogen gas. The second was
the electrolytic cell that has become the subject of this account. (He does not
talk about the other two.) They chose the second, the cell, to work with.
In it, the hydrogen nucleus is moved through a modest potential to ob-
tain the equivalent of a large amount of compression inside the cathode
electrode. The metal cathode is composed of tiny crystal grains of the metal,
and each crystal is a molecular lattice structure. “Whatever you say,” says
Fleischmann, “you can achieve conditions in a lattice through electrolytic ac-
tion which you could never achieve in any other way known.”2
So the experimental concept was born. An electrolytic cell was designed
where the nucleus of the deuterium isotope of hydrogen would be highly con-
centrated (loaded) in a palladium cathode in order to see what happened.†
Experimental work was started in Pons’s basement, but that proved an unsuit-
able place for many reasons. Before the end of 1984, their work was moved to
what was then designated the basement level (now called the first level) of the
north Henry Eyring chemistry building, Room 1113.

The Meltdown
An early experiment consisted of a one-centimeter cube of palladium sus-
pended in a flask of heavy water containing dissolved lithium metal. Pons’s
son Joey, who did not have technical training, was a quick, intelligent helper,
and he worked for his father as a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice. By the late fall of
1984, the experiment had been running continuously for several months. At
one point, Pons raised the current from its nominal rate of 0.75 amperes to
1.5 amperes, and at the end of the day, sent Joey to turn off the current. They
left the laboratory for the night.
Joey came in the next morning and found the experiment in a shambles.

* The atoms in a metal are arranged, as in a crystal, in lines and ranks. This structure is referred
to as a lattice. This lattice structure effects the behavior of the atoms, electrons, and protons
when they move about.
† There is no implication here that this reasoning is correct. Many discoveries have been made
by looking for one thing and quite unexpectedly finding something else of value.
36 anomalous power

Fleischmann and Pons reported in their Preliminary Note, “. . . a substan-

tial portion of the [palladium] fused (melting point 1,554C), part of it
vapourised, and the cell and contents and a part of the fume cupboard hous-
ing the experiment were destroyed.”3
Kevin Ashley was a graduate student of Pons in the chemistry depart-
ment. He witnessed the scene the morning after the meltdown. “This one
morning I walk in, the door is open and Pons and Fleischmann are in the
room with Joey. The lab is a mess and there is particulate dust in the air. On
this lab bench are the remnants of an experiment. The bench was one of those
black top benches that was made of very, very hard material. There were cabi-
nets under one end of the bench, but the experiment was near the middle
where there was nothing underneath. I was astonished that there was a hole
through the thing. The hole was about a foot in diameter. Under the hole was
a pretty good sized pit in the concrete floor. It may have been as much as four
inches deep.
“What really surprised me,” Ashley continued, “was that Stan and Martin
Fleischmann had these looks on their faces as though they were the cat that
had just swallowed the canary. They were clearly not displeased with this
mess. They were happy about what had happened. I was rather surprised by
this; very surprised by this.”4 Ashley was also able to identify the room in
which the event took place as Room 1113 in the north Henry Eyring Building
(HEB).
Other persons who were members of the chemistry department during
these years have helped to identify the time at which it happened. The build-
ing of the south HEB was sufficiently completed during 1984 that the chem-
istry department was able to move its offices and laboratories over the Christ-
mas holiday season of 1984 which ran from December 7 to January 2 that
year. At that time, the cold fusion laboratory was moved into Room 1113.
The “meltdown” occurred sometime during the next two months.
Fleischmann and Pons were both elated and chagrined by this event.
They knew well how to compute the energy content in hydrogen escaping
from palladium. The energy released was much too great to be accounted for
by that phenomenon. If it was not a chemical effect then where could so
much energy come from? They had succeeded with their little experiment;
they also realized the risk they had inadvertently taken. They say they scanned
the area with some sort of detector device to see if a dangerous level of radio-
activity was present. They thought they saw some increase above the usual
background levels, but they concluded that the nuclear process that delivered
such high levels of energy was largely without radioactivity. That lack of evi-
dent radioactivity was parallel to their later claim of only a few neutrons.
After the accident, they modified the experiment so as to use a flat sheet
or small diameter palladium rod cathode. These shapes avoided the center
 The Enigma of Discovery 37

part of a cubic structure (the bulk), which tended to heat up much faster than
the surface.
To continue this work in an orderly way, an experimental cell had to be
designed. Would it be the size of a liter jar, or would it be the size of a thim-
ble? Scaling was of importance, as it would determine costs. It would also de-
termine whether any experimental effect would be large enough to be detect-
able. One would expect that primitive experiments were tried during these
initial years to establish scaling, but there is no available record. As for costs,
they could not possibly bring such an idea to any funding agency. “You expect
to achieve nuclear fusion in a high school chemistry experiment?” They would
be laughed out of the agency.
Would the design be a cell open to the atmosphere or would it be com-
pletely enclosed? The costs of working with a closed cell were avoided by oper-
ating with an open cell at a high electric current. Any effects from the two
bubbling gases recombining together would be negligible. Gradually, the opti-
mal design emerged. The choice of a Dewar (double-walled) vacuum flask was
to prevent heat conduction out of the sides and bottom of the cell. Heat flow
out of the cell would be by means of radiant emission to the bath water. A sil-
ver plating was added later to the inside near the top and continued down to
below the level of the electrolyte. This limited heat loss through the top, and
made the heat loss value less dependent on the changing liquid level. The
quality of the vacuum was improved to a hard vacuum. The flask’s shape was
narrow and tall on the inside so that the bubbling action of the deuterium and
oxygen emerging from the surface of the cathode and anode served to keep the
electrolyte well mixed.* The Dewar’s vacuum insulation and the effervescent
bubbling action from the anode and cathode rods kept the temperature of the
electrolyte sufficiently uniform to permit accurate heat flow measurements.
An overall design goal was to make the mass (amount of material) in the
cell as small as possible so that temperature change would require a minimum
of energy. That meant using a flask of small volume so that the heat source
could more easily drive the temperature up. The cell would give out a strong
reaction signature, and possibly enhance hidden reactions that might respond
to rapid temperature change. A liquid electrolyte filled the flask above its sil-
vered neck. The platinum anode wire was wound on glass support rods, and
the palladium cathode was suspended at the center bottom of the flask. This
geometry produced a uniform electrical pressure on the surface of the cathode.
This pressure would force deuterium nuclei into the metal without allowing it
to escape.

* The inside diameter of the silvered Dewar flask was approximately 3.30 cm, about equal to the
length of a standard paper clip.
38 anomalous power

The Cell
Fleischmann and Pons decided on a high level of electrical current as a mini-
mum level of activity for their cell: about 65 milliamperes for each square cen-
timeter (cm2) of cathode surface. They would drive the cathode hard. The ob-
jective was to override small error effects with a large experimental outcome.
The electrolyte was heavy water with lithium metal dissolved in it. The cell is
shown in Figure 3.1.
The thermistor (for temperature measurement) and the calibration heater
(for inserting electrical heat pulses) are used to calibrate and monitor the rate
of radiant heat transmission by the cell to the surrounding water bath.
To “run” the cell, the power supply’s positive terminal is connected to the
platinum anode and the negative terminal to the cathode. Ions, which actually
constitute the current flow, move between the cathode and the anode through
the electrolyte solution. When electric current flows through the cell, the wa-
ter molecules break up into two gasses. Oxygen is produced at the anode (+)
and deuterium at the cathode (−). These gasses bubble up to the surface and
leave the flask. The energy that was put into the electrochemical reaction that
separated the water molecules into the two gasses is carried away from the cell
with the gasses. Many students have done similar electrolysis experiments in
freshman chemistry classes. Electrolyte solution is added each day to make up
for what was bubbled away during the previous twenty four hours.
Once the cell current is turned on, it ordinarily operates continuously day
and night for weeks until the end of its life.* Experimenters often try to find
an optimum adjustment to the current, a change of its amplitude instantly, or
slowly, up or down, once or repeatedly. The purpose in this wiggling is to
cause non-equilibrium conditions inside the cathode.
The cell flask is usually submerged up to its neck in a water bath that is
held at a constant, lower temperature. This difference causes heat to flow out
of the cell. In the examples that follow, the bath fluctuated by only ± 0.01C.
Maintaining the temperature with that accuracy required careful preparations,
but allowed the necessary energy measurements.
The most critical part of the cell was the surface of the cathode electrode.
The excess energy that was claimed would be generated in or near its surface.
Many researchers have experienced a buildup of unknown material on the sur-
face of the cathode that the electricity could not get through, bringing the ex-
periment to an end. These problems have always plagued electrolytic experi-

* The power supply often operates in a constant current mode in which the applied voltage is al-
lowed to vary in order to maintain the desired current. The current, however, may be exter-
nally programmed to be set at different values as the experiment progresses.
 The Enigma of Discovery 39

figure 3.1 A Fleischmann and Pons cell schematic layout. Its height is foreshortened.
40 anomalous power

mentation. It took considerable laboratory skill to operate an electrolytic cell

satisfactorily.
The cell design was greatly inhibited by the lack of adequate specification
for the palladium itself. The metallurgical processing was a critical factor that
determines what happened on both its surface and inside it. Control of the
many characteristics of the metal was an exceedingly complicated matter and
not well understood.
In the Fleischmann and Pons cell, 95% of the heat is removed from the
cathode by radiation, and only 5% by conduction. The radiation is not ioniz-
ing radiation, but is heat radiation of the kind a person feels from a hot object.
The radiant energy flows from each point of the electrolyte volume to each
point of the outside water bath volume where it is absorbed. If the tempera-
ture of the bath and the cell are accurately known, then the transmitted heat
can be accurately calculated.
The most significant question for planning the course of experimental
work was, What would be a signature that something of unusual interest was
happening? What should the experimenter look for as a result? If one per-
formed an experiment, all the while looking for the wrong kind of indicator,
then an important result might not be noticed.
Fleischmann and Pons expected to see neutrons—lots of them. They
were convinced that they could measure heat to a few milliwatts (1/1,000 of a
watt) of power.5 They calculated from this estimate that the presence of excess
heat would forewarn them of radiation danger. While one might measure
both neutrons and heat, their resources were severely limited as their expenses
were being met out of their own pockets. The experimental signature that
they would look for first would be the anomalous (excess) heat flow.
An important point to remember is that this laboratory work was con-
ventional. Building and operating electrolytic cells was such an established
part of chemistry that it was a recognized sub-specialty, called electro-
chemistry, with its own professional organizations and publications. The
Fleischmann and Pons cell was not a development on the fringe of science.
These cell systems have long had a fundamental place in the scientific arcade
of laboratory technology.
By the autumn of 1988, the two chemists were completely aware that
their experiment generated an unaccountable amount of heat power. They
had done enough in the way of limited experiments to feel ready to do labora-
tory work that was more formally structured. The final scale (size) and detail
of the experiment had been set. Now, much more carefully documented ex-
periments would be worthwhile.
One of Pons’s graduate students, Marvin Hawkins, was put to work
building not only the elaborately structured cell but the water bath in which it
would reside. He assembled the operating electronics, and the instrumenta-
 The Enigma of Discovery 41

tion to measure time, temperature, and voltage, for each cell. By December
1988, the laboratory was functioning. Many cells were percolating in their
baths. At this point, most data were recorded by hand.
Now the laboratory had a payroll to meet. Fleischmann and Pons submit-
ted a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for several hundred
thousand dollars in September.* It landed on the desk of an administrative sci-
entist,† who was in charge of projects that did not fit into the usual categories
of energy research. He, in turn, sent it out to be refereed by other scientists.
This was a form of peer-review to get opinions on whether the proposal was
worth funding.
Steven E. Jones, professor of physics at nearby Brigham Young University
(BYU), Provo, Utah, was one of those selected to referee the proposal because
of his expertise in the field of what was previously called cold fusion. Jones
and a physicist at the University of Arizona had co-authored an article just the
year before in Scientific American (July 1987) entitled, “Cold Nuclear Fusion.”
Jones’s work offered two sources for the use of the term cold fusion. He
had been experimenting with what was called muon-catalyzed fusion for some
number of years. That fusion was done on an atomic scale at room tempera-
ture, and bears no import on this narrative. In 1985, he experimented with an
electrochemical reaction. He knew that the interior temperature of the Earth
was hotter than could be explained by contemporary theories. In addition, he
had detected helium-three in gas given off by volcanoes. These considerations
meant that something was creating that helium inside the Earth and that it
could only be a nuclear process of some kind. So he devised an experiment.
He placed two metal strips in a baby food jar and connected them to a
battery. He added a mixture of earth chemicals (salts) for the electrolyte. At
the time, he believed he detected some neutrons emanating from it. This
claim also had the name of cold fusion.‡ In December 1993, he retracted his
claim that neutrons were being emitted by some process that was occurring in
the jar. At no point did he attempt to measure heat.
In the fall of 1988, there was no way for one to judge the conflicting
uses of the term cold fusion, nor was there a way to evaluate the history of
electrolytic experiments on the part of both BYU and the University of Utah.
However, there was an exchange of information between them, and then a
race for priority of whatever discovery might have occurred. The competition
created a bitter conflict between the two universities, as well as between Jones
and the chemists. These personal antagonisms lasted for a decade and more.

* The proposal was never funded. Without a grant, they somehow persevered.
† Ryszard Gajewski.
‡ He looked for neutron particles instead of looking for heat energy, because the considerable
difficulties in measuring particle radiation were familiar ones and because the considerable dif-
ficulties in measuring heat energy were unfamiliar.
42 anomalous power

Nuclear Measurements
By the winter of 1989, Fleischmann and Pons knew their neutron radiation
level was astonishingly low when compared with the amount of heat released
and they set about measuring it. One consideration that had to be taken into
account was that their experiment was located in the chemistry department.
Any attempt to set up nuclear detectors presented a problem as knowledgeable
staff would recognize the equipment’s purpose.
Serious nuclear particle counting in a routine chemistry experiment
would raise cries of incredulity, not unlike those that accompanied the formal
announcement of their work. What on earth is going on here? Every one
knows that chemical experiments do not involve nuclear behavior. “Whose
setup is this? Explain yourself !”
If they had proceeded in this direction, the whole university would have
been looking over their shoulder to see the results. Opinions would be offered
as to whether the university’s resources were being well spent. That would nec-
essarily absorb Fleischmann and Pons’s attention and implicitly place an outer
limit on the experiment’s duration. One can not carry the day in this type of
discussion without producing results. The project was so profoundly radical in
its conception that peer exposure could not be contained for long. These
questions would rise again within the larger world of the state legislature. Was
the university using wisely the resources given to it?
Yet, to actually explain what they were attempting would expose the two
scientists to a review of their plans by their peers in the chemistry and physics
departments. Obviously, some would offer a loud declaration that the experi-
ment was ridiculous. There would inevitably be members who would not be
able to contain themselves with the thought of what the two were attempting.
Others would be fearful of damage to their own reputations, or to the reputa-
tion of the department by association with it. It could damage the university’s
reputation if outsiders learned what was going on.* Any involvement of their
colleagues would likely make the experimental effort completely untenable.
They would have had to abandon it and accept the waves of ridicule that
would follow them afterwards. Yet, without such help, they had to get some
reasonable measurements of nuclear products.
By January 1989, they had been contemplating the existence of an unex-

* An excellent example of this type of response occurred at Texas A&M University in 1994. The
University accepted a fully funded contract for Bockris to work in collaboration with an ama-
teur experimenter who had been replicating various medieval alchemical experiments pur-
ported to convert base metals into gold. These experiments were carried out over a year and
then terminated. (The amateur later was sent to state prison on some unrelated matter.)
Bockris suffered at the hands of his colleagues for doing this work. An attempt was made to
have the faculty formally remove his title of “distinguished,” and ridicule was always just out of
earshot. There are those who believe he ruined an otherwise stellar career by his involvement
with this nefarious character.
 The Enigma of Discovery 43

plained heat energy source with negligible particle radiation for about four
years. They felt altogether certain that the heat existed and assumed the source
must be some sort of nuclear process as no other possibility could be imag-
ined. They had done enough primitive radiation tests to feel sure that their ex-
cess heat was neutron free when compared with text book nuclear behavior.
Nuclear measurements were difficult for them at low levels of neutron ra-
diation. While maintaining secrecy, they tried to measure what particle radia-
tion there was. They managed to make something of a mess of it. Pons had
gone so far as to ask the head of the physics department how to detect neu-
trons. The department at Utah did not do plasma research and he was referred
to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Pons turned to a health physicist on the safety staff of the university and
was provided with a detector for gamma-rays. These rays are emitted when a
water bath is irradiated with neutron particles. Neutrons emitted by the cell
would be stopped by the water bath, which would then emit gamma-rays for
the detector to measure. The detector would also collect gamma-rays from
natural sources that were present in the concrete of the basement walls and
floors. I have not been able to determine exactly what mistakes they made
with the setup and operation. They followed a false signal and obtained and
published unexplainable data. The difficulty was greatly embarrassing to them
after they went public in March when experienced nuclear physicists discov-
ered the chemists’s error.
Then they changed the detector type. They were using one of high sensi-
tivity (sodium-iodide) and they changed to one of high resolution (germa-
nium). By measuring the sought for gamma signal over a long time, they
finally detected what they believed was a gamma-ray signal from their experi-
ment.6 These results were published in June 1992 and can be seen in Fig-
ure 18.1, page 256.
Fleischmann and Pons maintained that their tritium measurements were
valid, but they never reported their results in a formal paper.7
During those winter months of 1989, Fleischmann and Pons collected
data as fast as they could. Some was collected by hand and later it was done
on computer. Pons brought it home for analysis. That raw data has never been
released. It was the data selected from those experiments that they submitted
for publication in the Preliminary Note. It was peer reviewed, requested
changes were made, and the final manuscript was received with an imprinted
date of Wednesday, March 22, 1989, the day before the public announce-
ment.
Their seminal, full-length publication on excess heat energy used data
from experiments that continued through the summer and fall of 1989. It was
submitted in December and published in July of 1990, in the same journal.8
They later defended that paper in a second article published in July 1992.9
They were also involved in the institutional conflict between the Univer-
44 anomalous power

sity of Utah and BYU during the winter of 1989. There were visits to BYU by
the technical and administrative officers of the University of Utah. Initially
Fleischmann and Pons wanted to postpone any publication or announcement
of their work to allow themselves another eighteen months of experimenta-
tion. Too many people were informed of this secret research for such a course
to be practical and the secret was too momentous to contain.*
Jones made a commitment to speak at the meeting of the American Phys-
ical Society (APS) scheduled for May at Baltimore, Maryland. The APS was
the principal professional organization in the United States for physicists, so
Jones’s speech would be noticed. Both BYU and the University of Utah agreed
to preempt that presentation by simultaneous publication in Nature magazine
without knowing if the magazine would accept and publish either paper. The
University of Utah, in turn, preempted that agreement by announcing on
March 22 that it would hold a press conference the next day. But late that
same day,† the London Financial Times preempted the press conference with
an article. The newspaper announced in its first sentence, “Two scientists will
today formally announce that they have carried out controlled nuclear fusion
in a test tube.”
If, indeed, this experiment demonstrates the discovery of something,
what could it be that was discovered? The sixteenth-century captain sailing on
the high seas might come upon an uncharted landfall, circumnavigate it to
conclude an island was discovered. Columbus after crossing the ocean sea real-
ized he had not found the culture of the orient. In his lifetime, he never
learned what it was that he had discovered. Similarly, Pierre Curie never
learned that he had opened the door to nuclear power. The enigma of discov-
ery is that often the discoverer never quite learns for certain what it is that he
has discovered.
If the Fleischmann and Pons observation of excess energy flow can be val-
idated, then that piece of observational science, standing alone, is sufficient to
begin a new area of scientific study. That observation, without an understand-
ing of its cause or its source, is of definite interest to science because it appears to
contradict the physical law that says energy can be accounted for. It is worth-
while now to look at the Fleischmann and Pons experiment in quantitative
terms. After that, the critics will do their worst with what was claimed by the
two chemists from Utah.

* I do not mean to imply here that what they had to announce was true. It was momentous as
presented, and that was an enormous difficulty for all to contend with at the time.
† London time is seven hours ahead of Salt Lake City time. If we are following events in Utah,
the Financial Times announced its message on the previous day, Wednesday, March 22, 1989.
 c h a p t e r f o u r

A Power Burst

A power burst comes on slowly, like a sneeze. The buildup takes weeks.
The burst itself may stay for 48 hours in order to complete its cycle.
Imagine a modern chemistry laboratory, a room that is the size of a two-
car garage crowded with wide, sturdy workbenches. At the place where the
benches butt against the walls are steel shelves rising to a height of seven feet.
The shelves hold electronics, power supplies, instruments, computers, and
printers. On several of the benches are open baths of water, each a yard square
and a foot high. Suspended over each bath are steel supports holding one, two,
three, or four glass flasks, each almost entirely submerged in the bath. In each
flask, or cell, is one variation of the Fleischmann and Pons experiment.
Imagine further, that sitting in front of the bench is a tall, lanky, bearded
scientist by the name of Ed Storms. He was described aptly by one writer
as the Hollywood image of the Biblical Moses. On his stool, Ed sits some-
what folded up while watching the cell’s instruments for signs of activity. He
watches for hours, for days. In his words,

I put the cell into the calorimeter and it went through a few weeks
doing essentially nothing. Then all of a sudden it just took off. It just
started making significant heat. I was as surprised as anyone, let me
tell you. You know, you sit there in front of the apparatus forever,
and think, “this is all so much nonsense.” This isn’t really real. This
waiting goes on for weeks, maybe months.
Then all of a sudden the readout device shows the cell has
started taking off. And you say, “Oh-oh, what’s gone wrong now.”

45
46 anomalous power

You start playing around with everything you can think of that
might have gone wrong to see what has happened. After a while it
suddenly dawns on you that nothing is wrong. This is what it is sup-
posed to do.1

This episode is one scientist’s tale of his feelings and responses as he bears
witness to an excess heat event, an anomalous power burst.
The experimental cells soaking in their yard sized baths depict one kind
of calorimeter. This “open,” isoperibolic, type is important because it proved
particularly suitable for these purposes.* Power in the cell will dissipate by
heat radiation to the bath and by a little inadvertent heat conduction to the air
and bath. Energy will also be dissipated through the wires and tubes emanat-
ing from the cell’s top. The two gasses given off by the cell carry off some heat
energy, and the liquid electrolyte will evaporate from its surface causing a
cooling effect.
When the equipment is working well and the cell is not generating excess
heat, the experimenter should measure power into the cell as equal to power
out, within plus or minus one percent.2 Absolute levels of accuracy will range
from 40 down to 2 milliwatts. This condition gives a set of base line values in
preparation for the experiment.

The Experimental Observable

The following example is taken from an early report. A burst excess heat event
is displayed in the two illustrations, Figures 4.1 and 4.2, both taken from the
same anomalous event.† The experiment included both the generation of
excess heat over a month or more, and a burst event that lasted only a
few days.
The part played by the control, or blank, cell was discussed earlier. The
two directions in which one might seek control had become a source of confu-
sion. Either cold fusion (literally) or anomalous power may need a control ref-
erence experiment and each requires a differently designed control cell. For
this reason, in the experiments that follow, Fleischmann and Pons have used
two kinds of control cells: those that use plain water in place of heavy water,
and others that use platinum cathode rods in place of palladium rods in heavy

* The isoperibolic calorimeter identifies all paths that carry heat out of a cell and measures the
heat loss from each of them.
† The article from which these figures are selected was submitted for publication December 21,
1989 and was published on July 25, 1990. It is the definitive paper by M. Fleischmann, S.
Pons, M. R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and M. Hawkins describing anomalous power generation.
(In that paper, Anderson’s name is mistakenly given as M. W. Anderson.)
 A Power Burst 47

figure 4.1 Fleischmann reported the temperature of the cell’s electrolyte liquid plotted
against the number of days of continuous electrical excitation.

figure 4.2 Fleischmann reported the energy flow rate after the start of electrolysis as dis-
played for days 54 to 72.

water. Equally important, direct comparisons between control cells and heat
generating cells will display differences and similarities that need to be ex-
plained.

A Power Burst
In Figure 4.1, the tracing shows a temperature burst.3 The burst appears as a
temperature excursion upwards from the base line. Some experimenters have
concluded that the temperature excursion is a necessary part of the energy
burst event, that it in some way enables the event to unfold.
The vertical scale is marked with cell temperature in degrees Celsius. The
horizontal scale shows time increasing from left to right, labeled in days. The
tracing starts near the lower left-hand corner. From day one when the electric
48 anomalous power

current is applied until day 55 where this tracing begins little of interest hap-
pened, so those days are not shown.
The shape of the tracing reveals some interesting excursions. There is a
flat extent to the tracing starting at day 55 that indicates a temperature of
thirty-two degrees. The brief positive impulse of temperature that appears at
approximately 64 days has been mentioned by Fleischmann, McKubre, and
Storms as a precursor of the large temperature excursion that follows.* The
burst of temperature starts shortly after day 65 and lasts for about 48 hours.
During that time, the temperature varies widely, but it stays near 48C for
much of the time.
In Figure 4.2, the tracing shows the burst of power for the same experi-
ment. It is labeled as a ratio of generated power to input power.4 The value of
the power generated divided by the power input is drawn on the vertical
scale.† Note the scale: the base line is approximately at a value of one, where
input and generated output are equal.
The excess generated power is relatively small from the start of the experi-
ment until day 55. This interval does not appear in Figure 4.2. The genera-
tion of power equal to the input power starts at day 55. By that time, the gen-
erated energy from day one is about one megaJoule‡.
The generated power, Figure 4.2, is shown to be about equal to the input
power during the period of 240 hours from day 55 to day 65. A burst of
power occurs between days 65 and 68. For about 48 hours, the ratio of the
generated power divided by input power is approximately 20. Afterwards, the
cell returns to its ratio of approximately one. The cell is turned off at 70
days.§
How much energy does this add up to? The energy generated is com-
puted by adding up the power from the beginning of the experiment. The to-
tal amount is just under four MJ.** This amount of energy is equivalent to ap-
proximately one kilowatt-hour of electricity.5
The amount generated during the 48 hour (2,880 minutes) burst is ap-
proximately two MJ or about one half kilowatt-hour. This is equivalent to a

* Fleischmann refers to this temperature impulse as “the onset of positive feedback.”

† Power input is the voltage (less 1.54 volts) multiplied by the current.
‡ One joule is equivalent in energy to one watt-second, that is, one watt continued for one sec-
ond; 3,600,000 joules (3.6 megajoules or MJ) is equivalent to one kilowatt-hour of electricity.
§ The Dewar flask had a vacuum of about 10-6 Torr. The palladium cathode was a 0.4 diameter
x 1.25 cm rod, 1.57 cm2 in charging area, and 1/2 cubic centimeter in volume; the liquid elec-
trolyte concentration was 0.1 Mole of lithium deuteroxide (lithium dissolved in heavy water).
The current density was 64 milliamperes/cm2 and 100 ma actual current. The bath tempera-
ture was 29.87C.
** The total specific excess energy for the experiment was seven and a half million joules. The spe-
cific energy is the energy/cubic cm of cathode. Where the cathode is 1/2 cc in volume, specific
energies will be twice the actual energies.
 A Power Burst 49

1,500 watt electric stove burner running on a “high” cherry-red color setting
for approximately 27 minutes. Given the small size of the cathode—it is 1/
100 the volume of the stove burner—this is an enormous amount of energy. If
that heat energy were not removed as rapidly as it is generated, it would
quickly vaporize the cathode.
To better visualize this amount of energy, consider operating the 1,500
watt stove burner from a chemical source like a battery. A typical 12 volt auto-
mobile battery is one of the most compact electrical energy storage devices
known. One with a 60 ampere-hour rating holds enough chemical energy to
operate that burner for 29 minutes, compared with 27 minutes for the cell
power burst. Roughly speaking, the burst generated the same amount of en-
ergy that is stored in the automobile battery. Notice how little chemical mate-
rial there is inside the Fleischmann and Pons cell compared with the size and
weight of the battery. Chemical storage can be discarded as a possible energy
source in this experiment.
The total generated energy over 75 days was 3.75 million Joules of en-
ergy. “It is inconceivable that this [energy] could be due to anything but nu-
clear processes.”6 This judgment stands firm after twelve years. During this
time, no one has suggested in the peer-reviewed literature how that amount of
energy might be provided in a Fleischmann and Pons cell by other means.
Note that the cell was operated for about ten weeks to thoroughly investi-
gate its potential for activity and that the most interesting action started at
seven weeks. At this rate, approximately three experiments can be completed
in one year if the results of one experiment were to inform the design of subse-
quent experiments. From the beginning, it was clear that cold fusion experi-
mental work was enormously time-consuming.
Many experimenters found that they did not have the laboratory skills
needed to keep the cell running for more than two weeks. The electrodes
gradually become covered with “foreign” matter. A description, circa 1883,
complains that “the formation of decomposition products on the electrodes
. . . was the most vexing problem of electrolytic measurements and the main
source of experimental errors.”7 The Fleischmann and Pons cell derives from a
hoary practice more than a century old.
Another description says, “I can attest to the fact that [in surface cata-
lyzed reactions] a very minute fouling of the surface can drive a reaction in a
totally opposite direction than what you thought.”8 A single monolayer of
contaminant on the cathode might disrupt an experiment. The surface may
show more than one crystal face of the metal with different reactions possible
on the different faces. The most likely cause for the variability of experimental
outcomes is the variability of the cathode surface.
Considerable skill was required if errors in measuring heat were to be lim-
50 anomalous power

ited to acceptable levels. In cold fusion laboratory practice, it was heat flow
that was measured. This was an even more demanding skill.* Fleischmann
and Pons generally followed the practice of using current in excess of 64 milli-
amperes for each square centimeter of the cathode surface to operate their
cells. The electrical energy used to separate the oxygen and deuterium in the
water molecule was allowed for when they calculated the energy balance of the
cell. (If some portion of the gasses recombined, the energy released would ap-
pear as pseudo excess power.) Some oxygen or deuterium gasses are inevitably
dissolved in the water where a part of them might recombine. These effects of
recombination were kept to negligible proportions by operating at high cur-
rent levels.
As explained in Chapter 1, p. 11, recombination of the effluent gasses
was measured as less than 1% in the experiment plotted in Figures 4.1 and
4.2. By the end of 1994, there was nothing in the scientific literature to un-
dermine that statement, nor was there by 2001. There was a claim in one
1995 paper that significant recombination was found when a cell was oper-
ated at the minuscule level of 100 microwatts (0.0001 watts).9 That such
recombination occurs at exceedingly low levels is well known to scientists
working with electrolytic cells.
Some experimenters measured the amount of water added every 24 hours
to the cell and found that it corresponded to the amount that would be elec-
trolyzed by the total current through the cell, which was accurately known.
Others measured the amount of gas leaving the cell. Recombination of the
gasses as a potential source of error was well under control.
Skeptics assumed that as heat measuring techniques improved, the
measured excess energy would incrementally decrease in order to remain
within the calorimeter’s margin of error. By the end of 1994, it could no
longer be argued that the best claims of anomalous power were due to faulty
calorimetry.†

* There may be some concern by practicing scientists that the computation of the output heat
flow from a cell requires the subtraction of two large numbers. That circumstance is always un-
desirable. Small fluctuations in the two large numbers can make the difference number mean-
ingless. While this may have been a difficulty, it is one a professional scientist takes in stride.
By giving attention to the accuracy and precision of the large numbers, the difference becomes
meaningful.
Also, it should be mentioned that as larger power levels were achieved, some of the differ-
ence numbers become themselves large numbers.
† Scientific methodology places the same intellectual discipline on the critic as on the experi-
menter. If a skeptic wishes to challenge this claim, that argument should be accompanied by a
corresponding paper published in the peer-reviewed literature for perusal by the scientific com-
munity.
 A Power Burst 51

Energy Conservation
One of the venerable scientific “laws” is that of conservation of energy. It
states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. This conservation
principle includes the conversion of mass to energy in nuclear reactions.* As a
mechanical or chemical process unfolds, the amount of energy present can be
determined in principle at every step. From the beginning to the end of the
process, that amount of energy should always be the same value after taking
into account additions and deletions of energy from outside the process as
well as additions from nuclear sources.
Scientists usually arrange their formulae so that when they finished ac-
counting for the energy, the formula’s value calculated to zero, the pluses bal-
ancing the minuses. If, when the formula is evaluated, its value is above zero,
this signifies more energy is present than can be accounted for and a minus
sign signifies less energy. If the calculation does not “zero out,” then the exper-
imenter has overlooked some part of the energy flow. This zeroing out of en-
ergy serves as an excellent control for the Fleischmann and Pons experiment.
An inert piece of palladium for the cathode served this purpose well because
they could be electrolyzed for weeks without giving the slightest indication of
anomalous behavior.
The energy conservation law is one of the oldest and most revered in sci-
ence. Any validated experimental outcome that challenged the certitude of the
law would demand the attention of the scientific community. The scientific
community could not rest until that challenge was resolved.
No one working in the field of cold fusion suggests a contradiction of
that principle. When more energy comes out of an experiment than can be ac-
counted for, which is the basic claim made in March 1989, that apparent vio-
lation of the law demands the most conscientious attention of the scientific
community. That challenge to the law of conservation of energy constitutes
the principal source of motivation for those who work in the field. Scaramuzzi
addresses this point, “. . . there are results that are real, for example, the excess
heat and the nuclear ashes do exist, in spite of the lack of reproducibility and
of all the difficulties . . . If they were not real the field would have been aban-
doned many years ago.”10

* In chemical reactions, energy is only converted from one kind into another kind, the total
amount remaining constant. This characteristic of the total being a constant amount is called
the principle of conservation of energy. Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 allows calculation
of the energy (E) equivalent of mass (m), where (c) is the speed of light in a vacuum. In nuclear
reactions of fission or fusion, a small portion of the mass may be converted into substantial
amounts of energy. This comprehensive use of the term conservation of energy is intended
throughout the book.
52 anomalous power

Scientific protocol requires that the measurement of anomalous power be

a correct measurement in all respects. To illustrate mistaken protocol, the fol-
lowing quotation is typical. “Although the . . . experiment is considered by
many advocates to be the premier evidence for excess heat, no nuclear reaction
products were reported!”11 The history of scientific protocol shows that none
need to be reported for the observation of excess heat to be accepted into the
inventory of scientific observations. While it would be nice to know of any
nuclear products, their lack carried no indication that the heat measurements
were erroneous. In the Utah announcement, the hypothesis is that the prod-
ucts are unknown and therefore the information is inaccessible. Scientific in-
quiry would be reduced to a benighted state if it were acceptable to dismiss
the heat measurements by pointing out the lack of nuclear products. Nothing
that was observed by scientists would be considered worth scientific study un-
til after its cause was firmly identified. But without scientific study, little in the
way of cause could ever be found.
The total amount of energy that the cell consumes and generates can be
measured during the experiment from start to finish. It gives a measure of the
experiment as a useful energy generating device. Fleischmann and Pons never
claimed the experiment as a useful device for the delivery of energy to some
economic purpose.*
Consideration by the skeptics of the energy sum of the active cell over
time would imply a large energy storage capability within the cell. Storage is
an unrewarding concept. The energies involved are greater than 50 electron-
volts per palladium atom. This amount of energy is sufficient to vaporize the
cathode if an attempt were made to store it chemically in the cathode. Alter-
nately, an hypothesis of temporary, in-out, storage in the atom’s nucleus is un-
heard of. Nuclear storage mechanisms have never been demonstrated. Addi-
tionally, the “in” part of the cycle would be detected by the calorimeter. It
would jeopardize the credibility of this text to allow the hypothesis of an un-
known energy storage mechanism of suitable capacity as the source of the
anomalous power. By comparison, the Fleischmann and Pons hypothesis of an
unrecognized or unknown nuclear source is most reasonable.
The measurement of anomalous heat power is necessarily the result of
one of four possibilities. There is an undiscovered error in the heat measure-
ment, there is some yet unnoticed or unknown chemical source, there is some
well understood nuclear source, or it must be hypothesized that there is some
unknown nuclear source.† Beyond those four, there is only consideration of

* I omit here off-the-cuff predictions of commercial readiness that have been offered by Dr.
Pons from time to time. As a student at MIT 50 years ago, I learned to take the visions of easy
commercialization by academic scientists with a grain of salt.
 A Power Burst 53

the abrogation of the law of conservation of energy in the fashion described by

the philosopher of science Karl R. Popper, whose logical impact we review in
Chapter 8, page 106.
The possibility of undiscovered error in heat measurements is adjudicated
by requiring replication of an experiment in an independent laboratory, by in-
viting thorough review of the procedures by experts, by emphasizing variety in
cell and calorimeter design, and with the use of control experiments.
The alternate to error is that nuclear fusion might be occurring. Neutrons
have not been observed in sufficient quantities in the Fleischmann and Pons
cell to ascribe the excess energy to conventional fusion. Fleischmann said at
the announcement, “Well, the interesting phenomenon about this is that the
rate of generation of tritium and helium-three is only one billionth of what
you would expect if the fusion reaction [causing the heat] was one of those
experienced in high energy physics. So we have a relatively low rate of pro-
duction of neutrons.”12 And further, “It is evident that [recognized] reac-
tions are only a small part of the overall reaction scheme and that other
nuclear processes must be involved.” That last possibility is the one of inter-
est. It is that there occurred in the cell a nuclear reaction of some unknown
kind.13
The category of “other nuclear processes” mentioned above does not per-
mit the inclusion of miracles. One skeptic had even suggested in all serious-
ness that three miracles were required to explain anomalous heat. There were
at last review no miracles registered in the physics textbooks. After the explo-
ration and understanding of cold fusion claims is complete—and this writer
does not expect to see that accomplished in his lifetime—there still will be no
miracles incorporated into the physics textbooks.
Experimental methodology also concerns itself with the part played in
science by the limited experiment. For example, a research laboratory is
funded from year to year by some agency to do research. Each year (or two)
the laboratory submits proposals for further research. Generally, the sponsor-
ing agency must see interesting results from year to year to justify continuance
of the funding. In a case like this, how does the laboratory plan the next year’s
proposed work? To merely recommend a particular direction of experimenta-
tion would be too risky. If that research plan produced no significant or inter-
esting results during the subsequent period, it would be too late to try another
research direction. The laboratory’s future funding would be put at risk.
Some laboratories are institutionally funded from decade to decade. If the

† There are other theories. They are so speculative that I have not tried to encompass them
in the text. Briefly, Randell Mills’s theory is described in Chapter 21, p. 296, others favor a
theory of a vacuum energy source.
54 anomalous power

output is poor, then the laboratory personnel are changed to remedy the situa-
tion. Other laboratories, however, need to survive from one grant to the next.
In those laboratories, that risk is finessed in the following way. During the
current year, the director tries those experiments to be proposed for the subse-
quent year. He performs what I call “limited” experiments. There may be a
lack of standard controls, a possible lack of statistical verification, no proof
that contamination was not involved, little documentation, and so forth. But
most emphatically, the director must be sure his outcome is right; the labora-
tory’s future depends upon it. Those experiments that produce an interesting
result are then proposed for the subsequent year.
So there exists in practice a double standard of laboratory work: one stan-
dard that is sufficient to persuade the experimenter himself, and a higher one
that is sufficient to persuade his peers. The first category provides direction to
the individual scientist. Scientists who do limited experiments with such a
high degree of expertise that they come up with the right result have a sub-
stantial career advantage over those who can not. The second category of labo-
ratory work consumes much greater amounts of time and resources, but it
produces publishable results. I label the experiment done only for the experi-
menter’s benefit the limited experiment.

Acceptors
Some skeptics mistakenly referred to scientists who work in cold fusion re-
search as “believers” or even “true believers.” The terms were derogatory, and
they were meant to be. They implied that commitment to the field was reli-
gious in its nature, a leap of faith. Unfortunately, writers of science at the
broad-audience scientific journals also adopted the use of this slur.
As the episode wore on, there were an increasing number of scientists
who accepted the confirmations of excess heat generation that emerged in
1989 and 1990. For them, the Fleischmann and Pons experiment had hit
upon something of scientific interest.
This acceptance was entirely independent of concerns with the lack of
reproducibility of the experiment, the frequent failure of independent labora-
tories to obtain excess heat, and the largely evanescent attempts to find a nu-
clear theory to support the claims. These acceptors looked at the successful sci-
entists, their experiments, the instrumentation, and the resulting data. When
they found the measured anomalous power to be scientifically credible, they
became, not believers, but acceptors.
Those acceptors of anomalous power considered the lack of experimental
reproducibility a hindrance. It greatly reduced experimental efficiency. Many
 A Power Burst 55

tries were necessary to get one cell that worked. Fleischmann and Pons ob-
tained 100 percent reproducibility in their laboratory at the University of
Utah during the winter of 1989. Their work had used palladium all taken
from the same production lot. On the morning of the announcement, Marvin
Hawkins, the graduate student assistant, set up four new cells. In doing so, he
used up the remainder of the batch of palladium that had always worked.
None was saved for later analysis, as it was not yet clear that batch variation
would be a substantial hurdle. For a conference in October of that year,
Fleischmann presented a set of 31 active cells of which 23 were reported as
generating more than 20 mw of excess heat, and 13 other cells were control
experiments that were not expected to generate excess heat.
Other scientists, who were successful in generating anomalous power,
found they could only do it occasionally. Some of them found that perfor-
mance depended upon the particular sample, or lot, of the palladium metal
used for the cathode element just as did Fleischmann and Pons. So their early
laboratory work had a significant element of luck in it. But it was not dumb
luck; it was smart luck. The resourceful experimenter learned to isolate, iden-
tify, and deal with the materials variability. Other experimenters went for a
year or more in a “dry spell” when the palladium they purchased did not
work. During this hiatus, the metallurgy of the palladium cathode consti-
tuted a significant part of the field of study. It was also the most secret part.*
Significant progress in the metallurgy of the cathode metal was considered
to be especially valuable and proprietary information. In general, it was not
published.
The generation of anomalous power was the signature of a successful ex-
periment. That success involved an apparent violation of the law of conserva-
tion of energy. An explanation or interpretation may properly be demanded,
and eventually one will be found—no miracles are allowed. How close was the
field of cold fusion research to an answer?
Fusion is difficult to bring about. With two-body reactions, extremely
high particle velocities are needed to bring two deuterons together close
enough so that they fuse. There is an international effort to build a device
called a tokamak to accomplish fusion. Such a process is referred to as “hot”
fusion. Its development has been a slow and expensive project, and any poten-
tial for commercial operation remains out of sight.
The tokamak reactor was the reference point when reporters referred to
the Fleischmann and Pons experiment as “kitchen chemistry.” This colloquial-
ism led the public, and many scientists, to assume the experiment was easy. It

* Galileo, while trumpeting his new telescope widely, kept secret his method for grinding Eu-
rope’s best lenses.
56 anomalous power

was not. It had four difficult stages to be mastered: the continuous operation
for months without “gumming up,” the generation of excess heat power, the
design of a wideband calorimeter system to measure the heat flow even in the
case of a rapidly changing temperature, and the achievement of one percent
accuracy.
With this discussion of an example of the generation of excess heat both
in a burst and in an extended interval of many weeks, we turn our attention to
the assault and criticism directed at this episode by orthodox scientists.
 P a r t Tw o

CRITICISM
 c h a p t e r f i v e

Baltimore

P hysics was introduced into the university curriculum at the turn of the
twentieth century to round out a liberal arts education. Its growth in the
university stagnated because physics was an experimental science that required
expensive facilities. The development of physics teaching and research facili-
ties in the United States prior to World War II inched along when compared
with the postwar period.
The federal government’s influence came to dominate physics research in
1941 and remained as a large, continuing presence. The Manhattan Project
was immense, possibly the largest single program of any government in its
time. The postwar federal government greatly influenced physics research with
its weapons research investment and it branched from there into commercial
nuclear power and particle accelerator facilities. The government also under-
took development of nuclear fusion power as a open-ended research program.
These projects offered lifetime career employment for those with a Ph.D. in
nuclear or plasma physics.
Long term, well-funded government work brought with it consider-
able benefits for those so employed: the time to devote to national profes-
sional organizations, the time to prepare and present papers for publication, to
travel to international meetings, and so forth. In many ways, a career in nu-
clear physics was not unlike holding an academic chair at a prestigious univer-
sity.
Those benefits provided the influence whereby many physicists found
appointment to government advisory roles. This dual support and parti-
cipation enabled the community of American physicists to assume a power-

59
60 criticism

ful voice in energy policy development in the White House* and in the De-
partment of Energy (DOE). When energy policy became centralized under
the DOE during the 1970s, it was assigned nuclear weapons development,
nuclear power responsibilities, and direction of most of the national scientific
laboratories.†
This paramount role of physicists in the American establishment was best
described by Daniel J. Kevles, a professor of the history of science at Caltech,
in his 1995 book, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Mod-
ern America.‡ Six brief quotes will give the flavor of the physicist’s position in
American public life during the latter half of the twentieth century.

. . . this generation was dominated by physicists who seemed to wear

the “tunic of Superman” in the phrase of a LIFE reporter, and stood
in the spotlight of a thousand suns. (p. 334)

. . . after the atomic bombings . . . physicists of the Los Alamos gen-

eration became a kind of secular establishment—with the power to
influence policy and obtain state resources largely on faith and with
an enviable degree of freedom from political control. (p. ix)

Whichever side they took on issues of arms control and defense,

physicists remained honored and empowered because they remained
essential in determining the shape and capabilities of American na-
tional security. (p. ix)

It was a time when Americans ranked nuclear physicists third in oc-

cupational status . . . ahead of everyone except Supreme Court Jus-
tices and physicians . . . (p. 391)

. . . much of the Los Alamos generation’s leadership counted the

Kennedy White House as its own. (p. 390)

. . . Whatever history might conclude, in the mid-1960s American

physicists headed a community of scientists who . . . had collectively
become “something very close to an establishment, in the old and

* The selection of the individual Presidential Science Advisors followed a different process that
resulted in a greater diversity of disciplines including electrical engineer, physical chemist, and
geophysicist. The later rise of government sponsored medical research has matched the histori-
cal support for physics.
† One exception was the Office of Naval Research which had been established by a separate item
of Congressional legislation in 1922 at the behest of Thomas Edison.
‡ Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971 and 1995.
 Baltimore 61

proper sense of that word: a set of institutions supported by tax

funds, but largely on faith, and without direct responsibility to polit-
ical control. (p. 392)

Within the profession, one specialty stood out from the rest: “High-energy
physicists were among the most prominent members of their profession—key
figures in the nation’s strategic defense and science policymaking councils . . .”
(p. xi). D. Allen Bromley, a physicist from Yale University, was scientific advi-
sor to President G. H. Bush. In a review of his time as advisor, he pointed out
that, “. . . the advisors and almost the entire membership of the [President’s
Science Advisory Committee] were physicists . . .”1
Those physicists who spoke out publicly on cold fusion research were fol-
lowing closely in this tradition of articulating national policy in science. This
influential position on matters of prime importance was held by physicists for
many decades as attitudes of rule and governance became endemic. The scien-
tific techniques that made physics itself so successful strongly reinforced these
attitudes. One technique was to devise the definitive experiment, one that
forces nature to reveal its structure. That kind of experiment is, of course, the
very purpose of experimental science particularly in nuclear physics, where it
had proved eminently successful with experiment after experiment in unlock-
ing the structure of the atom.2 The new knowledge was highly definitive and
was put to work promptly. It emerged as the technology of the atom bomb,
the electrical generating plant, and the quest for a fusion source of electrical
power.
These technologies involved physicists, their literature, and their profes-
sional societies in a visible leadership role that went well beyond government
policy making. Physics, and particularly nuclear physics, was looked upon by
many physicists as the senior science relative to other sciences although in later
years it was somewhat eclipsed by particle or “high energy” physics. Physicists
expected to have the final cut in ascertaining what was and was not to be
labeled science.
This outlook contrasts starkly with that, for example, of the geologist ex-
amining the question of plate tectonics. Since no definitive experiment was
possible, geologists accumulated evidence for nearly a half century before
drawing conclusions. From this perspective, physicists confidently saw physics
as a more scientific discipline than geology.
This view of the proper role of physics was evident when the cold fusion
furor broke. Cheves Walling was an eminent chemist in Pons’s chemistry de-
partment at the University of Utah and a member of the National Academy of
Science. He drafted a paper with another department chemist, Jack Simons,
suggesting a nuclear mechanism that might provide a heat source in the
Fleischmann and Pons experiment. They sent a copy of their paper to Dr. Ste-
62 criticism

ven E. Koonin, a well-known theoretical physicist at Caltech. He replied,

“You have a real problem. These are all the right questions to ask. I don’t have
any answers, and neither do you.”3 With that slap in the face, the precedent
was established that there would be no dialog about nuclear physics with the
other disciplines of science.
The outspoken physicists were without the proper expertise when it was
time for the community of scientists to evaluate the claim of anomalous
power generation. They spoke out with the voice of a few skeptics. They made
no assertion of professional expertise in the disciplines of electrochemistry
and calorimetry. Lacking that, they simply assumed the calorimetry must be
wrong. They then proceeded to forcefully promote that assumption from
spring 1989 onward. These skeptical physicists can trample other specialties
in science, it would seem, but others may not trample theirs.
Fusion science had been the home territory of plasma physicists for sev-
eral decades. A plasma is the fourth state of matter after those of solid, liquid,
and gas. A flame is the most common example of a plasma. In parts of it,
the electrons have broken off from their hot atoms due to their high energy.
The flame’s intense light is generated as they return to their proper orbit
within the atom.
The velocity of the particles in the center of a hot fusion reactor (toka-
mak) was high enough to produce deuterium-deuterium or deuterium-tritium
nuclear collisions. The resulting nuclear fusion reactions release nuclear en-
ergy. It was only natural that an announcement dubbed “cold fusion” would
bring to the fore those trained in plasma physics as its chief evaluators.

Pathological Science
The term pathological science has been used historically to describe the more
outstanding incidents of mistaken discovery of incredibly wrong science. Nu-
clear physicists were the first to charge the two Utah scientists with practicing
“pathological science.” This charge was a serious one because it implied that
the scientific community had no obligation to evaluate their claims. This
charge required a careful look.
Robert W. Wood was an optical physicist at Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, Maryland, and one of America’s most eminent professors at the
turn of the twentieth century. He played a definitive role in the case of the
claim of discovery of N-rays.
Professor René-Prosper Blondlot was the leading French scientist of his
day and head of the physics department at the University of Nancy. He had
watched the discovery of x-rays become one of the great accomplishments of
experimental science. A few years later, he was convinced that he had observed
 Baltimore 63

a new kind of invisible, penetrating ray. He named them N-rays, in honor of

his city, Nancy. Blondlot asserted that these N-rays could be diffracted by an
aluminum wedge, much as light was diffracted by a glass prism. He worked in
a darkened laboratory because his experimental results depended upon his be-
ing able to observe a dull circle of light.
Other physicists, mostly French, replicated his experiment and reported
similar results. Approximately 100 papers were published to report N-ray ex-
perimental results.
Professor Wood was aware of Blondlot’s claims. With the encouragement
of his associates in England and Germany, he took a steamer across the Atlan-
tic one summer near the turn of the twentieth century on a vacation trip with
his family. On arrival in France, he sent his family by train to Paris and rode
on to Nancy in the early autumn of 1904. He participated with Blondlot in
performing the N-ray diffraction experiment.4 As Wood told the story, he
slipped the experiment’s critical aluminum wedge into his pocket unnoticed
in the darkened laboratory, and watched while Blondlot continued to record
his experimental results. When Wood published the story of his maneuver,
Blondlot’s claims for N-rays came to an abrupt end, as did his career.
A conflict over the reading of scintillation counts arose in 1923. A mis-
reading caused a controversy between the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge
University, England, and the Vienna Radium Institute in Vienna, Austria. It
happened as follows.

Vienna had reproduced the Cavendish’s light-element disintegration

experiments and published completely different results . . . [James]
Chadwick laboriously reran the experiments . . . The results con-
firmed Cavendish’s earlier count. Chadwick then went to Vienna
where he found that the scintillation counting was done by three
young women . . . Chadwick observed the young women at work
and realized that because they understood what was expected of
the experiments they produced the expected results, unconsciously
counting nonexistent scintillations. To test the technicians [the
women] he gave them, without explanation, an unfamiliar experi-
ment; this time their counts matched his own. Vienna apologized.5

Counting visual impulses by eye was singularly prone to error.

Bergen Davis, a professor of physics at Columbia University, was the pro-
ponent (c. 1929) of an outlandish experiment. Irving Langmuir, a renowned
American physical chemist and Nobel laureate, invited him to visit his labora-
tory in Schenectady, New York, and give a seminar on his purported new dis-
covery. Afterwards, Langmuir suggested a return visit to Davis’s laboratory. A
few days later, Langmuir took an early morning train down the Hudson River
64 criticism

valley to New York City, and spent a day in Davis’s laboratory doing his exper-
iment. Langmuir participated by doing each single function that Davis did.
Eventually, he guessed that the body motions of a laboratory assistant during a
critical step in the experiment were telegraphing a clue to Davis. He suggested
a change of arrangements so Davis could not observe his assistant. After that
change, the experiment always failed.
The “polywater” episode is an example of pathological science, the kind
of mistaken science that was charged against the cold fusion claims. The topic
of polywater emerged in the early nineteen seventies from the Soviet Union
(Russia) with the claim to have discovered a new molecular formation of water
(H2O). Only one conference was held in the West to discuss the subject,
and “The number of full length technical papers [published] . . . was fewer
than ten.”6 The experiments were plagued with low signal to noise ratio. Care-
ful laboratory work at Los Alamos National Laboratory ultimately demon-
strated that what was called polywater was nothing more than contamination.
Full-length technical papers published in the field of cold fusion research
numbered more than twelve hundred by the end of 1994, many showing ex-
periments with a comfortably high signal to noise ratio. It was not reasonable
to make a comparison of the two fields of study, as was attempted by some
skeptics.
During his long and successful career, Irving Langmuir made something
of a pastime of reviewing cases of mistaken scientific discovery. In a 1953 col-
loquium, he described three cases in the basic sciences: R. P. Blondlot of the
University of Nancy, Bergen Davis of Columbia University, and Fred Allison
of Alabama Polytechnic Institute. Each experiment and its “discoverer” had
captured the attention of the scientific world. Scientists eventually demon-
strated that each one of the claims were empty. Over a period of years,
Langmuir abstracted those characteristics that the false discoveries had in
common.
In three of his six cases, the experimenter visually observed a flickering
light to collect the experimental output data (Langmuir did not include the
Vienna case). These three cases had in common that the experimenter’s eye
and brain were the detector or sensor instrument. This laboratory technique
was especially prone to entice the operator into a pattern of self-deception. As
Langmiur put it, “. . . these observations are near the threshold of visibility of
the eyes”.7 Of course, this light detection technique by eye was soon overtaken
by electronic detector instrumentation.
Two examples, that of Blondlot and of Davis, demonstrate how visual
measurements can go awry, and how two of America’s best experimental scien-
tists, Wood and Langmuir, went about setting things aright: the critic went
into the laboratory and participated in the questionable experiments. He practiced
the experimental protocol and performed the calculations. His criticisms, then,
were well informed. Langmuir’s investigative methodology was participatory.
 Baltimore 65

s u m m at i o n
Langmuir’s Criteria for a Pathological Science
Irving Langmuir’s criteria for a pathological science can be condensed from his
original lecture of December 1953.*
1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of
barely detectable intensity. The magnitude of the effect is substantially inde-
pendent of the intensity of the cause.
2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability or
many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical sig-
nificance of the results.
3. There are claims of great accuracy.
4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
6. The ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then
falls gradually to oblivion.
* Langmuir, Irving, “Pathological Science,” (Physics Today, vol. 42, October 1989), p. 44.

When he declared a science to be pathological, he knew what he was talking

about.
The accusation that the Fleischmann and Pons experiment was a form of
Langmuir’s pathological science was demonstrably wrong. Noting Langmuir’s
first criteria, the experiment’s outcome varied in a large proportion to the driv-
ing current thus failing the first requirement.8 Criteria two and three are also
not affirmed. Four is not applicable; Fleischmann and Pons offered a nuclear
source, not as a theory, but as an hypothesis, a substantially different sort of
thing. Their theory about a mechanism for fusion may prove wrong, but it
was not fantastic. The insistence that the Fleischmann and Pons experiment
was an example of Langmuir’s pathological science can be seen to be in error.

Other Pathologies
The accusation that cold fusion was pathological science brought with it a few
other pathologies of a different sort.
Dr. D. R. O. Morrison, a physicist at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, de-
clared that, “Cold fusion is best explained as an example of pathological
science.”9 His arguments discussed the ratio of supporters to skeptics,
Langmuir’s last consideration, and the ratio of successful to unsuccessful ex-
cess heat experiments, a criteria that was not a part of Langmuir’s method.
He gave a paper at the Baltimore APS meeting on the “Status of Cold Fu-
66 criticism

sion.” He explained that he was studying the “mistakes” of science. One got
the impression that he stayed deeply in the midst of cold fusion studies so he
could say at some later time that he watched its failure from the inside and
that he was in a position to know the authentic history of its rise and fall. It
must have been discouraging for him to see his target topic continue to levi-
tate year after year.
Morrison mistakenly refers to the discrepancy between the amount of nu-
clear emissions and excess energy as a flaw that only the critics were sharp
enough to spot. “But scientists quickly recognized a drastic discrepancy—for
each watt of power there should be 1012 neutrons per second (a million mil-
lions) but only a few were observed . . .”10 It was Fleischmann who first de-
scribed that discrepancy.
Morrison’s view of cold fusion did not change. After another conference
in December of 1993 he said, “. . . nothing at this conference changed [my]
mind that [cold fusion] is pathological science.”11 Explaining himself at an
earlier conference, he pointed out that, “In 1953 Irving Langmuir gave a de-
lightful lecture on pathological science . . . where he discussed some cases such
as N-Rays, where a number of good scientists reported wrong results.”12
Morrison appears to have overlooked the first four items in Langmuir’s
list that concern the claims of unusual scientific measurements. They do not
fit Fleischmann and Pons’s claims. For example, Langmuir’s first specification
requires an absence of proportionality between the experimental excitation
and the anomalous power as claimed. Fleischmann and Pons show three suc-
cessive electrical currents exciting the cell of 8, 64, and 512 milliamperes in
their Preliminary Note. They claim the cell’s responses were 0.036, 0.493, and
3.02 watts of excess power output. This progression of input and output is not
evidence of an absence of proportionality. Whether these numbers were right
or wrong is not the point either. It is the claim that was charged with being
pathological. The claims as presented did not fit the Langmuir characteristic
that called for an output value independent of the intensity of the input.
What was the significance of the failed experiment? Morrison had made
great hay with the topic. He seems to have found that it was equally as sig-
nificant as the successful experiment. He lectured at Baltimore and at the
University of Utah (September 1989) on the subject of the number of failed
experiments as compared with the number of successful experiments. My in-
vestigation concluded that the counting of failed experiments conveys no
diagnostic information with regard to the Fleischmann and Pons phenome-
non. This topic is developed more completely in Chapter 8, p. 106.
Morrison is emblematic of the almost unlimited verbosity of e-mail type
communications. E-mail networks carry not only unruly critiques, but often
versions one, two, and three of the critique.13 It was as though the world had
the time and interest to watch someone do their homework. The verbosity
 Baltimore 67

and ego-centricity of e-mail communications greatly curtailed its usefulness.

Also, that characteristic of the medium seemed to be present in many other
academic fields of study. I generally found that the study of print publication
was more rewarding for the time committed.
Morrison presented a request at Baltimore that was exemplary. He asked,
“. . . for humility and sympathy for everyone,” involved in this mutual adven-
ture. At that time, and in those circumstances, it was a profound offering. It
still is.
In an article published in September 1989, the director of one of the
national laboratories recognized that the Langmuir criteria did not fit the
Fleischmann and Pons claims, but he was still sure that their claims were
pathological science. So he and his co-author conjured up a list of criteria for
such “degenerate science” and, lo and behold, their criteria fit the Fleischmann
and Pons experiment precisely. This event is treated fully in the next chapter.
The critic of cold fusion research needs to be an active laboratory partici-
pant. Full exposure to laboratory procedure is a requirement. This experience
is the ordinary way in which a scientist gains confidence in, or discovers an er-
ror in a claim. This is especially true if the experiment is one that happens to
be revolutionary in its implications. It may even be appropriate to have a cot
in the corner, should the work prove tedious and extended.
Dr. John R. Huizenga, professor of chemistry and physics, at the Uni-
versity of Rochester, New York, qualifies as a skeptic of cold fusion. He played
a preeminent role in its public evaluation and derogation during the first six
years of the cold fusion saga. His book, Cold Fusion:The Scientifiic Fiasco of the
Century, informs us of his manner of evaluation.* I searched it in vain to learn
of his actual experiences with cold fusion experimentation in the laboratory.
It could reasonably be wondered if he had ever even walked through a cold
fusion laboratory.
The same thing could be said about Morrison. He tried his hand at writ-
ing a peer-reviewed critique of Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetry papers of
1989 to 1992.14 The two chemists replied with a comprehensive display of the
fine details that must be accommodated for successful calorimetry. Morrison
apparently then abandoned the field.
There was another aspect of Langmuir’s concept of pathological science
that was not recognized by the skeptics. If one looked at his examples in the
hard sciences, they involved unusual laboratory apparatus designed and built
specifically to serve as the basis for the extraordinary claims. The apparatus of
Fleischmann and Pons, however, was quite conventional with a history more
than a century old. The electrolytic cell through which a current was passed to
give off oxygen and hydrogen is well known to undergraduate students. The

* It has been published in two editions, 1991 and 1993.

68 criticism

cell the two chemists designed for their cold fusion work appears to be tightly
configured, but otherwise perfectly conventional. Their experiment was a
modest variation on the most ordinary sort of laboratory technology.
Was cold fusion research pathological science? No. It may prove right or
it may prove wrong, but it was not pathological. More important, there is ap-
parently no useful standard by which one can avoid the sometimes lengthy
and expensive effort to determine the correctness of a purported new field of
science. Declaring cold fusion to be a pathological science was seen as a short
cut to understanding it. There is no shortcut; the experimental work will have
to be followed through to the end, wherever that may lead.

Judgement at Caltech
It is worthwhile to remember from our perspective at a twelve year remove
that University of Utah President Peterson in 1989 called for evaluation and
judgement of Fleischmann and Pons’s work by the scientific world.

The full story of the research . . . announce[d] today will not be

known for months or years as others confirm and challenge and en-
large their ideas and their data.15

He never imagined what would take place just 39 days later. Peterson’s state-
ment can be contrasted with a retrospective comment made by Professor
Koonin the week after the American Physical Society (APS) held its spring
meeting on May 1, 1989 in Baltimore. He reminisced about the formation of
his judgement on the cold fusion claims, “So I would say already by about the
17th or 18th [of April] . . . I think at that point we really started to get wor-
ried . . . I decided finally . . .”16 The seventeenth of April was just twenty-three
days after the Utah announcement. His final judgement appears to have been
made not later than the April 25, thirty-one days after the announcement.
Dr. David Goodstein, Vice-Provost at Caltech, did not participate in the
Baltimore meeting nor in the preparation for it. His assessment of it, however,
written five years later, articulated precisely its principal achievement. He
wrote,

For all practical purposes, [cold fusion] ended a mere five weeks after
it began, on May 1, 1989, at a dramatic session of the American
Physical Society in Baltimore. Although there were numerous pre-
sentations at this session, only two truly counted. Steve Koonin and
Nathan Lewis, speaking for himself . . . [both] from Caltech, exe-
 Baltimore 69

cuted between them a perfect blocked shot that cast Cold Fusion
right out of the arena of mainstream science.17

The APS assigned two evenings for special sessions on the new subject of
cold fusion, Monday and Tuesday, May 1 and 2. What took place in 20 hours
at Baltimore set the conditions of debate, and reporting of the debate, for sub-
sequent years. The meeting disposed of the ongoing evaluation of the Utah
claims by placing them permanently into a small box. That intellectual box, or
ghetto, became the most salient characteristic of the field of study. Ten years
later, Scaramuzzi could say,

However, after ten years, in spite of undeniable (although not over-

whelming) progress in the field, there is hardly any communication
between this small CF community and the scientific world at large
. . . I have experienced with distress the lack of communication with
the rest of the scientific world, mostly because I am aware of the rig-
orous scientific approach with which the research has been per-
formed by the ENEA Group in which I have been operating in
Frascati . . . There is still no effective dialogue between the CF com-
munity and the traditional scientific world.18

A hint of the debacle that took place in Baltimore was first seen at a Na-
tional Academy of Sciences meeting on April 18–20 in Washington, D.C. At
this gathering of scientists, the theme of stopping the cold fusion fantasy was
bandied about in the corridors. The spring meeting of the APS in Baltimore,
eleven days hence, was fortuitously timed to serve as a platform.
Professor Steven E. Koonin was one of America’s recognized theoretical
physicists. He took an intense interest in the Utah cold fusion episode from its
start. He called to Professor Jones, a nuclear physicist at BYU, to ask if the
scheduled announcement at the University of Utah that afternoon was conse-
quential. Jones informed him that it was.
Within a week, Professor Koonin had completed a first set of fusion cal-
culations and submitted the paper to Nature for publication.* In the first three
weeks he wrote three papers, had been invited to give presentations at a gath-
ering of nuclear physicists at Erice, Italy, and had also been invited to give a
presentation at Baltimore.
In retrospect, there was a lot of education for him in this activity. He was
surprised to find a whole book solely on the subject of hydrogen in metals. He
was astonished to learn that the subject of possible hydrogen fusion in metals

* Koonin calculated the rates of fusion of deuterium nuclei when they are compacted.
70 criticism

had been experimentally studied as long ago as 1926. At the start, he knew
only one electrochemist.19 But he was a quick read.
He felt that the two Utah chemists were off by a factor of a billion, pre-
sumably referring to the claim of D+D fusion. He had dismissed the hypoth-
esis of a source of energy in presently unknown nuclear processes, although
other comments of his indicate he was well aware of that hypothesis.
Koonin gave us the arguments that led to his conclusions about the cold
fusion announcement. Koonin’s conclusions were based in part on Lewis’s
work (below). (1) Lewis allegedly found errors in Fleischmann and Pons’s cal-
orimetry, (2) Lewis was unable to generate anomalous power in his own ex-
periments, (3) Koonin could not understand theoretically how cold fusion
was possible. Koonin had reached a more significant opinion one week after
the APS meeting, “It is looking to me more like it’s outright fraud at this
point.”20
Nathan S. Lewis, professor of chemistry at Caltech, was an experi-
mentalist. He experimented with various electrolytic cell designs within the
scope of the information available to him. He tried to produce anomalous
power, tritium, neutrons, gamma-rays, and helium. He put together an ad
hoc team that ultimately consisted of twenty-one graduate students and post-
doctoral associates culled from the corridors of Caltech. This large number of
technicians was astonishing for an academic setting; Fleischmann and Pons
had a support team numbering exactly one. The difficulty in making use of
such a large group was illustrated with the following example selected from
the effort to discover “high temperature” superconducting materials two years
earlier.
Dr. Paul Chu, University of Houston, was recognized for having discov-
ered a high temperature superconducting compound. He had tried a maneu-
ver similar to Lewis’s during the several months of frenzy leading up to the dis-
covery. Chu had an assistant, Ru-Ling Meng, who was responsible for the
critical steps in preparing samples. This maneuver was described in a contem-
porary account.

In the hopes of trying a greater number of potential superconducting

compositions, Chu augmented his overworked team of graduate stu-
dents and postdocs with three undergraduates. They were assigned
the exacting but tedious tasks of weighing chemicals, mixing and
grinding powders, and overseeing the baking and cooling operations.
But after three weeks of trying, nothing seemed to work. Perhaps
they hadn’t ground their starting materials finely enough, or maybe
they mixed the chemicals in the wrong ratios. Whatever the reason,
Chu reluctantly told Ru-Ling Meng, who had a special knack for the
tricky synthesis, that she would have to get back to the grind.21
 Baltimore 71

A cold fusion laboratory’s performance depends greatly on the details of

technique such as cleanliness, the careful handling of components, preserving
an electrode’s surface exactly as it ought to be. To put together an ad hoc
group to do surface-catalyzed electrochemistry was preposterous, like collect-
ing some physicists at a convention to build a tokamak.*
Unfortunately for Lewis, Pons would not communicate with him. He
may have had some concern about the ultimate purpose of such a large staff or
there may have been other reasons. Lewis had to get the cell specifications by
whatever means he could manage. His team collected reports from the press,
facsimile networks, and by telephone inquiry, to learn the design of the
Fleischmann and Pons cell. For example, he determined the overall flask di-
mensions from a photograph in which one was held up by Pons. He said he
proportioned the diameter of the flask to the diameter of Pons’s wrist.
Every known variant of each element in the cell was incorporated into
one experiment or another in Lewis’s laboratory. Although an Edisonian “try
everything” technique is not unknown in science, it inevitably gives the im-
pression of waste as it has the appearance of being a somewhat mindless strat-
egy, one that consumes excessive resources. One of the post-doctoral members
of Lewis’s team, Reginald Penner, gave his view of that kind of experimental
procedure. He tells how, “The first two weeks were an incredible roller coaster.
Every day we learned something that made us think everything we had done
so far was wrong. So we’d say, ‘That’s it! That’s the thing!’ and make a new
cell.” “This casting [of the palladium cathode] business really bummed us out.
It implied that everything we had done up to April 20 was wrong. Which
wasn’t true. We found out later that Pons and Fleischmann hadn’t used cast
palladium at all, but just regular extruded wire.”22

Loading
It was suggested during 1989 that the numerous failed experiments might be
due to some threshold effect in which failure always results if the experiment
operates below a particular value. One such threshold tentatively emerged by
the spring of 1990. It became clear that merely letting the palladium cathode
absorb deuterium to the level it was pleased to reach was not sufficient. To
generate excess heat, the ratio of deuterium atoms, compared with the number
of palladium atoms, had to be greater than a threshold value or the experi-
ment could not work. This was referred to as the loading ratio, the level to
* To a great extent, this ad hoc method decreased the likelihood of success of the Japanese gov-
ernment’s experimental efforts in the mid-1990s in cold fusion research. The U.S. Govern-
ment has several national laboratories available to it that are maintained precisely for the pur-
pose of evaluating scientific questions.
72 criticism

which deuterium atoms have been loaded into the palladium metal. I believe
Michael McKubre, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, was the first to
explore this phenomenon.*
Trying a multitude of possibilities was only one of several avenues open
to Lewis. In contrast, McKubre expressly did not set out to copy the experi-
ment. He decided that since his group had worked intensively with deuterium
in metals previously and had observed no anomalies such as excess heat, he
knew the interesting region, if one existed, must be at the high loading levels.
Until now, he assumed, these had not been obtained and, therefore, had not been
studied in the open literature. McKubre was quite explicit about this.

We set about it in a different way from most of the more famous

people, other people whose experiments are now more famous. We
didn’t attempt to reproduce the F and P experiment as understood
by close examination of newspaper clippings, for example. We didn’t
build a cell like theirs at all. What we did was take the hypothesis
that under conditions of high loading in an electrochemical environ-
ment the deuterium palladium system could be made to give off heat
and possibly nuclear products. Given that hypothesis, how would
you go about testing it? We devised an experiment that we believed
would achieve those conditions independently of any knowledge of
the electrochemical apparatus and cell geometry of Fleischmann and
Pons.
So the first experiments we did were at elevated pressure and re-
duced temperature, both of which favor achieving the high loading
conditions [D/Pd]. We didn’t use open cells. It was an electrochemi-
cal cell with a modest over-pressure of deuterium gas.† We started
working with the elevated pressure and reduced temperature experi-
ments and obtained good loadings, and it was reasonably replicable.
In our first experiments we saw what we thought was evidence for
excess power.23

McKubre had an advantage over Lewis because his team was immersed in
the chemistry of deuterium dissolved in palladium at the time of the Utah an-
nouncement. He was in a position to lay out a course of research that brought
him to the position of corroborating the Fleischmann and Pons claim of
anomalous power. Reaching that point took five years of laboratory research.

* Others, i.e., Kunimatsu and Fleischmann, were coming to the same conclusion at about the
same time.
† About 1,000 pounds per square inch of pressure inside the closed cell.
 Baltimore 73

Caltech underestimated the time required to evaluate the Fleischmann and

Pons claims by a factor of about fifty.
For his scheduled talk at Baltimore, Lewis developed a multifaceted criti-
cism of the Utah claims. In addition to his experimental work, Lewis devoted
time to recalculating the performance of the Fleischmann and Pons cells as
reported by them in the Preliminary Note. He found that one column of
their published results went beyond what was normally accepted as data re-
duction (the calculations that turn raw data into meaningful values). They
had included a column of values that could be anticipated as resulting from a
superior, but as yet untried, electrochemical operation. Such an extension of
calculation was improper for them to include unless special attention was di-
rected to it, which it was not. The column provided data for claims of much
higher power output to input ratios than they had actually achieved.
Lewis’s own experiments demonstrated to him that there must be major
deficiencies in Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetry: without mechanical stir-
ring of the electrolyte solution the heat measurements would be wrong. He
concluded that Fleischmann and Pons had committed the mistake of not hav-
ing stirred their cell’s electrolyte sufficiently to obtain accurate temperature
measurements. Lewis thought this would cause temperature variations large
enough to vitiate their claim for anomalous power.
During the month of April, Koonin and Lewis arrived at these conclu-
sions, and started planning what would be done at the Baltimore meeting.
They agreed that the Utah scientists had not achieved the generation of anom-
alous power. Koonin concluded that his theoretical calculations eliminated
any possibility of deuterium-deuterium fusion; that no one could figure out
how cold fusion might be theoretically possible; that the Utah nuclear mea-
surements were erroneous; that no one was seeing the necessary neutrons; and
that there were gross calorimetry errors in the Utah experiment. But mostly,
“. . . nobody could think of how it could work . . .”24
Koonin spelled out his plan for Baltimore: “. . . I was going to hit really
hard . . .”25 He decided carefully what words he would use, “I talked to a lot of
people before I settled on those words . . .”26 It was with alacrity and fervor
that Koonin and Lewis prepared for what was to be Baltimore.

The Assault
Although the meeting occupied two evenings and over 40 papers were pre-
sented, Koonin’s and Lewis’s on Monday evening did the heavy work. (The
three press conferences that were associated with the two evening sessions
proved important. These are reviewed in the next chapter.)
Koonin’s presentation showed the deep conflict experienced by those with
74 criticism

expert knowledge when faced by an utterly impersonal heresy whose potential

sweep of change was quite inconceivable. He went through the calculations of
deuterium-deuterium fusion under what he took to be the conditions inside
the palladium lattice, and proclaimed that it could not happen. He did noth-
ing with the Utah hypothesis that, “. . . other nuclear processes” caused the ef-
fect. He demonstrated that conventional nuclear reactions in the quantity
needed to support the amount of anomalous power claimed by Fleischmann
and Pons were impossible. No one, however, had claimed that the anomalous
power was due to well-known nuclear reactions.
He presented his calculations and results to the assembled physicists
in a professional manner, although with arrogant overtones when passing
judgement on other physicists’ work, “. . . he got it mostly right.” As he
came to the end of his lecture, he switched from science to politics. There was
the matter of Fleischmann and Pons and how to protect the world from
them.27 Koonin offered this denouement to the gathered professional audi-
ence. “We are suffering from the incompetence and perhaps delusions of Drs.
Pons and Fleischmann,”28 a comment he knew was likely to destroy their pro-
fessional stature. The audience sat quietly for a moment, possibly waiting to
see if the sky would fall, and then it burst into enthusiastic and sustained ap-
plause.
The assembly of physicists had found deliverance. Now they could go
back to their desks relieved of this crazy anomaly. Hot fusion research funding
would not be threatened. From this time forward, the cold fusion episode for
the orthodox was only argumentative politics; politics and nothing more. The
Utah fusion threat had been quickly and successfully contained.
That considerable response of the roomful of physicists ought not be at-
tributed entirely to the persuasive powers of Koonin and Lewis. As scientists
the two did not carry great authority within their respective professions. They
were only a couple of especially competent professors. Their polemics on that
evening in May simply triggered the pent-up emotions of the audience. The
rank and file physicists knew from the announcement that Fleischmann and
Pons were offering bogus science either out of audacity or ignorance or a little
of each.
The falsity of some of these accusations against Fleischmann and Pons
was recognized immediately by New York Times science reporter William J.
Broad.
. . . and one called them incompetent. They are far from that. Dr.
Fleischmann, 62 years old, is a past president of the International
Society of Electrochemistry and a Fellow of the Royal Society, the
top honorary society for British Scientists.29
But Broad was the only reporter to notice.
 Baltimore 75

Lewis’s presentation in Baltimore followed immediately after Koonin’s. It

came across to the audience as a thoroughly competent, comprehensive, ana-
lytical and experimental review of the Fleischmann and Pons experiment. Did
Lewis successfully copy the Fleischmann and Pons experiment? Certainly not.
The information needed to copy it simply was not available.*
Consider the length of the experimental run. It can be calculated that
only ten days ought to be required.† Fleischmann and Pons’s definitive experi-
ments ran for 10 weeks, even though a clever experimenter can get some re-
sults earlier. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 in Chapter 4 showed that in some cases the
most interesting things happen after more than seven weeks have passed. In a
paper published two years later, Fleischmann and Pons say, “. . . The mini-
mum time for a single experiment had been three months.”30 Lewis was re-
porting on his laboratory experimental work just thirty-nine days after he
started.
Another question concerns achieving proper loading of deuterium into
the palladium. Lewis did not mention this topic during his APS presentation,
perhaps because he was unaware of its importance. It was one of the first con-
siderations of those scientists who were more experienced in hydrogen-in-
metal (hydride) systems.‡ In his published paper (August 1989), Lewis states
his achieved loading, “The D/Pd of 0.77, 0.79 and 0.80 obtained from these
measurements were taken to be representative of the D/Pd for the charged
cathodes used in this work.”31 By the end of 1993, McKubre’s experimental
reports specified that the minimum loading needed to allow the generation of
excess energy was 0.9032 (although some had published values as low as 0.85).
This value (0.90) was confirmed by others working in the field. Only at levels
above 0.90 will the Fleischmann and Pons phenomena of excess heat occur,
thus making it worthwhile to look for neutrons, gamma-rays, tritium or he-
lium products.
At Baltimore, Lewis stood before the audience of 250 or so physicists and

* In 1993, for example, Fleischmann and Pons reported in the peer-reviewed literature the oper-
ation of a cell and calorimeter at the boiling point of water in an experiment that generated
over 100 watts. (Physics Letters A, 176, May 3, 1993) pp. 118–293.) Some of this experiment
and its calorimetry was corroborated by being successfully reproduced in part by a team at the
French Atomic Energy Commission laboratories in Grenoble, France. (G. Lonchampt, L.
Bonnetain, and P. Hicter, “Reproduction of Fleischmann and Pons Experiments,” [ICCF-6,
vol. I, October 1996], p. 113.) That reproduction required twenty-four months of work, close
consulting with Pons, and is not yet complete. (It is said that Pons provided the Pd cathode
that finally made the experiment work.) This example gives the reader some inkling of the dif-
ficulty of the Fleischmann and Pons electrolytic cell experiment.
† The infusion time of deuterium into palladium metal is well known. One can use this as an ar-
gument for estimating the required loading time of the experiment. Some experimenters have
suggested that additional factors are involved in the loading that extend the overall time con-
siderably.
‡ A hydride or deuteride is a metal that has absorbed a great deal of hydrogen of deuterium re-
spectively.
76 criticism

gave a lecture in absentia to Fleischmann and Pons on electrochemical labora-

tory technique. He explained as a professor might to a freshman chemistry
class, that in this experiment one must stir the electrolyte exactly so if they
want their temperature measurements to be correct.* The Utah scientists had
failed to stir their cells (see Figure 3.1, page 39, no mechanical propeller is evi-
dent). It seemed quite beyond Lewis’s imagination that a lifetime experience
working with such cells might have gone far beyond the awkward notion of
using propellers or such to provide adequate stirring.
Lewis’s cell design did not mirror the Fleischmann and Pons cell. Pons
had used an overly large diameter flask for the photograph from which Lewis
had taken his measurements. The flask was designed for much higher power
levels, but never used. Lewis’s cells probably needed mechanical stirring to give
correct data because of excessive diameter and lack of a vacuum insulation.†
In his paper, Lewis says that there was no vacuum whatsoever in his Dewar
flask, and, while giving its volume, avoids mentioning the inside diameter. He
also does not mention that Fleischmann and Pons transferred heat out of the
cell by means of radiation while he used conduction. Lewis’s notion that he
had copied the performance of the Utah experiment was a fantasy.
Lewis, nevertheless, was thoroughly persuasive with the audience and
with the science reporters about the failure of Fleischmann and Pons’s work. I
have not been able to find any confirmation that Lewis ever again invoked or
defended his absolute assertion that lack of stirring invalidated the Utah
claims of generating anomalous power. Yet he never revoked that absolute as-
sertion to America’s science reporters.
For the physicists in the audience, Koonin and Lewis’s successive put-
downs of the two Utah chemists along with their work was delicious. Their
sustained applause indicated acceptance of Koonin’s and Lewis’s implication
that the scientific evaluation of the Utah claims was now complete.

* Wilson et al., dealt with this issue in his 1992 technical review of Fleischmann and Pons’s calo-
rimetry, with the statement, “ . . . inadequate mixing within the cell . . . does not appear to be a
problem.” (Wilson, et al., Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, July 1992.) Lewis never re-
sponded in the literature to Wilson’s or Fleischmann’s refutation of his criticism.
† Building a mechanical stirring capability into the cell would add to the complexity and cost of
the cell. The cell is surrounded by a meticulously insulated and temperature controlled bath.
Since cold fusion experimentation was already expensive, great care was taken by Fleischmann
and Pons to design a cell, and a system for operating the cell without mechanical stirring and
still keep the performance and measurements entirely adequate to their scientific purpose. At
times the experiments were set up in what is called a factorial manner. Five experiments would
or would not be present in each cell. There are 32 permutations of five binary values. Then the
32 cells would be run for three months. It gave multiple results for each of the five experi-
ments.
 c h a p t e r s i x

Four Press Conferences

T he most revealing aspect of the Baltimore meeting was the manipulation

of the press. Three press conferences accompanied the first evening ses-
sion, two before it and one afterward. There was a fourth press conference at
the Electrochemical Society (ECS) meeting held in Los Angeles one week
later.
There were ninety-nine science reporters registered for the conference
due to the widespread national interest in the Utah announcement. The first
press conference started at 4:00 p.m. on Monday afternoon, May 1, 1989, be-
fore the first evening special session on cold fusion research. A second started
at 5:00 p.m. on that same afternoon. The third took place, not on Wednesday
after the two sessions were complete, but on Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m.
This arrangement was quite unusual. Ordinarily, one press conference would
convene after the proceedings to allow for any questions the press might have.
These three scheduled press conferences demonstrated an aggressive intent.*
The first press conference had little content. This was to be expected
since the presentations had not yet taken place. It ended at 4:30, with the an-
nouncement that there would be a second press conference in a half-hour.
The 5:00 p.m. press conference was the second of the three. It belonged to
N. S. Lewis and there he revealed his purpose to the assembled press, the

* It is not likely that the assigned leader of the two special sessions was involved in the planning
of the press conferences.
I have concluded that the press conference in March was forced upon Fleischmann and
Pons by two factors: the revolutionary content of their claims, and the university setting that
prevented further secrecy. These considerations played no role at Baltimore.

77
78 criticism

cream of America’s science reporters, a few hours before his evening presenta-
tion. He averred, “If we’re going to have publication with press conferences,
we should have peer reviews as press conferences, too.”1
He reminded the reporters present, “As most of you know, we’ve been
working on this since day one, in fact, since the evening of the [Utah] an-
nouncement.” He then stated Caltech’s intent, “we’re going to do the experi-
ments necessary to see if this works.”2 The reporters, it seemed, were to under-
stand that if the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon did not exist, Lewis
would do the experiments necessary to demonstrate that fact. Caltech was
prepared to prove a negative, if necessary. Thus his testimony to the press was
absolute.
He opened the press conference with an extended summary of the pre-
sentation he had not yet given. He ended it with the following statement.*

We’ve uncovered a lot of methods that do not work. For instance,

not stirring your solutions [in the cell]. You have temperature gradi-
ents[differences between one point and another]. The one electrode
will inherently generate more heat than the other. The electrodes be-
ing big pieces of wire, also were cooling pins. They are efficient at re-
moving heat from the system if you do not agitate the system and
stir it. The temperature you measure depends on where you put the
thermometer. You can get a very large range of errors this way and
those errors place serious doubt on the accuracy of the numbers that
were measured by Pons and Fleischmann. When we stirred the solu-
tion uniformly to obtain measurements that were independent of
where you put the thermometer, we see no evidence for any excess
heat.3 (Emphasis added.)

A reporter asked, “Do you think that it was possible that in some of these
results, where people did report some excess heat, that this failure to stir the
solution could have caused them to get these [excess energy] measurements?”
Lewis’s unqualified answer was, “Absolutely.” Another reporter asked, “Pons
thinks he’s proud of the fact that . . . he himself around December 1 produced
this so-called excess heat, but that doesn’t mean anything, does it?” Without
demurring to the questioner’s blatant attitude, Lewis replied in full, “Of
course not.”4 Both answers were wholly unmitigated: “absolutely,” and “of
course not,” period. Lewis came prepared not only to report on his own work,
but to report on the work of Fleischmann and Pons as well.

* The terms anomalous power and excess heat (flow) were used pretty much interchangeably dur-
ing this period to stand for the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon. Where these terms appear
in the quotations that follow, I have let them stand as they were originally used. In some cases,
it is not clear whether the speaker is referring to heat energy or heat power.
 Four Press Conferences 79

A few minutes later, he said, “. . . we believe the excess heat will turn out
not to be there.”5 There was no room allowed in these three answers for any
possibility other than that excess heat energy did not exist in the experiments
done by Fleischmann and Pons. For the nation’s science reporters, the first
APS special session at Baltimore began on that note.
The third press conference was held the next morning with Koonin as the
respondent. He repeated large parts of his 20 minute presentation of the eve-
ning before. He then reinforced the evening’s vilification of Fleischmann and
Pons by adding a measure of ridicule. He said, in an ill-constructed simile,
“It’s all very well to theorize how fusion might take place in a palladium cath-
ode . . . One could also theorize about how pigs could fly if they had wings,
but pigs don’t have wings.”6
These savage words of satire were intended to destroy the Utah chemists.
After that, their leaving from America was only a matter of time. Pons was
driven to abandon his U.S. citizenship. Let me emphasize, it was not only that
the Utah scientists were deemed wrong; the whole episode was much larger
than that. The damage came as thickly in the press conferences as in the tech-
nical sessions.
It is interesting to note Fleischmann’s response, since he is a particularly
adept speaker. In an August 1992 invited speech to the British Association for
the Advancement of Science (BAAS), he said, “. . . America has developed a
conformist society . . . It was not that we were wrong; it was that we must
stop.”7 Continuance would inevitably give a glow of legitimacy and thereby
threaten the establishment’s verdict. Fleischmann’s point about conformity
gains emphasis when one considers that it was unthinkable that the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) invite him to speak to
one of their meetings.
The Caltech contingent was probably as surprised as anyone to observe
the unintended consequences: cold fusion science moved from the inhospita-
ble United States to a more hospitable Japan. It thrived there from 1993 to
1997 (and continuing into 2001). As the decade unfolded, research continued
in Japan, China, Italy, Russia, India, and France, with no little continuing in
the United States.
The ostracizing of scientists who work in the cold fusion field did not
happen entirely in this one step. After the discrediting of Fleischmann and
Pons in the eyes of the scientific elite, the next step was to extend knowledge
of that fact to the national elite.
A high price would be paid for the conversion of this national debate
from one about science to one of politics. Evaluation of the electrochemical
experiment announced in March was to continue, taking five, ten, twenty or
more years to complete. The U.S. evaluation was to be done under the most
severe and generalized scorn. Public derision or the threat of it was always
80 criticism

present: Who would be ridiculed next by some old antagonist who smelled a
fresh opportunity?
The American Physical Society’s Baltimore meeting occurred the biblical
40 days and nights after the first publicity about cold fusion. At Caltech,
Koonin “could not think of how it could work.” Lewis, after his five weeks of
Herculean labors, found no excess heat or nuclear products. So much work to
no avail, except that their labors availed well for their particular purposes. The
Caltech crew to this day look upon that Baltimore evening as a solid success.
As Koonin put it in his retrospective commentary, “The institute of Caltech
comes out like a hero . . .”8 Indeed, it was completely successful, but only in
political terms.
Neither Koonin nor Lewis were especially powerful members of their
professions by rank of office, awards and honors, or publication of textbooks.
Their importance to us was due to the impact they imposed upon a new field
of scientific activity.
Four broad-audience scientific journals (Scientific American, Nature (Lon-
don), Science (AAAS), Chemical & Engineering News (American Chemical So-
ciety)) have remained largely silent in the subsequent ten years. This avoid-
ance of cold fusion research news provided a protective cover for Lewis’s
assertions about Fleischmann and Pons’s experiments. The world of science
twelve years later knows only what Lewis claimed. Lewis was never obliged to
defend his claims concerning Fleischmann and Pons’s work. His claims stand
as the last word on the subject, largely because the extensive work done and
published since 1989 was not reported to the scientific community. This
blackout of sorts was a principal accomplishment of the four press confer-
ences.
By going beyond their own work, by speaking about the experiments
of other scientists and of the psychological stability of those scientists, by do-
ing so with professional acumen, articulate expression, and unbounded con-
fidence, and by conveying this to an audience of established but now threat-
ened physicists, Koonin and Lewis in twenty hours consigned cold fusion
science to a ghetto. Thirty-nine days after its announcement, cold fusion stud-
ies became a scientific heresy.
Professor Koonin recorded his feelings about the meeting a week later. He
expressed his confidence in a job well done. He was not pleased in the sense
that, “. . . I think it has destroyed those two guys,”9 after all, he continued,
“you’re not an assassin . . .”10
Six years later, Koonin’s ridicule of Fleischmann and Pons had become in-
stitutionalized within the APS and voiced by their spokesman at an official
APS meeting, Dr. Robert L. Park.11 At a San Jose meeting, he titled his formal
address, “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves.” He
opened it with a repeat of Koonin’s ridicule of the two Utah chemists’ work.
 Four Press Conferences 81

At Baltimore, the public aspect of cold fusion was converted from science
to politics. From that point, it was only a matter of each of us, you and I,
choosing sides. The Baltimore event was well characterized by a comment of
the late Petr Beckman in his newsletter, Access to Energy, on May 8, 1989,
“Most of the . . . physicists at the convention applauded these and other in-
stant experts who have found a short cut to glory by understanding everything
in five weeks of guesses about a phenomenon that still puzzles two respected
scientists after five years of laboratory work.”12

Los Angeles
The vilification continued. The Electrochemical Society (ECS) held its an-
nual meeting in Los Angeles one week after the Baltimore meeting. Lewis,
Fleischmann, and Pons were present and gave talks. Lewis gave a restrained
version of his Baltimore presentation.* To some extent, the speakers and the
audience were following different agendas. The audience of electrochemists
was only partially aware of the extent of the calumny that was heaped upon
Fleischmann and Pons the previous week. On the other hand, the two chem-
ists had no choice but to use their time to defend themselves.
Fleischmann responded to Lewis’s claim that lack of stirring “absolutely”
invalidated his results. He presented a video showing how quickly the cell’s
bubbling action causes mixing. When a red dye was added to a cell, the bub-
bles from the electrodes mixed the solution quickly. The dye was fully mixed
in twenty seconds in a flask where the temperature was recorded every five
minutes. This dispersion of the dye in a flask well insulated against heat loss
by conduction implied a uniform temperature.
Fleischmann recognized the mixing issue as it was a staple of electro-
chemistry. He had selected the easiest way to achieve uniform temperatures.
He set a high minimum value for the electric current, a high vacuum in the
Dewar’s wall for conductive insulation, and a low value for the flask’s inside
diameter, 3.30 cm. These were principal cell design values.
Lewis’s flask did not meet these requirements. His Dewar vacuum was
one atmosphere—none at all. He avoids revealing the inside diameter saying
he used “dimensions very similar to those used” by Fleischmann and Pons.13
Too large a diameter and a lack of a vacuum insulation on the outside surface
of the electrolyte ought to be sufficient to cause Lewis’s cell to give erroneous
temperature readings. His statement that Fleischmann and Pons’s measured
power was wrong because of non-uniform temperatures was itself an error.
The demonstration of excellent heat measurement appeared much later

* There is no verbatim record of the proceedings of this ECS meeting.

82 criticism

when Fleischmann and Pons balanced their control cells to better than one
percent. How easy it was to fool oneself into believing things about another’s
experiment when that other experiment was 1,000 kilometers distant.
Nature’s Washington editor, David Lindley, specifically referred to Lewis’s
talk in his report of the meeting. “But the centerpiece of Fleischmann and
Pons claim, that the heat is produced in their cell in amount too large to be
explained by purely chemical process, was dissected by Nathan Lewis . . . who
ascribed the energy generation to poor calorimetry . . . at the end of the meet-
ing the physicists were left with the comfortable feeling that cold fusion
was dead.”14
A question about helium-four evidence was brought up at this Los An-
geles meeting. Pons had mentioned that he first detected it in the gaseous
effluent from heat generating cells the previous December (1988). He thought
this helium-four was a nuclear ash resulting from the generation of anomalous
power. He had mentioned it to Walling and Simons in March.* Fleischmann
and Pons’s opinions about the significance of the helium differed. Fleisch-
mann assumed that the nuclear reactions, what ever they were, would leave
their product in the bulk of the palladium. Pons’s assertion that he detected
helium in the effluent gasses came from a limited type of experiment. Under
the onus developed the previous week in Baltimore, such data could no longer
even be even alluded to in a public forum. Pons withheld his intended discus-
sion of evidence for helium-four.
The fourth press conference in our series took place in the late evening
after the technical conference. About twenty cameras were present. J. K.
Footlick reported:

. . . a physicist from the California Institute of Technology—a non-

journalist who had crashed the press conference—commandeered
a microphone and began shouting loaded questions at Pons and
Fleischmann. Soon everyone was grabbing microphones and inter-
rupting each other; a number of people, some of them physicists
cholerically denouncing the work, stood on chairs to shout. Pons
and Fleischmann sat stony faced in the television lights, perhaps
stunned, certainly angry.15

The “physicist” from Caltech who commandeered a microphone was Dr. N.

S. Lewis.

* We will see in Chapter 16, p. 223, that the claim has since been rescinded. It has been to some
extent corroborated by several dedicated experiments in independent laboratories beginning in
June 1991, although one cannot yet say that it is validated.
 Four Press Conferences 83

The audience saw the meeting as so much shadowboxing. Altogether, it

did a disservice to Fleischmann and Pons. After the resounding attack of the
previous week, the largely friendly audience wanted a powerful response.
What they got was a discussion of a few assorted issues. The two chemists
were now permanently on the defensive.

Santa Fe
Santa Fe was the nearest vestige of civilization to the Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL) at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was the site of a cold fu-
sion conference, “Workshop on Cold Fusion Phenomena,” on May 23–25,
1989, sponsored in part by the U.S. DOE. At that time, LANL had a large
program underway. Virtually the entire cadre of those working in the field at-
tended. This included members of the newly commissioned DOE Panel on
Cold Fusion (Panel). Their accomplishments will be reviewed in the next
chapter.
The two and a half days of presentations covered about everything per-
taining to cold fusion research: nuclear and calorimetric data, positive and
negative results, and some initial theoretical musing on the possible energy
source. The name “believers” was introduced as a derogatory term for those
who took the excess heat reports seriously, and many of those scientists who
were not sensitive to the impact of word connotations used the term them-
selves. Approximately fifty papers were included in the published conference
report.
It was true that the purpose of the meeting was to continue the debate on
the reality of “cold fusion” announced two months previously. Many were
surely looking for a correlation between nuclear activity and the amounts of
heat claimed. The contingent of those who by then had taken a serious inter-
est in anomalous power—the “believers”—had a different sense of purpose.
They wanted to exchange views with others of like persuasion about the best
way to design their next experiment.
The meeting was orderly and civil in contrast to the APS conference ear-
lier in the month. Although reporters were present, the scientific points to be
made were directed to the assembled scientists. Dr. E. Storms, a LANL scien-
tist, offered the first emphasis on the need to obtain high D/Pd loading.
These “believers” were starting on a high risk and high stakes track. They
knew that reaction products from well-known nuclear processes had not been
well demonstrated. It was a rare and precious moment in their careers: the
chance, from the very beginning, to work in science on something new and
fundamental.
84 criticism

The Coup de Grâce

The DOE’s Panel released its preliminary report in July. The report was thor-
oughly discouraging about the possibility of there being any “useful energy
source” from cold fusion research.
Nature published Dr. Lewis’s paper in August reporting on the work he
presented at the Baltimore meeting. By September, Fleischmann and Pons
were virtually without peer support. The Baltimore meeting in May and the
Panel’s negative interim report in July combined to destroy their reputation
within the scientific community in America.
A major newspaper article that appeared in September contributed fur-
ther to the destruction. Although the U.S. academic, political, and social lead-
ers were aware of the disgrace cast upon Fleischmann and Pons, they received
it second hand in short press quotes. That disgrace would be set forth now in
detail in a newspaper read by America’s intellectual elite. It happened in a long
article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 24, 1989. This
may be thought of as following the Baltimore assault with a coup de grâce.16
Reports of confirmations and failures of the Utah experiment were falling
off now. The March bandwagon jumpers were returning to more familiar re-
search. A few long-timers were just getting their research underway for the
several years required to evaluate the Fleischmann and Pons effect.
As far as the nuclear physicists were concerned, evaluation was complete.
One of those was N. P. Samios, Director of the Brookhaven National Labora-
tory, Upton, Long Island, New York. He collaborated with Robert P. Crease,
assistant professor of philosophy, University of New York, Stony Brook. They
co-authored a description of the controversy in a newspaper article that was a
lampoon. It said that the cold fusion episode was just another incident in the
long history of pathological science, the science of things that are not so.
Considering the level of prestige the New York Times carries in the aca-
demic world, the Washington, D.C., community, and the national media, this
amounted to a public tar and feathering of Fleischmann and Pons. From this
point forward, they faced a hostile national elite as well as a hostile academic
community. The two authors positioned the two chemists from Utah thus,
“Today . . . Pons and Fleischmann continue to cling to their assertion that
they have found something new. ‘We are absolutely sure of our result,’ Pons
told the Wall Street Journal, earlier this month.”17
The article introduces the public to Langmuir’s term “pathological sci-
ence.” It states, “In fact, there may have been another factor at work—self-de-
ception. Pons and Fleischmann apparently fell victim to the experimental sci-
entist’s worst nightmare.”18 The article describes how two established scientists
with a good record fell into a pattern of self-deception that left them clinging
to a cliff. How humiliating for them and for us all.
 Four Press Conferences 85

The first photograph in the story was that of Fleischmann and Pons, the
second was of Blondlot who fell into a pattern of self-deception with his N-
rays. The caption for both pictures uses a parallel construction: “Victims of
self-deception? Martin Fleischmann . . . and Stanley Pons told Congress they
had achieved fusion at room temperature. Below, turn-of-the-century scientist
René Blondlot thought he saw N-rays.”19
The theme digressed into the story of unlimited energy from hot fusion
and the almost insuperable technical difficulties of releasing it. Far be it for a
simple bench-top chemistry experiment to touch any of that. Then there was
an explanation of how the electrolytic cell works. It was delivered, however,
as though the authors considered the cell a simple “kitchen experiment.” Its
formal name of surface-catalyzed electrochemistry was not mentioned. Dr.
Samios was beyond his realm of expertise when it came to chemistry, catalysis,
surface kinetics, and calorimetry.
A striking characteristic of their lampoon was the heavy application of
satire and childish over-simplification:

No need to create a sun in the laboratory, no need for the equivalent

of a hydrogen bomb. Just a tub of heavy water, an electrolyte, two
electrodes, and some current.20

In an unusual and admirable accreditation, the authors stated that the

Utah announcement did recognize that the neutron count was much smaller
than would be required if conventional fusion had been at work. Samios and
Crease’s technical criticism ran as follows,

Equally surprising was the relative lack of neutrons produced . . . If

the excess heat that Fleischmann and Pons reported was due to fu-
sion, then they should have found a neutron flux of 1013 neutrons
per second in their laboratory . . . But they reported only 104. They
attributed this to the fact that a new form of reaction was taking
place.21

The authors did not explain to their elite audience how the two chemists
reached that conclusion or, in their circumstances, what better conclusion was
possible. Unfortunately, the authors went off the rational track and indulged
themselves with more satire.

They attributed this [lack of neutrons] to the fact that a new form
of [nuclear] reaction was taking place. Wonderful! No need for tons
of lead shielding, no vexing problem of waste disposal, no need
86 criticism

to decommission plants because their parts had become too hot to

handle.22

With that bit of derision, the Fleischmann and Pons claim for the anomalous
power phenomena was dismissed out of hand. No attempt was made to sug-
gest what error was concealed in their chemistry. There was no need to. Balti-
more had taken care of that item.
The story’s principal thrust was to describe the event as another example
of pathological science. The authors enlisted the name of Irving Langmuir. In-
terestingly, they did not use his criteria. As they abruptly put it,

Pathological science, [Langmuir] said, has a characteristic set of

symptoms, and he drew up an informal list based on his own experi-
ences. We have drawn up our own, based on ours.23

Well now, is it polite to ask, Why? Langmuir’s list was not “. . . an informal list
based on his own experiences,” as asserted. It was based on his study of six
cases and it was presented in a scientific symposium, a quite different sort of
thing.
The two authors “. . . have drawn up our own [list], based on our [own
experiences].” Again, is it polite to ask, What experiences? Have they too
made a study of pathological science from which to derive their own list? Or
did their ad hoc list serve only the purpose of this one article?
Crease and Samios’s approach to the subject of pathological science was a
marvel of manipulation. First, having made full use of Langmuir’s name,
they tossed his work overboard. They substituted a new list generated, heaven
knows how, but designed solely to condemn the work of Fleischmann and
Pons. They point out, for example,

When an experiment begins producing results, the experimenters

must still make sure that the readings represent a true profile of a sci-
entific phenomenon—that the data have not been produced by
something else in the environment or idiosyncrasies of the equip-
ment. To guard against these “systematic effects” . . . scientists run
experiments over and over, making small changes in the equipment
to see whether the effects change.24

It is hard to see how this might apply to the Fleischmann and Pons experi-
ment where each experiment runs for about ten weeks. Doing the experiment
over and over, with the results of each run informing a “small change” to be
made in the next run, as they describe it, might have required a decade. The
authors seemed oblivious to what the two chemists actually did and to the
myriad of consequences that followed from the nature of their experiment.
 Four Press Conferences 87

They proceeded to the heart of their story by listing and explaining the
four pathological symptoms they have conjured up for their article. It is im-
portant to review their listed symptoms to understand the impact their think-
ing had on the national elite.
“Symptom No. 1: Too Many Miracles.” This symptom expresses Samios’s
incredulity at the two chemists for hypothesizing a new, unknown nuclear
process. There was no explanation of how Fleischmann and Pons rationally ar-
rived at that hypothesis.
“Symptom No. 2: The ‘Discoverers’ Are Outsiders.” The authors failed to
show any self-awareness. Crease, as an assistant professor of philosophy, was
certainly an outsider, if anyone was. Fleischmann and Pons were doing their
stock-in-trade work to develop their electrolytic cell. That was their field and
their expertise: surface-catalyzed electrolysis, chemical kinetics, and calorime-
try. Furthermore, while they originally expected to get a lot of neutrons, to
their surprise they got only heat, and measuring heat is another area in which
they were, or rapidly became, insiders.25 They were certainly not outsiders to
the extent the two authors were in this field.
“Symptom No. 3: The Discoverer Has Not Tried to Kill the Discovery.”
The one example they give is the second hand comment that “They hadn’t
performed the experiment . . . with ordinary water instead of heavy water.”26
Again, they seemed oblivious to the technical considerations involved in se-
lecting control experiments from among several possibilities.
“Symptom No. 4: Inability to Repeat the Experiment Is Met by Ad Hoc
Excuses.” Here they raised the “recipe” theme on which Professor Huizenga
holds the patent. “A scientific paper with an inadequate recipe is a tip-off
that the author’s understanding of their work is incomplete.”27 They failed
to realize that science, at the beginning, does not expect or require under-
standing. That would become the continuing purpose of scientific study. In
1903, Pierre Curie did not understand the self-heating of radium. In 1911,
Dr. H. K. Onnes did not understand what enabled superconductivity. Never-
theless, both won Nobel prizes.
The Crease and Samios article was not intellectually serious. The pub-
lisher’s and the authors’ only apparent purpose was political: to make the dam-
age done at Baltimore permanent, preventing the emergence of any further
public support for the funding of cold fusion studies.

NSF/EPRI Conference
The first meeting of people who wanted to nurture this new field of experi-
mental science originated under the auspices of the National Science Founda-
tion (NSF) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). It was held in
Washington at the NSF facility in mid-October 1989. It was planned by those
88 criticism

who wanted to get some real work done on excess heat experimentation by
means of a non-media conference.
The conference intended to advance the nascent effort to find (1) the ex-
tent of the Fleischmann and Pons effect, (2) a more replicable experiment, and
(3) the source of the anomalous power. Huizenga gave us an excerpt from the
letter of invitation to the participants.

This workshop will attempt to achieve scientific dialog among a

small number of invited participants (less than 35) away from the
press and other forms of public attention. It is planned that there
will be a volume of proceedings that will include recommendations
and suggestions for future work. A preliminary agenda, including
the names of some invited speakers, is being sent to you. The orga-
nizers look forward to your input and advice in discussion sessions
and in proposing working group reports.28

The dichotomy between the skeptics and the acceptors becomes appar-
ent, as Huizenga explains.

. . . At least two skeptics, on receiving the above letter of invitation,

refused to attend because, based on the number of “yeah-sayers” on
the proposed [speaking] agenda, they concluded that the meeting
simply offered a platform to present again the often-repeated ques-
tionable and well-known “evidence” for cold fusion.29
On the other hand it was reported that a “believer” had to be
persuaded that the meeting was not stacked with skeptics before ac-
cepting his invitation.30

In a wonderfully ironic quote, he includes a statement by one of the

American Physical Society’s officers31 concerning the conference, “The entire
cold fusion episode has been played out against a backdrop of academic mis-
conduct.”32
Those sponsoring the meeting wanted a discussion of anomalous power
experiments. This placed a premium on attracting those who claimed success.
The skeptics wanted a discussion about whether or not cold fusion exists, a
quite different agenda. The acceptors wanted to get some work done in dis-
cussing the best evidence and what experiments ought to be tried next; the
skeptics wanted to debate whether there was sufficient evidence for them to be
persuaded that deuterium-deuterium fusion exists.
There was an acceptance within the engineering division of NSF that
the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon, “cannot be explained as a result of
artifacts, equipment, or human errors.” With the meeting so justified, the
 Four Press Conferences 89

sponsors wanted it to be a quiet work session among those getting results. So,
“. . . the sponsors tried to keep the meeting secret, initially planning to trans-
port the participants by bus to an undisclosed location for their three day
meeting.”33
The skeptics raised a great uproar on two counts. They said that the
planned conference was loaded with those who had “positive” results, that it
lacked equal representation by those who had “negative” results, and was a
rally for cold fusion “believers” rather than a scientific conference. The second
and determining rebuke was that the NSF as a public institution could not
bar the press. So a few more invitations went out, and the meeting went ahead
in public.
The director of the physics division, Dr. Marcel Bardon, sent a mes-
sage to 500 NSF employees just prior to the meeting. He wrote, “It seems un-
fortunate that a NSF office is now appearing to encourage such discredited
work.”34
It was a gross political act to write in that fashion to that many NSF em-
ployees when it was another part of NSF that sponsored the conference. That
message told each employee that they ultimately must decide their loyalty be-
tween the science division and the engineering division of NSF. The implicit
reason was that any continuation implied legitimacy, and legitimacy refuted
the considered judgement of the physics establishment who were determined
to be the decision-makers. The physics division wanted to wield whatever in-
fluence or authority they possessed to stop work on the Utah claims. That is
how a conformist society is built.
Even within such a conference, the participants would have a behavioral
concern. Who would be selected next to be publicly ridiculed, to be de-
meaned in front of others at a gathering of 200 peers in the manner of Balti-
more? Would some selected person be singled out as a deluded and incompe-
tent troglodyte disguised in a scientist’s white lab coat? One would speak up
only with great caution, or better yet, listen only, leaving the risk of exposure
to others. Nevertheless, this was a chance for those having some degree of suc-
cess generating anomalous power to compare notes with others and to plan
further work.
Scaramuzzi much later expressed the need well, “. . . those who started
working on it and got positive results believe in the reality of their results and
are willing to go on until a better comprehension of the phenomena is ac-
quired, . .”35
There was another aspect of the NSF meeting worth noting. Lewis was
present (he gave a tutorial on electrochemical systems). Fleischmann gave a
presentation in which he reported on 28 active (non-control) cells that had
undergone electrolysis for three months, none of which was mechanically
stirred. Twenty-three cells generated anomalous power greater than 20 milli-
90 criticism

watts. He also argued that the recombination phenomenon did not effect his
results.
When his presentation was done and the floor opened to questions,
Lewis had nothing to say. Nor did he offer any argument for having told 250
physicists, and the science reporters most emphatically, that without a me-
chanical stirring of the cell one could know, “absolutely” that their results were
wrong. At this critical moment, Lewis was silent on that matter. He had ac-
complished what he wanted to accomplish at the Baltimore and Los Angeles
press conferences. He had no reason to speak to the subject ever again.
The skeptics had much public fun by ridiculing any mistakes made in
analysis. The skeptics’ sarcasm was only human. Their perception was that
the participants were trying to analyze something that was not there, as a
shadow-boxer hits something that is not there. It is always amusing to the on-
looker. It seems like fair game as a target of mirth.
What was disconcerting in this behavior was that the science reporters
also indulged themselves. For example, a press representative insisted at ad-
journment that some member of the conference’s panel repeat an imaginative
and wholly speculative statement made by a famous attendee, who had left
early.36 Most of the leadership refused to be intimidated by such juvenile
sport. Unfortunately, no one had the presence of mind to speak up and expose
the ridiculous pose the press had adopted.
All in all, the attack on the conference by the orthodox establishment ex-
acted its toll. The technical report of the meeting was never distributed.
 c h a p t e r s e v e n

The DOE Panel

A dmiral James D. Watkins, Secretary of Energy, requested in April 1989

that his department investigate and report on the cold fusion claims. The
Department of Energy (DOE), under whose aegis the new claims fell, had a
long standing advisory group for technical matters, the Energy Research Advi-
sory Board (ERAB). Under direction of the Secretary, the ERAB established a
Panel on Cold Fusion (DOE Panel) consisting of experts in the appropriate
specialty fields.
It had twenty-three members of whom two were from the ERAB, others
were selected from industry and academia. Both co-chairmen were academics,
Dr. John Huizenga, professor of chemistry and physics, at the University of
Rochester, New York, and Dr. Norman Ramsey, Nobel Laureate and professor
of physics, at Harvard University. The Panel’s work spanned the months from
April to November 1989. It submitted an interim report in July and a final re-
port in November.
What Admiral Watkins learned about cold fusion studies from the Panel’s
report was revealed in a talk he gave two years later. He concluded that it was
all, “Just bad science . . .” and that, “Two members of the scientific commu-
nity made everyone in white lab coats look fraudulent.”1
What exactly did the Panel see as its purpose? How did the Panel carry
out that assignment? What work did the Panel complete? On what grounds
did it reach its recommendations?
The operation of the Panel was curious. It went about evaluating “cold
fusion” much as a salon in Victorian England might go about evaluating “so-

91
92 criticism

cialism.” There would be a shelf full of books and reports arguing the many
wonders of the world of socialism. Lectures by visiting or resident scholars
would be offered, and above all, there would be discussions, relentless discus-
sions. Members of the salon would visit some communal encampments to
provide the sight and smell of their new-found subject, as well as offering
some needed physical exercise. From this activity, the members would gain the
satisfaction that they understood “socialism,” or at least enough about it for
their purposes.
In much the same manner, the Panel collected a five-foot shelf of reports
from cold fusion researchers, many of which no doubt were read. There was
the staff scientist who was available to lecture them on any subject, should
they tire of each other’s lectures and, of course, there would be discussions. Six
field trips were arranged. Unlike a Victorian salon, the Panel had two co-chair-
men who were obligated to submit a report. The report’s principal conclusions
are examined first.

Conclusions
The DOE Panel’s final report gave faint praise to cold fusion: “(2) The Panel
is sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative
experiments within the present funding system.”2 DOE subordinate agencies
realized that if there was no recommendation to resolve any of the claims, and
no recommendation to allocate money, they could conclude that the Panel
considered the whole matter unimportant. They could assume that the Panel
believed the claims to be without merit. Presumably, the cooperative experi-
ments were merely to provide proof of flawed calorimetry. With those flaws
revealed and removed from the Fleischmann and Pons experiment, nothing
would remain.
There were reasons for this small recommendation by the Panel. The
Fleischmann and Pons experiment was touted as a simple one, a “kitchen” ex-
periment. They knew of N. S. Lewis’s assertion of bad temperature readings,
but may have overlooked his silence at the previous month’s NSF/EPRI con-
ference. The Panel may have hoped that discretionary funds would be suf-
ficient to discover what was wrong with the calorimetry. If that were true, then
all experiments would revert to zero anomalous power.
Those who knew how government careers are made and broken recog-
nized the obvious risk to any laboratory director who ventured to follow in the
footsteps of those scientists who had been described in a publication of the
American Physical Society to be “hucksters,”3 and at their Baltimore meeting,
to be “incompetent and possibly delusional.”4 It was only in the month pre-
ceding the Panel’s final report that Dr. Bardon, at NSF, sent a memo to five
 The DOE Panel 93

hundred staffers referring to “such discredited work.”5 The Panel’s final report
clearly conveyed to government agencies that there was nothing of interest in
the assorted cold fusion claims.
In particular, its final report frequently mentions the lack of “. . . con-
vincing evidence, for useful sources [of energy] . . .” This wording constitutes
a gross distortion of the Panel’s assigned task, a distortion that allows out of
hand dismissal of much experimental work. The instruction given by the Sec-
retary to the Panel shows that he was wise enough to know that identifying a
useful source of energy is far too much to ask of a review Panel. The Panel had
no such charge from the Secretary.
On an ethical point, the Panel repeatedly mentions the discrepancy be-
tween the amount of heat that was claimed and the number of detected neu-
trons that were claimed, and does so without giving proper attribution to the
discoverers of this important relationship. In the Executive Summary there
was the statement, “. . . Others . . . report excess heat production . . . and
[conventional] fusion products at a level well below that implied by reported
heat production.”6 In no case was scientific protocol followed by giving proper
attribution of this important discovery to Fleischmann and Pons.
There was something much worse here than lack of ethical procedures.
The Panel never really evaluated the one observation which was the most un-
expected to its discoverers. The Panel preempted the issue by commenting
that, “. . . it would require the invention of an entirely new nuclear pro-
cess . . .”7 The panel did not mention that this was what was hypothesized
both at the announcement and in the Preliminary Note. The implication here
was that the Panel never clearly identified Fleischmann and Pons’s claims.
A lack of neutrons in the presence of anomalous power was the principal
surviving claim announced at Utah. The Panel used that relationship to indict
what was announced, never separating the one from the other. Neutrons, if
detected, the report said were, “. . . at levels 1012 below amounts required to
explain the experiments claiming excess heat.” The circular logic continues,
“the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process . . . is not per-
suasive.”8,* That the lack of neutrons in the presence of unexplained heat
might itself indicate the discovery of a new nuclear process seemed completely

* The paragraph in full, the fourth in the Executive Summary, reads as follows.
Neutrons near background levels have been reported in some D2O electrolysis and pressur-
ized D2 gas experiments, but at levels 1012 [1,000,000,000,000] below the amounts re-
quired to explain the experiments claiming excess heat. Although these experiments have no
apparent application to the production of useful energy, they would be of scientific interest,
if confirmed. Recent experiments, some employing more sophisticated counter arrange-
ments and improved backgrounds, found no fusion products and placed upper limits on the
fusion probability for these experiments, at levels well below the initial positive results.
Hence, the Panel concludes that the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear pro-
cess termed cold fusion is not persuasive.”
94 criticism

s u m m at i o n
Charge to the DOE Panel on Cold Fusion
The Secretary’s original instruction to the DOE-Panel on cold fusion was well
drafted, reasonably specific, and yet sufficiently general in its requirements.
Watkins charged the Panel as follows.
Specifically, I would like the Board to:
1. Review the experiments and theory of the recent work on cold fusion.
2. Identify research that should be undertaken to determine, if possible, what
physical, chemical, or other processes may be involved.
3. Finally, identify what R&D [research and development] direction the DOE
should pursue to fully understand these phenomena and develop the infor-
mation that could lead to their practical application.*
* ERAB Panel on Cold Fusion, Final Report of the Cold Fusion Panel, (Department of Energy, Wash-
ington, D.C., November 8, 1989), p. 2.

beyond conception by the Panel. The Panel begs the question it was charged
to investigate.
How did the Panel actually go about its work? A specific requirement to
evaluate the Fleischmann and Pons claims was notably absent from the Secre-
tary’s charge. The Panel was left to seek its duty in the mélange of claims and
counterclaims that followed the Utah announcement.

Organization
The DOE Panel, co-chaired by John Huizenga and Norman Ramsey, solicited
and received a large quantity of formal and informal reports prepared by sci-
entists who had been experimenting in the field since the Utah announce-
ment. It submitted an interim report in July. Since this differed little from the
final report, it will not be mentioned further, except to note that its content
leant credence to the observation that the Panel formed its final opinions alto-
gether too early in its work.
The first instruction to the Panel was to “. . . review the experiments and
theory.” What it did about the theory was to concentrate on the impossibility
of generating excess heat by means of deuterium-deuterium fusion. How they
dealt with the experimental part of Watkin’s charge was central because experi-
mental results are the driving force of new science.
Delegations from the Panel visited six laboratories during the summer
months. It was not clear that they did much at the laboratories except visit, in
the lightest sense of the word. Their visit to Salt Lake City, for example, ought
 The DOE Panel 95

to have been one of the most important. They arrived at the city in the eve-
ning and left the following evening. Subtract from that the time needed for
the necessary auto travel, introductions, breakfast, lunch, and there are few
hours left for the technical part of the agenda. Other laboratory visits were
equally superficial.
Another example of the Panel’s effort to, “. . . review the experiments,”
came at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Two researchers there had
many years of experience working with tritium and knew how to avoid con-
tamination problems. They reported the generation of tritium from several
cells. They were subsequently visited by one member of the Panel in an inter-
view that lasted for just seventeen minutes. They never heard from the panel
member again.
There was no indication of Panel members spending sufficient time in
any laboratory to gain some acquaintance with the experimental work at
hand. Two of the six visits were to laboratories that had reported generating
no anomalous power. The Panel did not invite Fleischmann and Pons to meet
with them in order to expand upon their press announcement, or to discuss
further what they thought might be the nature of their discovery.
The visit to McKubre’s laboratory was held at the offices of his fund-
ing agency, EPRI (at its request) not at the laboratory itself. In Chapter 23,
p. 329, I review the visits where, several years later, three senior scientists each
spent two full working days in his laboratory in a conscientious effort to eval-
uate his experimental techniques.* This is the minimum time and effort
needed to evaluate technical work. (Langmuir and Wood participated in per-
forming the experiments.) The Panel, by the scientific standards of the twenti-
eth century, did not fulfill a reasonable review of the experimental activity.
Watkin’s second instruction was, “Identify research that should be under-
taken to determine . . . what . . . processes may be involved.” The Panel rec-
ommended two excellent items where research should be undertaken. These
are the report recommendation numbers 3 and 5.

(3) The Panel recommends that the cold fusion research efforts in
the area of heat production focus primarily on confirming or dis-
proving reports of excess heat . . . 9

No single, better recommendation could have been made. The other recom-
mendation was also right on the mark.

(5) Investigations designed to check the reported observations of ex-

cess tritium in electrolytic cells are desirable.10

* They were experts in the requisite specialties, and they concluded they could find no flaw in
McKubre’s calorimetry or experiments.
96 criticism

There were many reports of tritium being generated in cells. The Panel
reported that “. . . a careful analysis of an electrolytic experiment must be
carried out if one is to interpret the specific activity value of tritium after elec-
trolysis . . . as anything other than electrolytic enrichment.”11 The lack of
review of the experimental work becomes clear at this point. The Panel’s two-
paragraph discussion consisted entirely of a general outlook. The Panel simply
did not learn whether researchers had already done the required “. . . careful
analysis . . .” They made no attempt to find out about this during their seven-
month investigation. Confirmation that tritium was being generated in elec-
trolytic cells would be evidence of nuclear processes at work and thereby es-
tablish the research as a legitimate scientific activity. The government did
not establish a calorimetric laboratory, or a tritium generation evaluation facil-
ity in the years after the Panel’s report was submitted. Virtually nothing
was done.
The sophistication of the Fleischmann and Pons experiment was underes-
timated not only by some physicists, as might be expected, but also by some
electrochemists. The time required to evaluate the experimenter’s laboratory
efforts was also grossly underestimated.
It is relevant to estimate the size of these recommendations by the Panel.
For the calorimetry research, the funds required had to be sufficient to estab-
lish and operate a laboratory commensurate in length of time, size, and
staffing with that of McKubre’s laboratory at SRI International. His labora-
tory took about five years and $6 million to accomplish precisely the task
of recommendation number three. Recommendation five requires that the
Fleischmann and Pons heat effect be achieved first. Accomplishing number
five should take about the same amount of time and effort.
The last charge from Admiral Watkins was to advise what direction re-
search and development should take in order to (1) fully understand these
phenomena, and (2) to ultimately lead “. . . to their practical application.” Re-
peated statements in the final report about the lack of a useful energy source
does not constitute a legitimate substitute for fulfillment of this charge. The
Panel failed to recommend any program under any caveats. It was quite firm
that no funding be allocated to “fully understand” what was going on and
what might be made of it. This instruction was utterly ignored in what might
be termed a dereliction of duty.
Only one member of the Panel published a paper about his work on the
Panel.12 Allen J. Bard, chairman of the Department of Chemistry, University
of Texas, Austin, Texas, had attended the EPRI/NSF conference the previous
month. His paper set forth his conclusions as a member of the Panel. There
was no indication that this work was done by a task group organized within
the Panel; it appears to be his own evaluations and conclusions even though
the reports to which he refers were those collected by the Panel and were avail-
able to its members.
 The DOE Panel 97

Bard shows that for his analysis, he had available at that time only four
written reports of anomalous power generation. In the discussion that fol-
lowed his presentation, it was made abundantly clear that (1) the field was
moving fast and (2) cells had to run up to 90 days to find out what they could
do, and (3) there were many more successful experiments that would not be
available in time for his analysis. Still there was no mention of the Panel tak-
ing an additional year or so to follow up on its soon to be released final report
of November 1989.
It appears in retrospect that the DOE Panel tried to draw final conclu-
sions too early. The schedule was imposed by the Secretary, but that would be
an excuse, not a reason. People of the caliber appointed to the Panel know
how to deal with such constraints. They could have recommended some con-
tinuing research in order to let the dust settle and gain some perspective. They
could have recommended the Panel be reconvened in two years to reconsider
its recommendations. Any continuing activity would have met the need. The
Panel failed to be sufficiently circumspect. The Secretary’s later attitude with
which the chapter opened accurately reflected the Panel’s report. At the high-
est levels of government, this brought official interest to a halt: no research, no
patents, no collegiality.
How could the Panel have gone so far wrong? It went wrong simply by
doing no work. In physics, work is only done if something is moved; pushing
hard for a long time against a stone wall does not count as work. Members of
the panel were properly industrious in their obligations to the Panel and its
chairmen. They were organized and instructed, however, in such a manner
that no real work got done.
In my earliest interviews with Panel members, I learned that there was
no division of responsibility assigned among its 23 members. No select group
of members were directed to examine the technical reports and laboratory
work that was concerned with a particular kind of cold fusion claim, e.g., tri-
tium generation, and then report their conclusions in an official sub-Panel
document. No staff were available—possibly assigned to the Panel from a na-
tional laboratory—who might be given full-time laboratory visitation assign-
ments for a few weeks and report their findings in a sub-Panel document.
Such internal reports would have been all but binding upon the chairmen if
written by officially appointed sub-groups with specific assignments. No orga-
nizational structure was established within the Panel that might prepare a sub-
report that the chairmen would have to respect when drafting their final
report.
The Panel was maintained as a hard-driving, amorphous body much in
the manner of the Victorian salon described earlier. In this way, the Panel
leadership was free to write its final report as it pleased, they being subject
only to a vote of the Panel members or the threat of a resignation or minority
report.
98 criticism

Revolt
There was a revolt, but it was one of delicate extent. As one astute observer
pointed out, “It’s fair to say that DOE went out of its way to get people [for
the Panel] who are sensitive to political nuances.”13 Most panel members were
selected from among those who were climbing a professional ladder of some
sort, where a public scuffle would only disrupt their career plans. Fortunately,
not every member adhered to that criteria.
Norman Ramsey, co-chair of the Panel, was a recent Nobel laureate with
no further career ambitions. He was a free agent. He spent several months
during the Panel’s time hiking in Europe. At the very end, he threatened to re-
sign unless a paragraph he had composed was inserted as the preamble to the
finished report. His request carried.14 We visit this preamble in Chapter 10,
page 129.
The Panel’s final report was delivered in November to Admiral Watkins.
It is worth noting that the letter of transmittal carried the signature of only
one of the two co-chairmen, that of Huizenga.
The past three chapters have provided a look at the politics of cold fusion
research. It is time to move on to the scientific community’s critique of the
Utah claims, of which there were remarkably few.
 c h a p t e r e i g h t

The Critics: I

I f the nation’s chemists responded at all to the Utah announcement, they did
so quietly. The nuclear physicists responded otherwise, and it was natural
enough that many of them found it hard to accept the anomalous power
claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Many assumed that the two chemists had
quite simply misread their calorimeters. This assumption went unstated by
the critics because they were not in a position to defend such a statement: they
did not know calorimetry and, it came to pass, they had no intention of
learning it.
If the measurement of anomalous power gained acceptance as valid, and
if the level of neutron emissions was low, then Fleischmann and Pons’s hy-
pothesis that there must be some unrecognized or unknown nuclear process at
work stands firmly in place. The announcement proved anathema to many
physicists. A number of them devoted a significant period in their careers to a
continuing deprecation of the claims of March 1989.
David Goodstein told a story that exemplified the instant write off of the
Utah heat claims. He reported, “On the evening of the original Fleischmann
and Pons press conference, I ran into one of my buddies at Caltech . . . ‘What
do you think?’ I asked. ‘If it were true, they’d both be dead.’”1 It is of interest
how casually the two claims were separated: the anomalous power claim was
refuted; the unknown nuclear reactions hypothesis was overlooked.
The response of the nuclear physics community was also evident in an
AP article just fourteen days after the Utah announcement. It was written by
H. W. Lewis, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.

99
100 criticism

In light of the laws of nature, it is probably worth putting the matter

straight . . . We mortals cannot change those facts . . . Did the Utah
team achieve cold fusion? No . . . The answer . . . should have been
unambiguous, if only to cut off the kind of wishful thinking with
which the country is now awash . . . That they lived to hold their
press conference is clear and unambiguous proof that they did not
produce any noticeable amount of power through cold fusion.2

This type of response, conveyed with absolute assurance, was well enough
known in science to be recognized by its historians. They recognize it as a
characteristic of a mature science. W. I. B. Beveridge, in his classic book, The
Art of Scientific Investigation, states:

Thus in subjects in which knowledge is still growing . . . all the ad-

vantage is with the expert, but where knowledge is no longer grow-
ing and the field has been worked out, a revolutionary new ap-
proach is required and this is more likely to come from the outsider.
The skepticism with which the experts nearly always greet these rev-
olutionary ideas confirms that the available knowledge has been a
handicap.3

Huizenga displayed perfectly that perspective regarding a mature science.

“As a field matures, as nuclear physics has over the last half-century,” he writes,
“the probability of a surprise becomes ever so much less probable.”4

Outsiders
Huizenga considered the two chemists to be outsiders. Discovery by outsid-
ers? “On rare occasions self-taught outsiders make a discovery in an area
largely unknown to them, but this is, indeed, rare. Most fundamental dis-
coveries are made by persons intimately familiar with their research disci-
pline . . .”5
Was the announced discovery made in the field of physics or chemistry?
It is interesting that this was the question that plagued the Nobel committee
when it considered an award for Svente Arrhenius in 1903 for his discovery
that the formation of ions is the change that makes water in salt solution elec-
trically conductive. It decided the discovery was in chemistry, not physics. The
same conclusion holds in this case. Fleischmann and Pons made their discov-
ery in the field of chemistry where they are not outsiders. Having measured
the anomalous power, and noticed that they were not fatally irradiated by the
experience, what were they to hypothesize as a possible source? No critic has
suggested a better hypothesis than theirs.
“The only evidence,” wrote Huizenga, “for invoking a nuclear process
 The Critics: I 101

was the claim that the magnitude of the excess energy was so large ‘that it is
not possible to ascribe this to any chemical process.’”6 Such logic was wholly
acceptable to him. At no point in his published writing and lecturing about the
field has he suggested that there might be some other credible source for the
excess energy than a nuclear source. What he could not accept was that a new
nuclear reaction might have been discovered by “outsiders,” e.g., chemists.
Actually, Fleischmann and Pons did not claim discovery of a new nuclear pro-
cess. They merely hypothesized that an unknown nuclear process exists, while
offering no suggestion as to what kind of reaction might be involved.
By way of contrast, the orthodox critics were woefully indolent in casu-
ally assuming that Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetry was erroneous. These
critics had little or no expertise in calorimetry: they were outsiders. They did
not profess skill in it, nor have they mended this fault during the intervening
twelve years. Yet they have persisted in their assumption that the experiment
had calorimetric error without actually asserting such a position, for they did
not have the necessary expertise to defend it.
Fleischmann and Pons’s defense in the literature of their calorimetry was a
tour de force.7 Their training and established professional skills show what is
required for other researchers who may wish to follow in their steps and de-
velop this field further.
The outspoken physicists are a highly cosmopolitan lot. They are people
who travel the world, and explore questions that reach to the origins of the
universe. Why then were they so precipitous in their judgement about the
heat and its consequent hypothesis?
Richard P. Feynman, Nobel laureate in physics, addressed a matter he
called “Cargo Cult Science” in 1974. It was the story of unreasoned expecta-
tions that have no basis in reality.

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war
they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want
the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arraigned to make things
like runways, to put fires along the side of the runways, to make a
wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he
is the controller—and they wait for airplanes to land. They are doing
everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it
looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these
things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent
precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they are missing
something essential, because the planes don’t land.8

In their hasty skepticism, these outspoken physicists were acting like cargo
cult scientists. They insisted that a nuclear source of energy must have lethal
102 criticism

amounts of radiation because that was what they had always known. Once
they stated that argument, they saw no need to look into the Utah heat claims
any further. They simply assumed such heat claims would be abandoned in
due course.
A fine example appears in the book, The Undergrowth of Science,9 where
neutrons hold the place of honor as the expected cargo in the planes that never
arrive. “Energy Unlimited,” a chapter title, evaluates the claimed excess heat by
the absence of neutrons at each stage of the unfolding episode. Even the early
meltdown is dismissed as a mere hydrogen explosion because of the lack of le-
thal radiation. It apparently never enters the author’s head that Fleischmann
and Pons’s calorimetry might be accurate and point to a new nuclear reaction.
The nuclear physicists were enormously interested in the Utah report of
tritium and neutron generation in the tabletop experiment. Fleischmann and
Pons claimed in their Preliminary Note to have measured tritium generated at
the rate of 10,000 atoms each second in their cells, and neutrons in roughly
similar amount. Their measurement of the neutrons was done indirectly. They
had a gamma-ray detector mounted over the (light) water bath so that neu-
trons emerging from the cell would interact with the hydrogen in the water
molecules (H2O) to produce gamma-rays.
Those physicists dismissed the tritium measurements as probably due to
contamination, and they then turned their attention to the measurement of
neutron particles. This would lend itself to mere counting, a more pleasing
prospect than heat measurements. Some nuclear physicists dismissed heat
measurements as too amorphous for their taste.
During the winter of 1988–1989, Fleischmann and Pons could not easily
approach the university physics department for assistance in measuring
gamma-rays without exposing themselves to consequent incredulity. They ob-
tained a gamma-ray detector from the University’s health monitoring depart-
ment. In their Preliminary Note, they offered what they claimed was the out-
put signal from the detector that showed gamma-rays of the correct energy
level so as to confirm that neutrons were being emitted from one of their cells.
It was natural that the physics community would look at radiation detec-
tion, counting, and energy levels as absolute sources of knowledge about what
was taking place within the cell, because that was their stock in trade. When
they examined the gamma-ray signals shown in the paper, some physicists
quickly spotted serious flaws in the nuclear detection work of Fleischmann
and Pons. R. D. Petrasso, a nuclear physicist with the Plasma Fusion Center at
MIT, had followed the unfolding episode from its announcement. He was
bothered by some details of the presentation that did not look right. For ex-
ample, the detected signal as drawn in the Note had the wrong shape. He
studied the Note, its errata published shortly afterwards, and TV news clips.
 The Critics: I 103

He argued persuasively that the signal shown by Fleischmann and Pons could
not possibly be what they claimed it to be. He drew the conclusion that
Fleischmann and Pons had not detected neutrons, nor evidence of neutrons.
Petrasso presented his data at the APS Baltimore meeting and it was pub-
lished in Nature on May 18.10 Fleischmann and Pons published their response
in Nature claiming a new interpretation and presentation of the questionable
signal. Their answer reduced their own estimate of neutrons by a factor of
1,000, but it also contained serious flaws, which Petrasso pointed out in an
adjoining reply. Overall, Petrasso’s critique was a thoroughly persuasive argu-
ment indicating that Fleischmann and Pons had not detected neutrons ema-
nating from their electrolytic cell. At that point, Nature withdrew from the
controversy by refusing to publish a further defense by Fleischmann and Pons.
In the eyes of scientists, this outcome was damning for Fleischmann and
Pons. It displayed a lack of competence with nuclear measuring techniques
that put a cloud over their other work. Fleischmann and Pons’s credibility
never recovered in the opinion of many scientists.
But the fact that Fleischmann and Pons did not do a good job did not
of itself mean that there were no neutrons emitted from their cells. Professor
M. H. Salamon, a physics department member at the University of Utah,
gathered a team of nine scientists from the various technical departments.11
During the months of May and June (1989), they placed a high-sensitiv-
ity neutron detector immediately below a bath containing four cells in the
Fleischmann and Pons laboratory.
It is a little embarrassing to describe how they worked. It appears that
Salamon and his cohort imposed themselves on the two chemists. (Salamon
explains that the University president asked him to “get involved.”) Although
they asked if they could place their instruments in the laboratory, it was also
clear that they and the chemists were not working cooperatively with each
other. Fleischmann says that he suggested to them that they ought to put their
instruments under (cell) bath number two. They insisted on bath number
one, where the original work had been done. Much later, Fleischmann and
Pons explained that the four cells in bath number one were planned to be less
active, one was acting as a control cell. Clearly the two groups were speaking
past each other. They were not working together and that is a requirement if
research is to be productive. Salamon’s results were published in Nature the
following March (1990). He reported that no neutrons were detected from
the experiments he monitored.
In the meantime, the editor of Nature had become cynical, if not angry,
at the cold fusion episode. He had come to the conclusion that there was no
science in cold fusion research, and refused Fleischmann and Pons space to re-
but.12 The report of Lewis at Baltimore and in the pages of Nature, and
104 criticism

Salamon’s report in Nature, condemned the two chemists forever in the eyes of
much of the scientific community.
Fleischmann and Pons published a rebuttal of Salamon, along with their
new gamma-ray data in the journal, Il Nuovo Cimento A, the Italian journal
of science, almost three years after Petrasso’s criticism, and two years after
the Salamon paper. By that time the scientific establishment was no longer
listening.
Their article displayed the record of a gamma-ray signal that, they ar-
gued, resulted from a cell’s neutrons interacting with the bath water. To detect
the gamma-rays, they allowed the detector system to accumulate the signal
over a long period of time. The estimated neutron rate was from 5 to 50 per
second for each watt of excess heat power. The article was published in June of
1992 (see Chapter 18, page 256).
Steven E. Jones liked to count particles. He maintains a standing offer to
take an operating electrolytic cell (provided by others) into a tunnel where
there was low background radiation of neutrons, and measure the neutron
count of a heat-generating cell.
One needs to know when to look for the neutrons. Conventionally, you
look for them when the cell is generating excess power. Jones, however, denied
that excess heat power could be measured satisfactorily. He had concluded
that no one could really measure a cell’s heat output well enough to know if a
cell was generating excess heat. He considered calorimetry so enigmatic that it
could not even give a yes or no answer concerning anomalous power genera-
tion.13
Jones would gladly measure a cell for neutron radiation if some other sci-
entist brought to him what was declared to be a cell generating heat. As oper-
ating cells that are submerged in a water bath are not transportable, nothing
has come of the offer. His overall results in the first decade were that he had
measured no neutrons emanating from Fleischmann and Pons type cells.
At the Los Angeles meeting of the Electrochemical Society (ECS), Pons
was persuaded that if fusion were really happening, helium atoms would re-
main in the palladium cathode where they might be found. Fleischmann was
also convinced that the nuclear reactions were taking place in the bulk of the
palladium cathode. By the end of the meeting, Pons had taken upon himself
the task of permitting several of his cathode rods (electrodes) to be analyzed in
independent laboratories to see if they held helium atoms. On the face of it,
this was a reasonable proposition.
Robert L. Park, public spokesman for the APS, saw it as a governing test,
“. . . the decisive test for fusion: is there helium in the Pons and Fleischmann
cathodes?”14 Six years later, he saw it similarly, “Everyone seemed to agree on
just one thing: if there was fusion taking place, whatever the mechanism, there
 The Critics: I 105

must be a huge buildup of helium in the lattice of the palladium cathode.

Pons and Fleischmann, under great pressure to back up their claims, finally
agreed to have their cathodes assayed for helium.”15
Pons wholly misjudged the social dynamics of the process. By the time
the sequence of steps in the tests had been completed, the national media and
the scientific community would be watching for the outcome. If the results
showed that no helium was found, the audience would be convinced, not that
some single test had failed, but that their announced new science did not
exist.
As the weeks went by, the world waited for the results to come in. It be-
came clear to Pons that he had gotten himself into a do or die demonstration
of the cold fusion claims. One of the first things an experimental scientist
learns is the important difference between an experiment and a demonstra-
tion. You never offer to do a demonstration without being absolutely sure of
the experiment. One rehearses the experiment thoroughly. After that, not a
single change in procedure is to be permitted, no matter how small it may
seem to be. Only then can the demonstration expect to go well. It seems in-
comprehensible that Pons allowed himself to be put into the position of per-
forming a public demonstration without having done it previously. Pons ap-
parently reneged on the obligation when it was time to reveal his data on the
rods. His performance damned the field in the eyes of many.
In subsequent years, evidence emerged that a helium generating reaction
does take place, but not in the bulk of the cathode. Rather, it takes place near
its surface. The generated helium is to be found in the effluent gasses. Six
years later, one could reasonably assert that no helium ought to be found in
the bulk of the palladium except near its surface.
A similar situation presented itself during this period (May 1989) when
the University of Utah allowed it to be public knowledge that some cathodes
had been sent to a company in England for helium analysis. Park stayed in
touch with the university so he could learn the results without delay. When
the university was informed of the analysis results, they refused to give them
to Park saying that the measurements would be presented in a scientific paper.
That paper, published the following March, did not report that helium was
looked for or found.16 Park was incensed at the refusal and remained so seven
years later. He marked that day, June 7, 1989, as the day he concluded that
there was no science in the cold fusion claims.17 That day was the end of the
cold fusion episode for him.
From 1993 to 1996, whenever technical papers were presented that re-
ported that helium was present in the effluent gasses, the orthodox physics
community refused to publicly acknowledge the event. Contrary to what they
had been saying, it appears that they really did not want to know about the ev-
106 criticism

idence for nuclear products. The American newspapers and journals refused
to report the evidence. Their science reporters did not demand some response
from the physics community: you demanded a nuclear product, you de-
manded helium, and now you have it, what do you say? The ghetto’s wall of
silence was strictly maintained.

Failed Experiments
What ought to be made of the many failed attempts to generate excess heat
energy? These experiments create no excess heat, no neutrons, nor any other
nuclear product. Many scientists take pains that their experiments are de-
signed according to the best information available. They are carried out ex-
actly as reported in their published papers so far as is known. Did such experi-
ments demonstrate that there is no “cold fusion” phenomena of interest? Do
those failed experiments invalidate the remaining claims of Fleischmann and
Pons? How is their significance to be weighed?
A large fraction of the unsuccessful experiments were run by scientists
who also had run successful experiments. These failed experiments were re-
ported by scientists who had measured anomalous power with their own
hands. They had developed confidence in their techniques, and they accepted
anomalous power generation by some of their cells as a real phenomenon.
They concluded that there was some additional agent (a variable or parame-
ter) in the failed experiment that was not under control. The failed experi-
ment may be of some value to the experimenter who can review its design.
Many experimenters never saw a positive result, even after intense effort.
These included some of the most prestigious institutions such as MIT, Yale (at
Brookhaven*), Caltech, and Harwell (England). Does the caliber of scientists
and resources that such institutions can bring to bear on a task imply that
their failed results are the correct results?
In his The American Scholar article, David Goodstein is clearly speaking
to the orthodox scientist only, not to the cold fusion scientist. He invokes the
failed experiment syndrome by raising the specter of Sir Karl R. Popper, the
late Austrian philosopher of science. Goodstein speaks about the significance
of the failed experiment.

Science in the twentieth century has been much influenced by the

ideas of Karl Popper, the Austrian philosopher. Popper argues that a
scientific idea can never be proven true, because no matter how

* The Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York is a large nuclear research
facility that works cooperatively with many eastern universities.
 The Critics: I 107

many observations seem to agree with it, it may still be wrong. On

the other hand, a single contrary experiment can prove a theory for-
ever false. Therefore, science advances only by demonstrating that
theories are false, so that they must be replaced by better ones. The
proponents of Cold Fusion took exactly the opposite tack: many ex-
periments, including their own, failed to yield the expected results.
These were irrelevant, they argued, incompletely done, or lacking
some crucial (perhaps unknown) ingredient needed to make the
thing work. Instead, all positive results, the appearance of excess
heat, or a few neutrons, proved the phenomenon was real. This anti-
Popperian flavor of Cold Fusion played no small role in its down-
fall . . .18

Popper assumes, as one might expect of a philosopher, that the experiment

is defined with infinitely detailed rigor. Otherwise, the “. . . single contrary ex-
periment . . .” becomes merely a different experiment, proving nothing.
To be more precise, Popper’s argument is about experiments disproving
theories, not other experiments. Moreover, the claims of cold fusion are con-
cerned with experimental observation, not theory. Orthodox nuclear theory is
of concern here because it apparently does not provide an energy source for
the anomalous power claimed. If the power measurements are right, then pre-
sumably that theory must suffer some degree of amendment. This argument
fits the Popper shoe to the physicist’s foot, so to speak. One, and only one,
cold fusion experiment that went contrary to a theory of orthodox physics
would be sufficient to prove that theory false forever.
The surface-catalyzed electrochemical reaction is a complicated one. No
assurance is available that only one type of experiment is involved in the “cold
fusion” episode. In fact, the plethora of results implies that a variety of experi-
ments are involved. This is why some produce heat and others do not. Which
reaction type is active at any moment depends upon the precise condition of
the cathode surface or the presence of particular impurities in the electrolyte
or the palladium.
It is not possible, of course, to prove the Fleischmann and Pons effect
wrong by performing the experiment and getting a failed result. The cold fu-
sion experiment has not leant itself to Popper’s kind of analysis. Unfortu-
nately, progress will have to be made without his help.
The counting of failed experiments was not useful if the relationship of
the experiment’s input to output was effected by some threshold effect such as
loading. Below the threshold value (0.85–0.90), the experiment’s output was
always zero. Above the threshold value, it was possible for the experiment to
succeed.19
In Figure 8.1, the average value of curve (A) may or may not have a useful
108 criticism

A.

CAUSAL DISTRIBUTION

B.

THRESHOLD RESULT
NO HEAT HEAT ?
THRESHOLD VALUE
figure 8.1 Illustration of the threshold effect on an otherwise smooth probability distri-
bution curve.

meaning. If the experiment responded with a distribution like that of curve

(B), then the average value was misleading and its use will invite error. In the
case of curve B, the statistical distribution of failures and successes is not help-
ful. One example of this appeared in the summer of 1991, when McKubre
suggested that the loading of deuterium into the palladium must exceed 0.90
(D/Pd ratio) value or the experiment will always fail.
A constructive way of looking at the failed cold fusion cells is as follows.
Imagine you have a lake before you, and you want to know if there are fish in
it. You send out one hundred expert fishermen to fish. When they return,
ninety-five of the fishermen have caught no fish, and five fishermen are each
holding up a fish. Now your question can be answered.
The political answer to the question is to take a vote, as the APS did for
its third press conference on May 2, 1989, at Baltimore. Clearly, if you do
that, the “no fish” have it: a ninety-five to five vote says that the lake does not
contain fish. Or, one can use scientific reasoning and argue that the five fish
caught indicate that the lake does contain fish. It may also be argued, of
course, that the five fish were the result of fraud or incompetence, e.g., that
the five caught actually were smuggled in tackle boxes or that they were eels,
not fish. In any event, the claim that fish were caught must remain at the cen-
ter of the argument. Counting the ninety-five empty returns is of no help.
Similarly, counting the failed cold fusion experiments is of no diagnostic
value.
 The Critics: I 109

s u m m at i o n
The Place of Failed Experiments
A threshold effect means that an indefinitely large number of failed experi-
ments could be expected if the experiment were operated at values below that
threshold.
Above the threshold, the statistical distributions of materials variety were not
known. They might have included additional threshold effects. It could not be
assumed that those statistics were smooth valued; they might have been piece-
wise continuous, or discontinuous.
There was one important conclusion that could be drawn from the discus-
sion of the failed experiments. The count of the number of failed experiments
carried no diagnostic value.

There is profit in discussing why some experiments failed. The presence

of certain experimental impurities may have had a positive effect, whereas
other impurities were definitely inhibiting. During 1989, palladium was ob-
tained largely from supplies on distributors’ shelves. It was not manufactured
with cold fusion experiments in mind. Some of it worked, fortunately, or
Fleischmann and Pons would have seen nothing and then would have aban-
doned their research. Much of it did not work, but for reasons that were not
understood. Five years later, there were companies that specialized in supply-
ing palladium more or less suitable for cold fusion research.
Since the metallurgy of palladium seemed to be so important, I asked
Fleischmann why he did not establish a palladium metallurgical operation as a
part of his operation in France. He responded:

I can understand the wish to [establish a metallurgical facility], but

in the first phase of the work you are better off [working] with the
experts [who are employed at the palladium vendor’s facility] . . .
People think that making palladium is easy; it is very difficult to
make palladium satisfactorily. You have to control the oxygen partial
pressure, the annealing history, the drawing history, the swaging his-
tory, the rolling history. [At the beginning] you don’t know what you
want to do. We have focused in on the rods, but maybe you want to
use wire? Maybe go on to [using] mesh? [At one point] we were
working with palladium-cerium electrodes, and those damn things
had to be made with electron-beam furnaces. Holy Moses, you could
be there forever.
You can spend the money. You are doing it in the end [through
the vendor], but it is premature [to try to do it in-house].20
110 criticism

There was the question of purity. The semiconductor industry finally re-
quired silicon that was 99.999999999% pure. Experimenters in cold fusion
by 1995 had available purity of 99.98% relative to some specific impurities.
No one knows if improving the absolute purity will improve the experiment’s
replication.
One scientist looked at the list of impurities (that is provided with each
delivery of palladium from the vendors). He calculated that the heat could
have come from any one of several impurities if they were consumed in some
as yet unknown nuclear reaction. In that scenario, the performance of a suc-
cessful cell would depend on the presence of that impurity.*
There is nothing about these difficulties that is foreign to science, to
chemistry, or to the specialty of electrochemistry. Good laboratory practice re-
quires the exact preparation of each item that goes into the cell in excruciating
detail. The cold fusion cell is no exception.

A Threshold
What about those 1989 claims that Fleischmann and Pons forgot to stir the
pot? Their two seminal papers of July 1990 and 1992 reported uniform tem-
peratures to ± 0.01C measured within their cells. R. H. Wilson agreed that
mechanical stirring was not necessary in the Fleischmann and Pons cell (see
Chapter 9, page 117).
The loading of deuterium into the palladium cathode (D/Pd) achieved at
Caltech was “. . . 0.77, 0.79 and 0.80 . . .”21 These values are shown in Figure
8.2 by the (A) arrow.† Published in 1995,22 this graph depicts the propensity
of a palladium cathode to generate excess heat as the loading ratio increases
from 0.2 to 0.8 D/Pd. This writer’s vertical lines show the region where Lewis
operated his cells. To generate excess heat, the tracing must be in the positive
region. If Lewis had built a thousand cells that only loaded to this extent,
none would have generated excess heat.
It would be a mistake to assume that the D/Pd ratio was the only thresh-
old to effect experimental results. There was a distinct onset of excess heat re-
ports when the current through a cathode exceeded a certain value. Below that
value, the phenomenon was not observed. This threshold was not as sharply

* Courtesy of David J. Nagel.

† Fleischmann referred to this figure as, “The variation of the relative partial molar enthalpy of
hydrogen in palladium as a function of the charging ratio.” Those who take a special interest in
this graph should move immediately to the referenced paper, as I have taken some liberties to
simplify the figure and its explanation.
 The Critics: I 111

RELATIVE POWER
A

RATIO D/Pd
figure 8.2 Fleischmann reported that as the palladium cathode stored more deuterium,
its ability to generate anomalous power changed from negative to positive.

defined as was the loading threshold. It was shown by some experimenters to

occur at about 100 milliamperes per cm2 of cathode current.23
The most damning fact about cold fusion research in the eyes of its critics
was the lack of repeatability of the Fleischmann and Pons cell: there were so
many failed experiments. The failure, however, was not so much in the failed
cells as in the obtuse conclusions drawn from them. A study of the first years
of the cold fusion saga might persuade a serene observer that the effect of a
threshold in an experiment was something new for science.
 c h a p t e r n i n e

The Critics: II

A fter the Utah announcement, severe criticisms arose about the presumed
lack of suitable control experiments in the Fleischmann and Pons paper.
These criticisms came both from individual physicists and from publications.
Each demanded an experiment substituting light water for the heavy water be-
cause the deuterium supplied for the claimed fusion was presumably provided
by the heavy water.
As was mentioned earlier, a dichotomy was implicit in the complaints be-
cause two situations needed to be tested. The control test for nuclear fusion
required substitution of light water. The test for anomalous power required
substitution only of an exhausted palladium or a platinum rod for the cath-
ode.
In April 1989 the New York Times wrote an editorial in authoritative
tones, “But the two [Fleischmann and Pons] apparently neglected a basic cau-
tion that scientists have learned to impose on themselves for fear of being car-
ried away—a control experiment, like repeating the test with ordinary water
instead of heavy water.”
Dr. Huizenga was emphatic about the need for this control experiment.
He said,

Pons and Fleischmann failed to carry out a number of even the more
elementary tests and cross-checks. When questioned about their re-
sults with ordinary light water, their answers were non-informative
and subject to ambiguous interpretations.1

112
 The Critics II 113

Neither the NYT nor Huizenga showed awareness of the experiment

listed in the Preliminary Note showing zero excess power. It can be considered
a control experiment. They appeared to be only interested in a light water
control. By the summer of 1989, however, there were claims of excess energy
generation in light water electrolytic cells. How does one know that plain wa-
ter constitutes a control test, elementary or otherwise, if the energy source is
unknown? They had no basis for asserting tests with ordinary water consti-
tuted “elementary tests and cross checks.”
The editor of Nature (April 1989) scolded the two chemists for not doing
control experiments with light water. Fleischmann insisted that he wrote to
the editor pointing out that they had done work with light water and had data
available, and that the editor did not publish his letter. That data appeared in
the Fleischmann and Pons article of July 1990.
Wilson (1992) pointed out that maintaining the heat balance of a cell
constituted a satisfactory control: heat in minus heat out must equal zero. If
that balance was achieved, that demonstrated substantial control of the calo-
rimetry.
Fleischmann suggested using a “dead” palladium cathode rod in an other-
wise identical cell.2 That change held most values in the cell identical with
those of a performing cell, and did so with its cell heat balance and data analy-
sis showing no generation of anomalous power. Attempts to use comparisons
between light and heavy water electrolytes were unsuccessful as the change
involved many difficulties3.
W. I. B. Beveridge insists, “Unless the basic needs of the control experi-
ment can be satisfied it is better to abandon the [experimental] attempt.” True
enough. Did achieving heat balance to 1% constitute a satisfactory control, or
did using a “dead” palladium cathode do the job? Orthodox scientists treated
the design of a control as a trivial matter, but it was not.
The design of a control experiment is not obvious in a new area of sci-
ence. Only when its boundaries are marked out can an experiment be de-
signed whose function lay outside the effect of the new area of scientific inter-
est. By the end of 1994, it appeared that the exhausted palladium rod, or a
platinum rod, offered the best control experiments for tracking excess heat ex-
perimentation.*
After the announcement, there emerged a demand for a Fleischmann and
Pons data set that demonstrated the excess heat characteristics as claimed.†

* Chemists assume that the platinum cathode rod will be inert.

† A data set, presumably, would consist of three columns of figures: cell temperature, cell volt-
age, and clock time. One such data set would be for a control cell. There would be associated
items, such as the value of the heater calibration pulses introduced into the cell for reference
purposes.
114 criticism

The demand came from both the physics and chemistry departments of the
University of Utah. In response Pons allegedly made a promise to furnish a
data set and the promise was not kept. If that happened, it was unfortunate.
Such a data set might have brought the physics and chemistry departments
into the project in a constructive way.

Four Critiques
The principal claim of Fleischmann and Pons’s was an extraordinary amount
of output energy that emerged in the form of heat. University of Utah Presi-
dent Peterson suggested at the announcement that during the ensuing years
the scientific community would have to evaluate the claims. Critiques were
published during the years 1989 through 1994 in response to the
Fleischmann and Pons publications from April 1989 to December 1994,
which together constituted their definitive statement of heat generation in the
experiment.
Immediately after the Utah announcement, four major centers for nu-
clear research hastily assembled several experimental programs in an effort to
duplicate the Fleischmann and Pons phenomena: Caltech,4 Pasadena, CA;
MIT,5 Cambridge, MA; Yale University,6 New Haven, CT, working in con-
junction with the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Brookhaven, New York
(Yale); and the British nuclear research center at Harwell,7 England. All, ex-
cept Harwell, had to scavenge the newspapers and television channels for
technical details on which to base their programs. Harwell had considerable
assistance from Fleischmann. All four assumed that neutron particle radiation,
rather then heat, would be the critical evidence in support of the Utah claims.
Within three months, the four research centers complained that they
were seeing nothing of scientific interest in the cells they had built and oper-
ated for however many weeks. This turned out to be their final conclusion.
Only Harwell, to its credit, made available their original “raw” data for
review by others. Fleischmann prepared a paper in the spring of 1995 giving
his review of their data, which showed numerous instances of apparent excess
heat generation in one of the cells.8 Unfortunately, he says there was not
enough calibration data to reach a definite conclusion.
Questions had also been raised whether the MIT cells might have gener-
ated unrecognized excess heat. The original data reduction steps were never re-
leased for independent review and publication.
N. S. Lewis, Caltech, produced the most damaging criticism of the
Fleischmann and Pons calorimetry because his commentary was absolute and
it was carried far. He claimed he had replicated the Utah experiment in Pasa-
dena and found it wanting. In particular, Lewis measured widely different
 The Critics II 115

temperatures at assorted points within the electrolyte volume. Without a uni-

form temperature, the calculations of excess heat were meaningless and could
be dismissed by the scientific community.
Lewis’s replication was faulty. The Dewar used by Lewis in his attempt at
replication was too large in diameter and used one atmosphere pressure inside
the Dewar walls. Mixing of the electrolyte fluid produces a uniform tempera-
ture if it is vigorous enough. The bubbling action of the electrodes stirs the
cell, and this stirring is adequate only if the cell is sufficiently narrow. Lewis’s
was not.
The cell is immersed in a bath of cooler water for the purpose of measur-
ing the cell’s emission of heat. Fleischmann and Pons had the ingenious idea
to get the heat out of the cell by radiation rather than by conduction.* A hard
(high) vacuum inside the walls of the Dewar cell accomplished this. In this ra-
diation mode, the heat propagated from all points within the cell electrolyte
volume through the glass Dewar walls to impinge on all points within the vol-
ume of the bath water. Thus there need be no temperature gradients, only a
temperature difference between the electrolyte volume and the bath volume.
In the Lewis cell, heat was removed from the cell by conduction to the in-
side Dewar wall; from there it moves across the air gap to the outside wall and
from there to the bath water that touches the flask. Along this conduction
path, one can expect significant temperature gradients because gradients are
what make heat flow in the conduction mode.
Lewis’s cell necessarily did have the large temperature gradients that he
demonstrated, but he was mistaken when he assigned that fatal problem to the
Utah cell. Most experimenters have learned that there are many subtleties in-
volved in the Fleischmann and Pons cell design.
Our understanding of Lewis’s criticism on May 1 lacks perspective be-
cause he never defended his work after his targets had an opportunity to learn
what he had done and said. However, he did give a retrospective interview to
Douglas Smith of the Caltech in-house magazine Engineering & Science (as
did Koonin) but when his interview tapes were offered to the Cornell archive,
Lewis did not release them.† He has not defended his work at subsequent sci-
entific meetings. In particular, the NSF/EPRI meeting, October 1989, saw
Fleischmann present his results for many cell experiments, a large fraction of
which were claimed as generating excess heat. Yet Lewis did not rise to point
out error in Fleischmann’s procedure. Because of these several reasons, it is dif-
ficult to put an analytical perspective on his reasons for being so critical of the
Fleischmann and Pons cell.

* With conduction, each hot spot heats the adjacent cooler spots. With radiation, each hot spot
radiates its heat outward to all cooler spots within “sight” in a transparent medium.
† Lewis retains these tapes in his possession. It would be a great service to science if they were re-
leased to the Cornell/Kroch archive.
116 criticism

From a later perspective, these four programs were undertaken unrealisti-

cally. The lack of information about what Fleischmann and Pons were doing
combined with a short experimental period were serious obstacles. Researchers
who were not immersed in the techniques of loading hydrogen into metals
and who did not have calorimetric skills were at a disadvantage. These re-
search efforts should not have been expected to succeed even though there is
skimpy evidence that MIT and Harwell did generate excess heat.9
The seminal paper of Fleischmann and Pons that described their calorim-
etry was published in July 1990. The scientific community gave this claim of
excess power a paltry review. As far as I know, only four critiques of their work
on calorimetry techniques have been published.*
While numerous papers and three books have critically referenced the
original Fleischmann and Pons work, those full-length, published papers that
undertook a direct critique of the calorimetric claims of the two chemists are
included here. The books do not discuss calorimetry.
The legislature for the State of Utah had allocated five million dollars for
further study of their discovery under the condition that the excess heat claim
be confirmed. As one part of that requirement, Wilford N. Hansen, professor
of physics, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, was commissioned by the
Utah State Fusion/Energy Council to make an independent critique of several
sets of cell performance data delivered to him by Fleischmann and Pons. Two
of the cells were control cells identical to the active cells except that ordinary
water replaced the heavy water. Besides the data sets, he was given ancillary in-
formation about the individual cells.
Hansen’s report to the Council was delivered in the spring of 1991. His
conclusions regarding the Fleischmann and Pons cell data are of interest. He
expresses the amount of energy in units of electron-volts per atom of cathode
material.† For evidence of anomalous power in cell number five, he states,
“Just for the two days [out of the cell’s operating period] this corresponds to
45 electron-volts (eV) per palladium atom. This amount is already ten times
larger than the energy it would take to vaporize the entire palladium electrode.
We have thought of no other self-consistent explanation than that the excess
heat is real and very significant.”10
For cell number two, the analysis is described as follows, “The integrated
excess heat is . . . about 1,700 eV per palladium atom. This is about 400 times

* There are, of course, many dozens of papers on the subject of calorimetry which list the
Fleischmann and Pons reports. This chapter reports on those papers whose content is a specific
critique of Fleischmann and Pons’s work as published, and where their abstracts and conclu-
sions offer amendment to the Fleischmann and Pons papers.
† The electron-Volt is a measure of energy used by scientists at the atomic level of calculation.
Here Hansen is calculating the excess heat generated for each atom of palladium in the cath-
ode.
 The Critics II 117

the vaporization energy of palladium for the electrode of cell 2!”11 For cell
number six, he said, “. . . there is about 6,000 eV per palladium atom excess
energy, or over a thousand times the energy required to vaporize the electrode.
Putting it this way, . . . we are not dealing with known chemistry or metal-
lurgy. At issue is a profound energy source.”12 For cell number 5, he calculated
heat generation at the rate of 1,000 watts for each cubic cm of palladium cath-
ode. Such a value is comparable to the power density within the fuel rods of a
nuclear reactor. These are the conclusions of an independent scientist after
conducting an independent data reduction of several sets of Fleischmann and
Pons’s data.

The Wilson Critique

A more aggressive and most revealing critique emerged from a group led by
R. H. Wilson at General Electric Co., Schenectady, New York.* They submit-
ted a paper criticizing the calorimetry work in the original article by Fleisch-
mann and Pons.13 The Wilson paper was published in July 1992 and was fol-
lowed directly by Fleischmann and Pons’s response.14
These papers were prepared in the proper manner that included peer re-
view before the publisher accepted them. They got to the heart of the excess
power question. Whether cold fusion was a science or not hinged on precisely
what was in these three papers: is there, or is there not, an anomalous source
of energy which appears as an excess of heat in the Fleischmann and Pons ex-
periment? These papers were the proper battleground. The passage of three
years had allowed for the critics to find themselves and their weapons, so that
the two sides engaged each other properly fitted out with the necessary infor-
mation.
An overview of the Wilson critique shows it to be quite limited. The au-
thors found it necessary to qualify their comments with, “appear,” or “possi-
ble,” or “probable,” or “potential,” which reduces the value of the criticism. It
is interesting that they stated, “. . . inadequate mixing within the cell does not
appear to be a problem,” without further discussion.†
The Wilson team summarized their paper in the following words.

We evaluate the data and methods of Pons, Fleischmann and co-

workers and, where sufficient data are available, conclude that they
overestimate significantly the excess heat . . . While our analysis

* It should be noted that GE had a financial incentive to reach a negative conclusion. They
wanted to back out of a research contract.
† A précis of the report is included in the appendix.
118 criticism

shows their claims of continuous heat generation to be over stated

significantly, we cannot prove that no excess heat has been generated
in any experiment.15

In their response, Fleischmann and Pons pointed out that the Wilson calcula-
tions still showed excess heat after taking into account their corrections, in one
case at the 50% level, far above the uncertainty floor. The Wilson report was
not negative. It was supportive in that there was still excess heat after all the
criticism Wilson could muster.
The argument between Fleischmann and Pons and the Wilson group was
over the manner of computing excess heat energy flow. Regarding the burst of
excess energy shown in the original paper (see Figure 4.2), Wilson said, “the
‘burst’ data [Fleischmann and Pons] present is not greatly reduced by the cor-
rections that we describe.” They also state that, “. . . the possible recombina-
tion of oxygen and deuterium within the cell is apparently eliminated . . .” So
in three crucial areas, that of the recorded burst of energy, the uniformity of
temperature within the cell, and the possible recombination of gasses, the
Wilson critique supported the Utah chemists’ techniques and claims.16
Wilson’s report also supported the claim of the existence of anomalous
power. The authors allowed that several of the cells still showed significant
power even after their values were recalculated. In one cell, after Wilson’s re-
calculation, the power amounted to four watts per cubic cm. of palladium and
the total amount for the run amounted to four megaJoules of energy. These
quantities were beyond what chemical reactions can provide. That the Wilson
team at GE did not follow up the Fleischmann and Pons defense with further
analysis is a pity.
The four critiques were as follows in the order of their publication. Pro-
fessor N. Lewis’s critique was published in Nature in August 1989;17 Professor
W. Hansen’s review of the Fleischmann and Pons’s data reduction techniques
was published in June 1991;18 the Wilson team’s GE critique was published in
JEAC July 1992;19 and Dr. D. R. O. Morrison’s critique was published in
Physics Letters A, February 1994.20 In my assessment, the N. Lewis critique
was too hurried to withstand the rigors of comparison with analyses developed
over a longer period of time. The evaluation of his critique given to the press
at Baltimore (press conference number 3) was mistaken: “. . . the level of so-
phistication of the current round of experiments is far greater than the level of
sophistication of the original Utah experiments.”21
W. Hansen’s work appeared completely credible, and no question was
raised about it in the literature. Its strength lay in the multiple calibrations and
multiple reduction methodologies he used. This permitted a comparative
analysis of the different methods to assure a high degree of internal consis-
tency.
 The Critics II 119

Dr. Morrison’s critique is not reviewed here as it was based upon a series
of misunderstood and misinterpreted capabilities of the open cell. When these
were set forth, he did not respond.
Wilson et al. offered the most thoughtful and comprehensive critical re-
view. It still fell seriously short of what was needed because it did not recog-
nize the central position of earlier critiques and did not take them into
account. I am disappointed by its own lack of self-awareness. It concluded
with evidence for both substantial anomalous power and equally substantial
disappearing power as expressed in their recalculation of the Fleischmann and
Pons paper.* Nothing was said in the text about either result.
Blame for the lack of more rigorous critiques of Fleischmann and Pons’s
work must be laid at the feet of the Department of Energy’s Panel on cold fu-
sion which was given the explicit charge to undertake a rigorous critique and
with those physicists who have turned the scientific community away from its
institutional obligation to fulfill such a critique.

Calorimetry at BYU
In December 1993, S. Jones, Brigham Young Unversity, abandoned his claims
that he had detected neutron emission from an electrolytic cell experiment of
his own design. Since that time he has become a prolific debunker of claims
made under the broad umbrella of cold fusion research. He was a co-author of
technical articles criticizing cold fusion calorimetry that are discussed in the
following paragraphs.
It is important to distinguish between the hasty work of 1989 and the
much more careful work of the subsequent five years. In 1995, Dr. Lee
Hansen, Professor of Chemistry at BYU, reported on a series of experiments
completed in the previous year whose purpose was to demonstrate that anom-
alous power could be explained as a misinterpretation of electrolytic cell oper-
ation.† The source of error claimed was primarily that of the inadvertent re-
combination within the cell of some portion of the two evolving gasses. This
recombination released energy that might be mistakenly seen as excess heat
energy. His conclusion stated that, “there is no compelling reason for not
adopting the hypothesis that calorimetric errors or failure to account for reac-
tions of hydrogen and oxygen during the electrolysis of water account for all
reports of excess heat to date.”22 If the reader will allow me a liberty: there is,
for that matter, no compelling reason for not adopting the hypothesis that L.
* Their recalculation of the Fleischmann and Pons work produced answers with negative gener-
ated excess heat.
† Although the date shows this paper to be beyond the six-year span of our present inquiry, we
review it because of its central interest to our purpose.
120 criticism

Hansen has a fetish for his computer. The quoted statement of conclusion by.
L. Hansen, et al. is not an intellectually serious formulation: it is a manipula-
tive ploy. Nevertheless, it should be answered.
He made the claim that his conclusion was applicable to all anomalous
power reports (to date). His paper did not include data to allow that conclu-
sion. It’s text does not consider the variety of heat power experiments and note
for the reader how his experimental results can be interpreted for each in-
stance. At the time the paper was in preparation there were about twenty-five
reports in the literature claiming heat power, and they included a wide variety
of cell designs.
For example, L. Hansen’s report shows that his “excess heat” ends when
a partition was placed between the anode and cathode. Oriani used a glass
partition in his experiment the report for which was submitted to Nature in
September 1989 to corroborate the Fleischmann and Pons claim of excess
power.23 Hansen’s report, then, was mistaken when, in the abstract, it said,
“All [cells] produced excess heat as defined and calculated in the literature re-
ports, but the production could be readily terminated by the introduction of
various barriers to the migration of hydrogen and oxygen.” But L. Hansen’s
cell did not produce excess heat in the manner exhibited in the Oriani report.
L. Hansen’s report was for an experiment operating at a level of a few
milliwatts of power. The experiment displays the minutia of electrochemical
cell operation. It was an excellent experiment with which to acquaint graduate
students with the electrolytic cell in its many vagaries. Still it claimed, without
further comment, that it undermined the conclusions of all reports of excess
power. The report’s conclusions were an unconscionable exaggeration of the
experiment’s significance.
What L. Hansen was critical about can be shown as follows. In Figure
1.1, a qualitative picture of the observation of anomalous power was graphi-
cally depicted. The evidence for anomalous power was inferred from the di-
rection and shape of the two tracings. The next step was to attach quantitative
readings to the figure.
The amount of energy in and out of the cell is known from the referenced
report for the experiment. The current and voltage delivered by the power
supply that created the large volume of bubbles amounted to 210 kiloJoules
over the four days shown. This report also stated that 26 kiloJoules of excess
heat was measured. Hanson’s argument was that if 13% of the gases recom-
bined, the energy released would amount to 26 kiloJoules. The experimenter
then would mistakenly think it was anomalous power when actually it was
heat released by gas recombination in the cell.
Fortunately, Fleischmann took measurements in this experiment from
which the amount of recombination was determined. They not only mea-
sured the quantity of the effluent gasses, but also the amount of heavy water
that had to be replaced. The referenced report stated that the measured re-
 The Critics II 121

combination was less than 1%. That amounted to less than 2.13 kiloJoules.
Note that Figure 1.1 represented 45, 66, 86, and 115 milliwatts of power for
each of the four days. A maximum of 6 mw out of these quantities might be
attributable to recombination during those four days of cell operation.
L. Hansen referred to the question Fleischmann and Pons asked about
the depiction in Figure 1.1. He said, “This may answer the question . . . ‘How
can it be that the temperature of the cell contents increases whereas the
enthalpy [power] input decreases with time?’”24 Recombination of gasses was
clearly not the answer. If recombination occurred, control cells would experi-
ence it and show apparent excess heat. Fleischmann and Pons’s control cells
show no excess heat.*
Fleischmann also measured the water replacement volume and found
that the amount required indicates that no significant recombination of the
gasses occurs.25 McKubre, Huggins, and Oriani have run “closed” cells that
generated excess heat. These and other closed experiments indicated that the
well-known recombination factor was well controlled by experimenters and
was not degrading the reported anomalous power data.
At the NSF/EPRI conference (Chapter 6), October 1989, Fleischmann
said of his cells:

The current [Faradaic] efficiencies . . . were determined by measur-

ing the combined rates of gas evolution from the cells . . . these
efficiencies were higher than 99% as was also shown by the record of
[heavy water] additions . . . Such high efficiencies have now also
been reported in other work. They can be understood in terms of the
inhibition of deuterium oxidation at the anode by Pt-oxide forma-
tion and the extensive degassing of the oxygen content of the electro-
lyte in the cathode region by the vigorous deuterium evolution.26

In the same article, Fleischmann and Pons described cells that generate anom-
alous power and control cells that do not. If the heat generation were due to
recombination, both kinds of cells would display a similar performance since
their geometry was identical. They would generate apparent anomalous heat
in cells that experimenters found to be easy to replicate. Therefore, many sci-
entists, when considering whether excess energy exists, reasonably conclude
that recombination effects are insignificant.
Bursts of energy were noted in Chapter 4, Figure 4.2. According to David

* Fleischmann and Pons point out that “. . . the comparison of the precision and accuracy of the
heat transfer factor for ‘blank cells’ sets an upper bound on the rate of reduction of oxygen in
the system.” They conclude that, “The magnitude of the source can be estimated to be ≈ 2.3
milliwatts for the example illustrated.” So they agree reasonably well with Hansen on the exis-
tence of the effect, but they point out that the consequence for it in their published reports of
anomalous power is negligible.
122 criticism

B. Buehler, BYU, these might be of chemical origin.27 He suggests that a

buildup of chemical layers on the cathode might fracture and result in a sud-
den release of chemical energy that would be mistakenly interpreted as a
power burst of nuclear origin.* He would have to do some rudimentary calcu-
lations at least to show that an appropriately large quantity of power could be
produced by such a source before his criticism could be taken seriously. Such a
calculation would fail to account for the magnitude of the observed bursts.
The amounts of energy under discussion here are many orders of magnitude
greater than this mechanism would allow.
The outspoken physicists, who were involved in the public debates about
the Fleischmann and Pons claims, did not give recognition to the heat flow
measurements. Amazingly enough, the physics community consistently took
the position that heat flow could not be measured, at least for the purpose of
confirming the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon. After their fine work in
the nineteenth century, they largely abandoned heat measurements to the
chemists. Scientists in this field, as acceptors, were motivated by the apparent
existence of excess heat. Thus, much of the confusion.
S. Jones was explicit about that attitude. “Our experiments on heat sug-
gest that you need some sort of additional signature in addition to the heat to
confirm that you are really doing something and not just getting a systematic
error.”28 Jones insisted that this point of view, “. . . is based on our [heat] ex-
periments.” Jones wanted to see, for example, x-rays, because he recognized
them as a necessary concomitant of a nuclear process. The thermal measure-
ments could be considered mistaken, as Jones considers them to be mistaken,
without the evidence of a nuclear process to provide the large quantity of heat.
In this way, the heat measurements of more than a dozen laboratories over six
years are held hostage by a coterie of nuclear physicists.†
There seemed to be a nihilistic quality about the reports from BYU on
the operation of the electrochemical cell. Experience from the routine use of
such cells since their inception in the eighteenth century resulted in a large
body of knowledge. This was routinely taught in graduate school. Ordinarily,
one assumed these matters to be well considered in any experimental setup.
Fleischmann and Pons clearly stated that those considerations were accommo-
dated in their work, “recombination is less than one percent.” Still L. Hansen
was concerned that the avoidance of recombination “has not been proved.”
This sense of nihilism was reinforced by what was previously described as ex-

* “. . . if a lithium layer is deposited on an electrode [cathode] under a coating (e.g., silicate, bo-
rate, or aluminum coating) and later should the coating crack, then exothermic water-lithium
reactions would result, producing ‘heat bursts.’”
† I was concerned here with the calorimetric critique of Fleischmann and Pons by BYU. The
further topic of the relationship between calorimetric and nuclear demands is developed in the
chapter on protocols (p. 174) after the validation evaluation is begun in the next chapter.
 The Critics II 123

aggerated claims, such as the phrase “. . . that probably invalidates all the cur-
rently available reports . . .”29
It is as though one were to step forward and declare that all claims of ex-
cess heat were due to the use of dirty glassware, and do so on the grounds that
none of the papers in the field include proof that the experiments started with
clean glassware. A review of those papers would show that they do not even
mention whether the glassware was washed. To raise the argument is to imply
that cold fusion experimenters, including Fleischmann and Pons, are utterly
inept until proven otherwise. The two chemists’ defense in the literature of
their calorimetry during those years does not support such a conclusion.
Quite the opposite seems to be the case. The Fleischmann and Pons paper of
July 1990 is likely to establish a higher standard for the calorimetry of heat
flow, one that measures heat power to 1% accuracy while, at the same time,
permitting rapid temperature excursions.
Chapter 14 (p. 192) includes discussion of the experiments of 1990 in
which recombination is deliberately induced, so that the results would be
affected only by a lack of recombination, and that in the direction of decreas-
ing any measured anomalous power. I agree with McKubre, who has said that
L. Hansen’s work is “mischievous.”

The Two Chemists’s Mistakes

That statement brings us around almost full circle. If Fleischmann and Pons
were correct in their claim of excess power, why all the fuss and confusion?
The broadest answer is simply that the claim of having achieved sustained
room-temperature fusion captured the intellects and egos of many nuclear
physicists. The chemistry community largely ignored the separate claim of ex-
cess heat without radiation.
The two chemists made some serious errors in both science and protocol.
The most egregious was that of publishing erroneous nuclear measurements.
The data included a picture of the claimed signal shape of the radiation. It did
not conform to any expected shape from such a reaction, and when that wave
form was questioned there was no forthcoming explanation about where it did
come from. That item remained a mystery. Their early nuclear data showing
that gamma-rays were detected emanating from the water bath surrounding
the cells were false.
The other area of concern was the way they offered up their control cell
data. Scientists missed the importance of a published experiment that pro-
duced zero excess energy simply because their heads were turned by the word
fusion. They wanted a plain water control. The two chemists did not include
one, even though Fleischmann later said that such data were available at the
124 criticism

s u m m at i o n
Fleischmann and Pons’s Errors of Protocol
The following list provides a summary of the mistakes of Fleischmann and
Pons.
1. Their statement of announcement in 1989 was substantially inadequate. For
want of supervision the role of the attorneys was not limited and the two
chemists did not offer coherent public statements for the news networks.
2. The two should have provided briefings for the University of Utah chemis-
try and physics departments prior to the announcement.
3. The Preliminary Note showed a column of calculated values pertaining to
an hypothetical experiment (see Chapter 5, p. 73). It claimed a large power
multiple of heat generation. The column of “data” was unsupported in the
text. Its inclusion was improper.
4. The measurement they claimed of gamma-rays from the experiment’s bath
were more than wrong. It is not discernable where the published wave form
came from. Their defense of those measurements was not persuasive.
5. It was an error of judgement for them to conduct a public search for the
presence of helium in the cathode rods.
6. They failed to share their cell data with other scientists (other than W.
Hansen). Under the circumstances of the first five months of this episode,
that was a significant failure.

time. Both of these errors had major, deleterious consequences for the presen-
tation of their work to the scientific community.
It has been said that their primary error was the failure to have a preprint
report of their discovery at the press conference. My observation is that this
item of protocol is well honored in the breach.
In retrospect, it was three years before the topics in their Preliminary
Note of April 1989 were published in formal reports. I accept Fleischmann’s
repeated insistence that they wanted and needed another eighteen months
prior to the public announcement, but they did not get it. Too little informa-
tion was released. The published “news release” could have been much more
complete in its descriptions.
The most unforgivable act was to have Fleischmann and Pons announce
their work to the press speaking extemporaneously. Just the thought of it
is staggering. What they said that Thursday afternoon ought to have been
crafted purposefully even if it meant staying up the entire night to do it. It is
said that Pons got a little stage fright lecturing a classroom. His public (TV)
appearances during the past decade displayed a pathetic inability to speak ex-
temporaneously on the record. Fortunately, Fleischmann spoke well and came
through just fine. He emphasized the accuracy of their heat measurements by
 The Critics II 125

use of the Dewar flask. He expressly separated their major discovery—the

large amounts of heat energy—from the nuclear measurements of fusion
products. That was not enough to save the conference. Overall, the announce-
ment content was utterly inadequate to the occasion.
Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons now fade from our narrative.*
Their contribution was set forth in its principal parts along with their errors.
The critique of their work, such as it was, has been presented in perhaps too
much detail. During 1990, the burden of their considerable celebrity, the on-
going research needed to support publication of their theses, and the over-
whelmingly adverse publicity made their positions in the chemistry depart-
ment at the University of Utah untenable.
The two were offered an opportunity to start afresh by Minoru Toyoda, a
senior member of the Toyoda clan, the founders and principal owners of the
Toyota Motor Company. He arranged for the Technova Company of Japan to
return them to their research. A laboratory was set up to their specifications in
a technology park in Provence, France. They worked together there from
1992 until 1995, when Fleischmann left. Pons left in 1998 and the venture
was ended. At the ten-year anniversary, Fleischmann was still active in retire-
ment attending the international conferences and contributing much to them.
Pons had left scientific employment and had purchased a farm in Provence.
There were some indications that he was doing a modicum of consulting
work.
The calorimetric work of Fleischmann and Pons, described in the first
four chapters, displayed real evidence of a new phenomenon. This review of
the critics’ arguments, along with Fleischmann and Pons’s laboratory exper-
tise, did not evidence ignorance, oversight, or illusion on the part of the two
chemists. By finding the measured heat, documenting it, and defending their
discovery with skill and erudition against knowledgeable critics, they demon-
strated that they were engaged in a scientific discipline. Fleischmann and Pons
were working as scientists doing scientific work during the years 1984 to
1998. Whether they are eventually proved right or wrong, that field of study
was a field of true scientific evaluation.
This critique of the first years of cold fusion research does not imply that
the scientific community ought to have accepted outright any of the Utah
claims. My argument continues to be that the door of opportunity to evaluate
their research should have been left open a little longer than five weeks. More
knowledgeable critiques became possible in 1990 after the publication of
Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetric methods.
An evaluation of the failed experiments was raised in Nature magazine in

* For the sake of stylistic variation, the Fleischmann and Pons type of cell with its palladium
cathode, platinum anode, and heavy water eletrolyte henceforth will be referred to as the
“eletrolytic cell” when such use does not introduce ambiguity.
126 criticism

its issue of October 26, 1989. Its Washington editor expressed the argument
as follows.

Critics, on the other hand, maintain that if you are allowed to keep
positive results and throw away the rest you can never be proved
wrong: it becomes, as one skeptic put it, religion, not science.30

This statement was categorically wrong and widely influential. Most scientists
are aware that one can not prove a negative, even about cold fusion research.
There is no primrose garden path to a knowledge of nature even if our most
prestigious societies and journals state otherwise.
Galileo liked to lecture that he could see moons circling Jupiter with his
new telescope. Corroboration of his observation would require that one build
a telescope as good as his, and eventually others did. A similar situation arose
with the calorimetric instruments used in cold fusion studies. Fleischmann
and Pons made an outstanding calorimeter: an utterly simple, open type, that
was astonishingly accurate, and offered considerable dynamic range. It took
several years for others to reach that standard of accuracy in order to validate
their work. No one has yet come up to their standard in all three characteris-
tics: simple, accurate, and dynamic.
The scientific critique of the Fleischmann and Pons anomalous heat
claims ran thin. It can be concluded that by the end of 1994, the critiques
held no evidence of a deficiency in Fleischmann and Pons’s claim to have mea-
sured significant amounts of anomalous power. With that, our review of the
critics and their works is completed.
 Pa r t T h re e

VALIDATION
 c h a p t e r t e n

Ramsey’s Way

H ere begins a description of how the anomalous power claims were vali-
dated during the years 1989 through 1994. Chapters 10 through 14
provide respectively the principle invoked, the variety of methodology recog-
nized, a suitable protocol identified, the specific criteria selected, and the
abundant laboratory data analyzed. An exhaustive reference list of anomalous
power documents for that time period completes the validation.
Norman Ramsey found himself in fortunate circumstances. While he and
John Huizenga headed the DOE’s Panel on Cold Fusion as co-chairmen,
Ramsey had drafted a preamble and insisted it be included in the Panel’s final
report on threat of resignation. His threat carried his request. Those who work
in cold fusion research are indebted to him for his pugnacity.
The preamble reads as follows.

Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent

and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not compli-
cated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few
months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even
the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments,
for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the
present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion pe-
riod would be revolutionary.1

If the experiment is a complicated one, then “a single short but valid cold
fusion period would be revolutionary.” At the very least, it would establish a

129
130 va l i d at i o n

new field of scientific research. This statement of Ramsey’s is quoted with my

emphasis on the word valid.
The definition of a complicated experiment needs some refinement. It
certainly does not mean that a large team of scientists is needed. Nor does it
mean that highly sophisticated facilities, like accelerators, are involved. A
complicated experiment is one that contains uncontrolled factors sufficiently
influential to determine the experiment’s outcome.*
Unfortunately, the cold fusion cell experiment is a complicated one. It
was compared to hot fusion experiments earlier in Chapters 4 and 5, where
some commentators have pointed out that the hot fusion toroid contains a
simpler experiment than does the Fleischmann and Pons cell. The two chem-
ists who designed the cold fusion cell have had several decades of professional
experience working with electrolytic cells. One picks up a lot of know-how in
that time. There were many variables in their cells that were not understood
but were important enough to determine the experiment’s outcome. Ramsey’s
criterion clearly applied to cold fusion research, and it can help to untangle
the confusion around this subject.
The natural warmth of radium when it was first measured offered a fine
example of a complicated experiment. It was proper that Pierre Curie’s heat
measurement was not held hostage for three or more decades until science
reached an understanding of the source of the warmth. It was correct for sci-
ence to recognize the heat measurement while accepting the fact that it had no
understanding of how the measured effect was possible.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the Wassermann test for
syphilis was used in thousands of clinics because of its great utility. But it was
never completely determinate, as is shown in the next chapter where a closer
look is taken of the well-known test that had some of the characteristics of the
cold fusion phenomenon.
In the 1970s, there was much argument over the properties of the surface

* Science journal addressed the use of the word “complex” at some length in an essay in its issue
of vol. 284, April 2, 1999, p. 79. (I prefer the word “complex” to “complicated” for my pur-
poses, but have chosen to stay with Ramsey’s word “complicated.”) The essay asserts, “Being
anxious to move beyond the semantic debate, we have taken a “complex system” to be one
whose properties are not fully explained by an understanding of its component parts.” They go
on to invite each of their authors to include their own definition of “complex” within their tech-
nical articles. The reader who questions my reliance upon Ramsey’s idea that there can be de-
fined an entity called a “complicated experiment,” ought to read the editorial.
Its purpose is identical to mine. The field of research called cold fusion needs this concept
exactly as Science needs it for the disciplines of earth sciences, molecular biology, chemistry,
and so on. Also, it is with some satisfaction that I find Science railing against “the small, elite
group of scientists whose ideas provide the theoretical underpinning for much of what is re-
ported here.” I am sure that some readers will see parts of this book as so much railing against
the small, elite group of scientists whose ideas provide the theoretical underpinning to ignore
the reports of anomalous power.
 Ramsey’s Way 131

of gold, whether it was hydrophilic or hydrophobic. Many years were needed

to sort out the confusion which, it gradually became known, was due to the
fact that the surface, after cleaning, became contaminated much more rapidly
than was at first realized. That contamination then served to determine the
surface’s chemical properties. The surface of the Fleischmann and Pons palla-
dium cathode could readily undergo similar transformation through contami-
nation unless the strictest laboratory regimen was maintained.
In the 1980s, it was claimed that there might be a fifth force hovering
about among the physical laws that would slightly change the pull of gravity
as measured at the earth’s surface. Trial measurement of the proposed force re-
quired a large-scale operation with high towers above ground and deep holes
in the ground. Composition of the earth in the vicinity of the measurement
could not be well controlled such that the outcome suffered an important
variability that made the experiment complicated. It required several years to
determine whether the basic formulae of physics had to be modified, which
they did not.
More recently there was announced the first cloning of an adult mammal,
a sheep. The offspring clone was named “Dolly”. The experiment required
over 200 tries before success was achieved, an eminently unrepeatable experi-
ment and certainly one that can be considered complicated. Yet it was given
immediate recognition pending a corroboration, which came forth from an-
other laboratory in eighteen months.
These are experiments in which the cause cannot be traced through to its
effect. The name of that class is complicated, although complex is also accept-
able usage.

Ramsey Modified
The presence of anomalous heat power has no scientific explanation at the
twelve-year anniversary. Its presence challenges the law of conservation of en-
ergy, for if the power is real (the heterodox opinion) and if there is no nuclear
source possible (the orthodox opinion), then that power may have appeared
from out of nowhere. Such an appearance inevitably threatens the theorems of
nuclear physics with some degree of change or appendage. For these reasons, a
single validated occurrence of anomalous power may reasonably be called rev-
olutionary.
A modification of the Ramsey criterion will better fit our case. I modify it
by substituting the term “anomalous power” for the term “cold fusion.” The
Ramsey principle is applied specifically to the claim of generating anomalous
power while producing few, if any, neutrons. The modified Ramsey criterion
says that a single short but valid anomalous power period would be revolu-
132 va l i d at i o n

tionary. This statement I refer to as the modified Ramsey criterion, and this
writer, not Norman Ramsey, is responsible for the assertion of its significance.
Am I trying to create an easy garden path that leads quickly to sure an-
swers about the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon? Not at all. On the con-
trary, I assert that there is no well marked path to the answer for a complicated
experiment. The obvious exception to this slow development of a new branch
of science occurs when the discipline permits readily replicable demonstra-
tions. Experiments of that sort were common in nuclear physics from its be-
ginning at the turn of the twentieth century, but that experience may be seen
as a significant exception to the general rule.
The scientific protocol for corroboration of a complicated experiment re-
quires replication in an independent laboratory. This does not mean that the
experiment needs to be repeatable, as there are experiments in science that are
quite difficult to repeat. Laboratories that have been successful in cold fusion
experimentation have achieved successful results in about one out of ten at-
tempts. The persistent demand for repeatable results comes from a misunder-
standing of what constitutes correct scientific methodology. The nature of
that misunderstanding is explored in the next chapter.
The reader might ask why not require proof of anomalous power? The
idea of proof is beguiling. Ready replication that always obtained the specified
result would constitute proof. In the Dolly corroboration (August 1998),
DNA checks were considered proof. As was pointed out in Chapter 1, proof
professes resolution of the issue in question, but the price for proof may be a
King’s ransom. To require proof may greatly raise the prospect of a false nega-
tive result. This is especially true in a field so new that theory does not provide
a guide. In those experiments where proof of the result is not available, de-
mands for proof should be dismissed. Proof may be inaccessible for many
years in cold fusion research. It is my purpose to avoid either a false positive or
a false negative conclusion.
That lack of accessible proof was the case with the fifth force in physics,
with “Dolly” in biology, and with the nature of a gold surface in chemistry. As
a consequence, it required many years to find answers in those instances.
Proof, one way or the other, was not available when these cases emerged, yet
they were eventually resolved within science and by scientific means.
Mistaken claims for discovery have occasionally absorbed the attention
of scientists for several years before they were finally abandoned. Would a
Ramsey type of criteria have validated such discoveries had it been used? Some
mistaken claims did start to climb up the validation curve of progressive cor-
roboration. The polywater claim was confirmed in other laboratories before
being snuffed out. The critical component of an effective protocol is for ex-
perimenters and critics to conduct themselves like experimental technicians,
 Ramsey’s Way 133

as did Langmuir and Wood. Only a careful, laboratory-centered critique of the

observed phenomenon provides the means to reject the experimental claim. That is
how the N-ray claim, the polywater episode, and the Bergen Davis experiment
were brought to an end. If that course involves a difficult laboratory process,
then the rejection may take some time.
The source of the confusion in 1989 should be clear at this point. An un-
reasonable concern with the place of theory led a few physicists to disregard
the corroboration of anomalous power measurements in what can be seen as a
vitiation of historical method in scientific discovery. Some scientists were at-
tracted to a strange protocol, one that held back, as though a hostage, the
claim for anomalous power while awaiting evidence of nuclear products. As a
consequence, the evidence for that claim was not exposed to the scientific
community. Evaluation of the power claim was to be put off until after nu-
clear products in commensurate amount were reported. Until such time, the
claim for anomalous power based solely upon its measurement would be held
aside for eventual burial along with its discoverers. Other scientists, fortu-
nately, followed conventional protocol. They pursued the well-measured ob-
servation of anomalous power as is ordinarily done in science. They would
pursue it to validation or failure.
Editors of the broad-audience scientific journals chose to maintain the
hostage strategy. The science reporters who found themselves involved in the
event did not explain this unfortunate pattern of behavior to the scientific
community. Most people saw only confusion.

The Skeptical Attitude

The scientific community recognizes the unique rôle of the critic as a neces-
sary partner. His critical faculty contributes by pointing out error, oversights,
or misinterpretations of data.
The skeptic, however, plays a different rôle than does the critic. Beveridge
defines the skeptic with the following unqualified statement, “There is a very
important distinction between a critical attitude of mind . . . and a skeptical
attitude.” He later asserts, “Perhaps the insistent skeptic serves a useful pur-
pose in the community, but I admit it is not one which I admire. It is said that
even today there are some people who still insist that the world is flat!”2
A significant number of scientists came to accept the existence of anoma-
lous power during 1989 and proceeded to set up shop in this new field when
they could find financial support. This adoption of the new field appalled
some of the outspoken critics. They were convinced that no new scientific dis-
covery had been made, a conviction that came solely from their knowledge
134 va l i d at i o n

s u m m at i o n
Characteristics of the Scientific Skeptic
In general, skeptics display the following habits.
1. They do not express their criticism in those venues where it will be subject
to peer review.
2. They do not go into the laboratory and practice the experiment along side
the practitioner (as does the critic).
3. Assertions are offered as though they were scientifically based when they are
merely guesses.
4. Questions are raised that concern matters outside of the boundaries of the
claimed observation.
5. Satire, dismissal, and slander are freely employed.
6. When explanations are advanced for a possible source, ad hoc reasons are in-
stantly presented for their rejection. These rejections often assert offhand
that the explanation violates some physical conservation law.
7. Evidence raised in support of the claims is rejected outright if it does not an-
swer every possible question. No intermediate steps to find a source are ac-
ceptable.

of nuclear physics. They were soon recognized as the skeptics of cold fusion
studies.
Their transition from thinking as a critic to thinking as a skeptic was of
their own making. They refused to acknowledge that other scientists could
look reasonably at Fleischmann and Pons’s data and accept the excess heat
values as an accomplished fact. The skeptics slandered such scientists by call-
ing them “believers.” In doing this, they labeled themselves as skeptics.
The professional skills needed to criticize the claim of anomalous power
as a stand-alone observation were electrochemistry, catalytic chemistry, surface
chemistry, calorimetry, and the mathematics of data reduction. The scientists
claiming to have been successful in generating anomalous power were expertly
trained at the beginning in most of these skills, except for calorimetry, which
they studied for months to develop the necessary expertise. The skeptics have
assiduously avoided any such substantive learning for twelve years.
The skeptic refused the measured data. He did not care how well or how
poorly it was measured. He refused invitations to go into the laboratory to ex-
perience the gathering of the data.
The skeptics demanded that nuclear effects be found. During these years,
as nuclear effects were found, these skeptics rejected each instance as not being
sufficient in some respect. As the skeptic rejects each and every instance of
measured excess heat, so they also reject each and every instance of measured
 Ramsey’s Way 135

nuclear product. They also insisted that the understanding of nuclear pro-
cesses be fulfilled inside the scientific ghetto, that the most fundamental pur-
pose of science be performed sub rosa. The accomplishments of successive cor-
roboration by inventive experiment was not reported in the broad-audience
journals.
Little of value can be expected from the skeptics. They are not playing the
valuable rôle of the critic even though their actions appear similar. They see
only wasted motion and shadow boxing in the activities of the cold fusion sci-
entists. They see the acceptors as so many acolytes blindly repeating what
Fleischmann and Pons taught them in their quest for the holy grail of cheap,
unlimited energy. Commentary by the skeptics cannot be expected to contrib-
ute to solving outstanding questions because the skeptics do not acknowledge
those questions exist. For that reason, review of their activities during the cold
fusion saga is postponed to Chapter 22.

Ethical Standards
There were violations of ethical standards on both sides of this controversy.
There is only space in this narrative to touch upon some of the more promi-
nent items.
One member of the electrical engineering department at MIT immedi-
ately started to work on theoretical problems raised by the Utah announce-
ment. Later, a laboratory manager told him that a physics professor said he
should be fired. Also, his expected award of tenure was opposed by several be-
cause of his association with cold fusion research. No doubt such efforts were
well meant. The good name of the department, and of the university, was won
by many decades of work, and it should not be lightly put at risk. However,
there are better ways to express doubts. Threats were unethical.
The APS meeting in Baltimore included attacks that were undertaken to
protect the innocent public from the likes of Fleischmann and Pons. There
were ethical violations there. Ridicule is a vicious weapon. The use of it in any
profession is questionable because of the nature of its impact: it proclaims its
target as contemptible and thereby precludes discussion and communication.
Scientific American, and Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) have resorted
to lengthy ridicule, while Nature has explicitly recommended its use.
It is unethical for those acting in a professional role to exercise public rid-
icule, but the APS used it for six years or more through its official spokesman.
Apparently, the APS abandoned such behavior after the appearance of the
Hoffman book in 1995. Possibly wiser and more ethical judgements are com-
ing to the fore at the APS.
Fleischmann and Pons did not have a preprint of their Preliminary Note
136 va l i d at i o n

available. It was published two weeks later. Others have severely criticized
them for conducting “science by press conference.” This writer has already set
forth his understanding of the enormous pressure that they experienced.
David Goodstein, Caltech vice-provost, provided an excellent vignette of
how a press conference may happen.3 He told of his Italian friend, Francesco
Scaramuzzi, an “excellent nuclear physicist of the first rank.” Scaramuzzi had
joined the cohort of benighted scientists by undertaking cold fusion experi-
ments in his laboratory at the Frascati Research Center, near Rome. He did
not mimic Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment, but tried one completely of
his own design. He chose to use titanium metal loaded with deuterium gas.
Scaramuzzi detected a burst of neutrons emanating from his experiment
just a few weeks later, after the Fleischmann and Pons announcement. The ef-
fect was thrilling. Neutrons have never been recognized as coming from a hy-
dride experimental system. Nuclear events were always an entirely separate do-
main of activity from chemical events. The word of his success went through
the laboratory like wildfire, but there was no need to inform the laboratory di-
rector at that moment.
The only thing to do with such astonishing results was to try to repli-
cate it. When the experiment was “confirmed” by a second run, the whole lab-
oratory was alive with anticipation. The laboratory director at that point was
not aware of the exciting results. For Scaramuzzi to not tell him would have
been an unimaginable breach of courtesy. He had no choice but to inform the
director.
The director was told and (as Goodstein described it) the next morning
Dr. Scaramuzzi found himself standing between two ministers of state ad-
dressing a national television audience. No published preprint of his work was
available for other scientists to examine. Scaramuzzi became a national celeb-
rity and the laboratory was fully funded by the Italian parliament for the first
time in several years. Scientists from time to time do give press conferences
without a published preprint available for distribution. There are extenuating
circumstances when it is ethical to do so.
In the instance of Fleischmann and Pons at Utah, the janitor, as he
pushed his broom under their laboratory bench, could appreciate the impor-
tance of the experiment—a new source of energy for society. There was no
possibility of these two faculty scientists thwarting the social pressure from
those who would watch and wager on the progress of their work. There was
no way imaginable that Fleischmann and Pons’s work could have remained se-
cret after university officials were informed. Relentless gossip would soon be-
gin. Other scientists would not assume a dispassionate attitude towards their
claims. The university might have remained free of widespread rumor-mon-
gering for a couple of weeks at most. There was no alternative to the early
press conference.
American scientists responded somewhat naïvely by getting angry at a
 Ramsey’s Way 137

press announcement without an available preprint. This attitude was well ar-
ticulated in the following quote.

Much of the circus atmosphere surrounding cold fusion could have

been eliminated if the standard scientific procedure of peer review
and publication in a reputable journal had been followed.4

This quote is not to be taken at face value. The writer assumed that peer re-
view would abort publication because the reported discovery was beyond the
experience or knowledge of any possible peer. This is to be expected in the
face of a revolutionary discovery.

Secrecy
If Fleischmann and Pons had avoided holding the press conference, not every-
one would have been satisfied with mere gossip. Some would have sidled up to
them to cooperate with them until they had milked them of their informa-
tion. They would then run off to their own Great National Press Conference,
possibly with a well-drafted preprint in hand.
Occasionally, secrecy is used in a departmental laboratory. Several years
prior to our cold fusion saga, Paul Chu, professor of chemistry at the Univer-
sity of Houston, apparently tried to keep his formula for a high temperature
superconductor material secret by means of a clever subterfuge for an interval
of three weeks until it was presented in a prestigious publication.5 His manu-
script’s purpose was to reveal the formula. It actually contained a similar, but
wrong, formula repeated throughout the text. Anyone seeing the manuscript
before publication would be misled. The formula’s “mistake” was corrected at
the last minute, just before printing.6 Many scientists do indeed keep secrets
for a time, and carefully choose when and how to release them. Beveridge
comments that secrecy is at times acceptable,

Personal secrecy in laboratories not subject to any [government] re-

strictions is not infrequently shown by workers who are afraid that
someone else will steal their preliminary results and bring them to
fruition and publish before they themselves are able to do so. This
form of temporary secrecy can hardly be regarded as a breach of sci-
entific ethics . . .7

People who argue against this practice ought to look carefully at how some of
the early participants in the cold fusion fracas behaved: Caltech assigned
twenty-one scientists to their research effort. Fleischmann and Pons would re-
138 va l i d at i o n

ceive credit for their work only if they kept it secret for a limited time, which
they did for five years.
Some degree of secrecy will continue to be an accepted practice as long as
budgets are short and research scientists are too numerous. The National
Academy of Sciences (NAS) recognizes this in its pamphlet “On Being a Sci-
entist,” “During the initial stages of research, a scientist deserves a period of
privacy in which data are not subject to disclosure.”8
The idealistic attitudes evinced by some physicists on matters like secrecy
may be due to many of them working in a cocoon environment. Isolation
from the pressures of the marketplace (except for job searching) was nurtured
by government support of the nuclear research community for fifty years. In-
ventions and patents would be owned by the government, and employment
lasted a lifetime. Exploitation of discoveries and inventions were somebody
else’s business. As a result, there was no reason for any degree of individual se-
crecy, and every reason to adopt an idealistic outlook.
Chemists to a considerable extent lived in a quite different world. Their
livelihood often came from short-term contracts with industrial firms, or from
two-year research grants. Their scrambling for contracts led to attitudes that
were altogether more pragmatic.
Those scientists who came to accept anomalous power as something that
might really exist wanted to get together and talk shop, as technologists natu-
rally do. They wanted to make the experiment more reproducible, and find
the source of the excess power. Those desires upset the skeptics, who assumed
that the only interesting or even legitimate topic was to ask whether or not
cold fusion existed. They insisted that this topic must be settled before there
could be any continuation of research.
Those who work in the field of cold fusion gather together about every
sixteen months at an International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF). For
example, ICCF-6 was held at Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, in October 1996,
ICCF-7 at Vancouver in April 1998, and ICCF-8 in Lerici, Italy, in May
2000. These conferences are organized largely on the assumption that the
Fleischmann and Pons effect is widely observed. The purpose of the confer-
ences is to exchange information about their work. One theoretician in the
field began his presentation by saying carefully, “I accept the phenomenon of
excess energy as real,”9 only then did he proceed with his paper. A school of
scientists had thus come into being and they organized meetings to advance
their common work. That was, and continues to be, the purpose and function
of these annual ICCF meetings.
The skeptics were actually asking for a different kind of conference when
they argued that those scientists whose experiments had failed were not repre-
sented by invitation at conferences. If the skeptics wanted a meeting to ex-
plore the question of whether cold fusion exists, they could organize such a
meeting. These ICCF conferences left the skeptics behind simply because they
 Ramsey’s Way 139

were organized for a purpose the skeptics could not appreciate—because they
were skeptics. The question of the existence of cold fusion was only raised as
a matter of personal courtesy to skeptics who might be in attendance. That
topic in its broadest interpretation was implicit in the question of the energy
source.

On Being a Scientist
The National Academy of Science (NAS) teaches the subject of these four
chapters of Part III, Validation. They do so with a broad brush and with the
cold fusion episode as an outstanding reference when preparing the second
edition of their pamphlet, On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Re-
search, in 1995. They assert that the scientist should use “generally accepted
methods,” otherwise “other scientists will be less likely to accept the results,”
an incontrovertible thesis. They mention that violation of this rule was a rea-
son for the negative reaction of many scientists to cold fusion research. They
go on to speculate, “The claims were so physically implausible that they re-
quired extraordinary proof.”
What if proof was inaccessible? Did that circumstance call for Fleisch-
mann and Pons’s demonstration of anomalous power to be interred with their
bones? How was their demonstration “physically implausible”? Conflict with
theory may have called for caution, but all that was necessary to achieve plau-
sibility was to measure the emitted power carefully, as they and others did.
The NAS pamphlet complains that, “. . . the experiments were not ini-
tially presented in such a way that other investigators could corroborate or dis-
prove them.” Wrong. One could corroborate the claim of anomalous power
by replication in an independent laboratory as was done a number of times
within two years. The NAS apparently believes that there is no such thing as
an experiment that takes two years to reproduce. It sounds a little like the
NAS was letting nuclear physics get in the way of science.
Much has been made of the importance of peer review. That is the pro-
cess whereby a professional journal evaluates submitted articles, and funding
sources evaluate proposals. Each submission is sent out to two or three of the
author’s peers in a specific field. These specialists will pass informed judge-
ment on the submission’s merits.
Peer review does not always work well. Henry H. Bauer, former dean and
professor of chemistry, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, considers this
question in his book, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method,

So moderately successful scientists learn to adjust to the predictabil-

ity and mediocrity of peer review by camouflaging their best ideas:
they seek support for “normal” research into the known unknown,
140 va l i d at i o n

but then use some of the granted funds to follow their pet hunches.
Those who decided to look at the possibility of cold fusion, though
they were accomplished people of high reputation, knew better than
to ask support for their long shot.10

Fleischmann and Pons knew better until they were ready to risk conflicts of
interest and premature publicity.
The NAS discusses peer-review in a limited manner. It referred disparag-
ingly to the scientist who, “. . . releases important and controversial results di-
rectly to the public before submitting them to the scrutiny of their peers.”
“. . . it should be done when peer-review is complete—normally at the time of
publication in a scientific journal.” Most scientists agree that this is a good
standard. It was more adequately met by Fleischmann and Pons than by some
of their most vehement critics who spoke most assertively to the press prior to
their own peer presentation and publication.
Something was missing from the NAS rule. It should have inserted into
its pamphlet a paragraph for that sort of exception to the general rule. Their
well-measured observations, which “defied all contemporary scientific experi-
ence”11 would likely have been cast aside by the editors of Scientific American
and Nature and for the wrong reasons. I trust that this casual, almost flippant,
NAS commentary will be reviewed by scientists with the broad experience of
several disciplines prior to publication of a third edition.
In her book Science on Trial (1993) Judy Sarasohn establishes the respon-
sibility of scientists for the continuing influence of their published papers.
This consideration ought to be incorporated into future editions of the NAS
pamphlet. She quotes Harvard Professor Paul Doty,

To forgo this obligation—to leave to others the responsibility of es-

tablishing the validity of what you have published—is not only a
fundamental retreat from responsibility but, if it became accepted
practice, would erode the way science works. For the cutting edge of
science moves forward by building rapidly on what is published on
the tentative assumption that [it] is correct, not by waiting for others
to test each paper’s validity.12

Doty’s admonition applies to Fleischmann and Pons, whose continuing

publications have largely met this obligation concerning their initial state-
ments and publications. There is the further question, should Fleischmann
and Pons still be considered “incompetent”? Is our knowledge that there is no
such thing as excess heat, still “absolute”? Many scientists believed these things
to be true. Doty asserts that the authors of such assertions were still responsi-
ble to the scientific community for their continuing acceptance.
 Ramsey’s Way 141

By the summer of 1989, it was clear that the anomalous power experi-
ments were not readily reproducible while the resulting phenomenon oc-
curred a small fraction of the time with some experimenters. At the NSF/
EPRI conference in October, Fleischmann presented the current results that
he and Pons had obtained. His data showed that 23 out of 31 cells generated
power. Should such results be published?
In nuclear physics, if the distribution of results was shown to be the direct
consequence of a distribution of excitation (input), the answer is a firm, yes.
But if it is an experiment that simply seems to work only part of the time,
then the answer is, no, it is not publishable.
Biology seems to publish by a different standard. Dolly was the single re-
sult of 227 attempts, and it was considered publishable. Over several years,
that experimental process became more efficient to eventually bring the odds
up to about fifty percent. The difference between nuclear and biological stan-
dards is an historical one. The rule is that in each discipline standards develop
over time that best serve it, and these differences reflect experimental peculiar-
ities of the field.
Sometimes peer review takes the form of visits to a working laboratory.
Mike McKubre’s laboratory did successful anomalous power experiments
from 1989 to 1997 and continuing. He was visited twice by scientists who
were eminently qualified in the appropriate technology but who were com-
pletely out of the public eye.
The first visitor was an electrochemist fully qualified in calorimetry. A
day was spent studying the experimental and measurement processes, and
looking at the equipment operation in the laboratory. This previously outspo-
ken critic found nothing wrong with the experimental work. If the results
showed excess energy, the visitor could see no basis on which that result might
be wrong. He so informed McKubre of his conclusion.
The second visit was by a team of three scientists. One was a well-experi-
enced nuclear experimental physicist. The other two were senior electrochem-
ists, one of whom had written several textbooks in the field. They enjoyed the
same visiting routine as the first visitor. They arrived at the same endpoint as
the first visitor, that there was nothing wrong with the calorimetry. They so
informed McKubre.
Then they were silent, completely silent. Were their individual reputa-
tions so important to them that they could not be put at risk by reporting
publicly what they had found? What they had found was that McKubre’s ex-
periments did reveal the existence of anomalous power as far as these experts
were able to tell. Their silence was unethical in view of the importance of the
matter at hand and the special expertise the four could bring to bear on the
subject.
The skeptic insists that technical reports on cold fusion research would
142 va l i d at i o n

not withstand the rigor of proper peer-review and that they were not of pro-
fessional quality. Much of that talk was disingenuous. It was based on the un-
derstanding that a competent reviewer will expect an additional data in any
paper that claimed excess energy, data that showed the nuclear products pro-
duced.* If that data were missing, the skeptics assumed the paper would be re-
jected.
The journal Fusion Technology decided, at the beginning of this cold fu-
sion episode, to take a considerable professional risk. Its editor drew up crite-
ria for the acceptance of cold fusion articles that was less rigorous than their
usual standards for review and publication: the reported laboratory work was
to be judged by unchanged standards; there could be no perceptible error of
procedure. Interpretation of the work, however, could be more speculative
than would ordinarily be permitted. It established these policies against the
recommendation of the editorial board of its parent organization, the Ameri-
can Nuclear Society (ANS). Many scientifically important accomplishments
of the first ten years have seen the light of day as a consequence.
The editor, George H. Miley, professor of nuclear engineering at the Uni-
versity of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, risked his position as editor to do this, and
is considered something of a hero within the ranks of cold fusion scientists.
He suffered professional criticism. Huizenga said of Miley’s editorial policies,
“The peer review is lax.”13 As Miley looked at it, “My editorial board would
long since have fired me if only they could find the time to get together.”14
The following letter to Miley as editor of Fusion Technology was typical of
many criticisms.

Do you really want to rapidly publish a bunch of “half-baked” work

on cold fusion? I expect that Fleischmann and Pons will find the er-
ror in their power balance within the next month or so, and all those
authors will be desperately trying to withdraw their papers.15

Miley explained to his board that science would benefit by publishing ar-
ticles in this new field. This benefit would happen without particular concern
for the cold fusion outcome. Publication would provide a rapid, disciplined
communication among researchers. It would provide a record of what was
done that might be of great value later even if the field died, much as the re-
cord of Paneth’s experiments in the 1920s is of continuing interest.
Under Miley’s regime, a reviewer examined a paper for freedom from fac-
tual errors, and for adequate internal coherence. Considerable leeway was
given for speculative theories and choice of experimental targets. The princi-

* See, for example, the discussion of the Oriani correspondence with Nature magazine in Chap-
ter 14.
 Ramsey’s Way 143

pal complaint raised concerned the choice of peer reviewers. Were you not us-
ing people in cold fusion research to review the papers? Was that not a self-
perpetuating activity, quite independent of reality? Miley’s response,

This is the way science is . . . You always have people within the
community review the papers because they are the ones who are the
experts. In hot fusion, I use hot fusion reviewers. You trust profes-
sional judgement; you trust the integrity of the reviewer.16

And, I might add, you trust the integrity of the editor.

So there was professional review of cold fusion papers in the journals.
Much of the talk of inadequate critique in the field turned out to be rumor-
mongering. Such talk was unsupported by data or any published survey.
There were, however, ethical lapses in the course of the cold fusion epi-
sode. How does a knowledge of those lapses help us to learn whether there was
any merit to Fleischmann and Pons’s claim to the observation of anomalous
power? Answering that question at this point involves two steps. There is the
broad question of scientific method: what is it, how flexible is it, how rigid is
it? Then one must ask, is the modified Ramsey’s way a scientific method that
can be expected to provide a reliable answer?
 c h a p t e r e l e v e n

Variety of Method

M yths of scientific method abound in the cold fusion episode. Skeptics

demanded reproducibility. Science does not require that particular
characteristic; replication will do. Skeptics demanded nuclear products. Sci-
ence does not require them today; discovery of the nuclear products tomorrow
will serve quite nicely. The electrolytic cell has been described as “high school”
science although there is much that is subtle about the Fleischmann and Pons
cell. A great deal of grandstanding occurred in the early weeks about a need
for “stirring” the electrolyte. As it turned out, the cell was designed to make
mechanical stirring unnecessary.1 Many myths had to be dispelled in order to
consider a validation process for the claim of anomalous power.
In this chapter, we touch upon the question of what constitutes science.
There are a wide variety of attitudes about exactly what claims lie within the
discourse of science. In general, this variability resides underneath the forum
of open debate, but it is never referred to by any party in the debate. However,
its existence introduces considerable confusion.
These attitudes follow the various disciplines, in general. The anomalous
power experiment, which topic occupies the first fourteen chapters of this
book, is a chemistry experiment. Its associated calorimetric measuring tech-
nique may also be considered a part of the discipline of chemistry. That the
experiment—the Fleischmann and Pons experiment—has associated with it
the hypothesis of a nuclear source for the energy does not change the disci-
pline of interest because the hypothesis is not a claim. It is for others to pursue
the hypothesis and eventually stake their claim. That claim will presumably
reside in the discipline of physics. This narrative plainly commits itself to the
discipline of chemistry.

144
 Variety of Method 145

From the beginning, the scientific community underrated the Fleisch-

mann and Pons experiment. The press referred to it as a “kitchen” experiment.
Shortly after that comment was made, one esteemed electrochemist reported
that he had spent two weeks with the experiment before he realized its sub-
tlety, and then he had to start over again.2
There was no appreciation in the scientific community that the experi-
ment might a difficult one. It was thought that anyone with scientific training
ought to be able to copy the experiment. If the claims were true, all that was
necessary was to assemble the cell and turn it on. In fact, only a few scientists
were clearly successful during the first year. They were mostly electrochemists.
None of them were physicists. There was no sensibility at the time that the
anomalous power generation experiment might take a practiced skill to do
properly. The principal signature of the Fleischmann and Pons experiment
was heat. Many of those who tried their hand at it were not aware of this.
An example of the experiment’s complexity emerged in 1996. A team in
France reported the successful duplication of part of the high temperature and
high power experiment that Fleischmann and Pons reported in 1993. This
partial duplication took thirty months.3
Three months after the Utah announcement, the experimental cell results
for Caltech, MIT, Brookhaven/Yale, and Harwell were reported. Those four
early experiments claimed to find nothing of interest. By way of contrast,
Tadahiko Mizuno required eight months to prepare his second experiment for
the start of electrolysis.4 He claimed interesting results in neutron and tritium
evidence, as well as excess heat bursts and the excess heat called “heat after
death,” the heat generated after the current was turned off. In the reference
given, he tells the toil of those eight months in the preparation of his cell. Lab-
oratory methodology was always a critical part of cold fusion research.
Scientists working in this field called cold fusion were impeded in their
work after the Baltimore event. They found access to scientific publications,
science funds, and to the collegiality of other scientists greatly curtailed.5 That
fact helps to explain why America’s scientists generally failed in their early as-
sessment of cold fusion research claims while those in Japan, France, Italy, and
India proceeded apace.
The variety of method in science is witnessed in the stories of the life of S.
Arrhenius and in the development of the Wassermann Test in medicine. We
look at each of them in turn.

Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927) was a Swedish chemist of renown and a Nobel
laureate whose discoveries had aroused feelings of hostility and anger in the
orthodox scientists of his day. His story bridged the turn of the twentieth cen-
146 va l i d at i o n

tury. His breach with the orthodox scientific community of twenty years dura-
tion, his intellectual survival in a small group with his scientific fellows, and
the argument whether his discovery was one of chemistry or physics, all paral-
lel the instance of the Fleischmann and Pons controversy.
Arrhenius finally achieved collegiality between himself and the scientific
world by persistently teaching his discoveries.* His story is almost prophetic of
what happened in cold fusion research during its first decade. He was ban-
ished from both his university and the Swedish scientific establishment. He
overcame that affliction and went on to great acclaim as a revered elder states-
man within the European scientific community. He accomplished much of
this by attaching himself to a foreign scientist of recognized integrity.6
Arrhenius’s principal scientific discovery asserted that when a salt is dis-
solved in water, each molecule of the salt separates into electrically charged
electrolyte particles that had been named ions fifty years earlier. It was ions
that interacted chemically with other ions in solution rather than atoms or
molecules that reacted. He asserted that these ions carried an electrical charge
as they moved about and were the mechanism by which the solution con-
ducted electrical current.
There was open and often bitter controversy during the two decades after
he announced the discovery. The distinguished German chemist Wilhelm
Ostwald stood at his side as a foreign savior and mentor during Arrhenius’s
most difficult times. Ostwald attested to the correctness of Arrhenius’s thesis
and he started a new technical publication as a vehicle for spreading and
defending the ionic theory. They traveled the world of science arguing
Arrhenius’ theory. The two of them made a major presentation and defense of
his theories in London in 1890.
Arrhenius’s redemption began at home when the University of Stock-
holm’s predecessor institution offered him a position as professor. The offer
was made under somewhat humiliating conditions which he bore with grace.
He was quickly accepted by his colleagues and in two years was elected to the
presidency of the school. In 1903, he became the first Swede to be awarded
the Nobel Prize and it was in chemistry. He enjoyed the considerable recogni-
tion of other scientists continuously until his death in 1927.
It is necessary to look back further to understand the nature of Arrhenius’
fall from scientific grace. Scientists had struggled to understand electrical con-
duction in liquids for the previous one hundred years. Pure water and pure
salt acting separately are each electrical insulators. When salt is dissolved in
water the solution becomes an excellent conductor of electricity, i.e., an elec-
trolyte. No one understood what actually happened when the salt dissolved in
water to make the solution electrically conductive. Arrhenius took a dedicated

* The writer is indebted for the biographical details of Arrhenius’s life to the four sources listed
in the several endnotes.
 Variety of Method 147

interest in this puzzle in his youth and made it a part of his university educa-
tion. He was then able to put the pieces into place.
Svante August Arrhenius grew up near the world-famous State University
of Upsala, Upsala, Sweden. As a bright youth, he turned his attention early to
experimenting with electrical conduction through salt solutions. When he en-
tered the University, Professor Robert Thalén, the professor for physics, did
not take him seriously and refused him the use of the physics laboratory. He
did his experiments in the laboratory of Erik Edlund, Academy physicist.7
Arrhenius made the fateful decision to continue with his interest in con-
ductive solutions when he enrolled to study for his doctorate degree. He re-
cords the exact moment when he came to his principal discovery about con-
ductivity in solutions. It was on May 17, 1883, that he entered a period of
feverish work to write it down. He claimed that the salt molecules in solu-
tion divided into electrically polarized particles called ions. He confirmed for
himself that he understood what was happening in salt solutions. His full
statement of discovery claimed that these ions became the reactive elements
for chemical behavior in solution and were also the agents for electrical con-
duction.
The relationship between theory and experiment was not well under-
stood at this time in the development of modern science. Arrhenius had con-
ceived a theory of ion formation and action. Professor Per Teodor Clève, his
doctoral advisor, was a distinguished scientist and the discoverer of the two
metals: holmium (holmio was the Latin name for Stockholm) and thulium.
Clève considered theory to be something like Henry Ford’s history, that is
“bunk.”

He came to Clève, his professor of Chemistry, with the new theory

formulated in his thesis. “I have a new theory of electrical conductiv-
ity,” said Arrhenius. Clève was no doubt a skillful experimenter and
investigator of the rare earth elements. But theories to him were
abominations to be fought or ignored entirely. In the classroom
Arrhenius had listened to him for months. Never once had he heard
a single mention of the great Periodic Law of Mendeléeff, even
though the Russian’s Periodic Table of the Elements was now more
than ten years old. Clève turned to this chemical tyro, “You have a
new theory? That is very interesting. Good-bye.”8

Arrhenius’s thesis dissertation was closely fought, and the outcome was
only a partial victory for him. He received his doctorate degree of the fourth
class, the lowest of four possible grades, and designated non sine laude
approbatur: approved not without praise.9 He could not pursue an academic
career at the university.
He responded to the setback by sending copies of his thesis to several
148 va l i d at i o n

prominent scientists outside of Sweden.10 One went to Wilhelm Ostwald,

professor of chemistry at the Polytechnical School at Riga, in the Russian pro-
vence of Livonia, later Latvia. Ostwald found his thesis compelling and de-
cided to help him. He traveled by train to Stockholm to meet and befriend
Arrhenius. The result of Ostwald’s mediation was the offer of a teaching posi-
tion for Arrhenius in the Stockholm Technical High School (the Högskola,
later part of Stockholm University). The world of science was focused at that
time entirely in Europe and North America. Ostwald’s continued patronage of
Arrhenius and his thesis gradually brought the world of science to terms with
the existence of ions in solution.
Arrhenius gained the respect and fellowship of his colleagues in the
Högskola, a result of his increasing international renown. During this time,
Arrhenius married Sofia Rudbeck, one of his pupils. The marriage lasted only
two years and produced a son, Olav Vilhelm.
Later, after the death of Alfred Bernhard Nobel in 1896, he became
deeply involved in the establishment of the Nobel prize awards and in the ad-
judication of his will.11 His principal contribution to the establishment of the
Nobel Academy was his insistence that the nomination and award selection
procedures be international in their vision. The Academy elected him a mem-
ber of both the chemistry and physics award selection committees.
J. H. van’t Hoff, a colleague in Holland, received the prize in chemistry in
1901, the first year of the chemistry awards. Arrhenius received it in 1903 af-
ter a thoroughly contentious candidacy. His discovery of ionic disassociation
in solution raised the significant question whether it was a discovery in physics
or chemistry .
The physics award committee included Professor Thalén, from Upsala. It
had no members from the Högskola other than Arrhenius. The Upsala Uni-
versity members looked down on the Högskola as an inferior institution.
Thalén, who strongly influenced the physics committee’s position concerning
Arrhenius’s candidacy, successfully persuaded the committee that Arrhenius’s
discovery was more properly assigned to chemistry thus absolving the physics
committee of his candidacy. Clève, who had once refused any interest in the
young Arrhenius’s theories, now advanced Arrhenius’s cause effectively in the
chemistry award committee and was successful in achieving for him the chem-
istry award.
Two years later, Arrhenius married Maria Johansson. This marriage pro-
duced three children: a son Sven, and two daughters, Ester and Anna-Lisa. In
1939, Ester married Tore Dahlgren a major in the army signal corps, who
worked in organizing Sweden’s psychological defenses. A daughter, Karen, was
born to that marriage in 1940.12
Karen attended Upsala University where she earned a Ph.D. degree in
biochemistry. Later, she settled in the United States where she accepted a posi-
 Variety of Method 149

tion at the University of Utah. There she married a theoretical chemist and
chemical engineer, Dennis James Caldwell. Now known as Dr. Karen D.
Caldwell, she was director of the Center for Biopolymers at Interfaces at the
University of Utah. She continued there until she retired and returned to Swe-
den in June 1998.
She held positions as Associate Research Professor of Bioengineering with
an Adjunct Associate Professorship in the Department of Chemistry at the
time of the cold fusion announcement. A colleague and friend of hers, and
head of the chemistry department at the university, was Stanley Pons.
She became aware of the March 23 (1989) press conference on the pre-
ceding day. She attended it as a member of the chemistry department. After-
wards she spoke with Fleischmann and Pons. In Fleischmann’s words,

After the press conference, Dr. Caldwell came up to us and said,

“Well, when my grandfather proposed electrolytic disassociation, he
was dismissed from the University. At least that won’t happen to
you.” I said to her, “But you are entirely mistaken. We shall be dis-
missed as well.”13

The Critique of Science

The academic world of literary criticism had experienced an ordeal of ex-
tended internecine criticism during the last quarter of the twentieth century
that amounted to a revolution in its culture. Those engaged in advancing that
cultural revolution generally refer to themselves as poststructuralists. By 1989,
their revolutionary rheticle was targeted on science, bringing those disciplines
under polemical fire. Because of its all encompassing purpose, I refer to this
movement as the critique of science.
That critique contends that what are called the physical laws of science
are actually only social constructs, like political laws. The critique argues that
the Darwinist theory of the survival of the fittest suited the purposes of laissez-
faire capitalism and, therefore, was constructed so, and that it emerged as a
discovery in that time and place because it suited the particular purpose of jus-
tifying the rise of industrial capitalism.14 That critique holds that “scientific
laws” are built by scientists who, at root, are political beings acting politically.
The importance of what is called cold fusion hinges on the question of
whether or not it is science. One of the outstanding questions is whether the
laboratory work underway during the first twelve years is a pathological activ-
ity, a political activity (construction), or whether it constitutes empirical scien-
tific activity. (That it might be a pathological activity, in Langmuir’s sense, has
already been examined and rejected in Chapter 5, p. 62.)
150 va l i d at i o n

The cold fusion saga lent itself marvelously to the argument by the
poststructuralists that the modern edifice of science was merely a social con-
struction. Its tale ought to have appealed to those who saw the laws of physics
as the laws of the physicists. Accordingly, the laws so constructed were not an
immutable property of nature. They were merely interpretations of particular
sets of data as seen by the scientists. As such, they necessarily expressed the
race, class, and gender positions of the interpreters. Such laws would be
merely subjective constructions.
It is surprising that more was not made of the circumstances of cold fu-
sion by the poststructuralists. The U.S. scientific establishment had dismissed
the whole field of cold fusion studies as a sort of mirage. The government re-
fused to issue patents, sponsor research, or even publicly discuss the merits of
the field. The Japanese government, by way of comparison, sponsored sig-
nificant research, encouraged academic and industrial institutions to do like-
wise, and issued more than one hundred patents. Two different cultures, both
with access to the same base of experimental data, drew opposite conclusions
as to the reality of cold fusion. What better evidence could one have asked for
to persuade the social theorists that the reality of nature in this case was cul-
turally determined?
These poststructuralists were not timid people, but they did not speak
out on the matter of cold fusion research. They were possibly waiting for the
dust to settle before committing themselves. If so, when that happens they
will find that it is too late for them. Years of research by hundreds of techni-
cians will have firmly established the place where nature stands: whether
anomalous power exists will no longer be a question. The culturally deter-
mined outcome will come to be seen as a culturally determined process. Nature
will determine the outcome.
There remains, however, a potential danger in this particular kind of the-
orizing about the nature of scientific knowledge. One of the poststructuralists’
leading opponents tells what that danger is.

Real harm is being done not to the indifferent body politic, but to
the cause of empirical rationality, which has been tacitly devalued by
many poststructuralists and explicitly condemned as oppressive by
some others. . . . the poststructuralists’ reliance on speculative Gallic
versions of the “sciences of man” has led them into a grave miscon-
struction of modern science and an inadvertent reassertion of the
Newtonian-Laplacean determinism . . .15

Empirical rationality is the historical mode of scientific thought in the hard

sciences, and tracking that rationality is the method in this account of the cold
fusion saga.
 Variety of Method 151

Empiricism begins with observation. The word observation as used in

this account does not necessarily refer to seeing in the literal sense. The histor-
ical cases of pathological science described earlier demonstrates the mind’s
tendency to misinterpret what is seen.
Observations will be obtained through instruments. Visual observation
still remains important, usually as a guide. The expert gaze reports that all is
well with the experiment, or that the cathode rod has bent, the bubbles are
distributed unevenly, and it may be time to bring it to an end. Measurements
that require precision and repetition are best done with instruments, while
qualitative and longer-term evaluations are done well visually.
H. H. Bauer helped to unravel some of the confusion within the cold fu-
sion episode.* He illuminated some important differences in experimental re-
search methodology between, for example, physics and geology. One can con-
trol the variables (conditions or parameters) in physics to perform definitive
experiments. Such detailed control is not generally possible in geological re-
search where the determining factors are generally not known. Much of chem-
istry lies somewhere in between those two disciplines. Chemistry was more
like geology than physics in its complexity. Unrecognized reactions are more
likely to be present. These differences of complexity have to be allowed for
when interpreting experimental results. Conclusions have to allow for the ex-
tent of unknown factors that contribute to an experimental outcome. The in-
terpretation of a complicated experiment is a markedly different proposition
from the interpretation of one where the variables are known. Ramsey’s pre-
amble was one way of stating that difference.
Science, from time to time, grows in a somewhat haphazard manner. Be-
cause this may well be the manner in which the evidence for anomalous power
has grown, I offer the following section as evidence that such growth is not
new to science.

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961) was born and lived most of his life in Lvov, which
was then in Poland. He worked professionally as a microbiologist of an unusu-
ally original bent. He studied the history and development of the Wassermann
Test for syphilic infection for many years. He derived from it a sense of scien-
tific methodology. He wrote of those studies in a book with the astonishing ti-
tle of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, published in 1935.16 His
story tells how in a complicated experimental science a scientific fact may

* In his earlier book, Electrodics, he explained some of the subtleties and complexities of surface
chemistry.
152 va l i d at i o n

emerge quite gradually over a period of years. His story may be enlightening
for those who have had difficulty recognizing the slow establishment of a fac-
tual base for anomalous power.
Fleck was educated in the public schools of Lvov, where the use of the
German language was a remnant of the Austrian Empire. He received a degree
in medicine in 1926 from Lvov University. His early laboratory work began in
the study of typhus and other infectious diseases. From 1928 until 1935, he
was director of the bacteriological laboratory of the Social Sick Fund and from
which he was dismissed for being Jewish.
Fleck spent the World War II years in the Buchenwald and Auschwitz
camps where he developed and manufactured vaccines for the German army.
He survived the war, although his siblings did not, and continued his techni-
cal work in Poland. He authored several textbooks, and more than one hun-
dred scientific papers. He emigrated to Israel in 1957 where he continued his
technical work until his death in 1961. His scientific publications included
“. . . seven papers on methodology of science, some articles on methodology
of scientific observation, on principles of medical knowledge, on the history of
discoveries, etc.”17
His Genesis book describes the slow development of the Wassermann se-
rum (blood) Test for syphilic infection during the first decades of the twenti-
eth century. It was an extended process of scientific discovery, a scientific
methodology about which little has been written. As Fleck remarked,

In the course of time, the character of the concept [of syphilic infec-
tion] has changed from the mystical, through the empirical and gen-
erally pathogenetical, to the mainly etiological. This transformation
has generated a rich fund of fresh detail, and many details of the
original theory were lost in the process. So we are currently learning
and teaching very little, if anything at all, about the dependence of
syphilis upon climate, season, or the general constitution of the pa-
tient. Yet earlier writings contain many such observations.18

He found that the changes go far beyond even those disparate factors.
“The explanation given to any [scientific or experimental] relation can survive
and develop within a given society only if this explanation is stylized in con-
formity with the prevailing thought style.”19
Beveridge pointed out the very same thing as follows.

In nearly all matters the human mind has a strong tendency to judge
in the light of its own experience, knowledge and prejudices rather
than on the evidence presented. Thus new ideas are judged in the
light of prevailing beliefs. If the ideas are too revolutionary, that is to
 Variety of Method 153

say, if they depart too far from reigning theories and cannot be fitted
into the current body of knowledge, they will not be acceptable.20
(Emphasis in the original.)

The development and clinical use of the Wassermann Test evolved, not
sequentially as might be assumed, but simultaneously. Those immersed in the
saga of cold fusion studies should note if the following passage does not seem
familiar.

Despite every safeguard and mechanization, however, new and unex-

pected findings continually emerge. From time to time very promis-
ing relations and vistas open up, only to vanish again like so many
mirages. The reaction occurs according to a fixed scheme, but every
laboratory uses its own modified procedure, which is based upon
precise quantitative calculations; nevertheless, the experienced eye or
the “serological touch” is much more important than calculation.21

Note, “From time to time very promising relations and vistas open up, only to
vanish again like so many mirages.” Is this description not reminiscent of one
of the characteristics of cold fusion research? Is it possibly a natural part, if
only a small part, of scientific methodology?
Fleck comments on the intrinsic variability even within a wholly success-
ful standard procedure.

It is possible to obtain a positive Wassermann reaction from a nor-

mal blood sample and a negative one from a syphilitic sample with-
out any major technical errors. This was shown very clearly at the
[international conference] where the best serologists . . . examined
the same blood samples simultaneously but independently. It was
shown then that the results did not completely agree either with each
other or with the clinical aspect of the disease.22

The early evaluation of the cold fusion claims saw the “thought style” of
fusion physicists’ as dominant. Imagine how they would have discredited the
Wassermann Test at the outset if they had demanded a recipe for its absolute
replication. They would have insisted that there was no science in the test.
The Wassermann Test would have died an infant death, as nearly happened
with the cold fusion episode.
There was no reason that such variability should deny a field the status of
being a science. Consider that the reaction was one of the most important
medical aids used quite successfully in thousands of medical establishments
every day and about which many theoretical papers were written.23
154 va l i d at i o n

Fleck explains how the Wassermann Test research moved ahead despite
the impossibility of any text of limited length ever doing justice to such an
amorphous subject.

These ideas certainly underwent substantive change in passing

through any one person’s mind, as well as from person to person, be-
cause of the difficulty of fully understanding transmitted knowledge.
In the end an edifice of knowledge was erected that nobody had re-
ally foreseen or intended. Indeed, it stood in opposition to the antic-
ipations and intentions of the individuals who had helped build it.24

Is not the subject called cold fusion studies an amorphous subject?

Fleck’s essential commentary upon the scientific methodology found
in his study of the Wassermann Test was set forth in the following lengthy
quotation.

The epistemologically most important turning point occurred with

the detection of syphilitic antibodies . . . During the initial experi-
ments it produced barely 15–20 percent positive results in cases of
confirmed syphilis. How could it then increase to the 70–90 percent
found in later statistics? This turning point represented the actual in-
vention of the Wassermann reaction as a useful test. The theory of the
reaction as well as the historical and psychological circumstances sur-
rounding its conception are of less practical importance. If the rela-
tion of the Wassermann reaction to syphilis is a fact, it became a fact only
because of its extreme utility owing to the high probability of success in
concrete cases. The moment this decisive turn occurred cannot be ac-
curately determined. No authors can be specified who consciously
brought it about. We cannot state exactly when it occurred nor ex-
plain logically how it happened.25 (Emphasis in the original.)

I will assume that the Wassermann Test was a product of scientific activ-
ity, and that its use held the status of being recognized as a scientific test by the
scientific community of its day and continuing.*
In the early 1980s, careful measurements were made of what is called
beta emission, the emission of an electron from a nucleus that character-
ized the change of a neutron into a proton. The electrons emerged with a
wide variety of energy levels. Carefully done calorimetric (heat) measurements
showed that the energy released over a large number of emissions was equal to

* Fleck’s book (in English) has been reissued by the University of Chicago Press.
 Variety of Method 155

the average energy of the individual emission. At the time, theory said that the
energy ought to be equal to the peak energy of the emission. Between theory
and measurements, there was a missing quantity of energy.
While those involved in the measurements thought this conflict meant
that the missing energy got transported away by a particle presently unknown,
most of physics refused the hypothesis and simply waited. They did this on
the supposition that there might yet be an error in the heat measurements. In
about twenty years, instruments were invented that were able to detect the
neutrino. It proved to be the new particle that carried away the “missing” en-
ergy. The calorimetric measurements and their corresponding hypothesis of a
new particle were vindicated.
This pattern of disbelief may be what is happening in cold fusion research
where the measurements will be held in abeyance until the nuclear answers are
in. But it should be emphasized that the beta emission case was quite a differ-
ent than was the careless talk of pathological science in the instance of cold fu-
sion research.

The Strict Criterion

Taken as a group, the American nuclear physicists during the second half of
the twentieth century looked upon the discipline of nuclear science as the
epitome of American science. That attitude was derived not only from de-
cades of magnificent discovery, but from its successful application to weapons
and energy generation, all of which resulted in the ascendancy of the nuclear
physicist in the ranks of government as described in the opening of Chapter
5. From that high place, the nuclear physicist came to realize that he was con-
genitally ordained to lord over American science. While, at the knee of his
mentor, he had learned that the definition of science for nuclear science was
the definition for all the disciplines. Woe unto the innocent who imagined
that the many disciplines of science stood on equal footing with one another.
That definition of what constitutes science was specified in the following
protocol. I refer to it as the “strict criterion.”

Science is concerned with the results of experiments. For a result to

be of interest to science, it must be reproducible. Furthermore, its
reproducibility is only of interest if it is the result of identical experi-
ments. Both the result and the experiment causing it must be identi-
cal as well as reproducible. The experiment must be precisely defined
by an instruction set. The set must come from the source that claims
the discovery.26
156 va l i d at i o n

The demand for proof that was discussed in the first chapter (p. 14) appears
now in this strict format. Interestingly enough, it demands a great deal more
than proof. It requires that the proof be acquired in accordance with a strict
procedure. Thus, within this protocol there existed science; outside of it there
was only the void.* Some astronomical observations, because they are not the
result of an experiment, may be given a sliver of scientific existence just short
of oblivion, but nothing more. The protocol, as expressed, was not meant to
be limited to the field of nuclear physics. It was applied, when provoked, to
any discipline of science. The strict criterion was clearly the product of a ma-
ture discipline in which the criteria have been notched up tighter and tighter
over many decades.
Imagine that an astronomer spots a large asteroid and computes that it
will soon collide with the Earth. Other astronomers are alerted who also see it
and they too compute that it is scheduled to hit the Earth. A nuclear scientist
is consulted about the possible use of a nuclear explosive to ward the asteroid
off its trajectory. Not to worry, comes the reply, because science does not
know of any asteroid threatening the Earth. A search has determined that no
experiment was performed which resulted in an asteroid coming towards the
Earth. Even if there were such an experiment, it has not been shown to be re-
producible. Nor has the asteroid been shown to follow an instruction set pre-
pared by the discoverer. Therefore, science does not know of any asteroid
menace to the Earth. Such is the logic of the strict criterion: much if not most
of reality resides outside its circumference.
Experimenters by the dozens may have measured anomalous power, but
those who followed the strict criterion had no need to show any interest in
laboratory accomplishments. The questioning scientist has merely to ask if the
experimenter’s instruction set came from Fleischmann and Pons. There being
no such set, then the question of anomalous power was resolved: it does not
exist within the discourse of science.
Scaramuzzi speaks to one piece of this strict protocol.

A well-known physicists was asked what he thought of CF. His an-

swer was that it was not good science, because of the lack of repro-
ducible experiments. I wrote to him presenting the following argu-
ments: a) I agree that reproducibility is a “must” in experimental
research; b) however, a new field, at it beginning, is often character-
ized by a lack of reproducibility, and it is the task of the scientists op-
erating in the field to understand what is going on, in order to pur-

* There is also a concern that this protocol might have a propensity to propagate error. If there is
embedded in the instruction set an original error, then each laboratory that supposedly was
corroborating the result would do so by reproducing that original error.
 Variety of Method 157

sue reproducibility; c) this has been done in the case of CF, making
meaningful, even though slow, progress (I sent him a paper of mine
in which I discussed this problem). My letter did not produce any ef-
fect, in the sense that he did not change his mind, and went on de-
manding reproducibility, as if it were an intrinsic characteristic of re-
search and not something that has to be pursued.27

I attributed the attitude of the physicist referred to above (whose identity was
unknown to me) to be the consequence of experimentation with perfect ob-
jects in an ideal environment. Without being told, one could be sure he was
not a physical chemist, for example.
The establishment of those strict qualifications, as they were presented to
me, allows only a sliver of scientific respectability for astronomical observa-
tions. Nothing is reserved for, say, a supernova observation, geological obser-
vations, or clinical, or botanical, and so forth. In fact, the strict criterion rule
places the well-measured observation beyond the circumference of science; the
well-measured observation is not a part of the scientific enterprise. Neither
our hypothetical asteroid nor anomalous power exists within the discourse of
science according to the strict methodology as taught and rigorously applied
in at least some parts of nuclear physics. This evaluation explains much of the
obtuse criticism—that cold fusion is dead—by scientists of that discipline.
Observation was a valuable part of scientific methodology since Galileo
established the practice with his observation of the moons of Jupiter and the
mountains on the Moon. It will continue to be so. But each scientific specialty
develops over time its own best methodology as an aggregate gathered from
successful experiences. For a number of fields, that methodology is merely ob-
servation. The “merely” implying that there is no overt manipulation of the
field as there is with experimental science. Observation as scientific methodol-
ogy, as was mentioned earlier, requires only that the observation be done with
meticulous care. The expert should be able to find no error in the observa-
tional procedure. The replicated, well-measured observation becomes a stand-
alone, evidential, scientific datum. And the astronomers are not to be observa-
tion’s beneficiaries alone. This narrative uses the standard of necessary replica-
tion of a scientific observation in independent laboratories.
In between the rigorous qualification, and the historical standard of care-
ful observation, resides evidentiary science. The Wassermann Test was included
in this narrative specifically to give a full illustration of that category. This evi-
dentiary category is preparatory to the later achievement of the strict criterion,
although, in the Wassermann case, that was never achieved. In individual in-
stances, the time required to move from evidentiary to strict may extend from
a few hours to many years. In the case of Dolly, the time required to move
from 227 tries to two tries for one live birth was somewhat over two years.
158 va l i d at i o n

In much of its activity, evidentiary science shares the same laboratories, scien-
tists, publications, funding, and collegiality with strict qualification science.
What it produces is not proof, but evidence.
During an interview, a nuclear physicist wanted to illustrate the scientific
method of the strict protocol. In particular, its requirement that a discovery be
teachable from one laboratory to another. “I saw McKubre and I asked him
about his claim to generate excess heat. He said he did it on his own. He said
he did not get any help from anybody—here is what I do and something like
20 percent of the time it works. I asked him if you can tell in advance whether
it is going to work? He said, ‘No, I can’t.’”28
Since McKubre was not following instructions given to him by Fleisch-
mann and Pons, he was not doing any science that was announced by the two
chemists at the University of Utah. Obviously, he was doing something in his
laboratory, but this nuclear scientist was not interested in McKubre’s experi-
mental outcomes, because, by McKubre’s own testimony, he was not follow-
ing a Fleischmann and Pons instruction set. Whatever he was doing in the lab-
oratory, it was not within the domain of science, at least with regard to cold
fusion research. Since that nuclear physicist has a vital and continuing dedica-
tion only within science, the anomalous power generation in McKubre’s labo-
ratory over seven years was not of even passing interest to him.
One could argue that McKubre did not try to generate and measure ex-
cess heat prior to March 1989, that he learned the experimental form and goal
from Fleischmann and Pons even if they came to him sensibly by means of the
newspapers. Where McKubre and his staff were already involved in deute-
rium-in-palladium experiments (Chapter 14), the critical Fleischmann and
Pons instruction step, perhaps, was to bother oneself to carefully measure the
heat output, something not previously considered. Certainly, he must have
learned something of critical importance from Fleischmann and Pons. Some-
thing that turned the direction of his experimentation after March 1989. Pos-
sibly the strict criterion had to be more carefully applied than was done in this
instance.
Would the Wassermann Test for syphilic infection pass muster under this
strict protocol? Not if it was developed and used in the manner described by
Fleck. Under the strict protocol, the Wassermann Test would have to be dis-
missed from the world of science, perhaps to be called pathological science,
because of its lack of absolute reproducibility. Its use then in thousands of
clinics for decades might never have happened. The strict protocol fails to ad-
equately limit its propensity to generate false negative conclusions.
The strict qualification as a definition of science had tried for perfection.
It strove to never allow the slightest possibility that a non-science item, no
matter how small, might sully scientific discourse by its presence. Three as-
pects of perfection were thus brought together within the discipline of nuclear
 Variety of Method 159

science: perfect particles, a hard vacuum environment, and a proof require-

ment (the strict criterion) that was absolute. The supportive argument was
that it was just this arrangement that enabled the field’s prodigious accom-
plishments during the twentieth century. For our purposes, there was proba-
bly no scientific basis for deploying the strict qualification against the continu-
ing evidence for the existence of anomalous power in the chemistry
experiment first set forth by Fleischmann and Pons.
A serious disadvantage of the strict qualification criteria was its capacity
to limit the scientific enterprise by generating an unfortunate number of false
negative results. In the case of cold fusion, the cavalier refusal of some skeptics
to participate in the laboratory experience was scientifically blasphemous. It
was the nuclear physicists within the ranks of the skeptics who overtly refused
invitations into the laboratory, and did so without a sense of shame. I attribute
that strange behavior to their inbred protocol which disallows multiple, well-
measured observations as scientific evidence. It should also be noted here that
those same skeptics who held the field of cold fusion in thrall for twelve years
refrained from clarifying their stance by explaining to the scientific commu-
nity the methodological reasons for their continuous aversion to the labora-
tory observations that animated the field. The publication of two books about
cold fusion by nuclear physicists did not include the needed clarification of
their refusal to participate in the laboratory work.
Thomas S. Kuhn taught that patterns of scientific thought make pro-
found changes from time to time. He called them paradigm changes and
found that a new paradigm was usually patterned after the methods invoked
in the latest major discovery.29 Whether a paradigm change will result from
cold fusion discoveries cannot be known until the science is set down. Also,
there may be more than one discovery involved in the course of elucidating
the field. The complexity of the electrochemical cell, and the inherent dif-
ficulties of establishing scientific knowledge, make that a slow process.
 c h a p t e r t w e l v e

Protocols

T here were numerous parallels between the fields of high temperature su-
perconductivity and cold fusion research. “The new superconductors
took center stage on March 22, 1988,”1 a year and a day before the Utah an-
nouncement. Scientists discovered the phenomena of superconductivity at the
relatively high temperature of liquid nitrogen during the years 1986–1988.*
Its proponents proclaimed, “Billions of dollars were at stake,”2 which sounded
a little bit like the inflated estimates that were originally touted over cold fu-
sion claims. Thirteen years later, high-temperature superconductivity had lit-
tle to show in return.
A fine description of observational science is given by Robert Hazen in
his book on the discovery of high temperature superconductivity. In telling
the story of its discovery, he describes the critical observation: “. . . at IBM’s
Zurich research center [scientists] discovered zero resistivity at a record high
temperature (−235°C) in a copper-bearing oxide material—a material that
by conventional knowledge should not have been superconducting at all.”3
Thus science begins with a well-measured observation—one that stands
alone: no theoretical understanding or explanation is required. In this case,
there clearly was none. It also had the advantage of immediate reproducibility

* Superconductivity describes the ability of certain materials to conduct electric current with
zero resistance. This property is well known to the physics community since its discovery by
H. K. Onnes in 1911. Exceptionally low temperatures are required: approximately −270C.
With the discovery of high temperature superconductivity, at −196C (liquid nitrogen), com-
mercial applications of considerable economic value are anticipated.

160
 Protocols 161

that was apparently due to the availability of pure inorganic compounds and
great intrinsic freedom in bringing them together in a precise mix before bak-
ing or sintering them.
There is variety of method in observation. Historically, the scientist ob-
served simply by looking with the naked eye, aided possibly by magnification.
The technique is still a principal method in fields like botany. There are dis-
ciplines where the scientist cannot experiment by manipulating the object of
investigation, such as astronomy. There, the empirical sensing is only observa-
tion. Contention may arise over questions concerning the conditions neces-
sary for the replication of an observation.
Structured contemplation has an important place in science. It provides
theoretical underpinning to observation. It synthesizes an explanation for past
observations, including those that were not originally understood. It contin-
ues from past experience to predict new observations as a guide to experimen-
tation. Limiting theory to the explanation of observations transforms mere
contemplation into theoretical science. Theoretical science thus recognizes ob-
servation as a principal source of knowledge.

Scientific Error
An important myth of protocol asserts that mistaken science can be identified
easily. The methodology of pathological science was loudly touted as a short-
cut to such an answer. There was, it was averred, no need to look thor-
oughly at what was claimed; the circumstances and the casual glance told all.
Furthermore, that glance must be final; pugnacious continuance got socially
punished.
From time to time, scientists compile lists of the properties that they be-
lieve are characteristic of mistaken science. Three such lists are compared.
(1) Irving Langmuir developed his list (1953); (2) R. P. Crease and N. P.
Samios composed their own list (September 1989);4 (3) Robert L. Park (APS)
devised his list (1995) under the rubric “What have we learned?”
Langmuir examined cases of reported scientific discovery where the
claims seemed outlandish, and collected memorabilia about them. His meth-
odology is of interest because it differs from that of the skeptics. The criteria
Langmuir used was discussed in Chapter 5, page 65, but for comparison pur-
poses, they are repeated here in abbreviated form.

1. Effect is independent of the amplitude of the cause.

2. Effect is close to the limit of detectability.
3. Claims are offered of great accuracy.
162 va l i d at i o n

4. Fantastic theories are offered contrary to experience.

5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses.
6. The ratio of supporters/critics reaches 50%, then falls to zero.

Crease and Samios argued (Chapter 6) that while they rejected the
Langmuir criteria, they were still sure that cold fusion research was pathologi-
cal science. They composed a list of characteristics that identified “degener-
ate” science. Needless to say, the list they devised fit the cold fusion experi-
ment well.

1. Too many miracles were needed.

2. The “discoverers” were outsiders.
3. The “discoverers” have not tried to kill the discovery.
4. Inability to repeat the experiment was met by ad hoc excuses.

In Chapter 6, p. 87, it was rebutted that (1) miracles were not required in
cold fusion research; (2) Samios and Crease were the true outsiders; (3) con-
trol experiments were used; and (4) science did not require repeatability, repli-
cation was sufficient. Langmuir’s pathological science did not fit the cold fu-
sion data. Only Dr. Samios accepted that conclusion publicly, although he did
so with considerable indirection.
Park set forth seven rules for what can be learned from this and other epi-
sodes in a speech to the APS 1995 spring meeting at a session on “Alternative
Science: Foolish, Fraudulent, and Phobic.”

(1) A Ph.D. in science is not an inoculation against foolishness. (2)

Because even scientists tend to see what they expect to see, a foolish
report by a respected colleague often carries other scientists along on
the road to ignominy. (3) It’s a thin line between foolishness and
fraud. (4) Over time, foolish ideas develop a constituency that would
prefer that the issue never be quite settled. (5) Most screwy sounding
scientific claims—are screwy. (6) It seems unlikely that there will
ever be an idea so crazy that a Ph.D. physicist cannot be found to
vouch for it. (7) When a charlatan is exposed, the outrage of his vic-
tims is most frequently aimed at the one who strips away the mask.5

In order to apply this list, one must first identify the topic as either foolish, or
screwy, or charlatanic. If that can be done, however, the lessons themselves are
not needed.*

* Park also seems to believe that the use of ridicule is an appropriate mode of expression for the
public spokesman of the American Physical Society.
 Protocols 163

More Myths
Beveridge recalls a description of how a great French bacteriologist* went
about preparing to do an experiment.

[He] was one of those men who achieve their success by long prelim-
inary thought before an experiment is formulated, rather than by the
frantic and often ill-conceived experimental activities that keep lesser
men in ant-like agitation. . . [He] did relatively few and simple ex-
periments. But every time he did one, it was the result of long hours
of intellectual incubation during which all possible variants had been
considered and were allowed for in the final tests. Then he went
straight to the point, without wasted motion. That was the method
of Pasteur, as it has been of all the really great men of our calling,
whose simple, conclusive experiments are a joy to those able to ap-
preciate them.6

This paragraph exemplifies the scientific method as it is widely taught in

books and schools: the scientist performs a carefully structured experiment
and from it learns a bit more of nature’s secrets. While Beveridge recites an
outstanding example, it was not exclusive. There are different methods for the
scientific study of nature, each with variations of emphasis. It can reasonably
be said that there is no one method of doing science.
The astronomer does not perform experiments on the cosmos. He is lim-
ited to inventing new ways to use his instruments, such as the telescope and
the spectrometer. Beveridge puts it this way, “. . . important as experimenta-
tion is in most branches of science, it is not used, for instance, in descriptive
biology, observational ecology or in most forms of clinical research in medi-
cine.”7 In the latter case, the patient’s physiological structure is not experimen-
tally rearranged. For example, a scientist administers an experimental drug
and then observes what happens.
Bauer—an electrochemist—spells out some differences in scientific
method.

Astronomy has to deal with the evolution of the universe, the birth
and development and death of stars; biology and geology seek to ac-
count for the evolution of living things and of the Earth. But phys-
ics and chemistry share no such concern with inherent, directional
change: they delight, by contrast in the discovery of permanent rela-

* Hans Zinsser, writing about the great French bacteriologist Charles Nicolle.
164 va l i d at i o n

tionships, and they do experiments in which time is just another

controllable factor.8

Differences in the subject matter prompt differences in scientific method.

The method of the evolutionary fields of study might be called, not so much
observation, as watching . . . and watching. Scientists in these fields expect
knowledge to be revealed slowly over many years as data about current ques-
tions aggregate. They work with a long time span of view, one that is mea-
sured in years and decades. By way of contrast, chemists and physicists often
see new fields of action develop almost overnight.
There are also significant differences between the outlook of chemists and
physicists. Bauer continues,

With these and other differences among sciences come far-reaching

differences in attitudes and method on the part of those who do the
science. . . For example, chemists and physicists do not mean quite
the same thing when they call a thing “stable”: physicists mean that
it is stable for all time, . . . whereas chemists mean the thing does not
by or of itself change into something else at a noticeable rate in a nor-
mal environment.9 (Emphasis in the original.)

These differences can be profound.

The differences among adepts of the various sciences go beyond mat-

ters of theory, method, and vocabulary to subtler habits of thought
and even to customs of behavior, to such an extent that the differ-
ences among the sciences . . . can aptly be described as cultural ones:
they involve a great deal more than just knowing about separate and
distinct aspects of nature.10

In 1989, every researcher assumed he ought to be able to make a cell

work. If they could not, they assumed Fleischmann and Pons had withheld
some piece of information. There was a great clamor for more information
during the first months after the Utah announcement.
Huizenga personified this demand for adequate information. In a TV in-
terview quite late in the episode (1993–1994), he insisted, “If someone claims
that they are making and doing cold fusion, he has to be able produce a set of
instructions so that someone in an independent laboratory can reproduce
those results.”11 He also declared, “I still demand reproducibility and I don’t
see it forthcoming.”12
Beveridge speaks to this concern with greater perspective.
 Protocols 165

The essence of any satisfactory experiment is that it should be repro-

ducible. In biological experiments it not infrequently happens that
this criterion is difficult to satisfy. If the results of the experiment
vary even though the known factors have not been altered, it often
means some unrecognized factor or factors is affecting the results.
Such occurrences should be welcomed, because a search for the un-
known factor may lead to an interesting discovery.13

Reproducibility
In May 1989, the president of the APS, said that with respect to the questions
raised about cold fusion experiments, in the end, the scientific method includ-
ing the need for reproducibility will determine the fate of the Fleischmann and
Pons cold fusion claims.14 The time required to attain reproducibility was not
mentioned, as though reproducibility were an inherent characteristic of a cor-
rectly done experiment.
The outstanding exception to that position was the Ramsey statement
where he said that even a single episode would be revolutionary. The word sin-
gle placed a lower bound on the requirement for reproducibility. In the modi-
fied form, a single anomalous power episode would be revolutionary. The
need to validate the experiment still remained, however, even after a single ex-
cess energy period.
The experiment that produces the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon
may reasonably be called revolutionary, because it implies a violation of the
law of conservation of energy (the energy appears to be emerging from noth-
ing as no chemical or nuclear source is evident). The revolutionary science
then had three immediate tasks: to develop a more replicable experiment, to
find the breadth and extent of the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon, and
to determine the source of the anomalous power.
Differences between the methods of chemistry and those of physics, espe-
cially between those of surface electrochemistry and those of nuclear physics,
contributed greatly to the confusion and error during the first decade after the
Utah announcement. Bauer identifies a telling item of methodology that had
a strong impact on the cold fusion episode. “Physicists look to crucial experi-
ments to decide among theories at one fell swoop . . .”15 Nuclear physicists es-
pecially look to the defining experiment that, once successfully demonstrated,
can then be exactly repeated in other laboratories. These experiments are sim-
ple in the sense that the determining variables are under control. Once the ex-
periment is announced, it can be repeated by any physicist versed in the art
with access to a suitable laboratory.
Bauer further delineates the difference by looking at the statistics of No-
166 va l i d at i o n

bel Prize awards. “Nobel prizes in physics have been awarded about twice as
often for experimental novelties as for theoretical ones, but in chemistry,
experimentalists have been so honored five or six times as often as have theo-
rists.”16 The accomplishments in chemistry are determined largely by experi-
ment, while in physics knowledge is considered incomplete and therefore
deficient until a correlation is established between experiment and theory.
These differences result from the consequence of specialization, which
allows the protocol for each specialty to become individually optimized over
decades of research. Bauer points out that, each science—and to a degree
each specialization within each science—has thus come to be an idiosyncratic
blend of theorizing and experimenting. That circumstance inevitably carried
certain distinct notions about what knowledge is and about the degree to
which knowledge can be said to be certain. Science encompasses a wide range
of knowledge and of diverse views about the nature of knowledge.17 Bauer
characterized the field of physics as follows. “Physics is oriented towards the-
ory: one learns physics as a set of mathematically formulated laws more than
as a set of observed phenomena; theory serves as a substitute for individual
facts.”18 A reading of Feynman’s writings confirms that view of the role of
mathematical formulation in physics.19
Interviews with scientists who are familiar with electrochemistry describe
a field of study that is more like that of geology as described in the paragraphs
below. The following excerpt from Bauer show crucial differences between the
outlook in physics and in geology.

Geology . . . is taught primarily through description . . . theory in ge-

ology is less specific than in physics and serves to explain after the
fact and not as a substitute for individual facts. Naturally, then,
physicists tend to regard quantitative theory as the epitome of sci-
ence and of scientificity; and, secretly or not so secretly, they see ge-
ology and geologists as somewhat less than highly scientific. So, too,
physicists have learned that it is possible to find distinct, single
causes for the variety of phenomena with which they deal, the phe-
nomena themselves being identifiably and distinctly discrete. And
for these reasons, and also because they can control the relevant fac-
tors, physicists know that they can perform “crucial experiments”
that compel nature to deliver definite answers. Geologists, on the
other hand, learn that their phenomena overlap one another, that di-
verse “causes” conjointly produce a given geological circumstance,
and that the most scientific approach is not that of seeking crucial
tests but that of “multiple working hypotheses,” for in geology one
must, over long periods of time, be willing to countenance the possi-
 Protocols 167

bility that any one of several competing explanations may ultimately

turn out to be the best.20

Cold fusion research had “multiple working hypotheses” regarding iden-

tification of possible sources for the excess power that was claimed during its
first decade. It was not possible to know how long it might be before the sev-
eral competing theories were resolved.
The Utah announcement probably contained a multiplicity of overlap-
ping experiments, exactly which one was running at any moment depended
upon the exact experimental conditions on and inside the cathode surface. An
outspoken physicist demanded one resolving experiment and demanded it
immediately: “For Mr. [sic] Pons and Mr. [sic] Fleischmann[,] the best bet is
to disappear into their laboratory and devise a clearly defined . . . experiment
that others can reproduce. Until they’ve done that, they have nothing.”21 Was
this not a provincial statement by one who was unacquainted with the labora-
tory practice of surface chemistry?

Protocol Failure
There was much talk about how Fleischmann and Pons failed to follow con-
vention by not offering a preprint at the Utah announcement. What was not
much mentioned was the failure of the community to follow convention since
that time. Ordinarily, claims for a new discovery are evaluated by the scientific
community. In this case, however, excuses were offered for not doing so or for
giving that responsibility a quick once over, a lick and a promise, so to speak.
Science was set back by this failure to abide protocol.
One can only ask, where were the chemists and their professional societ-
ies? Where were the books written by chemists that told the surface chemistry
account of this episode as several books had told about the nuclear physics?
Where were the activist chemists in the public forums? They were nowhere to
be found.
No single one or group of them came forth to insist that heat could in-
deed be measured, and to argue that the calorimetry used did meet scientific
standards of quality.
But that failure might have been avoided. The shallowness of the science
reporting, the inability of the reporters to get beyond the misnomer cold fu-
sion to report judgements of the controversy by chemists, was stifling. Jerry
Bishop, of the WSJ, himself became controversial because he reported the
views of chemists, as we will see in Chapter 22, p. 310.
It is important to keep in mind the introduction of ad hominem argu-
168 va l i d at i o n

ment because it had an enormous impact. It introduced fear of uncalled-for

public humiliation in the answering of technical questions that needed resolu-
tion by the scientific community. It greatly inhibited adherence to established
protocol.
One of the world’s most prestigious journals led the way into confusion
by abandoning conventional protocol. In October 1989, Nature said, “Both
sides seem to accept that the heat measurements will probably not prove con-
vincing one way or another, and that the presence or absence of nuclear prod-
ucts is the crucial evidence.”22
The four critiques (Chapter 9) of the Fleischmann and Pons calorimetry
failed to undermine the experiment’s credibility, but none of them could be
said to constitute an adequate evaluation of the experiment by the scientific
community. McKubre has reported heat bursts outside the standard deviation
of random errors by factors up to fifty. The scientific community never evalu-
ated this datum.
The truth was that the physics community was not interested in heat
measurements. Their insistence that the most carefully done calorimetry
ought to be ignored was a travesty of science. In scientific protocol, there is no
support for this degree of prejudice. The established accuracy of McKubre’s
work went unappreciated by the scientific community.
Again, where were the professional societies? Can the APS show that
Fleischmann and Pons defense of their calorimetry (July 1992) is flawed? At
that time, the APS spoke to the subject of cold fusion studies often. Why did
they not address the important aspects of it? Was the APS complicitous in
seeking only punishment?
Scientists or institutions may have chosen to not respond to the Utah
claims and they could not be denied that choice. Others may have chosen to
wait for nuclear data supporting the claim to become available. That was
fine, too. Even the declaration that one is sure there is nothing of value in
the claims, was not disallowed by protocol. No individual or institution is
obligated to do or say anything. Refraining from participation on the part of
the individual scientist or institution was not a diminishment or corruption of
science.
But those who would speak for the science community carry a responsi-
bility to see the evidence placed before it for evaluation.

Unidentified Error
Despite the inherent clarity of the proper protocol, there is room for confu-
sion if only because some were willing to be bold while others required a
greater aggregation of evidence. EPRI was much bedeviled by this during
 Protocols 169

its eight years of support for McKubre’s research at SRI. Many scientists and
executives at EPRI accepted the existence of excess power, but some of them
did not. I think of the following protocol as the “Doubting Thomas” method
of analysis.
One of the EPRI managers who was close to the sponsorship of research
at SRI from the beginning has encapsulated a more wary concept of the appli-
cable methodology. He expressed his view in April 1995 as follows.

Indeed, the lack of any significant measurements of nuclear products

suggests that proponents interpretation of the anomalous heat as
real, yet unexplainable by any chemical, electrical, or mechanical
source, and hence by implication a nuclear phenomena, seems to me
to be at least an extremely naïve interpretation, and reflects a very
poor understanding of modern scientific methods.
The alternative explanation, that the anomalous heat measure-
ments are not from nuclear reactions, but are the result of unidenti-
fied error or artifacts appear to me to be the only viable explanation
of the excess heat.23

Those holding such concerns deplored the lack of redundancy of measure-

ment, a concern with which everyone could commiserate. No one can be
blamed for desiring a higher state of determinism in an important matter: if
only there were nuclear products to corroborate those heat measurements. To
resolve these frustrations, sometimes the excess heat measurements were as-
signed to something called unidentified error.
Dr. Morrison attended all of the ICCF meetings until his passing in Feb-
ruary 2001. His report on the eighth meeting at Lerici, Italy, May 2000, con-
cludes with an explanation of the methodology he has followed in his contin-
uing skepticism of twelve years duration. He likened the presentation of
anomalous power data to a magician performing magic tricks. In this view,
“true believers” who present in peer-reviewed journals a demonstration of ex-
cess heat are comparable to a magician suspending a body in mid-air. This at-
titude is apparently due to an unwillingness to separate—at an intellectual
level—empirical data from established theory. That is, to separate them for
the sole purpose of thinking about them.

I have often looked at experiments which gave results that appeared

to violate the laws of Nature which had been established by previous
work.
Later these experiments turned out to be false, but I have often
found it very difficult to see just where the error was. But the fact
170 va l i d at i o n

that I had not detected the flaw did not mean that the experiment
was correct and that the laws of Nature had been violated.
Rather I feel the same as being at a circus watching a magician.
Normally he and I know that the laws of nature are being obeyed but
there is a trick that is hard to spot. At [his first] trick . . ., I may spot
the trick and am happy that there is no problem with the laws of Na-
ture—similarly with [his] trick number two. But suppose at trick
three, I do not see how the magic is performed. The magician may
say “I won, I tricked you,” and it is left unsaid that the laws of nature
have not been violated. But suppose the magician says, “You did not
see anything wrong with my demonstration, therefore it is true. See,
I have supernatural powers. The old laws of Nature have been re-
placed by new laws.” And if I protest, I am told that I have a closed
mind, am an establishment figure, and do not face up to the happen-
ing performed in front of me. But almost all magicians admit that it
is all trickery and the laws of Nature are not threatened.
So if someone comes along and says, “Look—excess heat—do
you see anything wrong?”, then I feel as if I am at the circus, and al-
though I do not immediately see anything wrong, I am reluctant to
give up well-established laws of Nature unless the proof is very
strong. Here [at ICCF-8] reports on cold fusion happenings are de-
scribed, especially in the summary talks by True Believers in cold fu-
sion in their words and then some clues as to possible explanations
are offered.24

His apparent disregard for specialties outside that of nuclear physics, such
as those of electrochemistry and calorimetry, does him a disservice. The core
of his consternation over the acceptance of excess heat measurement was the
concomitant need, “to violate the laws of Nature.” Besides his habitual rejec-
tion of all evidence except proof, he apparently carried the notion that the
laws he knew so well had to be given up if the anomalous power data were to
be publicly accepted as a guide to further research. The idea that the current
nuclear science of two-body reactions might reasonably endure amendment
by the addition of a class of multibody, coherent nuclear reactions within the
lattice of a metal under exceedingly particular conditions ought not to have
been so profoundly disturbing for so many years.* If the excess heat measure-
ments are correct, we know then that no laws of nature are violated in the pro-
duction of that heat. Correspondingly, if violation of the laws of nature were

* It is this writer’s observation that Dr. Morrison was for his own reasons angry and bitter at
both Fleischmann and Pons. I believe that this attitude greatly influenced his judgement of the
field.
 Protocols 171

necessary for the generation of excess heat, then such generation would not
occur.
It should be clear to the reader at this point that the writer does not find
the above quoted explanation credible, although it is certainly sincere. An as-
sessment of it is properly included here to better understand the role scientific
methodology played in the cold fusion skepticism. This treatment also offers
the reader an opportunity to develop his own assessment of Morrison’s expla-
nation.
Fleischmann spoke to this question of “unidentified error,” as follows.

It has frequently been asserted that these discoveries were made by

“serendipity.” This view is incorrect although serendipity certainly
played a part in the progress of the work. In my view, the true role of
serendipity is the recognition of the significance of unusual results. It
is better to guide one’s research by a series of logical steps rather than
to indulge in a process best described as “Gee Whiz.” However, it is
also important to accept and explain unusual results rather than to
ascribe them to unspecified errors.25

There are historical examples where half a century was consumed in find-
ing the source or cause of a scientifically interesting observation, thus estab-
lishing full redundancy of measurement. Furthermore, that long effort was the
work of acknowledged science; presumably the time would have been much
longer had that effort been looked upon as a pseudo-science. It ought to be
considered wishful thinking to hope that the source of excess heat will be
identifiable in the same era when the calorimetric evidence was first noticed. It
is a further failing to label excess heat measurement as pseudo-science, thereby
foreclosing the needed research to establish a science of the source. There is no
substitute for the evaluation of the excess heat data by the scientific community.
Many substantial data sets for anomalous power were collected in the
years 1989 through 1994. Only one really good set was needed according to
the modified Ramsey rule, and then a second one for corroboration. To turn
instead to something called “unidentified error” was a nihilistic response. It is
what was said of the things Galileo saw with his telescope. While everyone
knew the moon to be immaculate, the moon was seen by him to have moun-
tains on it. This contention found resolution in the academy of the day by at-
tributing those mountains to unidentified error in his telescope. Such a con-
clusion in the case of cold fusion is nothing less than an abandonment of
modern science.
These transgressions of protocol expressed responses by their proponents
that were fully sensible. That manner of response may have been one of the
historical factors that delayed the onset of modern science until its emergence
172 va l i d at i o n

in the seventeenth century. It was counter-intuitive to realize that the well-

measured observation ought to be separated from its cause. The emergence of
modern protocol, that allowed the separation of research into these two parts,
acknowledged simply that the observation was occurring in the present and
that an identification of the cause would often not then be accessible, as was
the case with Curie’s too-warm radium. If one was to pursue the observation,
it had to be done without knowledge of the cause. To ignore the observation,
or to wait until the cause somehow became known, was to abandon the meth-
ods of modern science.
Let us systematize these differences of methodology. I bring no estab-
lished expertise to this topic, but I have a rhetorical obligation to explain to
the reader my understanding as best I can. Figure 12.1 depicts how the differ-
ent methodologies relate to one another. It has two dimensions: the experi-

figure 12.1 Variations of protocol for the evaluation of experiments in the arts and sci-
ences with some examples.
 Protocols 173

ment, and its evaluation. The rectangles labeled 1–5 are experimental disci-
plines in science and esthetics. Their placement shows the relationship
between the kind of experiment undertaken and the protocols that are avail-
able for their evaluation.
The word simple is used in the figure as the complement to Ramsey’s com-
plicated. In practice, simple means the natural steps are known which lead
from cause to effect. The evaluation category named “proof ” includes ready
reproducibility or other incontrovertible outcome for an experiment. The cat-
egory named “evidence” includes laboratory notebook records, measurements
data collected from the experiment, publications, testimony of the scientists
involved, corroboration in other laboratories, and statistical analysis of the
outcome’s significance. This follows the most conventional of scientific proce-
dures.
Figure 12.1 identifies five categories of experiment by means of the num-
bers, 1–5, inside circles. Each has its category of “evaluation” and “experi-
ment” protocols. Category 1, the experiment is described as a simple experi-
ment in science: the experiment has a recipe or formula. It may connect a
mathematical experiment and a required evaluation protocol that, in this case,
is a proof: a theorem demands a proof and that proof is reproducible accord-
ing to a recipe (derivation). Category 1 also includes nuclear physics or, at
least, a significant part of it. Its pairing up with mathematics is attributable to
both fields of study using ideal (perfect) elements (e.g., particles or numbers)
in their experimental research, circumstance that enables both fields to rou-
tinely require proof. The extension of category 1 upward in Figure 12.1 allows
for complicated nuclear experiments that might be subject to evaluation by
evidence rather than proof.
In category 2, three examples are given of complicated scientific experi-
ments. The sequence of steps between cause and effect are not known, and at
the same time no means is known for achieving an (absolute) proof of the ex-
perimental outcome. Evaluation is by means of evidence, not proof. Exam-
ples given are the first announcement of a mammalian adult clone (Dolly-I,
February 1997) (biology), the experiments involving research about a possible
fifth fundamental physical force (physics), and the Fleischmann and Pons gen-
eration of anomalous power (chemistry). In these cases, proper methodology
calls for the available evidence to be used to evaluate the experimental out-
come.
In category 3, Dolly-II represents the Japanese experiment (August 1998)
that had available through DNA a comparison of the source and the clone to
provide proof. In category 4, I place evaluations that involve some degree of
“aesthetics.” This includes the Wassermann test for syphilis and the claim that
prions cause disease. Specialists of the Wassermann Test considered the scien-
tist’s “serum touch” to be as important as the need to follow a recipe. It might
174 va l i d at i o n

be argued that there is only circumstantial evidence available in the case of

prions.
The final category is 5, that of non-science, or art, where the validations
are aesthetic in nature.

The Basic Rule

Most surprisingly, the cold fusion episode triggered a regression of protocol
from the modern age back 400 years to the end of the Aristotelian age, before
Francis Bacon. At the Utah announcement, Fleischmann emphasized the rela-
tively few neutrons that were measured when compared with the amount of
anomalous power reported. The number of neutrons was nine to twelve or-
ders of magnitude too low to represent the source of the quantity of heat
claimed. This constituted a direct conflict between a well-measured observa-
tion and contemporary nuclear theory.
In their Preliminary Note, referring to the considerable amount of power
they had measured, they state “It is inconceivable that this could be due to
anything but a nuclear process,” and a few paragraphs later, “It is evident that
[conventional nuclear] reactions are only a small part of the overall reaction
scheme and that other nuclear processes must be involved,” and lastly, “the
bulk of the energy release is due to an hitherto unknown nuclear process. . .”
They have nothing more to offer about such processes in the Note. Their full
paper of July 1990 takes the same position. I take these statements to be an hy-
pothesis about the source of the heat power, although Fleischmann and Pons
do not use that word.
The outspoken physicists demanded that the disparity between the
claimed measurement of power and the lack of evident nuclear process be re-
solved first. Only then, it was said, could the measurements be considered
valid. The following quotes illustrate the level of argument used to turn the
scientific community away from a focus on the quality of the heat measure-
ments as a matter of protocol. This demand was expressed as follows.

• Conventional nuclear physics was declared invalid in metallic lattices by

fiat.26
• Although the McKubre experiment is considered by many advocates to
be the premier evidence for excess heat, no nuclear reaction products
were reported!27
• We were told that many people are finding heat. We were told that peo-
ple are finding neutrons, tritium, and helium. But what was not said is
that individual experiments do not see heat AND neutrons, or tritium,
 Protocols 175

or helium in amounts that would be required if a nuclear process is go-

ing on.28
• In the case where the fusion products were reported to be many orders
of magnitude less than the excess heat, the excess heat was assumed to be
due to an unknown nuclear process. This point of view was first stated
by P&F. Their assumption that the reported excess heat was due to some
unknown nuclear process puts the responsibility on them to delineate
the characteristics of such a process.29
• So, delta E [energy] equals [delta] MC2; where is the delta M [mass]?
This is your redundant test. You can’t identify a new science without be-
ing consistent with known . . . that is as solid as we can get in science. It
is based on thousands of experiments. Serious efforts will include look-
ing for the delta M part of the equation.30
• You cannot talk about having a nuclear process if you’ve not seen the
nuclear product and the x-rays which must be present and all of these
experiments do not see the nuclear product nor do they see the x-rays
and, therefore, it makes no sense to talk about these reactions without
seeing product.31
• Findings [of nuclear products] of the order of 1012 nuclear transmuta-
tions per watt should be relatively easy, and ,if found reproducible,
would prove the claims beyond all doubts.32
• Fleischmann has publicly admitted that when excess heat is found, there
should be a commensurate amount of nuclear ash. The time has come to
hold him accountable for this equivalence.33 [emphasis in the original]
• Cold fusion “. . . contradicts the foundation of nuclear science.34

This exclamatory language seems unquestionably reasonable, but it is not

because it is the wrong protocol for science. It dismisses out of hand the evalu-
ation that is required by protocol. It turns science away from its duty to evalu-
ate the quality of the anomalous power measurements. To find the unrecog-
nized reaction or the ash that results from an unknown nuclear reaction could
well take nuclear physicists a generation to accomplish. In fact, it is not rea-
sonable, it is a crippling digression.
Science embraces the perpetual task of explaining the world about us, at
least that part of the world composed of matter and energy. Typically, science
must search for its cause or source. There would be wasted effort in this search
if the observation was mistaken, so the protocols of science require that the
observation be correctly made. That confirmation is the stock in trade of ex-
perimental science.
Once upon a time, observations were discarded as illusions if their cause
were not apparent. It would seem perfectly sensible to deny the observation, at
least until such time as its source or cause is established; only then can one be
176 va l i d at i o n

sure. Perhaps such a wholly sensible course of action was precisely what hap-
pened during the millennia prior to the establishment of modern methodol-
ogy. This was certainly the way contemporary academics responded to Gali-
leo’s description of the mountains on the moon.
Does this mean that any claim of observation must be accepted as worthy
of scientific study? It does not. It means something quite different. It means
that the controversy must center about the quality of the measurements and not
about the source or cause of the phenomenon. It means that to turn the head of
science away from its duty to evaluate the observation on grounds that the
source is not evident is a violation of modern protocol.
At first glance, it might seem that such a protocol does not allow the left
hand of science to know what its right hand is doing. Not quite. The proper
concern is with the course of action to take when there is a conflict between
experiment and theory. Karl Popper provides an escape from the difficulty of
accepting into science an observation that went contrary to established theory.
He asserts that science advances, not by proving theories correct or by defend-
ing them to the ends of the Earth, rather, by accepting (not adopting) experi-
mental outcomes that contend with theory. His example was that the observa-
tion of a thousand white swans does not prove that all swans are white, but the
observation of a single black swan undoes forever a theory that says all swans
are white. More formally, a single contrary experiment proves a theory wrong
forever.
Popper teaches that an experiment must not be refused admission into
the inventory of science simply because its well-measured outcome runs con-
trary to theory. Such refusal would abrogate the canon of falsifiability. If con-
flicting data is prohibited from contention, then theorems are no longer
falsifiable. Were science to enable such practice, it would evolve into a secular
theology.
The claim for anomalous power generation in the Fleischmann and Pons
cell needed no miracles and none were sought. Nor did their claim portend vi-
olation of the law of conservation of energy. Claims could be verified by repli-
cation in independent laboratories, preferably with several different cell de-
signs, and several different types of calorimeter. This was properly done by
those with expertise in electrolytic cells and in calorimetric measurements.
Therein resides the correct evaluation protocol. In such a manner, the anoma-
lous power claimed by Fleischmann and Pons could follow a legitimate valida-
tion procedure. If it were then so validated, a new field of scientific study
would begin, a new science that was not beholden to theoretical suppositions
about the source of the heat power. The new area of scientific research will
have been established in its own right—by claim of measurement.
 c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n

Without Exception

A single event is, in principle, sufficient to bring about a revolutionary out-

come. It follows that each claim of well-measured anomalous power,
without exception, must be undone to dismiss the claim. This is a severe crite-
ria, but it is nevertheless what follows from the modified Ramsey premise.
It is not our purpose in this investigation to see if everything done under
the rubric of cold fusion can be ratified. Our choice of the anomalous heat
claim, the presenting empirical factor, and the only claim so far to hold our
concern, greatly limits and simplifies the task. Its correct measurement consti-
tutes the prime requirement, and that requirement must be met also in an
independent laboratory.
The anomalous heat phenomenon belongs to an informal category of ex-
periment that I refer to as complicated. The word implies that there are uncon-
trolled factors within the Fleischmann and Pons cell that largely influence its
performance. If several cells are set up identically in accordance with the
then current practice, identical processes or reactions may not occur in each
of them. The chemical experiment announced by Fleischmann and Pons
involves surface-catalyzed electrochemistry. The palladium cathode harbors
chemical reactions on, near, and inside its surface. To some extent surface vari-
ations determine what reactions proceed, pause, or reverse. Those factors in-
clude the electrical potential at the surface and the concentration there of each
species of chemical. Their concentrations will vary depending on how fast the
reaction proceeds. This indeterminacy is part and parcel of cold fusion re-
search as it is to other fields of science.
Reconsider the words of Ramsey: “Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries

177
178 va l i d at i o n

are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are

not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few
months.”1 The Fleischmann and Pons cell involves reaction complexity at and
near the surface of the cathode. Learning how to make these cells perform the
reactions for which they were designed requires time and skill. It is a tough
laboratory drill.
I interviewed several professors who had tried for over two years without
success to get cells to function for more than a couple of weeks. A “gunk” ac-
cumulated on the electrodes after two weeks that impeded current flow and
brought cell operation to an halt. In Chapter 4, p. 49, Dr. Caldwell was
quoted as saying that a very minute fouling of a surface could drive a reaction
in a totally opposite direction than anticipated. She remembered that for sev-
eral decades there was a battle between the “big guns” of the surface-science
community over whether gold was a hydrophobic or a hydrophilic metal (i.e.,
does the surface tend to reject or attract water molecules).*

The two possibilities became two schools of thought. They were just
at odds all the time, and these were good scientists. What happens
when you strip a gold surface is that immediately it takes on mate-
rial. It is fouled from air by hydrocarbons or by carbon dioxide.
Whatever first comes in touch with that surface fouls that surface.
The surface then acts as either a hydrophobic or a hydrophilic sur-
face. So I am not offended by the fact that their [Fleischmann and
Pons’s] results were not reproducible.2

Allen J. Bard, Chairman of the Electrochemistry Department at the Uni-

versity of Texas, Austin, spoke keenly to these difficulties during 1989.

The Utah researchers made it seem like such a simple experiment, a

freshman chemistry experiment. The fact is the more you probe and
the more you look at it, it’s very subtle. I wasted my first two weeks
by not looking closely enough.
There have been times in my career when I couldn’t reproduce
someone else’s results for a long time. So the fact that you can’t re-
produce it doesn’t say it’s wrong.3

And Caldwell again, “To just say that because they cannot reproduce
what they are doing they are not scientists, is wrong because there are certain

* Gold is important to experimental science because it is an inert metal. Cold fusion experiment-
ers use it for a cathode to form a control cell where they can be sure no special reaction occurs
at the cathode. However, there are some claims to have experienced reactions on gold surfaces.
 Without Exception 179

phenomena that are very difficult to reproduce.”4 The insistence that science
requires a general reproducibility represents a kind of duck-pond thinking.
Textbooks emphasize the complex reactions that can exist on a surface
like that of a cathode. For instance, a 1981 textbook on surface chemistry
warns the scientist that the chemical properties of the reaction depend inti-
mately on surface preparation. A great deal of experimental evidence indicates
that each type of surface site may have a different chemistry. Contamination
by a single layer of molecules is almost instantaneous: after cleaning “the sur-
face may be covered [with contamination] in a fraction of a second . . . The
[contamination] may impart to the surface unique chemical properties by
blocking sites or changing the oxidation states of surface atoms . . . The con-
stant presence of the [contaminate] layer may influence the chemical, me-
chanical, and electronic surface properties.”5 One might wonder how such a
surface could be used at all.
There were other problems with cathodes. The metallurgy of the cathode
was also critical to cell performance. The presence of micro-cracks inside the
surface may have allowed deuterium gas to escape so that adequate loading
was not achieved. These cracks may have formed from the pressure of the ini-
tial loading if the metal was too weak. Different batches from the supplier
may have had quite different properties in that particular regard.

Complicated Experiments
In February 1997, a laboratory in Scotland tried their experiment with mam-
mal cloning more than two hundred times before achieving success.6 Clearly,
there were unknown factors in the chemistry and biology of that experiment
which contributed to the outcome and made success difficult. Fortunately for
them, the scientific community followed conventional procedure in its re-
sponse: their numerous failures along with the failure of other scientists to
replicate the feat were largely ignored. In August 1998, a Japanese group re-
ported that they had replicated the feat of cloning a mammal. Pending review,
that report was accepted as validation of the Dolly claim. In the Japanese case,
the use of DNA testing made proof accessible to the experiment. Easy or hard,
the scientific community handled the matter properly. Science accepted the
observation of a successful cloning event even when each step that causes or
helps the cloning process to happen was not yet fully known.
I mentioned earlier that there was an analogy between the perfect parti-
cles of nuclear physics and the perfect numbers of mathematics. The contrast
between the perfection of nuclear particles and the chaotic structure of a
chemical surface was clear. A similar dichotomy of discipline exists within
physics. Wolfgang Pauli, a renowned physicist, spanned this dichotomy at the
180 va l i d at i o n

peak of his career in 1932. He was thoroughly versed in the nuclear physics of
the day, but he was also one of the founders of solid state physics. He ex-
pressed the anguish of the scientist who moves from the neat world of nuclear
physics to the sordid world called semiconductors. “I don’t like this solid state
physics . . . though I initiated it. . . . One shouldn’t work on semiconductors,
that is a filthy mess; who knows whether they really exist.”7
Can any experiment be validated if it is in such a primitive state of devel-
opment that its details are not known? The chemist, the biologist, the geolo-
gist, will generally answer that it is done, though it is not easy. Initial difficulty
of replication is not uncommon in scientific specialties outside of nuclear
physics.
Caldwell offers this outlook.

We cannot be too moralistic in terms of judging Stan and Martin for

experiments that were irreproducible, because they were inherently
working with very difficult material, that is, the electrode surface. If
you poison the surface with one leachable material or another (e.g.,
from the glass flask), you would just have different results.8

Experiments involved with outcome determining factors that were uncon-

trolled appear frequently in laboratory work. Fleischmann put the matter di-
rectly, “Getting catalytic reactions to work is always a struggle; but we do it all
the time.”9 Allen Bard seemed to agree, “So the fact that you can’t reproduce it
doesn’t say it is wrong.”10 These views were in keeping with our picture of ex-
perimental science, at least that part of it which differed from that of using
perfect pieces like atoms or neutrons or numbers, and from working in the
more perfect environment of a hard vacuum or with a blackboard. Bearing
this in mind, scientists must ultimately track down those additional factors
and eventually bring them under experimental control.
Excess power sometimes happened in a burst whose time of occurrence
could not be predicted. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 in Chapter 4 recorded such an
event. This spontaneous behavior was not a barrier to a claim of their exis-
tence. Scientists long knew how to observe and record spontaneous events
whose timing could not be predicted. The measurement techniques were well
developed. Automatic monitoring techniques recorded those events. For ex-
ample, lack of predictability did not prevent scientists from observing and
measuring seismic events.
A Fleischmann and Pons type of electrolytic cell is set up and left running
with the recording equipment attached. After many weeks one looks at the
data and, with a little bit of luck, there will be a burst of output power on the
record. But it may still be necessary to explain to the naïve scientist why a
burst cannot be scheduled for his Thursday visit.
The government Panel did not review the burst phenomenon even
 Without Exception 181

though it was known about as early as May 1989, nor did it provide for its
evaluation by others, either then or later. Two power burst reports are in-
cluded in this book, one by Fleischmann and Pons (Chapter 4), and the other
by McKubre (Chapter 14). The bursts’s behavior—turning sharply on and off
during a continuously running measurement—constitutes a secondary, but
important, form of anomalous power corroboration based on its dynamics.
The observer can see in the tracing its sharp “on” and “off ” characteristic.
Skeptics of the anomalous power claims will have to suggest other interpreta-
tions of this phenomenon if they wish to prevail.
When planning laboratory work, the scientist envisions the whole process
that will unfold during an experiment. The expected magnitudes of each mea-
surement are estimated so that the instruments are ready to make the desired
measurements. What temperatures will the experiment produce? Those tem-
peratures must be measured without undue degradation of accuracy. If there is
ionizing radiation expected, will it be dangerous? In 1989, those who assumed
that the primary signature would be neutrons were mistaken and disap-
pointed. The experiments carried out prior to the Utah announcement estab-
lished that the signature of the cell was heat energy flow (power).
The high cost of cold fusion experimentation is another important con-
sideration. The definitive experiment runs for three months. Each year allows
enough time for approximately three successive experiments in which the re-
sults from one can inform the design of the next. The work on high tempera-
ture superconductivity allowed more than two dozen experiments to be com-
pleted over an extended weekend, while the same number of cold fusion
experiments might require eight years. Such experimentation is not only time
consuming but expensive.
The corroboration and eventual validation of a complicated experiment
proceeds by replication in independent laboratories. If no one is able to ac-
complish replication after the passage of several years, the original claim is
usually dismissed as an aberration of some unknown sort. The claim is tenta-
tively validated when replication is accomplished in an independent labora-
tory. Only tentatively, because the independence of one laboratory from an-
other cannot be taken for granted. Both might follow a similar mistaken
procedure, for example. Validation requires that the replication be truly inde-
pendent.
As the number of corroborations add up, validation takes on the aspect of
certainty. Each corroboration must be shown to be in error, if it is to be dis-
credited. If those successive corroborations utilize a variety of cell designs, and
if their respective calorimeters utilize a variety of techniques, the prospect of
disqualifying them by finding an error that was common to them all becomes
vanishingly small. This variety is shown in the next chapter when actual heat
generating experiments are examined.
The cold fusion experiment consisted of the most ordinary kind of labo-
182 va l i d at i o n

ratory science. Its new aspect was that of emphasis on packing a lot of deute-
rium into the palladium and keeping it there. A high order of technical skill
was needed to build and run the cell in that mode, even though it was a stan-
dard piece of chemistry equipment. Most of those who jumped into the field
after the March 1989 announcement were not prepared to work for two or
more years to master cell peculiarities. McKubre and Bockris and other elec-
trochemists came to the field so prepared.

Calibration
While Chapter 1 provided a qualitative view of anomalous power (page 6), it
was pointed out there that the evidence was independent of whatever calibra-
tion technique might be adopted to put that evidence on a quantitative basis.
In Chapter 4 there was an example of excess heat accompanied by detailed
measurements of the quantity of energy. The instruments that are used to get
such measurements always need to be calibrated. They must be referenced to
absolute standards that are maintained by the Federal government. They must
also be checked from day to day in case their settings have drifted. How is the
power output of a cell determined?
An overview of one method is given here. But with any calibration sys-
tem, it is important to use several different measurement methods so that an
error in one will not be hiding in all of the readings. The interested reader will
find many more details in the references.
The Fleischmann and Pons type of cell design passed its heat energy
through the flask walls into the bath water by means of radiation, not by con-
duction. The bath was held at a constant, lower temperature by circulating the
water through a temperature regulating unit, by keeping it well insulated, and
by stirring it.* The electrolyte was held at a uniform temperature by the vigor-
ous bubbling action of cell operation, by the narrow inside diameter of the
cell, and by the insulating effect (from conduction) of the Dewar’s hard vac-
uum.
A control cell is one that does not generate anomalous power and, there-
fore, will demonstrate an equal amount of power in and out. How much goes
in is known from the power supply current and voltage values with an allow-
ance made for the electrolytic action. The temperature of the cell is continu-
ously measured and that of the bath is known. The transfer factor of cell heat
into the bath is calculated from the two temperatures and the known output

* The bath is held to a temperature in the vicinity of 303.15 Kelvin and is uniform throughout
to within ±0.01 K except within 0.5 cm of the bath’s surface as reported by Fleischmann and
Pons.
 Without Exception 183

power (equal to the input power). This measurement technique was aug-
mented to satisfactorily accommodate inadvertent energy leakages and so as to
remain stable over many months.* The two temperatures and the calibration
factor are used with an active cell to calculate the generated excess power.
If the heat out is larger than the heat in, then the cell is generating anom-
alous power, the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon. In one sense, the mea-
surement is an easy one because the exact magnitude is of little importance;
the overriding question is whether excess heat exists as a natural phenomenon.
Namely, is there a difference other than zero between the operation of a con-
trol cell and one that claims to be generating excess heat? That question places
a minimal burden on the measuring technology.
In the planning of an experiment, it is important to set up control cells in
such a way that their behavior can be compared with the active cells. Control
cells have to meet two somewhat conflicting requirements. The control should
be as nearly similar to the experiment as is possible, but sufficiently dissimilar
that it is free of the effect to be explored. The Fleischmann and Pons experi-
ment made such planning problematical because the specific source of the
heat phenomenon was not yet known. That there is a large difference between
heat generating cells and quiescent cells is shown in their first publication of
April 10, 1989. Three of the cells shown there perform in a distinctly different
manner from the fourth cell. This difference is referred to as the generation of
anomalous power in the three cells. The fourth cell may be considered a con-
trol on the other three.
Wilson correctly argued that if the experimenter achieved an energy
balance when anomalous power was not evident, a suitable calibration was
achieved. Fleischmann suggested the use of a spent palladium cathode in an
otherwise complete cell to make it into a control cell. Another approach was
to use a platinum or gold cathode. In principle, any of these techniques will
make an adequate control cell.
The following characteristics of the different kinds of cells should be kept
in mind:

1. Some cells do not have a thermometer in the cell as their calorimeter

does not require it. These cells are not dependent on uniformity of tem-
perature within the cell.
2. In some experiments, the degree of recombination of the gasses is moni-
tored and reported.

* Other important heat losses result from heat conduction to the bath, from conductive loss
through the exposed top of the cell to the atmosphere, evaporation into the cell’s top space
from the electrolyte’s liquid surface, and from the evolving gasses and the electrolyte’s vapors
that carry heat out of the cell as they egress.
184 va l i d at i o n

3. In a closed cell a recombiner is used within the cell so that the oxygen
and hydrogen gas molecules are deliberately recombined into water.

The phenomenon under consideration can also be recognized somewhat

more simply as the difference between a failed cell experiment and a successful
one. That difference is the generation of excess power. For example, at the
NSF/EPRI meeting Fleischmann reported on 8 active cells and 13 control
cells in which no anomalous power could be detected. Another 23 experi-
ments in the same group showed generated power greater than 20 mw, with
15 above 100 mw. The Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon is exhibited as
the difference between these two sets of experimental outcome.
Chapters 1–13 provide the background needed to understand how to in-
terpret the Fleischmann and Pons cell performance. In Chapter 14 we look at
seven examples of excess heat corroboration.
 c h a p t e r f o u r t e e n

Validation

T he intrepid pilgrim has arrived at the holy grail. The alarums and diver-
sions of failed experiments, failed recipes, and failed theories are defeated.
The demand for proof is seen as an invitation to preemptive failure of the in-
vestigation. A cautious attention to the norms of protocol is rewarded. The
most significant claim of Fleischmann and Pons—anomalous power—is now
to be validated.
Validation is an ongoing process that becomes more secure with each suc-
cessive corroboration. Protocol ordinarily allows the original experiment full
confirmation if it is successfully replicated once. That corroboration was prop-
erly done in the fall of 1989 by Oriani who submitted his report of anomalous
power corroboration to Nature magazine, but the submission was refused for
wrong reasons.*,1
With confirmation, an experimental observation is admitted into the
company of mainstream science even if it conflicts with theory. During that
admissions process, the confirmation must include a full consideration of pos-
sible systematic error, error that may be common to every trial. For example,
the observation of extraordinary cosmic expansion may conflict with other
data and with theory, yet those observations are allowed into the discourse of
science.

* Two reasons were given in Nature’s refusal letter of January 26, 1990: the lack of evidence of
nuclear ash in Oriani’s experiment, and the difficulties with replication of such experiments in
general.

185
186 va l i d at i o n

Replication
Seven examples of replication will suffice for this investigation. A reference list
of additional replications follows them for those readers who would like to
study this essential topic further. This replication record includes the first six
years, 1989 through 1994. Successful replications continued, and will con-
tinue, but they have in them little to add to the overall account.
The first two examples concern replication only of the data reduction cal-
culations because that is such a difficult and important topic. The unevaluated
time-voltage-temperature series of data in these two examples came from
Fleischmann and Pons’s cells. Their data was then reduced (evaluated) by an
independent scientist. Following these two examples, five experimental repli-
cations are selected from five independent laboratories that reported genera-
tion of anomalous power.

W. N. Hansen
The first evaluation was done by Professor Wilford N. Hansen, Physics De-
partment, Utah State University, Logan, Utah.* The Utah State Fusion/En-
ergy Council commissioned him to do an evaluation of some Fleischmann
and Pons’s calorimetric work and he delivered his report in the spring of
1991.2 Hansen received eight sets of data that Fleischmann and Pons recorded
from eight cells. His task was to complete an independent data reduction to
answer one question: did the data set demonstrate that anomalous power had
been generated in the cells?
For each of eight cells of the general type shown in Figure 1.1 and 3.1,
the data series consisted of three columns of numbers: time, cell temperature,
and cell voltage (potential). These three values were recorded every few min-
utes from the moment the electric current was turned on as shown in Figure
14.1. The experiments ran for less than two weeks during the winter of 1989–
1990. These cells used the improved Dewar flask with a harder vacuum and
silvering about the neck.
Two of the eight cells were control cells identical to the active cells except
that platinum replaced the usual palladium for the cathode, while one of the
two used heavy water and the other used light water. The cells reported on
here had palladium cathodes and used heavy water electrolyte. Hansen was
also given ancillary information about the individual cells such as the cathode
size, the nature of the electrolyte solution, the amount of current at which the

* In Chapter 9, p. 116, a summary of a part of Hansen’s work was given in a review of the vari-
ous critiques of Fleischmann and Pons’s calorimetry.
 Validation 187

figure 14.1 Hansen, Utah State University, Logan, reported anomalous power of 300
milliwatts with a 27 milliwatt reference pulse. Data was taken from a set of Fleischmann
and Pons cells. (Ignore the data after the last 24 hour time tic.)

cell was operated, the bath temperature and the value of the pulses of heat in-
troduced into the cell for calibration purposes.
Hansen had his choice of several methods of reducing the data, and by
using more than one, he was able to compare the effects of different method-
ologies. After filtering the data,* and choosing initially to use the Fleischmann
and Pons heat emission formula, he tried various methods of applying the cal-
ibration information. At least one cell showed significant anomalous power
generation for each of several calculation methods. The control cells showed a
slightly negative heat generation, indicating that the formulae resulted in an
underestimation of generated power.
Figure 14.1 displays the data from Fleischmann and Pons’s cell number
five. The calibration for this illustration was determined by adjusting the cal-
culations to set the height of the calibration pulse to 27 milliwatts, the value
of the calibration pulse power. The tracing labeled “excess heat” is the amount
of power being generated by the cell at each point in time. It may be anoma-
lous or it may be a calibration pulse. It is shown for four days starting at 150
milliwatts for the first day and increasing to 300 milliwatts. Hansen estimates

* Hansen used the mathematical method known as a Kalman filter.

188 va l i d at i o n

the accuracy of his computations at ±2%. The data noise level can be seen
from the figure. The amount of energy involved is expressed in units of elec-
tron-volts.* Hansen gives his conclusion for cell number five.

Just for the two days [out of the cell’s operating period] this corre-
sponds to 45 electron-volts (eV) [of generated energy] per palladium
atom. This amount is already an order of magnitude larger than the
energy it would take to vaporize the entire palladium electrode. We
have thought of no other self-consistent explanation [other] than
that the excess heat is real and very significant.3

Analysis of cell number two reached the conclusion that, “The integrated
excess heat is . . . about 1,700 eV per palladium atom. This is about 400 times
the vaporization energy of palladium for the electrode of cell 2!”4 For cell
number six, he said, “. . . there is about 6,000 eV per palladium atom of excess
energy, or over a thousand times the energy required to vaporize the electrode.
To put it this way, . . . we are not dealing with known chemistry or metallurgy.
At issue is a profound energy source.”5 An independent scientist came to this
conclusion after conducting a detailed analysis of several sets of cell data that
had been collected by Fleischmann and Pons.

R. H. Wilson
R. H. Wilson et al. at General Electric published a critique of the initial full
length paper by Fleischmann and Pons which we discussed in Chapter 9,
p. 117.6 Wilson comes into this court (of validation) as a reluctant witness,
brought to the bar by the bailiff: he and his cohort insist there is no such thing
as excess heat.
In 1991 Wilson et al. recalculated the cell performance as presented by
Fleischmann and Pons to take into account what they felt were several techni-
cal oversights in the original paper. Wilson still found that one Fleischmann
and Pons cell generated approximately 40% anomalous power compared to
the power put into the cell. This amounted to 736 milliwatts. This level of
anomalous power was more than ten times larger than the error levels associ-
ated with the data.
But the cases of Hansen and Wilson are only the reworking of Fleisch-
* The electron-volt is a measure of energy used by scientists at the atomic level of calculation.
Hansen calculated the excess heat generated for each atom of palladium in the cathode. Chem-
ical energy levels are about four electron-volts maximum.
 Validation 189

mann and Pons cell data. Now a look at replication of the entire experiment is
in order.

M. McKubre
Michael McKubre achieved confirmation of anomalous power during the
period from August 1990 through February 1991. Because he was a central
figure in the cold fusion story, a view of his background will offer some per-
spective.
Michael McKubre started his university education in Washington, DC,
when his father was with the New Zealand embassy. He went to high school
there, and then for a couple of years to The George Washington University.
He was back in New Zealand to complete his Bachelor’s degree, Master’s de-
gree, and Ph.D. in Chemistry, Geophysics and Electrochemistry. As he ex-
plained it, “All during my Ph.D. studies, particularly in electrochemistry,
scanning the literature and attending the conferences, it became clear that
of all the places in the English speaking world, the University of Southamp-
ton was the clear leader in electrochemical research.” In Chapter 2, p. 31,
McKubre appears as a student in Fleischmann’s electrochemistry department.
It was with considerable trepidation that he entered the graduate program in
chemistry at Southampton in 1977. Here was a boy from the sticks of New
Zealand preparing to compete in the big arena.
The department of chemistry at Southampton was quite large. Its preem-
inence was due to the presence of two individuals. Graham Hills (later Sir
Graham Hills) was McKubre’s post-doctoral supervisor and mentor. Martin
Fleischmann was the chief electrochemist there, and one of considerable
global recognition. At that time, the department was considered the leading
academic institution in Europe for electrochemistry.
McKubre was accepted in the graduate program, and spent, “. . . a de-
lightful two years . . . Two glorious years at Southampton learning a great deal
about electrochemistry and the philosophy of science in the real world.” From
there, he went directly to SRI International, Menlo Park, California, a private
research institute, where he has spent his working career.
SRI International is a well respected commercial research firm near the
campus of Stanford University. At SRI McKubre came to cold fusion studies
with a running start. The group working there through 1994 was essentially
the same group that had worked there in 1988 prior to the Fleischmann and
Pons announcement. They were then developing a palladium wire sensor to
detect hydrogen in the cooling water of a nuclear CANDU reactor at the Ca-
nadian nuclear facility in Chalk River, Ontario, Canada. The measurement of
190 va l i d at i o n

hydrogen levels in the water was accomplished by observing the change of re-
sistance in the wire as the palladium took up hydrogen (deuterium) from the
heavy water. By March 1989, the group was already well versed in the technol-
ogy of palladium hydrides.*
“We understood the electrochemical interface which controls the uptake
of deuterium into the metal,” explained McKubre. His group understood the
means by which one can measure high loading of deuterium into palladium.
They reasoned that since others had worked reasonably intensively with the
chemical system before and observed no unusual behavior, if the Fleischmann
and Pons phenomena did exist, it must be at the highest loading levels. These
levels must be greater than 0.6 D/Pd, which had not been obtained previously,
at least as reported in the open literature.
In McKubre’s words,

We set about it in a different way from most of the more famous

people, other people whose experiments are now well known. We
didn’t attempt to reproduce the Fleischmann and Pons experiment as
understood by close examination of newspaper clippings, for exam-
ple. We didn’t build a cell like theirs at all.
What we did was take the hypothesis that under conditions of
high loading in an electrochemical environment, the deuterium pal-
ladium system could be made to give off heat and possibly nuclear
products.
Given that hypothesis, how would you go about testing it? We
devised an experiment that we believed would achieve those condi-
tions independently of any knowledge of the electrochemical appara-
tus and cell geometry of Fleischmann and Pons. So the first experi-
ments we did were at elevated pressure and reduced temperature,
both of which favor achieving the high loading conditions. We didn’t
use open cells. It was an electrochemical cell with a modest over pres-
sure of deuterium. We worked at about a thousand pounds per
square inch of pressure of deuterium (D2).
We started working with the elevated pressure and reduced tem-
perature experiments and obtained good loadings that were reason-
ably reproducible. In our first experiments we saw what we thought
was evidence for excess power.
By this time the furor was starting to erupt. Other people had
done experiments and not observed results. We sort of forced our-
selves to make haste slowly. We didn’t want to be the first to repro-

* When a metal has absorbed enough hydrogen to affect its physical properties, it is referred to
as a hydride.
 Validation 191

duce Fleischmann and Pons’s results. We wanted to be the first to

understand, a somewhat vain hope looking back these six years.7

No one in the McKubre team was a calorimetrist. McKubre says that he

really did not understand the calorimeter that initially had been somewhat
hurriedly put together, “We were reasonably confident of the result, and sim-
ply sought to test that result in a somewhat improved calorimeter.” The strat-
egy was what scientists call trying to prove your experiment wrong, which is a
most important step. They designed a heat power measuring system of the
type called a mass flow calorimeter. That took a great deal of time, perhaps
two or three months, in which they did nothing but think about calorimetry.
McKubre was one of the first to appreciate that heat was the primary sig-
nature of the Fleischmann and Pons experiment. Here is the account of their
exploration into the measurement of heat power.

Calorimetry is a somewhat medieval discipline. It has not been prac-

ticed seriously by any large numbers of individuals since the 1950s.
One of the things necessary, and a very positive consequence of the
cold fusion experiments that have been performed, is that the quality
of calorimetry in electrochemistry is [now] much improved. We have
dragged calorimetry into the twentieth century.
Computers had never been used in calorimetry up until we and
others started using them. Calorimetry was performed by strip chart
recorders. You calibrate on day one; you perform your experiment
on day two; you calibrate on day three; you interpolate your results,
and that’s how you do it.
One of the attempts we made to validate our method of calo-
rimetry was, in fact, to take the design and the results, including ex-
cess power results, to an annual calorimetry conference and expose it
to the experts. We said: We are farm boys, we don’t know what we
are doing, but we did this, we saw this result; tell us what is wrong
with it.
They didn’t tell us that anything was wrong with it by and large.
Did we receive acclaim? No. But a rather grudging acceptance of the
mode of calorimetry that we had developed. As yet nobody has ever
told me of an issue or problem with the mode of calorimetry that we
developed. Which is one reason we stick to it.8

McKubre had developed a different kind of calorimeter from that of

Fleischmann and Pons. It was an isothermal flow calorimeter that operated at
a constant temperature and was insensitive to temperature gradients within
the cell. This was quite different from the isoperibolic calorimeter of the
192 va l i d at i o n

Fleischmann and Pons cells. By using a different kind of instrument,

McKubre hoped to avoid systematic errors that might lie hidden in the iso-
peribolic design.
McKubre and his team performed four experiments with a high deute-
rium loading in the palladium metal. They observed anomalous power in
three out of four closed cells. This, in itself, corroborated the core of the
Fleischmann and Pons claims. Unfortunately, it took place after the scientific
community had closed its eyes on the subject. McKubre commented on the
fourth cell, “We didn’t get what we now know to be acceptable loading, and
didn’t observe any excess power.”
Figure 14.2 shows data from one of McKubre’s cells (P12) after 53 days
of operation.9 It started to generate excess heat energy on day 53, and contin-
ued to do so for 12 days. For 7 of these days it generated 0.9 watts of power
continuously, as read on the left-hand scale in watts. This added up to 0.54
megaJoules of energy over the twelve days. This amount of energy would op-
erate a 1500 watt stove burner at a cherry-red setting for 6 minutes.
Once the electric current is started in a cell, it may be adjusted in ampli-
tude from time to time. In Figure 14.2, the solid line of straight segments
marks the value of current density as read on the left scale in amperes.* On
day 53, the current was “ramped” steeply upward from the previous value
of 0.04 amperes. The current was then abruptly dropped to the original
value and ramped upward again, and so forth. In this experiment, the load-
ing amounted to approximately one deuterium atom for each palladium atom
(D/Pd = 1).
Figure 14.2 also labels the “uncertainty,” in watts, in measuring the
anomalous power. The amount of power measured was much greater than the
uncertainty in its measurement.
McKubre was not given a recipe for the experiment. He perceived that
deuterons had to be jammed into the palladium, and he had to know how to
run a cell for seven weeks without the cathode gumming up. Neither of these
criteria lent themselves to recipe type formulation. Both came from training
and experience.
The McKubre team went through a dry spell, as did Fleischmann and
Pons. There was a whole series of experiments that did not yield excess heat,
and it took a fair amount of strength of character to persevere. McKubre ex-
plains it:

One of the reasons this group of people are in it, is that we were well
positioned in the first instance. That was luck. But the group of peo-

* Current density is the value of current entering each square centimeter of the surface of the
palladium cathode. Total, or actual current, is the current density multiplied by the cathode
surface area.
 Validation 193

figure 14.2 McKubre reports an experiment showing an excess heat generating burst.

ple I have here including two New Zealanders, an Englishman, and

Tanzella are a pretty tough minded group of guys. These were people
who were confidant of what they had seen with their own eyes, and
really didn’t care that much about non-scientific criticism. We tried
to concern ourselves very much with scientific criticism, and to this
date I’ve never had a substantive criticism of our calorimetry. Not
only has no one ever followed one of our publications with a refereed
criticism, but neither have we had the precursor to it: a polite per-
son, having such criticisms would approach you saying, I have these
questions. How do you answer this?10

McKubre’s technique used the most conventional kind of electrochemis-

try, exactly the sort of thing he was taught how to do at school, except that he
pushed hard on a couple of the margins. His work was done entirely within
the bounds of conventional science. Only the results were new. He concluded
that excess power was observed when three conditions were met. The average
loading of deuterium in the palladium cathode was a ratio of about one, e.g.,
one atom of deuterium to one atom of palladium. The loading was held for a
long time, and then current was applied in excess of a threshold value.
Figure 14.2 confirms the anomalous power claim of Fleischmann and
Pons. What they had done in Utah was now replicated in an independent lab-
oratory in California using a different kind of cell and calorimeter. McKubre
continued this confirmatory experimental work for nearly eight years. During
194 va l i d at i o n

that time there was no criticism of his calorimetry practices directed at him or
published in the scientific literature.*

R. A. Oriani
McKubre’s results were not an isolated verification of the Fleischmann and
Pons phenomena. Richard A. Oriani is a professor emeritus at the University
of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His experiments were done in the summer of
1989.11
Oriani introduced the innovation of a cylindrical glass partition between
the palladium cathode at the center and the platinum anode wrapped against
the inside wall of the flask. This glass was perforated with fine holes that al-
lowed the electrolytic action to take place while separating the oxygen and hy-
drogen bubbles in order to ensure that any residual recombination was negli-
gible.
When you are looking for experimental validation, it is essential that a
common fault not reappear in different laboratories. It is of special impor-
tance that Oriani used a Seebeck-effect calorimeter. The Seebeck design sur-
rounds the cell with more than a thousand thermocouples (tiny metallic de-
vices that respond to temperature differences) connected electrically in series,
each of which registers temperature differences from inside to outside by gen-
erating a small voltage.
One advantage of this kind of calorimeter is that it is not affected by the
distribution of temperature inside the cell. That is, the measurement of heat
power was independent of the cell’s spatial temperature distribution. Calibra-
tion of the Seebeck measuring system was reported to be correct to within
plus or minus 0.3% or ±40 milliwatts, whichever was greater.
Figure 14.3 displays input net power against the Seebeck calorimeter’s
output voltage. Points that lay along the diagonal line record equal input and
output power, a normal condition for a control cell, and it means that the en-
ergy is fully accounted for. If the experimenter did his work well, quiescent
operation will lay at a point exactly on the diagonal line, thus providing a fine
control of the experiment.
The seven tiny “x” marks are visually located by the short, straight line
that points to each. They represent a run that used ordinary (light) water and,
as expected, they lay on the diagonal over the full range from a power level of a
few hundred milliwatts to nearly 18 watts.

* During these years, McKubre was funded by the EPRI. Their interest expired with the vast
changes in the electric utility industry’s regulatory environment in the mid-nineties. He and
his group continued to work in cold fusion under other sponsors, but with more diverse objec-
tives than measuring anomalous power.
 Validation 195

figure 14.3 Oriani, University of Minnesota, reported excess power in a heavy water/pal-
ladium cell (dots inside circles) that achieved 3.6 watts for 150 minutes (top circle), or 106
W/cm3.

If a point fell above or below the line, then one had either a serious error
or a scientific revolution. A point below the line would mean that energy was
somehow disappearing from the cell, and a point above the line would mean
that energy was somehow appearing in the cell. Either case was an apparent vi-
olation of energy conservation. Oriani reported that the many points above
the diagonal were a generation of excess power that cannot be accounted for:
the anomalous power of Fleischmann and Pons.
Two runs using heavy water are shown as a sequence of points on Figure
14.3. The more interesting one, indicated by a dot within a circle, displays
substantial amounts of power generation at various levels of input power.
Oriani considered the hypothetical possibility that the energy might have
come from chemical (storage) activity, and found that such activity would
196 va l i d at i o n

have produced a point below the diagonal while it was storing up the energy
that was to be released later. No such negative intervals were found.
The highest point reached during the run was held for 150 minutes and
signifies the generation of 3.6 watts ±0.2 watts of anomalous power in the
cell.* The calculated energy generated during that time was 32.4 kiloJoules.
The energy density was 106 watts/per cubic centimeter of palladium. Total
energy generated during the run was 200 kJ.
The size of the dots in the figure correspond to the amount of uncertainty
in dot location. Notice how the “x” marks which define control cell operation
are tight against the diagonal. Six of the excess heat’s open circle dots are well
separated from it. This separation demonstrates a good signal to noise ratio in
the data.

R. A. Huggins
Robert A. Huggins, professor of materials science at Stanford University,
started early with experiments designed to generate anomalous power. Like so
many others, his first work in 1989 was fraught with difficulties and these
were widely reported by the skeptics.
Like McKubre, Huggins was well qualified at the time of the Utah an-
nouncement. He was working with electrolytic cells to investigate the proper-
ties of solids, and hydrogen in palladium by using the metal as a membrane
through which hydrogen and lithium could pass. He also had available “glove
boxes” so that materials could be handled uncontaminated by the hydrogen in
the water vapor of the air. He used a metallurgical arc-melter device that was
immediately put to work purifying the only palladium they could get their
hands on, a quantity used in earlier work and thoroughly contaminated with
other material. His sample preparation was unique—multiple remelting in a
high purity argon gas environment to remove dissolved gasses from the palla-
dium.
While McKubre aimed at a high level of loading, Huggins tried a fine
grain structure in the palladium cathode. He achieved this by forming a round
ingot into a flat electrode by pounding on it with an instrument called a
hammer.
He took some time to move up the learning curve, as did other experi-
menters. His team did a number of experiments and was fully convinced that
something of interest was happening at least some of the time. He saw excess
heat in three of the first four cell runs. He was not put off by the failures in
other laboratories.

* This cell used a palladium cathode of 99.999% pure metal, and a solution of lithium deuter-
oxide with sulfuric acid (made with heavy water).
 Validation 197

His first calorimetry technique was to compare the performance of two

cells, one with heavy water and the other with light water. The measurements
were not good because of the multiple differences between the two systems.
Huggins thought he was seeing excess heat in the heavy water cell but it was
not a satisfactory approach.
A new cell and calorimeter design was ready by the fall of 1989. It was
delightfully simple in concept and execution.12 The principle on which it op-
erated can be seen by examining Figure 14.4. Huggins’s calorimeter used two
aluminum cylinders with the electrolytic cell located inside the inner cylinder.
The cell’s heat passed outward to the inner cylinder raising its temperature

figure 14.4 Huggins, Stanford University, used a calorimeter with two aluminum cylin-
ders to carry heat away from the cell.
198 va l i d at i o n

(T1). Then it passed through the K-Layer of alumina (aluminum oxide) to

the outer cylinder of temperature T2. Between the two cylinders, heat flow
followed Newton’s law of heat conduction in which the rate is proportional to
the temperature difference. (This was in contrast to the Fleischmann and Pons
calorimeter in which the heat escapes by radiation.) Once again, a different
kind of calorimeter was involved and one that required a different set of cali-
brations and calculations and, therefore, would not be subject to earlier error
sources.
Heat transmission could be readily calibrated and measured with this de-
sign. The outward flow of heat power was calibrated using three different
methods, and was precise to one half of one percent over the time and temper-
ature range of the experiment. The resulting amount of energy conveyed from
the cell to the outside air did not depend upon the distribution of temperature
within the cell or upon a need to stir the cell.
Another unique characteristic of the Huggins experiment was the appli-
cation of constant power, rather than constant current to the cell. This nice
fillip was accomplished by continuous computer regulation of the electrical
power source that operated the cell. The Huggins cell also treated the two
gases in an unusual manner. Above the electrolytic liquid was located a recom-
biner catalyst (the dark grey area in Figure 14.4) consisting of a platinum
mesh which causes the two gases to recombine into heavy water that dripped
back down into the electrolyte solution. Inadvertent recombination of the gas-
ses was thus not a concern.
Huggins’s results are seen in the Figure 14.5. Note that the left scale is
used for power (watts), temperature (C), and anomalous power (as a percent
of input power).13
The tracing of solid diamond shaped points marks the input power of ten
watts during the entire 120 minutes shown. There was a sudden temperature
rise of about six degrees after about one hour as shown by the open squares.
This rise was caused by a surge of anomalous power that is shown by the hol-
low diamond markers, and is read as percent on the left scale. The excess
power reached 56% of the input power, or about 5.6 watts maximum.
The calibration was determined to be accurate to ±0.5% at power levels
to 22 watts, cell temperatures to 60C, and over several weeks time.
While this data were ready for presentation at the first cold fusion confer-
ence the following spring (March 1990), it was too late for consideration by
the DOE Panel that had finished its work the previous November.

M. H. Miles
Melvin H. Miles was a research scientist at the Naval Weapons Center, China
Lake, California. His calorimeter also was different from those described pre-
 Validation 199

figure 14.5 Huggins reported anomalous power generation. Its value is read from the left
scale as power times 1/10 or as percent. The peak power is 5.6 watts or 56%.

viously.14 An inner cylinder of water collects the cell’s heat and releases it
through an insulator to a surrounding water bath. The cell does not need ei-
ther stirring or a thermometer. Temperature readings are taken from the inner
cylinder of water and from the bath.
His first tests were disappointing, and when he was contacted by the
DOE Panel he told them that he had not detected excess energy. He studied
200 va l i d at i o n

figure 14.6 Miles, Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, CA, reported generation of
anomalous power. “X” is excess power. It is expressed as output-power/input-power.

many different samples of palladium that had been processed in different ways
in order to select the best candidate for a cathode. By the end of 1989, when
he experienced some success in measuring excess power, he contacted the
Panel to inform them of this change of fortune but his calls were not returned.
In 1991 Miles’s cell design was conventional except that he sorted the pal-
ladium carefully. By doing so, he experienced a 50% rate of success in obtain-
ing excess heat. Electrolysis lasted for 26 days. He checked for possible recom-
bination of the gasses, and found that it did not happen to within an accuracy
of 1%.
Figure 14.6 shows his results in the solid black dots. On day eleven, the
power output is 30% greater than the power input. The estimated accuracy of
this power reading is ±20 mw or ±1% of the input power, whichever is
larger. Its average over 11 days was 14.5% excess power. The average excess
power was 140 milliwatts, and the total excess energy was 110 kiloJoules.
Miles stated that his excess power results for at least one of his runs was sig-
nificant at the 99.95% confidence level.

Y. Arata
Possibly the most ingenious of experiments in this field was accomplished be-
tween 1991 and 1994 by Yoshiaki Arata and Yue-Chang Zhang, both at
 Validation 201

figure 14.7 Arata, Osaka University, shows two versions of the the special double struc-
tured cathode he used. Its inside space holds palladium black, a powder form of palladium.

Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.15 Much of Dr. Arata’s experience was in high-
power plasmas and lasers. He was one of the first to develop powerful CO2
lasers. Professor Arata is an Academician of the Japan Academy, Recipient of
the Arthur Schawlow Award (1985), and recipient of the Emperor’s Award
(1997). A major building on the Osaka University campus is named in his
honor. But their results in cold fusion research did not come quickly. They ex-
perienced repeated failure before learning how to generate excess power. Arata
explained that “A long trial and error period of over two years was required be-
fore success was achieved.”16
Arata configured his cell with a “double structured” cathode, two varia-
tions of which are shown in Figure 14.7. Its shell is made of palladium, and
the inside holds palladium-black, an extremely fine powdered form of the
metal. The powdered palladium* can be seen inside the cathode which is
welded closed. About 3 to 5 grams of powder proved to be sufficient for the
production of hundreds of megaJoules of heat.
The cathode has a temperature sensor, sometimes a pressure gage, and a
connection to the negative terminal of the power source that runs the cell.

* The particle size is about 0.04 ±0.02 microns in diameter.

202 va l i d at i o n

figure 14.8 Arata shows power output as a function of input power. At 125 watts input
power, there is almost 250 watts of output power. This calculates to 125 watts of power gen-
erated by the experiment.

Placed in a vacuum chamber and out-gassed, the cylinder is sealed by means

of electron beam welding. Heavy water (and a lithium salt), and a platinum
anode complete the cell’s electrical circuit. Arata anticipated that the heat gen-
erating reaction would take place in the powdered palladium.
During electrolysis, deuterium (from the water) is deposited on the sur-
 Validation 203

face of the cathode, to take the form of single atoms or, possibly, single nuclei.
These pass through the wall of the cylinder to enter the interior space free of
contamination by other atomic elements. Only the three forms (isotopes) of
hydrogen can pass freely through palladium. The palladium black absorbs
the deuterium to a high concentration and generates excess heat. Arata was
the first to show that palladium black exposed to deuterium gas was highly
active.
Figure 14.8 shows the results of one of his experiments from the period
1992–1993. The interval A-B is the “incubation,” period during which no ex-
cess heat is generated. That also may be considered a “control” period. The
distribution of the dots shows the kind of signal obtained without excess heat
(Q* = 0).
After B, the power output increased from that zero line up to twice the
input power level showing the generation of 100% excess heat power. It gener-
ated more then 200 megaJoules of anomalous energy over 3,000 hours at an
average rate of 14 to 28 watts, and produced a maximum power generation of
125 watts, which lasted for several weeks.17 From Figure 14.8, it can be seen
that this set of data displays an excellent signal to noise ratio.
In a related experiment, two cells were connected electrically in series
with one using heavy water and the other using light water. Excess heat was
generated by the first and none by the second.18 Arata considers the data from
his hollow-cathode experiments to be 100% reproducible.

Electrochemistry
Planning of the experiments and the laboratory data collection and reduction
that are presented in this chapter was accomplished by researchers who were
chemists in all cases except for W. N. Hansen and Y. Arata. But Hansen had
spent two years doing electrochemistry in a post-doctoral fellowship where he
worked with Professor Heinz Gerischer, at the Technical University, Munich,
Germany. Arata emphasizes that two years of trial and error were necessary for
him. All of these scientists enjoyed considerable expertise in electrochemistry
and calorimetry. These were the relevant areas of expertise for exploration of
the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon.
My own acceptance of the reality of anomalous power came from reading
McKubre’s many reports supplemented by a visit to his laboratory where I
found him quite willing to show me whatever I asked to see and to answer at
length the most critical of questions. The person, the laboratory, and the re-
ports added to my present opinion that he was doing good science at SRI, and
that his results should be given serious consideration.
204 va l i d at i o n

Validation Summary
Our review of the most significant claim of the three Fleischmann and Pons
claims of March 1989 is now complete. The original claims of nuclear prod-
uct production were immature and, in at least one case, wrong. Although the
claim of deuterium-deuterium fusion was exciting, even more exciting, as well
as more important, was the claim for anomalous power along with its con-
comitant property—the lack of significant radiation. The scientific commu-
nity, led by nuclear physicists, was diligent in evaluating the evidence for neu-
tron particles but woefully lax when anomalous power needed evaluation. The
chemists, acting as a professional community, or acting as individuals in the
dress of independent referees, chose to play no role whatsoever in responding
to the Utah claims. The most surprising aspect of the entire episode was that
the scientific community concluded that the claims could be adjudicated in a
mere five weeks.
There is no overlooking the fact that the 1989 evaluation can best be
characterized as frenetic. The appalling turn that events took when ad homi-
nem arguments were introduced along with the concomitant and indefensible
shut down of communications with those working in the field constitutes an
historic blemish on the American scientific community.
Though major American corporations were not doing cold fusion re-
search, many were keeping a weather eye on its evolution. A senior engineer-
ing executive from a major international company gave a paper at the ICCF-5
conference in the spring of 1995. He reported the results of an informal sur-
vey carried out over the previous eighteen months. This overview included
substantive visits to several laboratories. The following quote from that report
expresses his view of the field: “The first [premise] is that the cold fusion effect
in its various forms is real. There exists sufficient experimental evidence at this
time that this issue no longer needs to be addressed. It is not justified to de-
vote additional resources to demonstrate the existence of the effect.”19 The “ef-
fect” referred to here is anomalous power. This quotation parallels the conclu-
sions reached by this writer at about the same time and constitutes a rational
response to the state of the art of cold fusion research at that time.
These seven corroborations prior to the end of 1994 are presented as sci-
entific validation of the announcement by Fleischmann and Pons of their ob-
servation of anomalous power in their electrolytic cell. In 1999, McKubre
summarized the evidence for excess heat, basing his views on many years of
cold fusion research.

The evidence in my view for the appearance of an anomalous unac-

counted excess heat in the deuterium-palladium system is essentially
overwhelming. There is something there. It is larger by more than
 Validation 205

s u m m at i o n
Validation by Independent Laboratories
After 1989, those willing to commit time to the field gradually brought forth
increasingly well designed experiments. The seven cases described in some detail
in this chapter plus two cases described in Chapters 1 and 4 offer confirmation
of Fleischmann and Pons’s claim to have observed anomalous power.
Dr. Edmund Storms collected reports of anomalous power corroboration in
March 1995, at the end of the first six years of cold fusion research.1 Each had
been reported in a published technical paper—an unusual protocol in science
where only the second occurrence was ordinarily needed to confirm a claim of
discovery. (The listed decimal number is the reported excess power maximum
value in watts.)
Researcher Year Country Max.power
Aoki (1994)2 Japan: 205.−
Appleby (1990)3 USA: 0.049
Bertalot (1991)4 Italy: 0.08
Bertalot (1992)5 Italy: 3.−
Bush (1991)6 USA: 6.0
Celani (1994)7 Italy: 05.0
Fleischmann (1990)8 Japan: 2.8
Gozzi (1991)9 Italy: 12.8
Guruswamy (1989)10 USA: 8.−
Hasegawa (1992)11 Japan: 0.5
Hugo (1994)12 USA: 23.−
Hutchinson (1990)13 USA: 3.−
Kainthla (1989)14 USA: 1.1
Lewis (1990)15 Sweden: 1.0
Okamoto (1993)16 Japan: 7.−
Ota (1993)17 Japan: 11.3
Storms (1992)18 USA: 7.5
Takahashi (1992)19 Japan: 130.−
Yang (1990)20 Taiwan: 12.9
Yun (1991)21 Korea: 0.24
Zhang (1990)22 China: 0.015
Experimental corroboration of anomalous power was now well advanced.
The variety of the experiments made any attempt to refute these reports a
daunting task as it must be done without exception. Such an undertaking would
only be meaningful if presented as a full-length report published in a peer-re-
viewed journal. The preponderance of experimental evidence was now in sup-
port of anomalous power because of its successful replication in many indepen-
dent laboratories.
1. Storms, Edmund, “Critical Review of the “Cold Fusion” Effect,” (preprint, 1993).
2. Aoki, T., Y. Kurata, and H. Ebihara, “Study of Concentration of Helium and Tritium
206 va l i d at i o n

in Electrolytic Cells with Excess Heat Generation,” (Trans. of Fusion Technology, vol.
26, no. 4T, pt 2), p. 214.
3. Appleby, A. John, J. Kim Young, Oliver J. Murphy, and Supramaniam Srinivasan,
“Anomalous Calorimetric Results During Long-Term Evolution of Deuterium on
Palladium from Alkaline Deuteroxide Electrolyte,” (First Annual ICCF-1, Nat. CF
Institute, SLC, Utah, 1990), p. 32.
4. Bertalot, L., L. Bettinali, F. De Marco, V. Violante, P. De Logu, T. Dikonimos
Makris, and A. La Barbera, “Analysis of Tritium and Heat Excess in Electrochemical
Cells with Pd Cathodes,” (S.I.F., “The Science of CF”, Proceedings ACCF-2, June 29,
1991, Como, Italy), p. 3.
5. Bertalot, L., F. De Marco, A. De Ninno, A. La Barbera, F. Scaramuzzi, V. Violanle,
and P. Zeppa, “Study of Deuterium Charging in Palladium by the Electrolysis of
Heavy Water: Search for Heat and Nuclear Ashes,” H. Ikegami, ed., (University
Academy Press, Frontiers of CF, 1993). p. 365.
6. Bush, Robert T., “Cold ‘Fusion’: The Transition Resonance Model Fits Data on Ex-
cess Heat, Predicts Optimal Trigger Points, and Suggests Nuclear Reaction Sce-
narios,” (Fusion Technology, 19, 1991). p. 313.
Eagleton, R. D., and R. T. Bush, “Calorimetric Experiments Supporting the Trans-
mission Resonance Model for CF,” (Fusion Technology, 20, 1991), p. 239.
7. Celani, F. A., A. Spallone, P. Tripoli, A. Nuvoli, A. Petrocchi, D. DiGioacchino, M.
Boutet, P.Marini, and V. Di Stefano, “High Power Microsecond Pulsed Electrolysis
for High Deuterium Loading in Pd Plates” (Trans. of Fusion Technology, vol. 26, no.
4T, pt.2), p. 127.
Celani, F., A. Spallone, P. Tripoli, and A. Nuvoli, “Measurements of Excess Heat
and Tritium During Self-Biased Pulsed Electrolysis of Pd-D2O,” H. Ikegami, ed.,
(University Academy Press, Frontiers of C.F., 1993), p. 93.
8. Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, Mark R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and Marvin
Hawkins, “Calorimetry of the Palladium—Deuterium—Heavy Water System” (Jour-
nal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 287, July 25, 1990), p. 293.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, and Marvin Hawkins, “Electrochemically In-
duced Nuclear Fusion of Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261-2A,
April 10, 1989), p. 301.
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Heat After Death,” (Trans. of Fusion Tech-
nology, vol. 26, no. 4T, pt.2), p. 87.
9. Gozzi, D., P. L. Cignini, M. Tomellini, S. Frullani, F. Garabaldi, F. Ghio, M. Jodice,
and G. M. Urciuoli, “Multicell Experiments for Searching Time-Related Events in
CF,” (Proc. ACCF-2, Como, Italy, June 29, 1991 The Science of CF, vol. 33, (T.
Bressani, E. Del Giudice, and G. Preparata, eds.), p. 21.
Gozzi, D., P. L. Cignini, L. Petrucci, M. Tomellini, and G. De Maria, “Evidences
for Associated Heat Generation and Nuclear Products Release in Pd Heavy-Water
Electrolysis,” (Il Nuovo Cimento, 103, 1990), p. 143.
Gozzi, D., R. Caputo, P. L. Cignini, M. Tomellini, G. Gigli, G. Balducci, E.
Cisbani, S. Frullani, F. Garabaldi, M. Jodice, and G. M. Urciuoli, “Helium-4 Quanti-
tative Measurements in the Gas Phase of CF Electrochemical Cells,” (EPRI, Proceed-
ings: ICCF-4, vol. I), p. 6-1.
10.Guruswamy, S. J. G. Byrne, J. Li, and M. E. Wadsworth;, “Metallurgical Aspects of
the Electrochemical Loading of Palladium with Deuterium,” (Workshop on CF Phe-
nomena, Santa Fe, NM, May 23, 1989).
11.Hasegewa, N., N. Hayakawa, Y. Tsuchida, and Y. Yamamoto, “Observations of Ex-
 Validation 207

cess Heat During Electrolysis of 1M LiOD in a Fuel Cell Type Closed Cell,” (EPRI,
Proc. ICCF-4, vol. I, December 6, 1993), p. 3-1.
Hasegawa, N., K. Kunimatsu, T. Ohi, and T. Terasawa, “Observation of Excess
Heat During Electrolysis of 1M LiOD in a Fuel Cell Type Closed Cell,” H. Ikegami,
ed., (Univ. Academy Press, Frontiers of CF, 1993), p. 377.
12.Hugo, Mark, “A Home CF Experiment,” (EPRI, Proceedings ICCF-4, vol. 2, De-
cember 12, 1993), p. 22-1.
13.Hutchinson, D. P., J. Bullock, C. A. Bennet, G. L. Powell, and R. K. Richards, “Ini-
tial Calorimetry Experiments in the Physics Division—ORNL,” (Oak Ridge Nat.
Lab, ORNL/TM-11356, May 1990).
14.Bockris, John O’M., N. J. C. Packham, et al., “Sporadic Observation of the
Fleischmann–Pons Heat Effect,” (Electrochemica Acta, vol. 34, no. 9, 1989), p. 1315.
15.Lewis, Derek; and Kurt Skold, “A Phenomenological Study of the Fleischmann–Pons
Effect,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 294, November 9, 1990), p. 275.
16.Okamoto, M., Y. Yoshinaga, M. Aida, and T. Kusunoki, “Excess Heat Generation
Voltage Deviation and Neutron Emission in D2O-LiOD Systems,” (Trans. of Fusion
Technology, vol. 26, no.4T, pt.2, 1994), p. 176.
17.Ota, K., H. Yoshitake, O. Yamazaki, M. Kuratsuka, K. Yamaki, K. Ando, Y. Iida, and
N. Kamiya, “Heat Measurement of Water Electrolysis Using Pd Cathode and the
Electrochemistry,” (Trans. of Fusion Technology, vol. 26, no. 4T, pt 2, 1994), p. 138.
18.Storms, Edmund, “Measurement of Excess Heat from a Pons-Fleischmann-Type
Electrolytic Cell Using Palladium Sheet,” (Fusion Technology, 23, 1993), p. 230.
Storms, Edmund, “Some Characteristics of Heat Production Using the “Cold Fu-
sion” Effect,” (Trans. of Fusion Technology, vol. 26, no. 4T, pt 2, 1994), p. 96.
19.Takahashi, A., T. Iida, T. Takeuchi, H. Miyamaru, and A. Mega, “Anomalous Excess
Heat by D2O/Pd Cell Under L-H Mode Electrolysis,” H. Ikegami, ed., (Universal
Academy Press, Frontiers of CF, 1993), p. 79.
Takahashi, Akito, “Nuclear Products by D2O/Pd Electrolysis and Multibody Fu-
sion,” (Elsevier, Proc Fourth Int ISEM Symposium on Nonlinear Phenomena in
Electromagnetic Fields, Nagoya, Japan 26, 1922, Supplement to vol. 3 of Int. J. of
Applied Electromagnetics in Materials).
20.Yang, C. -S., C. -Y. Liang, T. -P. Perng, L. -J. Yuan, C. -M. Wang, C. -C. Wang,
“Observation of Excess Heat and Tritium on Electrolysis of D2O,” (Proc. CF Symp.,
8th World Hydrogen Energy Conf., July 22, 1990), p. 95.
21.Yun, K-S., J-B. Ju, B-W. Cho, S-Y. Park, “Calorimetric Observation of heat Produc-
tion During Electrolysis of 0.1 M LiOD_D2O Solution,” (Journal of Electroanalytical
Chemistry, 306, 1991), p. 279.
22.Zhang, Z. L., B. Z. Yan, M. G. Wang, J. Gu, and F. Tan, “Calorimetric Observation
Combined with the Detection of Particle Emissions During the Electrolysis of Heavy
Water,” (Proc. Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium /Solid Systems, Provo, Utah,
October 22, 1990), p. 572.

one order of magnitude, in some cases by more than two orders of

magnitude, than the sum total of all possible chemical reactions.20

Our examination of excess heat claims during the years 1989 through
1994 is now complete. From this point forward our narrative will recognize
the existence of a new natural phenomenon, anomalous power. The science of
208 va l i d at i o n

anomalous power will mature as the many fundamental and unknown aspects
of it are gradually filled in over the years. These are obviously of an order that
requires the best minds and facilities for an indefinite period of time. It is not
reassuring that an understanding of the mechanism of superconduction re-
mained out of reach for forty-six years, from 1911 to 1957.
These first fourteen chapters have tried to explain and witness the genesis
and development of a scientific fact: the anomalous power phenomenon that is
exhibited in the Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment.
 c h a p t e r f i f t e e n

Posthumous Heat

T he fourteen preceding chapters are dedicated to the empirical evidence

for a field of science called cold fusion studies, and how it emerged and
developed during the years 1984 through 1994. With that purpose behind us,
the story from this point can range more broadly. This chapter and Part Four
following it, tell of the further aggregation of empirical evidence for excess
heat and the unrecognized or unknown nuclear reaction that powers it.
First, a number of different types of electrolytic cells will be briefly re-
viewed. Some experiments that follow operate at high levels of power. Finally,
there is the emergence in several laboratories of what I call posthumous heat,
heat generated after the electrolytic cell current is extinguished.
There were many types of electrolytic cells tried in the course of the first
ten years—-almost as many as there were research groups working in the field.
My account of the history so far has carefully limited itself to the Fleischmann
and Pons cell. It is now time to look at other designs.
A number of laboratories have claimed to detect excess energy in cells us-
ing light water for the electrolyte and using nickel rather than palladium for
the cathode. The status of this sub-field is summarized in a 1995 survey by
Dr. Edmund Storms: “Although most studies (with a nickel electrode) used
primitive calorimetric methods and open cells, proof-of-principle evidence for
excess energy production is sufficiently strong to warrant further study.”
Robert T. Bush and Robert Eagleton, both professors of physics, Califor-
nia State Polytechnic University, Pomona, California, have been working with
cold fusion electrolytic cells since the summer of 1989. With them, the gener-
ation of excess heat is a routine accomplishment of many years standing.1

209
210 va l i d at i o n

They use a potassium salt to make the light water into an electrolyte, and,
for a cathode, they use varieties of nickel, such as foil, screen, and mesh. They
achieve power gains of up to 1.40.
The purpose of their laboratory work is in support of R. Bush’s theoreti-
cal studies looking towards the source of the power
Mitchell R. Swartz, JET Energy Technology, Inc., Wellesley Hills, MA,
and MIT, has measured excess heat in nickel/light water electrolytic systems
for several years. One reported experiment in 1998, produced a power gain of
1.38 at its optimum operating point.2 He finds that excess heat does not occur
with cathodes of iron, aluminum, or platinum.
Swartz shows that nickel/light water systems have an optimal operating
point for excess heat generation. Increasing the cell current beyond that point
causes a falloff in power generation as does lowering the current. By operating
more optimally, the cell gives a more reproducible excess heat phenomenon.
He suggests that the failures to produce heat may be due to operation far out-
side the optimal operating range.
Most people are aware that electric current consists of the movement of
electrons in metals. A less well known type of electric circuit uses protons
moving in ceramic materials. Dr. T. Mizuno, Hokkaido University, and Dr.
Richard A. Oriani, University of Minnesota, have applied varying electrical
voltages to ceramic materials under the conditions of a high temperature
(250C) in a deuterium gas atmosphere.3 Mizuno prepared the ceramic sam-
ples* and supplied them to Oriani.4
The ceramic obtained its needed protons by absorption of deuterons
from the deuterium gas. The deuterium nucleus, a positively charged deu-
teron, may move through the ceramic from the positive to the negative termi-
nals as an electrical current. Both scientists claimed a measurement of excess
heat. The (generated) excess power measured is from ten to one hundred
times greater than the excitation power applied to the ceramic. Oriani also
found that the ceramic electrode in deuterium gas operating at a high temper-
ature spontaneously generated anomalous power, without concurrent electri-
cal excitation. That the electrical excitation was not needed was in keeping
with other cell designs using gaseous deuterium, and with the possibility that
in liquid cells the electrical current is used to load deuterium into the palla-
dium rather than to participate necessarily in the heat generating reaction.

L. C. Case
Leslie C. Case, Sc.D. MIT, has been practicing and teaching chemical engi-
neering for many decades. Much of his professional work involved the use of
* The preferred ceramics were of a perovskite type, SrCe0.9Y0.08Nb0.02O2.97.
 Posthumous Heat 211

catalysts to augment industrial chemical reactions. He became attentive to the

field of cold fusion studies when the episode broke open and was much influ-
enced in 1993 by the Yamaguchi experiment where helium and an enormous
amount of heat were reported in a vacuum bell jar5 by exposure of palla-
dium to deuterium gas. In his basement laboratory at Newfields, New Hamp-
shire, he explored by trial and error the available commercial catalysts for a
possible reaction with deuterium gas, and found a variety of promising candi-
dates.
Case traveled about central (formerly Eastern) Europe, until he found
that the nuclear laboratory at Charles University, Prague, was willing to work
with him to make the necessary nuclear measurements for his experiments.
He was granted an international patent in November 1997 for his experimen-
tal device. He authored an article at the ICCF-7 in Vancouver in April 1998
to explain what he had been up to for so many years.6 The professional scien-
tist who follows the given reference will be disappointed in what he finds.
Case is not functioning as a scientist in this endeavor, but as a development
engineer, which is what he is professionally. This referenced paper, which is all
we have of his solo work, is only a program manager’s progress report; it is not
a scientific paper.
Case’s experiment is quite simple. It consists of a metal canister of about
one liter capacity. In it he places a few 10s of grams of the selected catalyst
and, after cleaning it with several fills of hydrogen (H2), finally fills it with
deuterium [D2] gas at about three atmospheres pressure. It is heated to about
200C by means of an external electrical heater. Immediately after reaching
temperature the catalyst activates itself to begin the reaction process in which
additional heat is generated raising the temperature an additional ten or
twenty degrees.
Case has explored the reactions of a broad array of commercial catalysts
when exposed to deuterium gas at modest temperatures and pressures. Most
exhibit no reaction. Those that do have a reaction, offer a range of parameters
much narrower than is the case with chemical catalytic reactions. The gener-
ally successful catalyst is metallic and is supported on a “fluffy” carbon sub-
strate. He reports that the platinum series of precious metals work: platinum
(Pt), iridium (Ir), rhodium (Rh), and palladium (Pd). Ruthenium (Ru) has
not yet been tried. Of these, palladium seems to work best. It is present as
minute particles on the carbon support at about 0.4% by weight for best ac-
tivity. But the performance is sensitive to the amount of catalyst used; too
much or too little squelches the reaction.
In his laboratory practice, Case applies the same amount of heat to an
identical (second) flask that is loaded only with hydrogen (H2). He notes that
the temperature of the deuterium loaded canister moves higher than that of
the second flask to indicate the generation of excess heat when deuterium is
used. The level of generated anomalous power is estimated at 5 to 10 watts.
212 va l i d at i o n

Reproducibility is excellent at a level of about one success out of two attempts.

We will look at this experiment again in the next chapter for its nuclear
effects.
Most disciplines in science recognize that an experiment is validated
by reproducing it in another laboratory and involving other technicians.
McKubre, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, California, replicated the Arata ex-
periment from Osaka University, and the Case experiment from Newfields,
New Hampshire. The staff were in frequent consultation with both of the
original researchers throughout the experimental period, but all the work
done in McKubre’s laboratory was done by his people, Arata and Case not be-
ing present during that period.
Arata’s results (Chapter 14) proved sufficiently robust that his experiment
was selected for reproduction at SRI in 1998. He supplied two of his specially
designed cathodes and they were subjected to electrolysis, one in heavy and
the other in light water. For these instances, abundant excess heat was gener-
ated with heavy water, and no excess heat was generated with normal water.7
In particular, McKubre obtained 64 MJ (17.8 kiloWatt-hours) of excess heat
from the cathode provided by Arata when it was electrolyzed in D2O. Our
imagined 1,500 watt stove burner would run cherry red for eleven hours on
this amount of energy. The Arata experiment thus appears to be reproducible
in other laboratories.
McKubre duplicated the L. C. Case experiment using stainless steel flasks
of about one liter capacity.8 To two of these were added the carbon supported
palladium catalyst. One was filled with hydrogen (1H2) gas and the other with
deuterium (2D2) gas. They were heated to between 170 and 250 C and were
filled with gas at from one to three atmospheres (15 to 45 lbs/in2) of pressure.
Calorimetric measurements showed that the flask filled with deuterium gas
generated excess heat and the one filled with hydrogen gas did not.
The Case experiment to generate excess heat has been successfully oper-
ated at Charles University, Prague, and at the Cold Fusion Technology Labo-
ratory, Bow, New Hampshire, as well as at SRI International, Menlo Park,
California.

Higher Power and Temperatures

It is important to look at the high power levels a few experiments have
achieved. The part played by calorimeter errors changes dramatically as the
power level of operation moves higher. That is, the large temperature excur-
sions due to high levels of anomalous power were more easily measured. The
fact that excess heat was claimed at these higher levels was an important source
of corroboration for the reports that were presented in the previous chapter.
 Posthumous Heat 213

There we have seen that Arata reached excess heat output levels of 125 watts
in the experiment of Figure 14.8.
A principal task of Fleischmann and Pons at their laboratory in southern
France (1992–1995) was to achieve higher excess power levels than had been
seen earlier. They reported in 1993 on an experiment that ran for four weeks
in which the temperature was driven to boiling and the electrolyte was boiled
away in the last few minutes. They reported power levels, at temperatures near
the boiling point of water, of 140 watts excess sustained for several hours. The
power density in the cathode under these conditions was 3,700 watts per cu-
bic cm. of the palladium electrode,9 a power density greater than that experi-
enced in the fuel rods of a nuclear reactor. The generated power was reported
as four times greater than the input power.
Replication of this experiment was begun by Dr. G. Lonchampt at the
French Atomic Energy Commission facility at Grenoble, France, after Fleisch-
mann and Pons published their results. Lonchampt published his initial report
in 1996 saying “We confirm the results published by Fleischmann and Pons,
more particularly in the boiling regime.”10 This paper was primarily a confir-
mation of the heat measurement techniques. They affirmed the correct perfor-
mance of the calorimeter at the boiling temperature of water.
Successful accomplishment of this limited confirmation required two
years of scientific effort in a national laboratory and frequent consultation
with Dr. Pons, who provided the cathode.
Dr. Pons reported a 1996 experiment that operated at high power levels
with a new type of cell design, one that operated continuously with the elec-
trolyte liquid at the boiling point.11 The cell was a cylinder insulated to limit
heat loss. It had a lower section where the boiling takes place, and an upper
section that acts as a reflux condenser, where the steam condenses into water
and falls down into the lower section to be boiled again. One experiment that
ran for 158 days generated 294 megaJoules of energy. A power level of 100
watts excess was maintained for 32 days, and produced enough energy to run
our hypothetical stove burner (1,500 watts) for twenty-four hours.
One of the most enticing revelations in cold fusion research came from
the evidence for bursts of energy. Sources of possible error change radically for
a burst. Wilson, for example, mentions that their criticisms had little effect on
values associated with bursts.
The existence of bursts was first mentioned by Fleischmann and Pons at
the May 8, 1989, meeting of the Electrochemical Society in Los Angeles. Sev-
eral other researchers had introduced data showing power bursts at the Santa
Fe meeting held at the end of May, 1989. The DOE Panel virtually ignored
the topic.
In a preprint, “Our Calorimetric Measurements of the Pd/D System”
(March 1990), Fleischmann and Pons gave a quantitative measurement to a
214 va l i d at i o n

burst phenomenon.12 The particular burst they studied continued for 19 days
during which it generated 2.5 MJ. This amount can also be stated as 16
megaJoules for each cubic centimeter of cathode rod. The average power level
during the 19 days was 1.5 watts.

Heat After Death

In 1992, Fleischmann and Pons experienced a new aspect of their cell’s behav-
ior. Instead of replenishing the electrolyte level, they let the cell run dry. The
electrical current passing through it went to zero, of course, because the circuit
was broken (opened). One would expect the cell to become quiescent and the
generation of heat to become zero. With the use of ordinary light water, that
was precisely what happened. But when the electrolyte was made with heavy
water (D2O) then an interesting phenomenon took place as is shown in Figure
15.1. It can be seen that the cells remained at an high temperature for three
hours after the cell boiled dry.13 The Kel-F plastic support in the base of the
cell had partially melted, indicating temperatures above 300C. They refer to
this effect as “heat-after-death.”
Fleischmann and Pons’s measurement techniques throughout the experi-
ment give assurance that there was no storage of energy during the course of
the experiment to provide the heat-after-death energy release. The accuracy of
their calorimetric measurements was estimated to be about 2 to 3% at the cell
dry point. Apparently, within the Fleischmann and Pons cell there is a mode
of operation that permits the generation of excess heat without the need for a
source of electrochemical excitation. I refer to this mode as posthumous heat.
Tadahiko Mizuno, Dr. Engineering and Professor, Department of Nu-
clear System Engineering, Hokkaido University, Japan, spent eight months
building a closed electrolytic cell that had 1 cm thick stainless steel shell, a 1
cm thick Teflon lining, and was a little larger than a pineapple. It was designed
to sustain several hundred atmospheres of pressure at 150C. He used a large
cathode that was one cm in diameter and 10.5 cm long to be operated at 6
Amperes. The electrolyte was LiOD in heavy water of exceptional purity. The
cell’s operating cycle would be three weeks of electrolyzing and six weeks rest,
repeated twice.14
The experimental run of interest started on March 24, 1991, a Sunday,
when Mizuno brought the cell up to 75C by turning on an external heater
coil that used 60 watts from a stabilized power supply until turned off. The
electrolysis current provided 6 Amperes at 4 volts, or 24 watts, to raise the
temperature further to 100C. In three days the pressure stabilized at seven at-
mospheres indicating a cathode loading of 0.95 D/Pd. The action of interest
started two weeks later when, without intervention, the temperature slowly
 Posthumous Heat 215

figure 15.1 Fleischmann and Pons let this cell boil dry thus interrupting the current. It
continued to generate heat for three more hours. They refer to this effect as “heat after
death.”

rose from its quiescent value of 100C to between 105 and 110. On April 22, a
Monday, he turned off the electrolysis current leaving only the external heater
coil running. Three days later, on Thursday the 25th, he saw that the temper-
ature, rather than subsiding to 75C where the heater would hold it, it was at
90C and soon rose to 100C.
An assistant said, “Maybe this is the cold fusion effect that everyone is
talking about.” “It can’t be,” Mizuno replied, “the electrolysis current has been
turned off for three days. Even cold fusion doesn’t do that.” The cell was ex-
hibiting the behavior we call posthumous heat.
Mizuno turned off the external heater, but the next day, Friday, the tem-
216 va l i d at i o n

perature had not dropped. He put the cell in a bucket of water, and after an
hour its temperature had dropped to 60C. On Saturday, he came in to check
the cell and found the water had evaporated, the bucket empty, and the tem-
perature up to 80C. He found a larger bucket and put 15 liters of water in it
so as to completely submerge the cell. He checked three days later, on April
30, to find that this water had evaporated too.
Mizuno refilled the bucket with another 15 liters, and on each of the next
two days he added 5 liters to it. Four days later, on May 7, the water was half
gone and the temperature subsided to 35C. He calculates that from April 30
to May 7 the cell evaporated water to the tune of 8.2 × 107 Joules. That en-
ergy would keep our 1500 watt stove burner running on high for 15 hours.
This example of Mizuno’s is the only occasion in this book where we have
presented a limited type of experiment. The data was not sufficiently well doc-
umented to be published in a journal.
Giuliano Mengoli, Instituto di Polarografia, CNR, IPELP, Padova, Italy,
by operating his cells at 95C, responded to an earlier Fleischmann note that
higher temperatures facilitate the onset of anomalous power generation. He
operated the cell and its bath at that temperature initially to enable cell tem-
perature excursions above 95C allowing a measure of excess heat generation.15
His design was similar to Fleischmann’s, it being of similar size with a Dewar
cell and palladium sheet cathode in a heavy water electrolyte. One difference
was that Dr. Mengoli used an external source of gas bubbling through the cell
to assure adequate mixing when the current was set at values much lower than
those used by Fleischmann and Pons.
Figure 15.2 shows, partially, the result of one such run in 1995. The fig-
ure is labeled in watts of excess heat and in minutes from the point at which,
after five days of electrolysis, the current was reduced to 1.5 mA/cm2. After
about 45 minutes the current was switched off. The amount of generated (ex-
cess) heat then increased to a level of 0.82 watts, about double its earlier value.
The cell continued at that power level for 3.3 hours as shown in the figure,
and for an additional 24 hours that are not shown. During these 27.3 hours,
there was no electrical excitation applied to the cell. Furthermore, the excess
energy generation stopped only because the experiment was shut down by
turning off the thermostatic bath and letting it assume room temperature.
Dr. Mengoli reports one run in which the excess heat after current cut-off
continued without cell excitation for 150 hours.16
Dr. M. Miles, China Lake, CA, received an appointment to the New Hy-
drogen Energy (NHE) Laboratory, Sapporo, Japan, where he performed an
experiment that ran for 70 days, from December 1997 to February 1998. The
cathode for his cell was an alloy of 0.5% boron in palladium made at the Na-
val Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, especially for this purpose. The
 Posthumous Heat 217

figure 15.2 Mengoli observed his cell, operating at 95C, to continue to generate heat for
27 hours after the current circuit was interrupted.

data acquired during the run was thoroughly evaluated in a report published
by the NRL17 from which this summary is prepared.
The cell was allowed to run dry on day 69 to produce, afterwards, the
phenomenon of heat-after-death (or posthumous heat) that lasted for approxi-
mately one hour during which time the excess heat being generated by the cell
increased from 1 watt to approximately nine watts.18 Fleischmann and Pons,
Mizuno, Mengoli, and Miles all obtained a substantial increase of power after
excitation was turned-off. Oriani found that excess heat could be generated
from the start without electrical excitation.
This display of posthumous heat enables a more intuitive appreciation of
the Fleischmann and Pons phenomena. No longer is it necessary to subtract the
input from the output power to determine the amount of excess heat. The mea-
sured heat is all excess heat.
With this chapter, we end our devotion to anomalous power, the princi-
ple presenting symptom of an unknown nuclear reaction in solid matter.
From the beginning of this episode, some scientists, correctly convinced that
the excess heat announced by Fleischmann and Pons in March 1989, would
prove true, started to search for the nuclear products that must be produced
by that reaction, no matter what the nature of that reaction might be. Part
Four is committed to that purpose.
 Pa r t Fo u r

LOW-ENERGY
NUCLEAR REACTIONS:

NUCLEAR PRODUCTS
 c h a p t e r s i x t e e n

Helium-Four

T he object of the series of experiments presented in this chapter is to mea-

sure the correspondence between the amount of energy generated in a
cell and the consequent production of nuclear products, or ash, and in partic-
ular, helium as isotope four (He-4, or 4He).
Nothing in this book denigrates the need to search for the energy source
of the anomalous power phenomenon. Clearly, if a nuclear reaction generates
anomalous power, then some nuclear ash must form. Nuclear reactions occur
in discrete increments: for example, when two deuterium atoms merge into
one new atom, they form helium-four.* The number of atoms of helium cre-
ated during each second of time should be proportional to the amount of ex-
cess heat power being measured in the cell.
Park, Close, and Huizenga mistakenly demand that such evidence is nec-
essary to affirm the Utah claims for anomalous power. Why, then, does the
topic get postponed to this later chapter, it being such a basic part of our in-
terest? It is because inappropriate motives fed the demands of the skeptics who
wanted evidence for nuclear ash. They were angry at the two trespassers: Are
establishment physicists to be taught potentially new physics from the likes of
two chemists from a place called Utah? Also, the skeptics much wanted to
avoid the need to develop a working knowledge of electrochemistry and calo-
rimetry.
The skeptics also argued that if the claims were true three miracles were
required while, at the same time, they refused to enter the chemistry labora-

* The various forms for writing the isotope name are used for stylistic variation: helium-four,
He-4, 4He, 42He.

221
222 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

tory. They acted towards Fleischmann and Pons like an only child when the
new baby arrived. Their assertion of the need for miracles was only another
put-down of the new field of study, as was their use of the word “believers.”
Such statements were effective in distracting the professional chemist or physi-
cist from his duty to properly evaluate the anomalous power measurements.
Was the demand for evidence of nuclear products a means to evaluate the
heat claims? No, the heat claims would have to sustain themselves under thor-
ough examination. The expert in the calorimetry of electrochemistry experi-
ments must find no procedural error in the detection and measurement of the
heat flow.
The search for nuclear products, however, was the science that followed
indirectly from the claim. It was the science whose fulfilled purpose would
bring increased understanding to a well-measured observation. We report in
this chapter on the evidence for helium-four, and in the next chapter for tri-
tium and helium-three. I recommend to the interested scientist the 1995 book
by Nate Hoffman, A Dialog on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, as an exten-
sive text on the range of nuclear evidence and activity for the years 1989
through 1993.1
Those scientists who settled into early cold fusion studies explored the
cell’s presenting symptom of anomalous power and the difficulties experienced
in its replication. Other scientists, however, moved directly to the search for
the source of the energy. Some took the more conservative path and looked
for nuclear effects only during the production of heat, and others tried to cre-
ate nuclear effects more directly, i.e., by temperature cycling of deuterium
loaded titanium.
The practitioners of this nuclear research found themselves trying to do
in a few years the research that might well occupy a generation. Their pur-
poses were noble: they were trying to release the field from its bound of ghetto
walls. Their efforts proved marginal during the first six years.2 Nevertheless,
the search for the origin of the heat energy accomplished some good science
during those years. Even here, only a glimpse of what has been done can be
offered.
The search for products (nuclear ash) of an unknown process constitutes
a herculean task, but a search for helium (He) could be more focused.* In par-
ticular, the reaction

D + D → Helium-four + 23.8 MeV (as lattice heat)

conjectures a fusion reaction that is without neutron or gamma radiation. As

Huizenga points out, “One couldn’t wish for a more attractive source of fusion
* Helium is second in the table of elements, placed after hydrogen. It has two electrons orbiting
the nucleus and two protons in the nucleus. Helium-three has one neutron and helium-four
has two neutrons in the nucleus in addition to the protons.
 Helium-Four 223

energy, free from the normal much more copious sources of neutrons and tri-
tium.”3 The enormous amount of energy emitted by each fusion occurrence
of this sort would provide heat as the primary signature of the experiment. In
fact, if Fleischmann and Pons had looked for radiation instead of heat, they
most likely would have missed their claim of discovery. Clearly, if this were to
prove the correct reaction pathway, then anomalous power is the presenting
symptom of the phenomena.
First, a note about helium that we will need in this chapter. Air contains a
0.00000522 fraction (5.22 ppm) of helium-four which is always available to
contaminate an experiment. Helium-four (4He) has a mass of 4.0026 atomic
mass units (AMU),* but deuterium molecules, D2 (two atoms of deuterium),
have a weight of 4.0282 (AMU). These close values present a demanding sep-
aration requirement for the instrumentation. A high-resolution (quadrupole)
mass spectrometer is used to distinguish between the two values.†
Stanley Pons claimed to recognize that his cells were generating helium-
four (4He) as early as December 1988, a position based on his own limited ex-
periments.4 Pons and Hawkins had earlier informed two of their associates in
the chemistry department that they had used a mass spectrometer to analyze
the gasses and found in them substantial amounts of helium-four. On Mon-
day, April 17, 1989, he held a press conference to announce the measurement
of helium in the off-gasses from a cell that was generating 0.5 watts of excess
heat. Pons presented this as further evidence of a nuclear source for the excess
heat. Pons planned to make a scientific presentation of his limited helium data
at the Los Angeles meeting of the Electrochemical Society on May 8, 1989.
The hostility generated the previous week in Baltimore, however, precluded
any such casual sharing of information.
In the meantime, N. S. Lewis, at Caltech, had called to interrogate him as
to the exact procedures used. Lewis used an identical model spectrometer to
replicate the measurement and concluded that Pons had measured, not he-
lium from his cell, but helium from the air. It seems that the amount of he-
lium generated by 0.5 watts is not sufficient according to the above formula to
be measured by the particular spectrometer they both were using.5 Shortly
thereafter Fleischmann and Pons retracted their claim of helium measure-
ment.6 Pons never turned his attention again to finding gas-entrained helium.
Out of the Los Angeles meeting came a promise by Pons to check for he-
lium embedded in the body of the palladium cathode, a search which also ar-
rived at a null conclusion.‡ Pons provided electrolyzed cathode samples and

* Atomic mass units (amu) with hydrogen as 1 amu is a measure of the mass of a proton.
† In 1992, a quadrupole-mass spectrometer (ULVACIII-RESOM 2SM) became commercially
available. It was effective in providing sufficient resolution to separate helium-four from deute-
rium (both are gasses) in the effluent gas flowing out of cells that are generating anomalous
power.
‡ This episode of the cathodes analyzed by Johnson-Mathey is reviewed in Chapter 8, p. 105.
224 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

table 16.1 Summary of Round-Robin Helium-Four Analysisa

As Received Electrolyzed Factor
Laboratory (×1013 atoms) (×1013 atoms) Increase
#1 2.0 6.3 3.15
#2 1.25 7.0 5.60
#3 0.31 2.4 7.74
#4 0.37 & 0.35 1.5 4.32 & 4.57
#5 0.84 4.6 & 8.3 5.48 & 9.88
a. Worledge, David H., “Technical Status of Cold Fusion Results,” (The First Annual Con-
ference on Cold Fusion, March 1990, National Cold Fusion Institute, SLC, Utah), p. 252,
Table 4.
Morrey, John R., Marc W. Caffee, N. J. Hoffman, B. M. Oliver, et al., “Measurements of
Helium in Electrolyzed Palladium,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 18, December 1990), p. 659.

samples as received from the supplier to EPRI for evaluation. EPRI forwarded
the samples to ETEC/Rockwell in a double-blind test. ETEC/Rockwell dis-
tributed the samples to the laboratories and collected their analysis reports.
All the laboratories found an increase factor of 3 to 10 in the amount of
helium-four in the cathodes after they were electrolyzed. It is further reported
that this amount of helium corresponds approximately to the small amount
of anomalous power reported for the electrolyzed cathodes. The results are
shown in Table 16.1. The considerable helium-four present in the “as re-
ceived” material prevents further refinement of this interpretation of the data.
There are in chemistry many different kinds of electrolytes. Professor Bor
Yann Liaw, et al., of the University of Hawaii experimented in 1990 with mol-
ten salt electrolytes that were operated at about 400C. They had previously re-
ported excess heat seven times greater than the input excitation power. In two
active experiments, palladium electrodes were embedded in deuterium satu-
rated electrolytes.* Their corresponding control experiments used hydrogen in
place of deuterium. After electrolysis the experiments were analyzed for their
helium-three and helium-four content.7
The amount of helium-three in all active and control samples remained
almost constant throughout the analysis. This implied that those known nu-
clear reactions that generate helium-three or tritium were not active in this ex-
periment or were active below the sensitivity level of the instrumentation.
Slightly enriched helium-four in the deuterium saturated sample was de-
tected from all four specimens, of which one was fourteen standard deviations
above the background noise level in the measuring spectrometer, while those
saturated with hydrogen showed an opposite effect. On the basis of this
data, the enrichment of the palladium with helium-four was recognized as an
anomalous event—it was without scientific explanation.

* The electrolyte was a LiCl-KCl mixture saturated with with LiD.

 Helium-Four 225

Liaw postulates that most of the generated helium-four escaped with the
effluent deuterium gas. The suggestion is also offered that there is a remote
possibility of atmospheric contamination in this experiment based upon an
analysis of the experimental conditions.
A team of graduate students, led by Dr. Bockris in the Chemistry Depart-
ment, Texas A&M University, electrolyzed a palladium cathode for three
weeks in the Autumn 1991. The run was deliberately interrupted when mea-
surements showed it was generating tritium, and the cathode was rapidly
(within one second) removed from the cell and immersed in liquid nitrogen to
hold the cathode’s chemical condition unchanged for analysis. Later, the cath-
ode was quickly cut up into small pieces, packed in dry ice, and sent to
Rockwell International for analysis of its contents. In Table 16.2, the series of
pieces labeled “a” and “c” were cut from the surface of the cathode. The “b”
samples were from cuts made away from the surface, from the core of the sam-
ple, without any of the near surface material.
Table 16.2 shows the result of the analysis above a background value of
0.5 billion helium-four atoms measured during the mass spectrometer’s cali-
bration procedure using non-electrolyzed samples of palladium. This value is
subtracted from the actual measurements on each of the six samples.
Excess helium-four was observed in nine out of ten samples from elec-
trodes that produced tritium. No helium-four was observed above back-
ground in the non-electrolyzed palladium (not shown) from the same virgin
stock or in the platinum anode material.
This early work was inconclusive, but it is not without merit. It inspired
other scientists to search for helium products that might result from the gen-
eration of excess heat. These products or “ash” might be found either in the
effluent gasses or in the body of the palladium cathode.

table 16.2 Helium-4 in Electrolyzed Palladium Cathodesa

4
Sample Sample: mass/mg He/109 atoms
5a-1 30.92 3.8 ± 0.3
5a-2 39.70 166.8 ± 3.3
5a-3 42.37 3.4 ± 0.3
5a-4 20.22 2.1 ± 0.6
1b-1 27.79 1.9 ± 0.3
1b-2 30.01 2.5 ± 0.3
1b-3 23.85 0.4 ± 0.3
1b-4 33.05 1.7 ± 0.6
5c-1 44.63 1.9 ± 0.5
5c-2 30.40 −0.1 ± 0.5
Note: the average background value is 0.5 × 109 4He atoms.
a. Bockris, John O’M., et al., “On an Electrode Producing Massive Quantities of Tritium
and Helium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 338, 1992), pp. 189–212.
226 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

Heat Correlated Helium-Four

Dr. Benjamin F. Bush, Department of Chemistry, University of Texas, Austin,
Texas, applied in 1990 for a postdoctoral position at the China Lake Naval
Weapons Center. This led to conversations with Melvin H. Miles (at China
Lake) regarding cold fusion type experiments. A collaborative effort was initi-
ated in the fall of 1990 to accomplish the first formally structured experiment
for the detection of helium in the effluent gasses of a heat generating cell.
Benjamin Frederick Bush grew up in Sacramento, California, and at-
tended the University of California at Berkeley. “At Berkeley I took every labo-
ratory course possible. While the process of understanding was itself of inter-
est to me, I strove to master laboratory practice. I wanted to participate in the
adventure of the laboratory.” Bush received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1981
from Berkeley.
From there, he went to the University of Texas at Austin where he re-
ceived a Ph.D. degree in inorganic chemistry in 1988, and continued there
with post-doctoral work afterwards. He described his reaction to the Utah an-
nouncement.

The cold fusion announcement came within the next year and I was
hooked on its possibilities. I made contact with Dr. M. H. Miles at
the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, CA, during the summer of
1990 and discussions of collaboration began soon thereafter. By this
time Miles was successful at obtaining excess heat. He would run the
electrolysis, conduct the calorimetry, and collect the off-gasses. I
would provide the flasks ready to accept the gasses and arrange for
the mass spectrometer analysis of the resulting gas samples at the
University of Texas.8

After working successfully in tandem with the laboratory at China Lake,

he accepted a one year post-doctoral appointment there, later extended for a
second year, and joined it in February 1991, where he developed the all stain-
less steel gas handling system there that eventually produced fine data.
In the March of 1993, his two-year appointment at China Lake ended,
he moved to SRI International, Menlo Park, California, with a temporary,
post-doctoral appointment to work with Dr. McKubre.* At SRI, Bush set up

* Bush was invited to reproduce his heat vs. helium experiment under EPRI sponsorship. He
participated in a program intended to encourage and allow visiting scientists to reproduce re-
sults at SRI, and with SRI supervision, experiments successfully performed elsewhere. In some
cases, and this was the case with Dr. Bush, these scientists were paid a stipend to support living
expenses. In all cases, these appointments were of defined and limited duration to allow other
scientists to participate in the program.
 Helium-Four 227

the Seebeck calorimeter and all-metal, off-gas sampling system he had been
mastering. The first set of three data points showed helium-four generation
from heat generating cells at a rate commensurate with the release of energy
from deuterium-deuterium fusion.
Bush moved back to the chemistry department at Austin in early 1994
where he got his heat generating and gas collection instrumentation working
in about two years. He began getting new data in 1998 that supported the
earlier work by Bush and Miles at China Lake to demonstrate helium-four
entrained in the effluent gasses as the nuclear product of the Fleischmann and
Pons phenomena.
Melvin H. Miles was born in the small town of St. George, Utah, and was
raised as a member of the Mormon Church. He attended a two-year commu-
nity college, Dixie College, and graduated in 1957 as valedictorian of his class.
In a manner customary in those parts, he served as a church missionary for
two and one-half years in northern Germany. From there he went directly to
Brigham Young University and graduated in 1962, with a B.A. in chemistry
and a minor in mathematics. He did graduate work at the University of Utah
and received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1966 with a minor in physics.
He won a one-year NATO post-doctoral fellowship to work at the Techni-
cal University at Munich in electrochemical kinetics under Professor Heinz
Gerischer, a preeminent electrochemist.9
He joined the technical staff at the Navy laboratory in Corona, Califor-
nia, in January 1967, but when that was closed, he left the Navy to teach
at Middle Tennessee State University for nine years. He joined the Naval
Weapons Center laboratory at China Lake, California, in 1978 to work there
on electrochemical programs such as thermal batteries for missile applications.
When the announcement emerged from the University of Utah, Miles
was engaged in using the hydrogen in palladium system for reference elec-
trodes in electrolytic systems. From there, he was able to move quickly into
cold fusion experimentation on a part-time basis. But he found that the exper-
iment was not an easy one, even for someone with his experience with electro-
chemistry and hydrides. His first publication on this topic reported no excess
heat and was cited in the DOE Panel report of November 1989. More than
six months would pass before the first excess heat registered on his calorimeter.
Miles agreed with Bush that it would be worthwhile during 1990 to search
effluent gasses for the atomic products of heat generation and, in particular,
for helium. They recognized that other parties had already mentioned detect-
ing helium in the off-gasses from cold fusion experiments. But even more
compelling, helium is the nuclear reaction product of fusion thus helium may
be considered diagnostic of fusion.
Precious few product atoms are expected when compared with the volu-
minous bubbling off of the oxygen and deuterium gasses, with which they are
228 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

entrained. But helium is a noble gas—it does not combine with other ele-
ments; it does not have a chemistry. Various chemical traps can be designed to
remove other gasses coming from the cell and helium will remain as the survi-
vor. This helium is then transferred to a mass spectrometer where it can be
identified by its mass of 4.0026 AMU.
A plan was devised for the fall of 1990 wherein Miles would generate the
excess heat, do the required calorimetry, and collect the helium samples in
flasks provided by Bush (at Austin). (Miles also would look for x-rays, radia-
tion, and neutrons.) The flasks initially contained only boil-off gases from liq-
uid nitrogen, void of detectable helium. Miles would fill the flasks and Bush
would have them analyzed.10 The helium flasks would be shipped to Austin
and to independent laboratories for a blind measurement of the quantity of
helium; Bush did not know the heat generation associated with the helium
sample. In a somewhat more logically structured formulation, the experiment
was to correlate the presence of helium to the generation of excess heat. A con-
trol was provided by performing helium analysis on samples collected when
the generation of excess heat was zero.
Table 16.3 shows the results of eleven gas samples that were collected by
Miles when the calorimeter showed excess heat generation. These samples
from active cells were collected between October and December 1990. Experi-
ment 12/14/90-B was lost when its flask broke during shipment.11 By inadver-
tence 12/17/90-B was allowed to lose electrolyte until the electrodes were ex-
posed, thus permitting recombination to appear as excess heat, so it was
omitted from the analysis process. These two samples were not considered
meaningful for inclusion in the analysis.
Experiment 10/17/90-A showed too little excess heat to generate detect-
able amounts of helium and none was detected.
The designation Pex stands for excess heat in Watts, Pout/Pin is the power
increase factor of the cell.
Miles filled six flasks in January 1991 from experiments using palladium
and light water, a condition that never generates heat, these flasks served as
control samples. Testing of the gas in the flasks was done at the University of
Texas as before.
The designation of large (lge), medium (med), and small (sml) refers to
the amplitude of the waveform shown by the mass spectrometer which was al-
ways set to its maximum sensitivity for these measurements. The values of ex-
cess power were those measured during the time period when collecting the
gas. The measured amount of helium-four, column four, is displayed as the
number of helium atoms per 500 ml collection flask for the electrolysis gasses.
Six experimental runs of control cells in January 1991 (not shown) exhib-
ited no excess heat and also measured no helium. This result is strong indica-
tion that atmospheric helium was not a contaminant. In each case, those eight
 Helium-Four 229

table 16.3 Helium-4 Gas Entrained, Series-I

Period from 1990–1991a Revisedb in 1992
He-4 atoms/ He-4 atoms/
Sample date (mo/dy/yr) Pex (W) Pout/Pin 500 ml. 500 ml.
12/14/90-A 0.52 1.20 1014 lge 1015 lge
10/21/90-B 0.46 1.27 1014 lge 1015 lge
12/17/90-A 0.40 1.19 1013 med 1014 med
11/25/90-B 0.36 1.15 1014 lge 1015 lge
11/20/90-A 0.24 1.10 1013 med 1014 med
11/27/90-A 0.22 1.09 1014 lge 1015 lge
10/30/90-B 0.17 1.12 1012 sml 1013 sml
10/30/90-A 0.14 1.08 1012 sml 1013 sml
10/17/90-Ac 0.07 1.03 <1012 none <1013 none
12/14/90-Bd — — — —
12/17/90-Be 0.29 1.11 <1012 none <1013 none
a. Bush, B. F., Miles, M. H., G. S. Ostrom, and J. J. Lagowski, “Heat and Helium Produc-
tion in CF Experiments,” (Proc. ACCF-2, The Science of Cold Fusion, Como, Italy, 1991),
p. 366.
b. Miles, M. H., Bush, B. F., et al., “Anomalous Effects Involving Excess Power, Radiation,
and Helium Production During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathodes,” (Fusion Tech-
nology, vol. 25, July 1994), Table II, p. 481.
Miles, M. H., and B. F. Bush, “Search for Anomalous Effects Involving Excess Power and
Helium During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathodes,” (Frontiers of Cold Fusion,
ICCF-3, U. Academy Press, 1993) Table 2, p. 192.
c. While this experiment did show some excess heat, the level was insufficient to produce
helium above the minimum detection level of the spectrometer.
d. The collection flask for this experiment broke during shipment.
e. A calorimetric error is anticipated here due to low D2O solution levels that exposed the
electrodes to allow recombination of the gasses in the cell’s head-space.

flasks of gas were found to contain helium when the respective cell exhibited
excess heat. In summary, Table 16.3 shows eight instances of helium and heat,
and there were six instances of no heat and no helium.* These helium quanti-
ties were later revised (column five) to account for the effects of diffusion of
helium into the flasks.
It was ultimately necessary to measure the diffusion rate of atmospheric
helium into the 500 ml Pyrex flasks. While this study of helium diffusion was
of importance and permitted a reevaluation of the results in Series-I, it is not
presented here. It was found that helium from the air diffused into the glass
flasks at a measurable, but predictable and tolerable rate. In 1991–1992 Bush

* No helium-three was detected in any of either the active or control experiments.

230 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

and Miles found that the diffusion rate of airborne helium into the flask was
reduced by one-quarter if nitrogen in the flask was replaced by deuterium.
The outward diffusion of deuterium apparently hinders the inward diffusion
of helium. The diffusion rate was found to be linear within useful limits.
These studies of helium diffusion into Pyrex flasks now indicate that the
approximate amounts of helium observed for Series I was incorrect and that
the number of helium atoms per 500 ml should be increased by one order of
magnitude. The revised values for Series I are given in column five of Table
16.3. For these revised values, yielding 1015 helium atoms for each 500 ml of
released gasses, the rate of helium creation is 1011 to 1012 atoms of helium-four
per second per one watt of excess heat.12
At China Lake, Bush and Miles continued their collaboration but were
unable to reproduce the excess heat effect during much of 1991. Eventually, a
second series of experiments succeeded in producing a useful excess heat ef-
fect. These experiments (Series II) were run during December 1991 and Janu-
ary 1992, and precise helium analyses were performed by Rockwell Interna-
tional Corp. These are presented in more detail in Hoffman’s book starting on
page 176. He says of them, “No definite conclusions can be drawn concerning
these observational levels . . .” of helium-four. Hoffman did not have the cor-
responding anomalous power values. They were given to a third party and
held until the helium measurements were in. Hoffman was not in a position
to draw conclusions, but his measurements support the Bush and Miles reports.
The results are shown in Table 16.4. The number of helium atoms pro-
duced per second per watt of anomalous power is shown as 1.9 × 1011, 2.5 ×
1011, and 5.2 × 1011 atoms. These are to be compared with 2.6 × 1011 helium
atoms per watt value for the ordinary deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction
cited earlier. While the results of Series II are in the ballpark, so to speak, they
are limited to one decimal place by the excess power measurements. Successive
measurements of helium taken over a period of weeks allowed the rate of in-
diffusion of helium to be measured, so that back calculation to the helium in

table 16.4 Helium-4 Gas Entrained, Series-IIa

4 4
Sample date He atoms/ He per second per
and flask used Pexcess (W) Pout/Pin 500 ml watt excess heat
12/30/91-B/F5 0.100 1.08 1.34 × 1014 1.9 × 1011
12/30/91-B/F3 0.050 1.02 1.05 × 1014 2.5 × 1011
01/03/92-B/F4 0.020 1.01 0.97 × 1014 5.2 × 1011
a. Miles, M. H., Bush, B. F., et al., “Anomalous Effects Involving Excess Power, Radiation,
and Helium Production During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathodes,” (Fusion
Technology, vol. 25, July 1994), p. 478.
 Helium-Four 231

the flask at the time of collection (time zero) was possible. The study was de-
signed to define the in-diffusion rate of helium in the sampling flasks.
Although diffusion of helium into glass was under some control, obvi-
ously the experiment ought to give a starker result if glass were avoided. Bush
constructed metal flasks designed to preclude ingress of atmospheric helium
during the later part of 1992. After his appointment expired in March 1993,
Miles continued these experiments alone as Series III in mid-1993 and 1994
using Bush’s metal flasks rather than the Pyrex flasks of Series I and II.13
Five experiments that produced no measurable excess heat were used as
controls (they were palladium cathodes with D2O and LiOD electrolyte).
These yielded, for the level of background helium in their cell apparatus, gas
collection, and distributed helium-measuring system, a mean value of helium
for the five runs of 4.4 ±0.6 parts per billion (ppb) or 5.1 ±0.7 × 1013 atoms
per 500 ml of electrolytic gasses.
Seven experiments produced significant excess heat using Pd and Pd-Bo-
ron cathodes with heavy-water electrolyte. They produced the helium values
shown in Table 16.5, where they are correlated with the measured excess heat.
Column one gives the date of the experiment and shows the letter assigned to
the particular electrochemical cell. The right-hand column shows the calcu-
lated number of atoms of helium created per second of time per watt of excess
heat.
In summary, Bush and Miles completed two experimental series in 1990–
91, and 1991–92 using glass flasks, and Miles completed a third in 1993–94
at China Lake, while Bush completed a third at SRI, both using metal flasks.14
Though Bush and Miles worked cooperatively in the first two series, the

table 16.5 Helium-4 Gas Entrained, Series-III, (Miles)a

4 4
Sample date He(ppb) He/500 ml
and flask used in flask Pex (Watts) above bkgnd 4
He/sec per Watt
13
05/21/93-3/A 9.0 ±1.1 0.055 5.1 × 10 1.6 × 1011
05/21/93-4/B 9.7 ±1.1 0.040 5.8 × 1013 2.5 × 1011
05/30/93-1/C 7.4 ±1.1 0.040 3.3 × 1013 1.4 × 1011
05/30/93-2/D 6.7 ±1.1 0.060 2.4 × 1013 7.0 × 1010
07/07/93-1/A 5.4 ±1.5 0.030 1.0 × 1013 7.5 × 1010
09/13/94-2/A 7.9 ±1.7 0.070 3.9 × 1013 1.2 × 1011
09/13/94-3/B 9.4 ±1.8 0.120 5.6 × 1013 1.0 × 1011
Note: Background (bkgnd) is 5.1 ±0.7 × 1013 of 4He/500 ml.
a. Miles, M. H., B. F. Bush, “Heat and Helium Measurements in Deuterated Palladium,”
(Trans. Fusion Technology, 26 (1994) p. 159, Table III.
Miles, M. H., personal correspondence, June 6, 2001, providing data not previously pub-
lished for column four and for the 1994 experiments of the last two rows.
232 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

experimental work of operating the apparatus, performing the calorimetry

measurements, and collecting the electrolytic gasses into flasks was done by
Miles. Three laboratories were used to measure the gas samples: University of
Texas at Austin, Rockwell International at Los Angeles, and DOI, Bureau of
Mines, at Amarillo, Texas. All three sets of experiments gave helium produc-
tion rates for each cell that lay between 0.7 × 1011 and 1.0 × 1012 helium-
four atoms per second for each watt of excess heat being generated by the cell.
These values are to be compared with the theoretical value of 2.6 × 1011 he-
lium-four atoms per second for one watt of excess heat. Funding for this pro-
gram ended in 1995.
During the spring and summer of 1993 after he had arrived at the SRI
laboratory, Bush put together a version of the experiment which included for
the first time his own cell and calorimetry instrumentation as well as the gas
collection system.15 His calorimetry used the Seebeck method, a technique
used much earlier in the Oriani paper that was submitted to the journal Na-
ture in August 1989.
Bush used an all metal collection manifold and collection flasks. The re-
sults are shown in Figure 16.1 for the three samples analyzed. The vertical axis
is labeled in watts (energy per second) of excess heat being generated at the
moment of gas collection. The horizontal axis is calibrated in the number of

figure 16.1 Bush reported the energy level generated per each helium atom detected from
a cell exhibiting the excess heat phenomenon. The 4,410 seconds is the time required to
generate 500 ml of electrolytic gasses at a normalized electrolysis current of 525 mA.
 Helium-Four 233

helium atoms produced during the time period of 4,410 seconds required to
generate 500 ml of electrolytic gasses at a normalized current of 525 mA. The
two diagonal reference lines show where the data points would fall were the
heat and gas measurements perfect and each nuclear reaction produced a he-
lium atom while releasing either 4 MeV or 24 MeV respectively of heat.
Bush ran these three experiments in addition to a number of control runs
in the SRI laboratory. Some of the helium atoms, apparently, did not get out
of the cathodes and others did not get through the traps. This experimental
limitation gave a higher value for the ower per helium atom ratio than ex-
pected for the energy assigned to each of the measured helium atoms. Figure
16.1 is evidence that (1) Bush found and counted the nuclear products from
heat generation, and that (2) the source of the excess heat is a nuclear reaction
whose outcome is similar to that of deuterium-deuterium fusion with the re-
sultant energy release appearing as heat in the palladium lattice rather than as
a 23.8 MeV gamma ray as in two-body hot fusion reactions.
These same months of 1993 saw Miles, at China Lake, also working with
an all metal gas collecting system. In due course he gathered seven data points
from gas collected while generating excess heat. These points are shown on
Figure 16.2 (●), and they appear to be clustered about the 23.8 MeV per atom
of helium reference line.

figure 16.2 Miles reports ten data points to show correlation of helium-four with excess
heat at a rate of approximately 23.8 MeV per atom. These points are taken from Tables 16.4
(▲) and 16.5 (●). Power measurements limit the accuracy of these points to one significant
place.
234 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

So the nuclear product, demanded by the skeptics for so many years,

had at last been, at the least, tentatively found. In these instances, it was
not located inside the cathode rod, but was formed at the surface and was
entrained with the bubbles of deuterium and oxygen gasses leaving the cell.
Thus two experimenters working in separate laboratories obtained values of
helium-four generation commensurate with a nuclear reaction process of deu-
terium-deuterium fusion. Their results are best summed up in their own
words.

Three sets of heat and helium measurements have yielded similar re-
sults. Our first experiments (1990 to 1991) using Pyrex glass flasks
resulted in eight experiments that yielded heat and helium, and six
experiments that gave no excess power and no detectable helium.
Our second set of experiments (1991 to 1992) also used Pyrex glass
flasks and involved three experiments that produced excess power
and helium. Our final set of measurements (1993 to 1994) used
metal flasks. Six experiments produced no excess power and only
background levels of helium. Seven experiments yielded excess
power and helium production.
We report 18 experiments with excess power and elevated he-
lium levels, along with 12 experiments showing no excess power and
no excess helium. To our knowledge, there are no experimental er-
rors that can explain these results.16

The reports resulting from the several years of endeavor by Bush and
Miles were severely criticized by Steven E. Jones, professor of physics, and
Lee Hansen, professor of chemistry, BYU, in the Journal of Physical Chemis-
try,17 although the original papers were published elsewhere. The journal’s edi-
tor did not follow conventional protocol by placing Miles’s defense in the
same issue. Rather, after much pleading with the editor, it appeared three years
later.18
There is a sense of futility in this mention of the Jones criticism. Jones
does not allow that a record of anomalous power exists in the scientific litera-
ture. He must, a priori, find that helium is not a product of anomalous power
generation because (1) he is convinced that anomalous power does not exist in
cold fusion experiments, and (2) the evidence for anomalous power genera-
tion is far more extensive than the evidence for helium. These arguments criti-
cal of the helium-four measurements have been debated earlier, yet they are
presented in the referenced paper as though they had not been previously
mentioned. It would not serve any pedagogical purpose, therefore, to present
Jones’s arguments here in detail as was done earlier with Wilson’s critique. The
interested reader will have to resort to the referenced literature.
 Helium-Four 235

This writer agrees with Jones’s assessment that the Miles series of experi-
ments does not offer “compelling evidence.” But I disagree with Jones when
he asserts that the evidence is “far from compelling.” The evidence is strong—
strong enough to be intellectually and scientifically interesting. It is suf-
ficiently so that one wants to see this experiment continued (1) in an inte-
grated laboratory with the necessary instrumentation at hand, (2) at anoma-
lous power levels an order of magnitude higher, and (3) with a much larger
power out to power in ratio. The posthumous heat mode of the previous
chapter might provide this requirement nicely.
The record shows that there were several suggestions before the fall of
1990 that helium had been detected in the cell’s off-gasses. Such claims would
continue during the ensuing years to come from increasingly well-designed
experiments to detect the presence of helium created in the cell. The Bush and
Miles three part series presented above, dedicated as it was to the quantitative
and timely correlation of helium and heat, is a major advancement over what
preceded and inspired it. The several experimental runs that detected helium
from a heat producing cell, and the several that could not detect helium
from cells that were not producing heat, taken together, were a scientifically
significant set of measurements. The quantitative correlation between heat
and helium, such as it was, identified the nuclear reaction pathway as some
new variation—presumably a collective and coherent variation—of nuclear
fusion.

Experiment Transport
The review of scientific methodology in Chapters 10–12 concluded that the
most common type of scientific confirmation for an experimental result was
that it could be reproduced in a different laboratory and with different techni-
cians from those of the laboratory where it was first accomplished. We look in
this section for the characteristic of interesting experiments to produce their
expected result when performed in a new setting.
Among first examples of an attempt to transport an experiment will be
the Arata experiment presented in the previous chapter. We will look at how it
fared when moved from Arata’s laboratory at Osaka University, Osaka, Japan,
to McKubre’s laboratory at SRI International, Menlo Park, California.
The SRI International relationship with EPRI had ended by 1998 and a
series of new sources of funding for the laboratory took its place. All of these
involved a wider variety of scientific activity, but all of it within the scope of
cold fusion research. McKubre’s laboratory evolved into a laboratory that du-
plicated the work of other laboratories so as to validate their experiments as
scientifically corroborated procedures. They attempted to replicate the results
236 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

of the Miles, Bush, Arata, Case and other experiments. One larger purpose
was to further correlate anomalous power with helium production.
McKubre designed a series of experiments to accomplish this purpose.
Seebeck type calorimetry was adopted, but the cells were now closed to the at-
mosphere to avoid possible atmospheric helium contamination. The off-gasses
were recombined inside the cell into water that was returned to the electrolyte,
but provision was made to collect gas from the head space over the electrolyte.
The cells were made of metal, as was the collection system.
Three runs were accomplished in the fall of 1998 with cells that were
generating a statistically significant level of excess heat. The number of helium
atoms produced, however, amounted to only 76% of what would be expected
if 23.8 MeV of heat energy were given off for each helium atom created.19
Three other runs that demonstrated excess heat gave marginal readings of the
quantity of helium as did several control runs. McKubre interpreted the he-
lium results (in the presence of excess heat) as indicative of a delayed release of
helium to the off-gas in the head space. In a later series of experiments, he
found that this was indeed the case. He tentatively confirmed the Bush-Miles
relation of helium and heat, but it is clear that much work remains to be done
if this correlation is to be firmly established.
During this same period, researchers in Japan, the U.S., and Italy were
also measuring helium-four in the effluent gasses of experiments that were
generating excess heat. Their experimental results will be presented as it was
accomplished in their own laboratory. Following that, we will look at the de-
gree of success achieved in McKubre’s effort to replicate their results in his lab-
oratory at Menlo Park, California.
Recall that Arata’s double structured cathode produced hundreds of
megaJoules of excess heat (see Figure 14.7). The hollow cathode is filled with
palladium powder of 0.04 micron particle size and welded closed under high
vacuum. When it is submitted to electrolysis, deuterium diffuses through the
wall of the cathode and enters into its interior space to achieve a considerable
pressure. The excess heat reported in previous chapters is generated in the pal-
ladium particles located there.
The necessary quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS) instrument was
available in Arata’s laboratory and was dedicated to the experiment. He re-
ported that the helium produced in the Pd particles mostly remained locked
within the lattice. Only a small fraction of the helium produced entered the
gaseous state directly during the course of the experiment. This is in contrast
to the work of Miles and Bush, where helium was apparently generated on the
surface of the cathode and more than half of it released into the gas-stream
effluent. This different result may be explained intuitively by noting that the
helium produced in the inner cathode space was physically separate from the
gasses boiling off from the cathode’s outer surface. Also, diffusion of helium
 Helium-Four 237

figure 16.3 Arata shows the presence as well as the separation of He-4 and D2 in a
quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS).

out of the cathode would be a slow process compared with the diffusion of
deuterium into the cathode.
After the experimental run was complete, the cathode was carefully
opened. The palladium powder was removed from the cathode and baked in a
vacuum at temperatures as high as 1000C to force the helium out of the palla-
dium lattice.
The QMS generated graph shown in Figure 16.3 gives evidence of the
presence of helium-four (three cycles of output reading are displayed).* The
two peaks (for each cycle of the QMS) are due to the presence of helium and
residual deuterium residing cheek by jowl, helium at 4.0026 and deuterium at
4.028 amu.20 The dip in the tracing between the peaks shows how well these
two values can be separated in the QMS instrument.
While “much helium-four” was found, there was no evidence of either
helium-three or tritium being also present.
The scientists in Italy had moved quickly into cold fusion studies in the

* The QMS repeats the waveform continuously on the strip-chart. In the figure, three successive
and somewhat overlapping scans of the QMS are shown.
238 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

spring of 1989, led by Dr. Scaramuzzi. Since then several groups have been
doing research while others were involved in entrepreneurial activity. The sec-
ond “annual” Cold Fusion Conference was held at Como, Italy, in June 1991,
and ICCF-8 was held in Lerici, Italy, in May 2000, a reflection of Italy’s com-
mitment and contribution to this field of research.
Dr. D. Gozzi, Department of Chemistry, University of Rome, captured
helium-four that is entrained in the gasses from a cell which is generating ex-
cess power. His purpose was similar to that of Miles and Bush. He first learned
to achieve the generation of anomalous power in 1989. His line of experi-
ments began in 1991 and continued into 1997.21 He begins with a rather con-
ventional cell and calorimeter, but the effluent gasses need to be rather elabo-
rately treated. After getting rid of the preponderance of other gasses, the
remainder was stored temporarily. Later, in a mass spectrometer, where the he-
lium-four and the residual deuterium were resolved, he detected and measured
helium.
His first experiments indicated helium gas present in large amounts, but
they were flawed by air leakage which he detected by monitoring for the pres-
ence of neon-20.* He then rebuilt the experiment in such a way that new tests
showed the elimination of any significant air leakage. This second round of
experiments also showed relatively large amounts of helium. But his attempt
to correlate heat generation with helium detection was marred by inadequate
flushing of the gas system at the start of the experiment. Gozzi later did a set
of flushing exercises and retroactively applied the results to his collected data.
The result was clear, though not overwhelming, evidence that helium in
amounts corresponding to the measured heat was produced in synchronism
with the heat generation after the effects of residual gases were subtracted
from the previously collected data.
He planned a third round of experiments that would use an advanced gas
flushing protocol, an integral mass spectrometer, and would have monitored
neon++ (rather than neon+) for air leakage so that all readings would fall
within one expanded spectrometer scan.† Unfortunately in 1997, his funding
ended.
Dr. Tullio Bressani, professor of physics, Department of Experimental
Physics, University of Torino, Torino, Italy, took his own direction in the
field. He picked up on the electromigration work of Alfred Cöhn (1929) that
was described in Chapter 2, p. 33. A thin palladium ribbon an inch wide and

* This is the element neon of atomic weight 20. Neon is a well-recognized constituent of air.
Monitoring for it provides a check on possible leakage of air into the experimental system.
† Questions of calibration become simpler to resolve if the values of interest lie within one scale
range of the mass spectrometer. By doubly ionizing the neon atoms, they will respond as if
their mass weight were ten rather than twenty. The values of 4 (helium) and 10 (neon x 12) can
be fit on one scale of the mass spectrometer.
 Helium-Four 239

eight inches long was loaded with deuterium gas. It was then placed in an
atmosphere of deuterium gas while a voltage was applied between the ends of
the ribbon. The Cöhn effect was used in this manner to achieve a high deute-
rium loading into the palladium.22
In Figure 16.4, the upper tracing shows the presence of deuterium at
4.0282 (amu) mass in a control sample taken just before the experiment.
There is no trace of helium at 4.0026 amu to the left of the deuterium peak.
This peak at 4.0026 (amu) (see the lower tracing) demonstrated the cre-
ation of 5⫻1018 atoms of helium-four during the experiment. The helium
peak appears after the experiment had run its course. It constitutes strong
evidence of nuclear processes at work in the palladium ribbon. There is no
assumption here that the purported helium atoms came from a deuterium-
deuterium fusion reaction. A reaction that created alpha particles (ionized
helium), for example, would also have resulted in a corresponding prolifera-
tion of helium-four atoms.
McKubre was also interested in devising his own search for heat and nu-
clear product correlation.23 In 1998 he designed an experiment following the
electrolytic loading and mass flow calorimetry of his earlier work.24 His cath-
ode now became a wire rather than a rod and the cell was closed. This set of
experimental runs was in their essence replications of earlier ones, but were
done with sealed systems.*
Eighty-two kiloJoules of excess heat were generated in one experimental
run, but the sample of gas taken out of the head space had a quantity of he-
lium only 62% of the amount needed to match the calculated deuterium-deu-
terium fusion energy release of 23.8 MeV per reaction. It was concluded that
some of the helium generated was sequestered in the palladium cathode,
which was then subjected to 200 hours of polarity cycling† to dislodge any re-
tained helium. Two more samples of gas were analyzed and used to calculate
all the helium involved in the experiment. The resulting value of the produc-
tion of helium in the experiment was 104 ±10% of the number anticipated
by a deuterium plus deuterium fusion reaction.

L.C. Case Experiment

The Case experiment that displayed excess heat as discussed in the previous
chapter was also examined for nuclear products.25 To review, it consists of a
canister in which are placed 10 or 20 grams of the catalyst, a fibrous carbon

* In this instance, his system was no longer isothermal as in his earlier experiments.
† Polarity cycling involves repeatedly reversing the power connection to the electrodes so as to
excite the surface of the cathode.
240 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 16.4 Bressani reported the generation of He in Pd ribbon. Upper tracing was
taken before the experimental run; lower is after. The fine vertical lines mark He at 4.0026
amu. and D2 at 4.028 amu.
 Helium-Four 241

base with 0.4% metallic palladium embedded in it. The canister is pressurized
to about three atmospheres (45 lbs/in2) with deuterium gas.
The canister is warmed to about 200C with an external heater. A mass
spectrometer records the level of helium-four atom concentration inside the
canister during the month or so experimental run. Case reports that helium is
produced in the experiment, but that result has not been published.
The laboratory work done by Case over the past ten years has been of the
limited form of experiment discussed in Chapter 4, p. 53. He is not interested
in publishing papers, but merely in constructing operating devices and getting
rich. We must wait until his work is confirmed in other laboratories that do
more formal work and publish it. But at least one careful and well equipped
experimenter, using catalyst samples that had previously been used success-
fully, failed to get any response out of the palladium-carbon catalyst in deute-
rium gas.26
Case allows that the nuclear process might be a catalyzed deuterium
plus deuterium fusion reaction to produce helium-four plus 23.8 MeV of en-
ergy transferred to the lattice as heat. Case speaks of this reaction hypothesis
in properly tentative language. Measurements in the nuclear laboratory at
Charles University, Prague, showed no evidence of tritium, fast neutron, or
gamma ray generation, only helium was detected. Thus the more common
deuterium-deuterium reactions are not candidates.
Case was careful to work only with catalysts available from commercial
suppliers. The particular catalyst used in his experiments can be purchased in
55 gallon drums. If the energy producing reaction were as presented above,
the fuel cost may be estimated as one one-hundredth that of coal. Large
amounts of catalyst would be needed because the heat for each pound of cata-
lyst is low. That is, the heat generation comes at a power density that is disap-
pointingly small.
The Case experimental results as reproduced by McKubre at his SRI lab-
oratory are shown in Figure 16.5.27 The dashed line in the figure shows the
level of helium in the atmosphere at standard pressure, 5.22 ppm.
The figure depicts evidence of a nuclear reaction within the experimental
canister. The tracing shows an increase of helium beginning at about day four.
The helium level reaches the level that would occur if air were leaking into the
pressurized system on day seven. At 19 days, the level of helium in the canister
exceeded that in the air outside the canister. At 28 days the level of helium-
four reached 11.50 ppm. Identical control experiments using hydrogen did
not produce helium. This experiment using deuterium gas has been per-
formed several times at SRI, sometimes producing nothing and sometimes
producing similar levels of helium. It appears that the helium can have come
only from a nuclear reaction within the canister. This experiment also shows
that the Case experiment is reproducible by other scientists in other labora-
tories.
242 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 16.5 The Case experiment at McKubre’s laboratory showed helium-four genera-
tion at eleven parts per million in 28 days, then decreasing at about the same rate.

At 28 days, an anomaly appeared in the data. The level of helium-four

abruptly began to decrease. It continued to do so at several different rates until
day 45 at which date the experiment was terminated. The reason for the
abrupt change from a positive slope to a negative slope has not been ex-
plained. Overall, however, McKubre estimates that the carbon base of the cat-
alyst, operating at 200C, ultimately absorbs the generated helium.
Evidence accumulating from Bush, Miles, Arata, Gozzi, McKubre, Bres-
sani, and Case points to the source of excess heat as a nuclear reaction that
results in the creation of helium-four and heat energy. The energy released
for each helium-four atom is approximately 24 MeV. The presence of that
amount of heat implies a nuclear source that is able to pass its energy as heat
to its surroundings in the lattice.
Figure 16.6 shows the history of groups involved in this line of research.
The vertical dashed line marks the date when a portable mass spectrometer in-
strument became available that could separate the nearly identical mass values
of one atom of helium-four from one molecule (two atoms) of deuterium.28
Seven laboratories have reported helium-four gas that corresponds in
some degree to the quantity and time of anomalous heat generation. In this
fashion, cold fusion research has moved forward the work of searching out the
energy source. One can only hope that these experiments will be continued
with their task of quantitatively correlating generated heat and nuclear ash.
From the evidence for helium-four, collected in these Bush-Miles experi-
 Helium-Four 243

figure 16.6 A listing of those scientists who search for evidence of helium-four atoms cre-
ated by the reaction used to generate excess heat. The vertical dashed line marks when the
portable QMS became available. The triangles indicate cooperative efforts. Drawing by the
author, after Bressani.

ments followed by those in other, separate, laboratories, it may reasonably be

concluded that helium-four is an established candidate for the sole nuclear
product that accompanies heat generation.
The reaction of interest cannot be the two-bodied fusion as known by
hot fusion physicists because that reaction generates lethal radiation and fast
neutron particles that are not present in cold fusion experiments. It cannot be
the reaction of muon-induced (catalyzed) fusion,* because that reaction also
generates strong radiation not present in cold fusion data. Several theorists
have suggested that the process might be the result of a multi-body or lattice-
coherent reaction, one that brings together an ensemble of particles into the
reaction process.

* Muon-induced fusion is a scientific effect that is not a basis for commercial power production.
244 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

The field of cold fusion research has now approached the criteria called
out by Frank Close: the proof of test-tube fusion would occur when its prod-
ucts turned up in amounts corresponding to the excess heat.29 At this remove,
the techniques and the direction of this research seem clear and worthwhile.
Miles’s funding ended in 1995 and Gozzi’s in 1997. One can only hope that
other funding will continue, and look forward to the time when a laboratory
dedicated to this goal can be established.
The difficulty in resolving the relationship between excess heat and the
production of helium-four relates directly to the difficulty of establishing such
a laboratory. It would necessarily involve real-time collection of the effluent
gasses, system capacity for 100 watt operation of multiple cells with their cor-
responding calorimetry requirements, and the availability of a variety of QMS
instruments as illustrated by the referenced literature, along with support fa-
cilities and technicians. There is no question of two points: (1) the phenome-
non of anomalous power remains the presenting and identifying characteristic
of this field, and (2) the pursuit of the nuclear reaction product can bring sub-
stantial intellectual rewards.
Those who are concerned with environmental issues may find these re-
sults alarming as they may undermine efforts to restrict individual access to
energy for discretionary use. Most environmentalists, recognizing the inher-
ently benign character of this energy source, will applaud these achievements.
Hot fusion gets a 23.8 MeV gamma ray with each helium-four atom, but
easily measured gamma rays are not seen. With cold fusion experiments a sim-
ilar amount of energy, 23.8 MeV per helium atom is released, but that energy
appears as heat not as gamma rays. This implies that a different physics results
in the reaction when it takes place within a certain kind of lattice structure.
In hot fusion the ratio of both tritium and neutrons to helium-four is
about 5 million. Hence, the next two chapters examine evidence for these im-
portant deuterium fusion products.
 c h a p t e r s e v e n t e e n

Tritium and
Helium-Three

T he government has a special interest in tritium, the heaviest isotope of hy-

drogen, because of its use in nuclear weapons. It is a radioactive gas that
has one proton and two neutrons in the nucleus and a half-life of 12.3 years.
When it decays, it emits a beta particle to become helium-three. Because of its
short half-life, tritium does not appear in high concentrations in nature. Its
production in an experiment is important because that is proof that a nuclear
process occurred.
Dr. Bockris counted 147 papers by the end of 1994 that claimed genera-
tion of tritium in a Fleischmann and Pons type of cell. Six years later, at about
the time of ICCF-8 in the early summer of 2000, the frontier of cold fusion
research had moved from the detection of helium-four, as illustrated in Chap-
ter 16, to the measurement of helium-three not only as the stable product of
the decay of tritium but also as a product of the nuclear reaction of interest.
This change is important because, unlike helium-four, helium-three is a rare
substance in the atmosphere with a ratio to helium-four of about one to one-
million. Its emergence in an experiment in a different ratio would indicate nu-
clear activity as distinguished from atmospheric contamination. Its detection
also might help to identify a particular nuclear reaction. Helium-three is mea-
sured in a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS) in a manner like that used
for the measurement of helium-four. Because helium-three has an atomic
weight close to DH (a deuterium with hydrogen molecule), the QMS must
be able to distinguish them from one another if the helium-three is to be
identified.

245
246 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

Tritium
Tritium is detected by placing a sample in a scintillation (flashes of light)
counter that measures its radioactivity as the number of disintegrations per
minute for one milliliter (cm3) of the sample (DPM/ml). The tritium atom
can substitute for a hydrogen atom in water, forming HTO or tritiated water.
It appears as a contaminant in heavy water and in deuterium gas, both of
which are used in cold fusion experiments. As a contaminant, tritium tends to
build up over the days and weeks of cell operation, a phenomenon called en-
richment.
Dr. Carol Talcott Storms worked with tritium measurements at the Los
Alamos Scientific Laboratory for many years prior to the Utah announce-
ment. She was intimately familiar with the methods necessary to obtain accu-
rate, contamination free, readings.* Dr. Edmund Storms, her husband, moved
into cold fusion experimentation immediately after the Utah announcement.
By summer of that year the two scientists had dozens of electrolytic cells run-
ning and were testing them for tritium activity.1
One cell produced tritium as shown in Figure 17.1, where two data sets
are displayed. The one designated with squares, run number 70, depicts the
output of a cell that did not generate tritium, but did have the tritium nor-
mally present in the electrolytic solution as a contaminate. The vertical axis is
scaled to discount that artifact. It depicts the ratio of tritium activity in cell
number 73 to the residual (background) level of activity in cell number 70.
Tritium generation for run 73 started on day three, and rose rapidly to
reach a peak at 25 days when the electrolyte tritium level was 380 DPM/ml.
This level indicates an amount greater than the sum of the tritium contained
in the initial D2O, its daily replenishment, plus that lost to the effluent gas.
My critique of Figure 17.1 is that the curve may be inappropriately drawn
with too much detail, but the data points themselves are of interest. This work
was finished in the fall of 1989, and the results were available early in 1990.
Other tritium generation experiments were underway at Texas A&M,
College Station, Texas, at about the same time. Dr. John O’M. Bockris, distin-
guished professor of chemistry, promptly entered the cold fusion fray in 1989.
His principal doctoral student in this work was Nigel Packham.
Bockris reported on the performance of one type of cell. It was tested for
tritium content from September 11 until October 19, 1989.2 In Figure 17.2,
the vertical axis indicates the amount of tritium activity. The solid tracing
shows the quantity of tritium activity present in the electrolyte solution, and

* At Los Alamos there is a deep underground natural reservoir whose body of water is estimated
to be over 1,000 years old. It is essentially tritium free, and is occasionally used in the labora-
tory for reference purposes.
 Tritium and Helium-Three 247

figure 17.1. Storms, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reported a clear signal of tri-
tium generation in his cell number 73. The fraction divides the tritium count of cell 73 by
the background count as shown in cell #70.

the dashed tracing shows the quantity in the effluent gas. Because the liquid
remained in the cell while the emergent gases moved out, the level of tritium
in the gas could decrease rapidly from the peak value while the tritium in the
liquid decreased more slowly.*
Bockris and Packham observed tritium in 9 out of 13 cells. The measured
tritium activity generated in these experiments was ten times larger than the
amount shown in Figure 17.2.†
Dr. S. Szpak, a scientist at the Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego,
California, followed the advent of cold fusion research closely from the early
days. He developed a new variation on the Fleischmann and Pons cell by start-
ing with the palladium initially residing as ions in the heavy water electrolyte.

* In 1989 there was published an implication that the reported tritium generation in Bockris’s
laboratory might be due to the surreptitious addition of tritium (presumably as tritiated water)
to the electrolyte. According to Storms’s analysis, the level of tritium activity from added
tritiated water would stay nearly constant rather than dropping off as it does in Figure 17.2 af-
ter 10/4 for the gas, and 10/5 for the liquid.
† Others working at Texas A&M found that there was tritium contamination in their palla-
dium, but that does not appear to have affected this experiment.
248 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

fifiure 17.2 Bockris reported (Lin, et al.) tritium activity levels from cell 4 in its liquid
and gas sectors.

When the current was turned on, it served to deposit palladium on the copper
cathode, soon coating it over and then building up a thick layer. Deuterium,
also from the electrolyte, was absorbed by the palladium as it came out of so-
lution and onto the surface of the cathode.3 This procedure permitted control
of the palladium material, in contrast to working with solid palladium cath-
odes of generally unknown impurities and micro-structure.
Immediate generation of excess heat was indicated from the start by the
cathode being several degrees hotter than the solution while similar cells using
regular water had no difference of temperature. The heating was estimated at
2500 Joules per second and it started after 20 minutes of charging. One cell
that was run for ten to sixteen hours experienced a tenfold increase of tritium
from an initial reading of 30 increasing to over 230 disintegrations each min-
ute for each ml of electrolyte. No water was added to the cell during this run
time. It appears that tritium was produced by the cell during its ten-hour-plus
operation.
Dr. Thomas N. Claytor, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Labora-
tory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, has reported the generation of tritium in glow
discharge experiments since 1989.* He did those experiments in a system with

* The term glow discharge refers to the illumination made by an electrical discharge in a partial
vacuum, such as in a neon sign.
 Tritium and Helium-Three 249

twin stainless steel containers, one held the glow discharge assembly and the
other was used for on-line detection of tritium. The first sealed chamber held
a palladium foil as one electrode and after a small gap, the end of a piece of
wire constitutes the other electrode. The chamber was filled with deuterium
gas at low pressure and a small amount was absorbed into the foil. When elec-
trically excited, a purple glow formed over the foil and extended across the gap
to the wire end. Using a sensitive detector in the second chamber, the gas was
analyzed for tritium content after the system has run for many hours.4
One of Claytor’s experimental results is shown in the data of Figure
17.3 that was taken from three experiments run in 1994 (plasmas 1–3). The
vertical axis records the concentration of tritium. The current was pulsed
(time-varying, non-continuous) to avoid over heating the cathode and anode.
Plasma runs number 1 and 2 lie along the base line with number 1 ending at
105 hours and run number 2 ending at 375 hours.

figure 17.3 Claytor reported the generation of tritium in plasma run number 3. Inter-
ruption of the plasma interrupted the tritium generation process at two places.
250 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 17.4 Scott, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reported a burst of tritium in one of
his cells.

Run number 3 yielded an increased tritium signal. It produced 30 nano-

Curies* (nCi) of tritium. The current was turned off for several hours at two
points during the run. These are the plateaus labeled “plasma off.” Afterwards,
the cell was heated to release gas from the electrodes. This produced an addi-
tional 52 nCi of tritium not shown in the figure.
Experiments at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory using electrolytic
cells reported tritium generation. Bockris recounted this event. “Scott at
ORNL reported tritium activity of 25 times the background level in one cell
with current densities varying between 200 and 600 Ma/cm.2 This tritium oc-
curred in a burst lasting 2 to 3 hours.”5
In Figure 17.4, Scott shows a peak of 30,000 DPM/ml that gradually dis-
sipates from this cell over a period of 20 to 30 days (the curve’s rise was not
finely plotted). The interpretation of this dissipation curve is that the tritium
is in the form of DT gas molecules dissolved in the electrolyte, rather than in
the form of tritiated water. The rapid dissipation of the tritium over a month
or so was expected.
Critics have pointed out that tritium contamination in the palladium, if
there were any, would take the form of DT gas rather than (OT-) ions in the
water resulting in a rapid dissipation of the tritium over a month or so,
whereas tritium as ions would remain as tritiated water.

* The Curie is a measure of the quantity of radioactivity. A nanoCurie is a one billionth part,
10⫺9, of a Curie.
 Tritium and Helium-Three 251

Helium-Three
The normal ratio of helium-three to helium-four to neon-22 in the atmo-
sphere can be used to check quite conclusively for possible contamination of
an experiment by leakage from the air. The ratio of helium-three to helium-
four (1.3 × 10⫺6 for the atmosphere) has the further possibility to provide
some insight as to the actual nuclear reaction processes that generated it.
While working in the chemistry department at the University of Texas, Aus-
tin, Texas, B. F. Bush made measurements, Table 17.1, of this ratio in the off-
gasses from a cell.
Bush used Calvet (Seebeck) calorimetry to measure for the occurrence of
anomalous power. Because heavy water always has a small amount of tritium
in it, the gas collection flasks were limited in their exposure to the cell to a
couple of hours at most. The amount of tritium in the D2O that would decay
into helium-three during that restricted time would be insufficient to unduly
contaminate the helium-three measurement. A crucial step of removing the
deuterium and oxygen from the gas stream took advantage of the ability of a
copper oxide surface at 450C to recombine the two gasses into water. A liquid
nitrogen cold trap then condensed out the water to leave a vacuum holding
the small quantity of the two helium isotopes for measurement by means of a
mass spectrometer.

table 17.1 Bush Helium-Three Dataa

4
He/30mlb
4 22 3
Sample Electrolysis/ma He/ Ne (Atoms) He/4He
12/04/97 29.3 16.754 5.9 × 1011 2.14 × 10− 6
12/16/97 9.8 6.056 2.0 × 1012 2.41 × 10− 6
12/23/97 10.2 7.379 4.1 × 1010 3.17 × 10− 6
Additional datac
09/10/97 missing 8.248 5.38 × 1010 1.66 × 10− 6
09/23/97 18.8 20.199 4.56 × 1011 2.66 × 10− 6
10/06/97 37.9 14.45 1.72 × 1011 3.05 × 10− 6
10/09/97 38.1 13.60 1.69 × 1011 2.85 × 10− 6
10/12/97 38.3 13.64 1.59 × 1011 3.40 × 10− 6
a. Bush, B. F., and J. J. Lagowski, “Methods of Generation Excess Heat with the Pons and
Fleischmann Effect: Rigorous and Cost Effective Calorimetry, Nuclear Products Analysis of
the Cathode and Helium Analysis,” (ICCF-7 Proceedings, April 1998), pp. 38–42.
b. Columns four and five have been corrected for atmospheric contamination by consider-
ation of the neon found.
c. Bush, B. F., personal communication. August 6, 2001. This material is unpublished. The
five experiments use palladium-boron cathodes.
252 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

In control experiments (not shown), the ratio of helium-three to helium-

four measured out to “about 1.3 × 10−6,” at extremely low concentrations
consistent with residual atmospheric contamination. Typical helium-four con-
centrations were about 100 parts per trillion (ppt) or one-tenth the detection
limit of the mass spectrometer used in the quantitative helium-four analysis
above. Thus, hydrogen-three decay into helium-three was not a measurement
factor even at exquisitely sensitive levels of analysis. This relief came about be-
cause the gas collection flasks had limited time exposure to the cell, and the
deuterium (and tritium) was removed promptly from the gas sample, after it
was collected.
The ratio tabulated in column five may be of help to discern the shape of
the nuclear reaction generating the helium. Bush raises the question of how
the palladium helps to catalyze the apparent fusion reaction. The deute-
rium—deuterium reaction can be mediated along its reaction trajectory by
electromagnetic interactions if one considers that the reaction emits an elec-
tromagnetic gamma ray under hot fusion conditions. Electromagnetic interac-
tion mediated reactions are fulfilled much more slowly than are those under
mediation of the strong force, the manner of hot fusion reactions. By happen-
ing more slowly, it is possible for the lattice to be involved in the process by
absorbing the released energy as heat.
Bush calculates that the helium-three is produced by a deuterium and hy-
drogen reaction* and the helium-four by a deuterium and deuterium reaction.
The former releasing 5.395 MeV and the latter 23.82 MeV of energy. He cal-
culates the relative isotopic ratio according to the formula, noting that the nu-
clear reaction matrix elements cancel to a coefficient of five for purely electro-
magnetic interactions.
3
He/4He = 0.005 × (5.395)5 / (23.82)5 = 2.98 × 10−6,兩6,7

This value compares favorably with the ratios as listed in Table 17.1, the
last column. This result is most encouraging, if only because the deuterium
and deuterium reaction is the most energetic nuclear reaction per weight of
fuel for the generation of energy.
We reviewed Professor Arata’s experiment, with its hollow cathode design
and the copious excess heat produced by it, in Chapter 14, p. 201. Arata re-
ported also the presence of helium-four embedded in the powdered palladium
after an experimental run. He also continued this work with the measurement
of helium-three. Figure 17.5 is a portion of a QMS printout for this measure-
ment.8,9 Both helium-three and hydrogen molecules, with one ordinary iso-
tope and one deuteron (HT), are detected with about equal amplitude while
the dip in the peak shows the degree of separation achieved.

* The hydrogen-one is provided by the residual presence of light water as .5% of the heavy
water.
 Tritium and Helium-Three 253

figure 17.5 Arata shows the presence and separation of He-3 and HD in QMS.

Arata reported that inside the closed cathode the ratio of helium-four to
helium-three was approximately four, far different from the natural ratio of
ten thousand.
McKubre’s interest in the reproduction of other’s experiments continued
in the fall of 1999 when he received two hollow cathodes from Dr. Arata.
Each was prepared for electrolysis with about 5 grams of Pd black sealed in its
hollow center after evacuation. They were electrolyzed, one in H2O and the
other in D2O, for three months, after which the polarity on the cells was re-
versed and they were run for 80 days, the cycle being completed in May,
2000.
The Pd powder that was encased inside a cathode electrode for 90 days
generated 64 MJ (17.8 kWh) of excess heat in McKubre’s laboratory. At the
same time, another cathode was electrolyzed similarly in H2O and produced
no excess heat. Both cathodes were further electrolyzed with their polarity re-
versed so that the cathode acted in the role of an anode, the purpose being to
release helium-four and helium-three, if they are present, from the solid body
of the cathode.
Analysis of the results involved the use of McKubre’s laboratory, the
Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Washington, and a helium analysis
facility at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. There were three com-
ponents in the hollow cathode to be analyzed: the Pd powder, the retained
gasses that might have reached a pressure of 1000 atmospheres, and a residue
of water. In addition, the solid cathode body itself would be sectioned and ex-
amined.
In September of 1999, at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories
(PNNL) the hollow cathodes were punctured and the gasses collected. The
light water cathode’s gasses were lost as it had not been properly welded shut,
so the light water control experiment was also lost. The cathode electrolyzed
in heavy water had its gasses collected, but 90% of them were lost by an
equipment failure. The remaining 10% were bottled up and sent to a helium
analysis laboratory at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. There, Dr.
254 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

W. H. Clarke found no exceptional amount of helium-four in the gasses, but

did find significant quantities of helium-three as the daughter product of tri-
tium which then permitted a calculation of the amount of tritium as well as
the time at which that tritium appeared in the cathode. The total tritium con-
tent in the electrode was approximately 1.8 x1015 atoms and calculations of
the time of its occurrence indicated that it was produced during the electroly-
sis run.10
Some of the Pd powder in each of the two cathodes was also sent to
McMaster for analysis. Again, no significant amount of helium-four was de-
tected, but a considerable amount of helium-three was found.11
Tritium seems to have been generated in substantial quantities, but not in
quantities sufficient to supply the enormous amount of excess heat detected,
assuming the hot fusion of 23.8 MeV of emitted energy per created atom.
Furthermore, an examination of the outer layer of the cathode for
helium-four would reveal if it were being produced there for release into the
off-gas stream. The report concluded that it was not generated in the solid
cathode, at least not by the conventional (Rutherford) deuterium-deuterium
reaction.12
This effort by McKubre to confirm the Arata detection of large amounts
of He-4 and a ratio of helium-three/helium-four of 0.25 resulted in a null re-
sult—no confirmation.
In summary, a variety of liquid electrolytic and gaseous glow-discharge
experiments enabled the recording of tritium production at significant levels
above background. This phenomena continued to be exhibited in various ex-
periments. In hot fusion, tritium production is 5 million times greater than
helium production. In cold fusion experiments, this ratio seems to be dramati-
cally smaller, although helium-tritium correlations in the same experiment
have not been made. The appearance of relatively little tritium implies that
the two-body, hot fusion reaction channel probabilities do not apply to cold
fusion reactions.
 c h a p t e r e i g h t e e n

Neutrons

I t is ironic that in this cold fusion episode the rôle of neutrons has proved of
only marginal interest after the high authority, even above that of excess
heat, it was given by the skeptics in 1989. If the reaction product ratios seen in
hot fusion applied to cold fusion reactions, neutrons would be seen in quanti-
ties comparable to tritium and roughly five million times greater than helium-
four production. So marginal is the place of neutrons in cold fusion ex-
periments, in fact, that twelve years later, evidence of neutron generation
seems not only marginal, even ephemeral, a scientific curiosity except for the
Mizuno/Takahashi results shown on page 261.
Neutrons, being neutral and unstable, are relatively hard to measure com-
pared to other radiations and to stable nuclei like He-3 and He-4. Neutron
measurements are usually made indirectly, for example, by measuring the
gamma rays they stimulate.
Some fusion physicists took a paternalistic interest in the claim of small
amounts of neutron generation in the electrolytic cell on the grounds that or-
thodox nuclear physics does not accept the possibility of such an occurrence at
room temperature. They quickly showed that the measurements presented in
the Preliminary Note were flawed. The neutron generation was far lower than
those measurements indicated.
Fleischmann and Pons, however, continued their efforts to measure neu-
tron emission from their cells during 1989. They made what appears to be a
recovery from their initial failure by changing detector types and their corre-
sponding data collection pattern.
Neutrons emitted from their cells would strike water molecules in the

255
256 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

bath and cause them to emit gamma radiation. Working at the University of
Utah during the summer and fall of 1989, the two chemists, using high reso-
lution germanium detectors, collected the gamma signals for more than one
hundred days.1 They reported a sampling technique that allows the long-term
accumulation of a weak signal, and their published report appeared in Il
Nuovo Cimento in 1992. It shows a clear signal for the signature of neutrons
interacting with water, at 2,224 keV, n1, Figure 18.1. The signal is displayed as
a ratio to the naturally occurring signal for the 214 isotope of bismuth at
2,293 keV, n2, used as a reference signal. There were five cells in the bath, and
they were turned on at day zero and off at day 205 (see arrow).
After the current was turned off, the signal did not drop completely to
zero. They report that this may be due to other cells in other baths that were
operating in the same room. The chemists interpreted the amplitude of the
signal to indicate a flux of about 5 to 50 neutrons per second for each watt of
excess power generated in the cell.
A group of scientists in the Chemical Technology Division at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (ORNL) built and operated a number of electrolytic
type cells during 1989.2 One of these provided neutron flux data for C. D.
Scott, as shown in Figure 18.2.3 He composed a schematic of the data show-
ing the average value with the error bars at the 95% confidence level. He oper-
ated a cell at a level of about one half ampere per cm2. A jump in the excess
power was observed as shown at about 1,310 hours into the run. This power is
referenced to the left vertical scale. A jump in the average neutron flux at

figure 18.1 Fleischmann and Pons reported evidence for neutrons emanating from power
generating cells. Error magnitude was depicted by the vertical bars on the graph. The arrow
marks the time (205 days) when the cells were turned off.
 Neutrons 257

figure 18.2 Scott, ORNL, reported anomalous power and neutrons. Neutrons are de-
picted as their average value. Excess energy is shown as the saw-tooth shaped tracing.

1,400 hours continued at least until 1,600 hours. He reported that, “Apparent
increases in the neutron count rate were also observed in several instances, in-
cluding one period that is coincident with induced excess power.” By “in-
duced,” Scott meant that he could cause changes in excess power by wiggling
certain operating parameters such as the current level.
There were at least four groups that practiced cold fusion experiments at
Texas A&M University. Dr. Kevin L. Wolf, professor of chemistry, a nuclear
chemist of solid reputation who worked in the Cyclotron Institute there, led
one of these groups. His experiment had three identical, palladium/lithium-
heavy water cells wired in series so the same operating current passed through all
three.4 It ran for six weeks during the months of August and September 1992.
A new protocol called for the cathodes to be removed and sanded during
a fifteen-minute intermission every seven days. Some boron and aluminum
were added to the electrolyte on the 18th day.
Like Takahashi, Wolf was an expert at neutron detection. On September
7, 1992 his experiment produced the neutron flux shown in Figure 18.3.
Wolf ’s experiment also produced the remarkable result that all three cathodes
became mildly radioactive. He also detected gamma rays. Both are shown in
the figure. Within five hours the neutron count moved from a background
level of about 24 counts per hour (cph) up to 150, then leveled off at near 100
cph. At 21 hours, the neutron count returned to the original level and stayed
there for the remainder of the experiment.
In a contrary manner, the gamma ray count stayed at background level
258 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 18.3 Wolf, Texas A&M, detected neutron and gamma emissions from Pd/LiOD
cells.

until that same twenty-one-hour moment when it soared to near 200 cph and
returned within a six hour period. All three cathode rods experienced a similar
result.
Professor Akito Takahashi, Department of Nuclear Engineering, Osaka
University, Osaka, Japan, an experienced hot fusion scientist, announced an
experiment in the spring of 1992 that emitted a great deal of excess heat and
low levels of neutrons at the same time. His expertise in nuclear measurements
allowed him to obtain a substantial record of the nuclear emissions. The num-
ber of nuclear products was too few to account for the amount of heat by a
factor of more than a billion. In fact, Takahashi found that increased heat out-
put was accompanied by decreased neutron count.5
Neutron counts, Figure 18.4, were separated from background noise by
the experimental technique used. The cell current was cycled high to low,
changing every six hours, and it can be seen that Takahashi’s neutron count
followed the cycling cell current in an up-down fashion.* The triangles give
the count of the number of neutrons detected during high-current, six-hour
periods, and circles give the count during low-current periods. The left-hand

* The experimenter must be careful, of course, that there is no electric or magnetic coupling be-
tween the cell excitation current circuitry and the nuclear particle counting system.
 Neutrons 259

figure 18.4 Takahashi, Osaka University, cycled the cell current up and down and de-
tected the neutron count following up and down.

scale is the count after subtracting away the remainder background count. Er-
ror bars associated with this figure may be found in the reference.
Takahashi explained that during the first years he noticed only a small
neutron signal, but after two and a half years of experimentation he obtained
significant results. The typical duration of one of his electrolysis experiments
lasted from two to four months, although Figure 18.4 shows only a 30 day
portion. Takahashi has difficulty reproducing these results as did others work-
ing with complicated experiments.
In 1994, Dr. M. Srinivasan reported on an experiment performed at the
Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Bombay, India. A large commercial electro-
lytic cell with palladium cathodes was operated at 30 amperes current for two
months. Surrounding the cell were 16 neutron detectors that registered bursts
of neutrons, as well as the total count of neutrons.6
Figure 18.5 shows the average of the total number of counts recorded
each day. The cell was inserted into the neutron detecting array on day 17. On
day 46, the cell’s heavy water was replaced with light water. With continued
operation, the deuterium inside the palladium was gradually replaced with hy-
drogen. This caused the neutron count to slowly fall off to background level.
It was also reported for the interval from day 16 to 46 that about 6% of
the neutrons came in bursts of from 20 to 100 neutrons each. During the first
16 days there were no bursts of over four neutrons. The authors concluded
that neutron emission from an electrolytic cell was observed, and that a small
fraction of these neutrons were emitted in bursts.
260 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 18.5 Srinivasan, Bhabha Atomic Research Center, presented neutron counts and
neutron bursts in an electrolytic cell. Changing the electrolyte from D2O to H2O caused
the count to fall away.

Neutron Bursts
Tadahiko Mizuno, Hokkaido University, in association with Akito Takahashi,
Osaka University, determined that the heat generating reaction required more
than just the absorption of deuterium into the palladium cathode. A survey of
experimental results in the literature showed that light hydrogen absorbed af-
ter a period of heavy hydrogen loading was the likely candidate.
The experiment used a palladium rod 1.5 mm diameter and 150 mm in
length in an electrolyte made with K2CO3 that had been baked at 300C to re-
move all traces of (hydrogen containing) moisture. The preparation of two
flasks provided a quartz flask with extra pure heavy water electrolyte and a Py-
rex one with light water electrolyte. Each contained an anode of platinum
mesh. The cathode was electrolyzed in the quartz flask at a high current for
three hours, and then transferred to the Pyrex flask for further electrolysis.7
The instrumentation consisted of three neutron detectors placed 50 cm
above and apart from the cell.* The neutrons emerge from the experiment in
all directions, of which the detectors will intercept only a small fraction, a
number designated as the efficiency of the detectors, in this case 4 × 10− 5.

* The detectors were helium-three type neutron detectors aligned in a row. After calibration
with a Cf252 neutron source, one of them was covered with a cadmium sheet to provide anti-
coincidence noise reduction.
 Neutrons 261

The detectors were enclosed in a shield to avoid pickup of electromagnetic

noise.
Large emissions of neutrons were observed in five out of ten runs of the
experiment. These occurred in bursts that continued for several minutes after
a triggering event such as a rapid voltage change. A typical burst sequence is
shown in Figure 18.6. The total emission for this event was estimated at 1.57
x106, or one and one-half million neutrons. The figure shows that the experi-
ment enjoys an excellent signal to noise ratio.
The ten experiments are listed in the table of Figure 18.7. Column three
gives the cell voltage before neutron emission occurs. Column four is the volt-
age after the emissions cease, or at the end of the experiment. Columns five
and six show the duration of voltage ramp and the total voltage boost, with
the ratio in column seven. The remainder columns describe the resulting neu-
tron emission. Half produced no neutron emission, a reproducibility wholly
acceptable for much scientific work.
The table shows that bursts occur after a voltage increase or at the start
of electrolysis. Neutron emission varied over an order of magnitude, from
100,000 to 1,000,000, and their duration from 2 to 200 seconds. All emission
events started with a high peak and decreased from there to the end. Conclu-

figure 18.6 Mizuno shows a typical neutron burst from the experiment using deuterium
followed by hydrogen electrolysis. More than 100,000 neutrons were generated during the
200 second burst.
262 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 18.7 Mizuno lists his ten experiments to show that five gave neutron bursts and
five had null results. these reproducible results indicate that hydrogen (1H) is involved in the
nuclear reaction.

sions are that the experiment is highly reproducible and it generates a high
level of neutrons. To quote the report, “the [theoretical] models proposed
heretofore based upon D + D reactions are inadequate to explain our present
results, which involve hydrogen nuclear reactions.”
It is clear that the detection of neutrons at low levels was as fraught with
difficulties as was the measurement of heat power. Only a small fraction of the
neutron measurement reports are included here.
Can the kinds of reports offered in this section show conclusively that the
Fleischmann and Pons cell produces neutrons? The answer is No. It will take a
large experimental effort to establish conclusively whether there are emissions
of neutrons from the cold fusion cell. What can be learned from the effort to
date is that in these experiments there is much interesting science to be ex-
plored.
 c h a p t e r n i n e t e e n

Gamma Rays and

Transmutation

T he experimental results presented in this chapter represent a considerable

difference from the Fleischmann and Pons result shown thus far. They
lead to claims for extensive elemental transmutation of the materials initially
placed into the experimental vessel. That is, there is experimental evidence for
nuclear reactions involving heavy nuclei that are much more complex than fu-
sion of two light nuclei, such as deuterons. With one exception, the reported
results have the singular characteristic that the resultant elements are not ra-
dioactive.
My principle rationale for including the material in this chapter is that
two independent experimenters on two continents have produced results that
are astonishingly similar. Therefore, their work is worth including along with
some appropriately cautionary words.
Research into the transmutation of elements is redolent of alchemy, the
chemistry of the middle ages with its goal the transmutation of lead into gold.
The rise of the nuclear age in the twentieth century made such transmutation
realizable (though expensive) through the use of large accelerators. That entic-
ing word—transmute—has emerged again in the field of cold fusion research.
Nuclear change of any sort is of interest as a possible clue to the source of the
heat energy. The electrolytic cell shows recurrent evidence of elemental change
among light nuclei, although the word transmutation is generally applied to
heavy nuclei.
Intimations of transmutation were present when the topic emerged at the
first cold fusion conference in March 1990. Huizenga speaks of an early en-
counter with it: “Fleischmann told me that he thought the unknown nuclear

263
264 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

process was fission of the palladium.” Huizenga did not respond to Fleisch-
mann at the time, but later wrote:

The answer startled me. Fleischmann was, no doubt, unfamiliar with

the fact I had researched nuclear fission for decades and had co-
authored a book . . . on the subject. Knowing that the energy thresh-
old for palladium fission was several tens of millions of electron
volts, I had to conclude that Fleischmann was either joking (al-
though he appeared to answer in all seriousness) or exposing gaping
holes in his knowledge of nuclear physics.1

This is the kind of comment that is skeptical rather than critical. Huizenga
was not sufficiently curious to ask to see the data that had led Fleischmann to
his supposition.
Dr. Wolf ’s experiment of September 1992 is described in the previous
chapter. The three cathode rods were examined with a gamma spectrometer
after the experiment was complete. Figure 19.1 shows a portion of that spec-
trum, from 295 keV to 574 keV, including peaks that ordinarily indicate the
presence of isotopes of rhodium, silver, ruthenium, that were not present prior
to the experiment.2,3 The interested reader will have to turn to the references
to see the entire spectrum in five frames. Gamma ray spectrum from the three
cathodes were similar to within a factor of three in magnitude.* The most ac-
tive one is shown.
Wolf never wrote up this experiment for publication because he was al-
ways waiting first to replicate it, but that never happened. With his death in
1998, its record will necessarily remain incomplete. What we have of it was
made available from the project’s files by Dr. T. O. Passell of EPRI, the spon-
sor of the study. Wolf and Passell consider this gamma spectrum taken in its
entirety to be evidence that element transmutation occurred in the three cells
of the experiment.
Cold fusion experimentation was widely practiced during the 1990s both
in Russia and in some of the former member states of the Soviet Union.4 Alex-
ander Karabut, of the Scientific Industrial Association “Luch,” Podolsk, Mos-
cow Region, published a number of papers with Y. R. Kucherov and I. B.
Savvatimova, as well as the one upon which this report is based, under his
name alone. The work was done in the glow discharge type of experiment that
was discussed earlier by Claytor in Chapter 17, p. 249.
In experiments that confirmed his earlier work, Karabut generated excess
heat using deuterium, hydrogen, and argon gas with various cathode materi-

* Gamma rays are high energy electromagnetic waves emitted by a nucleus when it undergoes
rapid evolution.
 Gamma Rays and Transmutation 265

figure 19.1 Wolf (via T. Passell) reports a portion of the gamma spectrum of one of his
electrolyzed cathodes that covers the energy spectrum from 295 keV to 574 keV. The exper-
iment proved unreproducible.

als. Some of the combinations used were palladium-deuterium, palladium-hy-

drogen (with apparently no excess heat), nickel-hydrogen, nickel-deuterium,
silver-deuterium, and niobium-hydrogen.5
In the case of the palladium-deuterium experiment, Karabut reports the
production of a variety of stable isotopes that appear as new “impurities” after
the glow discharge period. By “stable” it is meant that the produced elements
are without residual radioactivity.
In Figure 19.2, the variety of new elements is displayed by the atomic
mass number (amu). The vertical axis indicates the measured approximate
number of atoms created during the experiment. Karabut further reports that
the quantity of impurity corresponds to the “complete value of excess heat.”
He reports further that radioactive nuclides with a low level of activity are
formed in many of these experiments. A much higher level of radioactivity is
detected during the experiment, but when it ends that activity disappears with
the formation of stable nuclides.
Dr. Tadahiko Mizuno, Division of Quantum Energy Engineering, Hok-
kaido University, Japan, did yeoman work in the cold fusion vineyards over
the nine years to 1999.6 He obtained some of the most interesting results in
the field.7 For example, he measured excess power in proton conductors and
those measurements were corroborated by Dr. Oriani at the University of
Minnesota.8
Mizuno’s evidence for the transmutation of atomic elements was shown
in a September 1996 report, and is reprinted as Figure 19.3. He ran an elec-
266 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 19.2 Karabut reports on the stable isotope “impurities” that appear in a palladium
cathode after a glow discharge experimental run.

trolytic cell at high temperature, high pressure, and high current continuously
for one month. He used 99.97% pure palladium and distilled the heavy water
to reduce the presence of contaminants. Four different kinds of elemental
analysis were employed to examine the cathode and electrolyte after the run.9
Evidence for the evolution of platinum (Pt), chromium (Cr), iron (Fe),
and copper (Cu) occurred near the surface of the palladium cathode to be dis-
played clearly in the before and after tracings of Figure 19.3. The signal level
amplitudes were 10 times larger than the background in some cases. The ele-
ment concentrations remained much the same after removing one micrometer
of the cathode’s surface. Large differences from normal were observed in the
isotope ratios. In naturally occurring copper, the ratio of copper mass 63 to
mass 65 is about two to one. In one experimental sample, the copper con-
sisted entirely of mass 63 isotope with no copper of mass 65.
Mizuno’s results produced from several different kinds of instrumenta-
tion showed that the evolved elements were distributed roughly into three
groups by atomic mass: 20 to 28, 46 to 54, 72 to 82, as shown by the triangle
markers in Figure 19.4. Many of these had isotopic distributions substantially
different from the naturally occurring element.10 Mizuno concluded that the
nuclear changes occurred during the electrochemical process. He reported that
 Gamma Rays and Transmutation 267

figure 19.3 Mizuno, Hokkaido National University, reported that by using x-ray spec-
troscopy, there appeared evolution of platinum (PT), chromium (Cr), iron (Fe), and copper
(Cu) present in the “after” scan that were not present “before.”

figure 19.4 Miley (■), University of Illinois, and Mizuno (▲) reported a rate of genera-
tion of the several elements. Mizuno’s rates are arbitrarily normalized to Miley’s. Note the el-
ements Si, Cr, Fe, Zn, As, Cd, Sb, and Pb.
268 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

five of these experiments were performed with similar results for each run so
they appeared to have a reasonable degree of reproducibility for the purpose of
scientific evaluation.
James Patterson, a chemist who spent his career at Dow Chemical Com-
pany, has provided scientific and strategic guidance for Clean Energy Technol-
ogy, Inc., (CETI), Sarasota, Florida. He had learned how to coat palladium
over tiny plastic beads (spheres) that he had developed for many processes
some years before. He was author of 16 U.S. patents on bead and electrolytic
technologies.
Patterson developed his version of the Fleischmann and Pons experiment
built on that technology. He designed a cell where the nickel-coated balls were
used as the cathode in place of the usual rod of Pd. As many as a thousand
beads constituted a cathode. These experiments used a light water (1-molar
L2SO4) electrolyte solution. The cell required 60 milliwatts of electrical power
for excitation and yielded about 500 milliwatts of additional power, or 1 watt
per cm3 of reactive volume.
The electrolyte in his cell flowed continuously in a loop. It passed over
the cluster of balls that made up the cathode, past a platinum anode, around a
plumbing loop including a filter, a reservoir, a pump, and back to the cathode.
The anode and cathode were electrically driven by a power supply. Substantial
generation of anomalous power was reported in technical papers and demon-
strated to the satisfaction of a number of observers.
George H. Miley, Professor of Nuclear and Electrical Engineering at the
University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, edited three well-known profes-
sional journals (one for the Nuclear Society of America and two for Cam-
bridge University Press) in addition to his teaching and research activities.
Winner of the Edward Teller Medal, he is well known for his innovative con-
tributions to hot fusion research.
The concept of fusion at room temperature caught his attention early,
and he was one of the scientists who testified at the congressional hearing on
the subject. The possibilities for transmutation interested him from the begin-
ning as a means of understanding the physics of the nuclear reaction.
Miley experimented with thin films (0.1–200 nanometers thick) of
nickel, palladium, and titanium. Thin films offer an experimenter the advan-
tage of fast take-up of deuterium into the metal, minimum cracking, and the
potential for a more complete analysis of the results. All the metal in the form
of a thin film can readily be made available for post-experimental analysis, un-
like the case with a cathode rod, where the bulk material must be sectioned
prior to the use of most analytical techniques.
In 1994, Miley began working with Patterson using his cell. Miley and
colleagues extended this concept to a form that used thin sputtered films on
the beads as opposed to the original, thicker electro-deposited type used by
 Gamma Rays and Transmutation 269

Patterson. The thin film coating on the beads consisted of only one metal,
nickel (or Pd or Ti), for a particular experiment. While single coatings are less
reactive, they greatly simplify the analysis. Miley reported having obtained
reasonable, consistent results with approximately 20 runs, some of which were
duplicate checks but many of which explored new metals or configurations.
The transmutation yield of an isotope was defined as the ratio of the frac-
tion of an isotope in the thin film after the run to the initial amount present
in the film plus electrolyte and other cell components.
Miley reported that during electrolysis a significant degree of atomic ele-
ment transmutation occurred. The trends (e.g., yields versus mass numbers)
he found were shown to be generally consistent with the results of Mizuno.
Miley was able to provide absolute reaction rates.11 Some elements exhibited
large “yields,” (e.g., 500 and 10 for copper and silver respectively). This result,
plus measurements of the isotopic composition showing non-natural ratios,
were cited among the evidence that the “new” elements were not due to impu-
rities.
The results of the Mizuno and Miley investigations are compared on the
chart, Figure 19.4.* The horizontal axis plots the atomic element number.
The vertical axis is the rate at which the elements were produced per second
during the experimental run as a fraction of the total amount of material.
Mizuno’s numbers are shown with triangles (▲), and Miley’s numbers are
shown with squares (■). Newly produced atomic elements appear bearing ele-
ment numbers between three and 85.
Miley finds that in one five-week “nickel” run (with nickel coated beads
for the cathode), 40% of the total amount of nickel in the cathode was
changed during electrolysis into other elements. In Figure 19.4, (after rotating
the page ninety degrees) each kind of atomic element lies along its own verti-
cal line. Its production rate is shown on the left axis where each vertical incre-
ment represents an increase of ten times in the rate of element production.
Notice that between atomic numbers of 24 and 34, chromium (Cr, atomic
number 24), iron (Fe, 26), copper (Cu, 29), and selenium (Se, 34) appeared.
Silver (Ag, 47), cadmium (Cd, 48), antimony (Sb, 51), are near atomic num-
ber 50 and the highest group includes lead (Pb, 82). Miley claims that the
amounts of these elements observed was well above the amount contained in
the electrolyte and cell components before the run began. The juxtaposition
of Miley’s and Mizuno’s data in this figure indicates that there is a degree of
corroboration of results between their experiments.
Miley also found in some instances significant isotope ratio changes from
those of naturally occurring elements. He showed related results for other
metals in later papers. He has proposed that such experiments result in charac-

* In this plot Mizuno’s rates are arbitrarily normalized to Miley’s using the value for copper.
270 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

teristic “signatures” (such as the high-low yield regions in Figure 19.4) which
must be explained by any theory. He points out also that these new elements
can be used to develop an understanding of the energy balance that leads to
the production of anomalous power. By multiplying the grams of each new
product observed by its respective bonding energy and subtracting the same
quantity of reactants (protons and metal), he predicts, a posteriori, power out-
puts of the same order of magnitude as was measured.
What is to be made of these reported nuclear transmutations? The best
that can be said is that they give the appearance of being created and caused by
the operation of the cell.
The low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) hypothesis is, of course, heresy
in orthodox physics. These data, if borne out by further work, would prove
revolutionary. But the experiment is complicated, time consuming, and ex-
pensive. One cannot repeat it twenty times during a long weekend to ensure
uniformity of result. Also, it is not clear that this work ought to be considered
a continuation of the Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon. Miley takes pains
at times to disassociate his work from that of the two chemists. It may well
prove to be something quite different, or it may be merely a mirage and in due
course disappear in the fashion described by Fleck in Chapter 11, p. 153. We
will have to wait for some time to see if what is happening here becomes the
genesis and development of a scientific fact.

Radioactivity Remediation
The nuclear elements that result from transmutation in the experiments de-
scribed above display little or no radioactivity according to published reports.
The LENR viewpoint holds that this is due to the long time interval during
which the nucleus settles into its final state. No further settling takes place in
the nucleus after the new elements emerge from the reaction. It has been sug-
gested that radioactive elements now in the national inventory (nuclear waste)
might be subjected to this transmutation process thereby preempting their
projected radioactive lifetime. This highly speculative concept is called radio-
activity remediation (RR).
To exploit this possibility, the entrepreneur has two approaches to RR.
Either develop a commercial product to process radioactive materials or offer
customers a consulting service in RR technology. Both have advantages and
disadvantages as commercial undertakings. The first plan requires develop-
ment of a device that treats radioactive materials by some sort of transmuta-
tion processing. At least two organizations have offered a RR device for experi-
mental use. They have experienced widely varying degrees of acceptance from
the initial users.
 Gamma Rays and Transmutation 271

The other means for commercial entry into RR work is to offer technical
consulting services to those who were grappling with the problem of America’s
backlog of radioactive waste. This course ought to be much less risky finan-
cially, and is a well proven way to develop a new technology without depend-
ing upon large new capital infusions. The customer participates fully and is in
a position to expand or contract the level of participation as laboratory results
warrant. It is a highly public arena in which to bring forth something new, so
it is not clear whether the outcome would be dependent upon technology or
politics.
Clean Energy Technology Incorporated (CETI), Sarasota, Florida, of-
fered its anomalous power cell design as an experimenter’s kit in 1995 and
sold a number of them to sophisticated experimenters. It was one of their kits,
or a homemade version of it, that Miley used for his transmutation experi-
ments. CETI had to withdraw the kit offer when buyers found it necessary to
burden the company with endless consultations. Their plan is to develop
commercial products from that cell technology after further development
efforts.
The Cincinnati Group, as they call themselves, are evangelical Christians
who do not hold separate their lives as Christians from their work. None of
them have degrees in science or engineering, but one has had training as a
chemical laboratory technician.
They appeared in 1996 with a small device that they claimed performed
the RR function. It was a two-inch cylinder three inches long and made of
stainless steel and zirconium metal. It could be opened up to receive the radio-
active material in the form of a conductive liquid electrolyte. The device was
then sealed tight. Insulation along certain edges of the container caused an ap-
plied electric current to flow through the electrolyte. A sufficient voltage was
applied to drive current through its contents and heat up the cell. They
claimed that the solution’s radioactivity was greatly reduced after an hour or so
of this processing because the radioactive elements were transmuted into sta-
ble elements. They have continued in the process of demonstrating it and ask-
ing knowledgeable scientists to evaluate it. A couple of respectable laboratories
have endorsed their device after working with it for a while.
The reader is warned that the material in this chapter is highly specula-
tive. The research that produced the reported results is difficult to carry out,
this is especially so if an attempt is made to thoroughly analyze the materials
involved before and after in the experiment, and much of it is done with mar-
ginal budgets. A reasonable attitude for the observer to take towards it is sim-
ply to watch how it works out. Miley and Mizuno are serious and established
experimenters and, as such, one hopes to see their work continue to be funded
and their results published.
My presentation of technical data that resulted from evaluation of the
272 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

Fleischmann and Pons announcement and claims now comes to an end. It

would constitute an oversight, however, if I did not offer some inkling to the
reader of how theorists grapple, or fail to grapple, with the “problem” excess
heat, helium generation, tritium generation and, especially, transmutation
present to nuclear science. Some of the theorists, of course, assume that all the
data were in error. But as we have seen and will see, a few address themselves
vociferously to resolve the matter.
 c h a p t e r t w e n t y

Theoretical Musing

T his chapter about musing touches lightly upon the possibilities of what
might be happening in the nuclear realm during generation of anomalous
power. Dozens of models of various nuclear reaction schemes have been ex-
plored with elaborate prose and, in some cases, detailed calculations. None has
yet rendered an answer to identify the source of anomalous power.
Fleischmann and Pons hypothesized an unknown, low energy, nuclear
process to provide the anomalous energy for their experiment. Fleischmann
augmented this hypothesis one year later by bringing to the attention of sci-
ence something it had forgotten. Philip I. Dee reported in the Proceedings of
the Royal Society, 1934, evidence for a nuclear reaction initiated at a low en-
ergy level. Using a cloud chamber, many of the observed tracks emerged after
the reaction at 180 (geometric) degrees, a result that implies the colliding deu-
terons had little energy. To quote Dee, “this no doubt being the result of trans-
mutations effected by slower [deuterons] which have lost energy by collisions
in the target.”1
The theoretician who elucidates the low energy nuclear reaction process,
if indeed there is one, will qualify for considerable scientific recognition. Dr.
Scaramuzzi estimates that, “. . . it is not possible to explain [cold fusion] on
the basis of two-body interactions. It is necessary to demand the existence of a
collective and coherent mechanism governing the phenomena.”2
The theoretical search for an unknown or unrecognized nuclear process
began immediately after the Utah announcement, as one might expect. A few
scientists were willing to take the risk that Fleischmann and Pons were right
about their measurement of significant amounts of anomalous power, even if

273
274 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

they were not necessarily right about their nuclear measurements. These theo-
reticians assumed that the power measurements were true and the hypotheses
of a nuclear process to power it followed rationally from the data. Moreover,
we have seen from Beveridge that there was a good chance that the elucidation
would be accomplished by someone from outside the field of nuclear physics.
Beveridge says,

The scepticism with which the experts nearly always greet these revo-
lutionary ideas confirms that the available knowledge has been a
handicap.3

The musing process is one of mental speculation. Ideas about possible

low energy nuclear processes that at first glance seem plausible are vigorously
evaluated. The critical question is whether such an imagined process can ac-
tually take place in accordance with physical law and produce the effects seen
in the laboratory. That question requires calculation of the reaction rate of the
process, the number of nuclear events per second, and the energy release of
each. Typically, the theoretician is looking for something like a billion or more
events per second for the imagined process to be consistent with the anoma-
lous power observed, and thereby warrant further study.
At the time of the Utah announcement, Peter L. Hagelstein was engaged
in research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Liver-
more, California, where cold fusion immediately became a favorite topic. It is
surprising that he is not a physicist, at least not officially. His permanent ap-
pointment is that of professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science at MIT, and his occupation, in this case, is that of ap-
plied physics. Hagelstein soon announced that he was filing four patent appli-
cations, each involving ideas of what might be the nuclear source of the excess
heat. He gave a seminar at MIT to explain these ideas to his colleagues. His
ideas were outside the boundaries of conventional theory as might be expected
and warranted if one considers the circumstances. Taubes reports that the pro-
vost, John Deutch, who sat in on the seminar, referred to those ideas as “ma-
larkey.”
Hagelstein is a disarming fellow. After he had discussed his first thoughts
with Koonin, who was critical of them, the Caltech professor of theoretical
physics reached the following conclusion.

Well, I had an interesting two days last weekend [May 6–7, 1989]
when I talked to Peter Hagelstein, the guy at MIT who came up
with this much trumpeted theory. . . I was talking with him for a few
hours (other people were there as well). Basically, he conceded that
 Theoretical Musing 275

it was all nonsense. He’s a nice guy; I’m sorry he got caught the way
he did.4

Hagelstein, of course, did not “get caught” at all, but he did give that impres-
sion to Koonin, as he has done also with other physicists. Some might say that
he gives the impression of being a misplaced hayseed from the corn belt. He
can do that, at least until he has something to say. At this writing, he is co-au-
thor of a mathematics textbook on Applied Quantum and Statistical Me-
chanics that includes a derivation of the equations of quantum electrodynam-
ics, a possibly important subject for cold fusion research.*
From the beginning, Hagelstein accepted the existence of anomalous
power in the Fleischmann and Pons experiment as a new scientific observa-
tion. He made the assessment that the two chemists from Utah were compe-
tent scientists in the measurement of heat (flow). He announced in his semi-
nar that four articles had been submitted to the Physical Review Letters
journal for publication (they were never published). Hagelstein continued to
develop his theoretical positions during the ensuing decade. In the give and
take of scientific contention, many of his ideas died a brave death, but others,
braver yet, arose in their places.
Early in this work, Hagelstein dismissed the possibility that electrically
charged bodies, protons or nuclei, could be directly involved by means of a
two-body fusion reaction to cause the observed low level of energetic neu-
trons. Conventional fusion occurs when two nuclei collide at such high ener-
gies that their velocity overcomes the repulsion of the mutual positive electri-
cal charges of the nuclei. The cold fusion phenomenon, however, seemed to
be functioning at a low energy level.
It is necessary to insert into a nucleus a sufficient amount of energy to
cause a nuclear reaction to occur. The nucleus recognizes when it has too
much energy and reacts in the ways available to it: emit a gamma ray, emit an
electron particle (beta emission), emit an alpha particle† (alpha emission), or
fission into two separate nuclei.
It was two years before Hagelstein hit upon a theory whereby energy
might be gradually transferred between the crystalline structure (the lattice) of
atoms and the nucleus. Most conventional physics and chemistry have always
assumed that such energy transfers were insignificant and that the behavior of
the nucleus and the lattice were independent of one another.‡ However, there

* The other authors are S. D. Senturia and T. P. Orlando. It is to be published by John Wiley
& Sons (New York).
† The alpha particle is the nucleus of the common type of helium, helium four: it has two pro-
tons and two neutrons, giving it an electrical charge of ⫹2.
‡ The Mössbauer effect is one of a few exceptions to this rule, along with hyperfine structure in
the optical spectra, isotope effects on x-ray spectra, and so forth.
276 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

is a class of nuclei called quadrupole because of their asymmetrical structure.

If atoms with quadrupole nuclei make up a crystal, and if that crystal has
many vacancies (missing atoms that leave behind vacant places), then phon-
ons* might be able to couple some amount of energy into or out of those
nuclei.
Hagelstein investigated this possibility assiduously. He visualized his way
through the physics of the atomic structures and worked out the mathematics.
He computed the possible reaction rates. He was looking for effects large
enough to cause the heat release that was observed in the experiments. What
he found were conditions where a small change in the frequency of the phon-
ons represented a large change in their energy content. He went looking, in
the physical structures of the atoms and lattice and in the physical laws, for a
way to force a phonon frequency change.
If a nuclear event were to cause their frequency to increase, this would
mean the phonons had, in this instance, absorbed energy. There might be
conditions under which significant amounts of energy could be added to the
lattice with small frequency changes of large numbers of phonons.
Hagelstein concluded that,

the major outstanding theoretical problem is not how to elude the

Coulomb barrier; and it is not how to account for anomalously
low neutron emission rates. The big issue is, and always has been,
whether a large energy quantum can be transferred efficiently from a
nuclear reaction to new degrees of freedom associated with the sur-
rounding environment. This is true not just for heat production, but
also for tritium production, gamma emission, charged particle emis-
sion, and induced radioactivity. Consequently, our interest must be
focused on the problem of anomalous energy transfer.5

This then, was the area of his interest and research.

In this way, a theoretical physicist tries to bring understanding to experi-
mental results. Hagelstein has offered predictions of something that the exper-
imental scientists should look for. To a limited extent, he was successful in
adjusting his theory to explain the experimental data. He advises the experi-
menter what to watch for when his theories predict some aspect of perfor-
mance. But his predictions have not yet borne fruit. He has yet to understand
the essence of low-energy cold fusion reactions.

* Phonons are mechanical vibration waves that are always present in solid materials. These vibra-
tions are interpreted by scientists as discrete particles called phonons that abide by the rules of
quantum mechanics.
 Theoretical Musing 277

A Musing Process
In the LENR literature, speculation about possible mechanisms is volumi-
nous. An exposition of the many different nuclear processes hypothesized as
cold fusion energy sources is beyond the purposes of this book. Nevertheless,
an example of what has been tried is worth examination so as to see how such
theoretical contemplation helps to advance the art by a process of trial and
error.
There is an interesting duality at work in this activity. The musing pro-
cess gets forced along by the intellectual challenge to the theorist, and the ex-
perimenter’s craving for guidance: what best to try next? The theoretician is
looking for a nuclear mechanism whose effect matches the experimental data.
The mechanism can then be studied for properties that could be exploited in
the laboratory. In this way, there is a mutual give and take between the theore-
tician and the experimentalist.
The theoretician’s first and most difficult step requires selecting those ex-
perimenters whose data were to be accepted as valid, a somewhat subjective
task. Who are the most careful experimenters? Who best understands how his
experiment worked? Who is of sufficient intelligence and character that their
data from limited experiments ought to be accepted as valid? In this fashion a
list is made up of the data that a new theory must explain. The data deals with
the lack of, or the generation of, heat, helium, tritium, neutrons, radioactiv-
ity, radiation, and possibly element transmutation. The theorist also notices
whether these items came alone or in combinations. This sorting process gives
the theoretician the requirements for a new theory to meet if it is to explain
the data. Such a theory, if one is found, may then predict other effects. In that
way, there is a test for the theory: do those other effects exist?
The atoms in a metal, or other material, are commonly arranged in the
orderly rows and columns of a lattice. Lattice structure is studied in the spe-
cialty of condensed matter (solid state) physics. The electrolytic cell uses a pal-
ladium metal cathode that is composed of tiny domains each of which is a
crystal with a lattice structure. It is in this structure of crystal domains, with
their interfaces between domains, pressed together into a solid piece of metal
that one looks for an understanding of the power source. One of the theorist’s
conclusions is that in a perfect lattice, with the atoms in their places, there
would be no low energy nuclear behavior.
Palladium atoms are relatively big and heavy. The particular way that at-
oms arrange themselves in the palladium crystal allows a small atom like that
of deuterium to be added to the crystal’s interstices. The deuterium atoms fit
nicely among the larger atoms without disturbing them too much. Deuterium
could be added, if one knew how, until there was almost one deuterium atom
for each palladium atom (the loading ratio).
278 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

One type of lattice imperfection is the presence of vacancies, places where

the large atoms are missing from the ordered array of atoms. Ordinarily in
metals there are only a few vacancies, a small fraction of one percent. The pos-
sibility for a new reaction might be greatly increased if the number of vacan-
cies could be increased to three or four percent. The dual atomic mix of two
sizes of atoms, along with the vacancies, might allow the nucleus of a large
quadrupole atom to be exposed to the influence of events in the lattice.
Phonons are always present in solid materials. Their movements contain
and can convey energy from one place to another. Phonon lasers, for example,
resonate at a single frequency and with great amplitude because of reflections
from opposite crystal boundaries. Some theorists conjecture that phonon ac-
tivity may cause small packets of energy to be transferred into the nucleus of
some of the large atoms. The nucleus could be excited in this way to an energy
level that would result in a nuclear reaction.
The energy transfer from phonons to the nucleus may happen in tiny
quantities (a quantum), but at a frequency of possibly 12,000,000,000,000
(or 12 ⫻ 1012) times a second. The nucleus might become sufficiently excited
by transfers that continued for five or ten minutes for this process to result in a
nuclear event. The nucleus would become increasingly agitated by the steady
increase of energy until it reached an energy level where it reacted. A reaction
might result in an alpha particle (helium), or a beta particle (electron) emis-
sion, or, with sufficient excitation, the nucleus might fission. This process is
called low energy excitation, and the resultant reactions are a category of low
energy nuclear reactions.
The heavy nucleus (Pd) remains in an under-excited state for an extended
period that lasts for minutes before producing a reaction.*
There was no theoretical structure early in 1996 that could explain
the detailed observations of many cold fusion experiments: helium-four in
amounts that produce the reported excess heat, low energy tritium, only mar-
ginal levels of radioactivity, and so forth. The theorists suggested that the pro-
longed period when the nucleus is in an under-excited state makes the forma-
tion of stable reaction products possible. This is in direct contrast with high-
energy nuclear reactions that result in an array of highly radioactive products.
The theory postulates nuclear excitation by means of coherently excited
phonons. This is an exothermic process for certain nuclei and would be a
source for the excess heat. The resulting nuclear products would be helium-
four along with a new element having two fewer protons and two fewer neu-
trons than the heavy atoms of the lattice. It would have an atomic number
two lower than that of the heavy element of the lattice.

* This theory is said to comply with all the conservation laws of physics including energy, spin,
momentum, mass, and parity.
 Theoretical Musing 279

Those nuclei that do not achieve sufficient excitation to emit alpha par-
ticles might be involved in beta emission or in an electron capture kind of
reaction.
When the fission condition is approached slowly (in minutes rather than
in nanoseconds), the initial nuclear state “sees” the final nuclear states of prod-
ucts, and a minimum energy principle can be applied. Minimum energy in
the nuclear products means they emerge in non-excited states—i.e., without
transitions that produce gamma-ray radiation.*
The precise reaction, and the energy needed to cause a reaction, depend
upon the particular nuclei in question. There are a number of atomic ele-
ments that have the necessary characteristics for anomalous energy produc-
tion. One of these is the expensive palladium, but researchers expect that there
are other, more suitable elements that are less expensive.
In the world of theoretical physics, some scientist have offered strong ob-
jections to theories such as this one, objections that set forth possible flaws in
the work. This example of theoretical musing may well have perished by the
time this book reaches the reader. The problem it attempted to solve will re-
main with us, however, waiting for other theories to be tried and found more
sturdy.
Each theoretician, as we have seen, must develop a target data set that his
theory will explain. The items in the sets might settle about two groups of
data, namely, those suggesting a fusion sort of reaction and those suggesting a
fission type of reaction. Both groups might presage a collective and coherent
source of nuclear reaction in or between flawed lattice domains of a required
size.
The fusion collective reaction must explain the presence of heat, tritium,
and an amount of helium-four that corresponds with the amount of heat.
Exceedingly low levels of neutrons and radiation might be included in the
theory.
The fission collective reaction must explain the presence of alpha particles
and the transmutation of heavy elements.

Other Theoretical Challenges

New experiments in nuclear physics were inspired by the events of 1989. In
two cases these produced anomalous nuclear behavior. Although no connec-
tion has been made between these results and those of the Fleischmann and
Pons cell, it seems appropriate to mention them here.

* Gamma-ray radiation, a much more powerful radiation than x-rays, is particularly dangerous
because of its capacity to penetrate barriers.
280 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

One way to transfer energy from a nucleus to the surrounding lattice is

by the expulsion of a charged particle. Because such particles carry an elec-
trical charge, they interact strongly with their surroundings, which quickly
brings their travel to a halt and transfers their kinetic energy to those sur-
roundings in the form of heat. Transfers of this type are not candidates for the
energy source in the eletrolytic cell, because the numbers of such particles are
many factors of ten less than required to explain the heat. But they are of pass-
ing interest because they are not explained by current nuclear theory.
G. P. Chambers, a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, irradiated a
thin film of titanium with ionized deuterium atoms at the low energy of 350
eV. These ions penetrated the titanium crystal domains and their interfaces.6
He made thirteen experimental runs from December 1989 to March
1990. Of these, four produced charged particle emission, five did not, and in
four cases the thin film of titanium delaminated from its base, voiding the ex-
periment. Those runs that emitted particles evidenced a characteristic of the
Fleischmann and Pons experiment by only working once. He was never able
to revive the performance of a particular film for a second run.
Figure 20.1 shows the results of a run in which 1,171 particles were
counted by the detector placed immediately behind the thin titanium foil.
The particles passed through 4 mm of partial vacuum from the thin film to
the detector. (For ease in interpreting the diagram, I have added the vertical
line at 5.00 MeV.)
The target was irradiated for forty minutes before counts were detected.
These were detected in multiple bursts. Even though bombardment was con-
tinued for two additional hours, the bursts never repeated. Considerable ef-
forts were undertaken to make certain that the results were not an artifact of
the experimental setup. Chambers interpreted the particles to be tritons (ion-
ized tritium atoms) emitted with the energy of 4.99 MeV.
From the four successful experiments, Chambers calculated that the rate
of particle production was 10–16 events for each deuteron pair each second, a
rate 26 orders of magnitude greater than the prediction of nuclear fusion oc-
curring under these conditions.* To quote from the report, “If the particles are
originating from small active volumes within the film, then the reaction cross-
section could be higher by many orders of magnitude.” It is remarkable that
Chambers produced 5 MeV tritons from irradiation by deuterons of only 350
eV energy.
F. E. Cecil, Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden,
Colorado, measured charged particles in an experiment that corresponded to
fusion research techniques.7 After a sample of palladium was loaded with deu-

* This result was seven orders of magnitude greater than that postulated by S. E. Jones for geo-
physical fusion reactions.
 Theoretical Musing 281

figure 20.1 Chambers, Naval Research Laboratory, reported that 4.99 MeV tritons pro-
duced this peak during multiple bursts lasting over three minutes after deuterium irradia-
tion had ceased.

terium by irradiation, a strong direct current was passed through the sample.
The experiment was done in a vacuum chamber because charged particles
travel only a short distance in air or water. First, Cecil mounted a thin film of
palladium and irradiated it with a 95 keV deuteron beam up to a loading ratio
of about 0.60. During irradiation, about 800 tritons and an equal number of
protons were emitted by the palladium foil. The corresponding energy spec-
trum showed only two peaks: the tritons at 1 MeV, and protons at 3 MeV. A
deuterium—deuterium nuclear fusion reaction produces, for charged parti-
cles, a triton at 1 MeV and a proton at 3 MeV.
Figure 20.2 displays the results from running a strong current through
this Pd film after the deuterium beam was turned off. During this time, parti-
cles emitted by the foil were collected and placed into count “bins” according
to their energy level. There is a small peak, perhaps ten counts, in channel 26
(immediately to the right of the 26 mark). This channel corresponds to a 3
MeV energy level. Cecil speaks of this data thus, “there is a suggestion of a
peak at about 3 MeV which could be identified as the protons from [this
same] reaction.” He entertained this fact as though it was not a surprise to
find a fusion reaction indicated, even when there was no bombardment un-
282 low-energy nuclear reactions: nuclear products

figure 20.2 Cecil, Colorado School of Mines, reported that the peak at Channel 26 and
27 indicates a 3 MeV proton emission, presumably the product of a fusion reaction.

derway. The production of particles in this reaction is at the low rate of about
50 cm-3-sec-1 (per cubic cm during each second).
In another run of the experiment, when the current was applied, a peak
appeared at 5 MeV, one that did not appear in the control runs. Cecil offers
no explanation for this peak.

The Nuclear Sum

Some skeptics complain not that Fleischmann and Pons are wrong, but that, if
they are right, then the physics textbooks will have to be re-written. Will any
of the conservation laws of physics be challenged? So far, the theorists say that
their theories conform to the conservation laws of physics. Will any of the nu-
clear reaction formulae need changing?
There is no indication so far that any of them need modification except
to note that they apply only to two-body interactions. There is some indica-
tion that nuclear cross section data may need modification, possibly, at low
energies.* There may well be future theories derived from cold fusion research
that call for, or that imply, some modification of the reaction rates.8 The most

* Kasagi reported at Vancouver (ICCF-7) that proton yields were surprisingly larger than pre-
dicted at energies of 2.5 to 10 keV in Pd and PdO thick targets. An extrapolation of this result
to lower energies might allow us to observe a nuclear reaction at room temperature.
 Theoretical Musing 283

likely requirement for nuclear text books would be additional material on

solid-state energy transfers. This knowledge may take years to attain, and so it
might be incorporated a little at a time.
The reader’s best response to the claim of new nuclear processes is the
usual one: stay calm and enjoy watching it unfold. Such change, simply
enough, makes another fine spectator sport.
For the present, a valuable assessment is offered by Scaramuzzi.

The study of collective and coherent phenomena promises very high

intellectual rewards, and the hope of contributing to the solution to
the problem of the energy supply for mankind is highly inspiring.
Last but not least, the challenge of studying a field that is not well
understood is definitely fascinating.9

A more important aspect of our subject for long term consideration is the
evidence for a nuclear source of energy that is environmentally benign. Oppo-
sition to fission nuclear power was to some considerable extent based upon a
desire to restrict the total availability of energy for individual use.
The anomalous power cell may be capable of technological development
into a desirable source of energy for society. Little can be said of the time or
funding that this development will require. Even when the scientific basis be-
comes well established, as in the case of hot fusion, the required engineering
will be difficult to estimate.
 Pa r t Fi ve

RESOLUTION
 c h a p t e r t w e n t y - o n e

Outlook

S cientists who accepted the reality of anomalous power entered a career that
dwelled in a no man’s land between waiting for recognition by the scien-
tific community and waiting for the realization of a commercial product. Ei-
ther would validate the new field and the new career. Both would prove slow
in coming.
Mistakes made by the scientific community aborted most of the public
stage of development in cold fusion science. A discovery made in the academic
environment ordinarily involved exposure of the science through publication.
This public period could be short, after which that discovery disappeared into
the industrial laboratory where results were held as proprietary. The national
laboratories, however, were in a position to do continuing development and to
publish it. It is during the academic, or national laboratory, phase that the
scientific details become public knowledge. For cold fusion research, the aca-
demic science period in the U.S. was quickly ended by Baltimore. The re-
search was continued mostly in private laboratories in California, and in gov-
ernment laboratories or university laboratories in Japan, Italy, France, and
Russia. Both Japan and Russia now hold annual cold fusion conferences (open
to all) to expedite correspondence among the scientists so engaged.
The University of Utah conducted research in cold fusion science (by
Fleischmann and Pons) from late 1984 into the early months of 1991. This
research was available for publication, and through the grace of IMRA Eu-
rope, much of it saw the light of day. Also, to my knowledge, there has been
no restriction on publishing the research done at the National Cold Fusion

287
288 resolution

Institute (NCFI), Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1989 until its demise in June of
1991.
During 1989, academic research in other universities was published.
Stanford University, Texas A&M University, Minnesota University, Case
Western University, Caltech, and several others published their work in this
field. The national laboratories were active in 1989, but that trailed off to a
few isolated researchers who carried on for a decade at LANL. Their work also
was published.
Scientific personnel and projects began to migrate as early as June 1989
to the proprietary laboratory in order to obtain protection for any inventions
that might result. Fleischmann and Pons accepted industrial positions from
Technova in 1992 that they might continue their work. But this meant that
the work was to be done in a corporation rather than in their natural milieu,
the university. After that move, they published information only about their
calorimetry results. No publications by them have appeared in the crucial area
of improved cathode design to achieve better reproducibility. In the case of
cold fusion research, the window that allows public disclosure was prema-
turely shut.
The experiment proved difficult. It cannot be too greatly stressed how de-
velopment of the field was thwarted by scientists grossly underestimating its
difficulty. Even Fleischmann and Pons thought it would be easy for them to
replicate their experiment since they had no trouble doing so up to the time of
the announcement. They also had no idea how problematic it would be to
bring others along to do the experiment successfully. These difficulties were
compounded when the two of them were made unwelcome in American aca-
demia and moved into the private environment of corporate research and de-
velopment abroad.
Even so, the original cell design is seen to have evolved in numerous ways.
The variety of technology that has emerged was briefly described in Chapters
14–19. No one can say what ultimately will become of it, but a few comments
are in order.
Three purposes direct this new field of science: (1) to develop a more
readily replicable experiment in order to reduce the cost and improve the im-
pact of research, (2) to learn the breadth of the Fleischmann and Pons effect
over the many disciplines of science, and (3) to find the source of the anoma-
lous power. Will one generation of scientists be sufficient to fulfill these pur-
poses?
The scientists practicing the attainment of reproducibility in cold fusion
research had to acquire ever increasing control of their experiment.1 After vali-
dation was reached at the end of 1994, the next goal naturally enough would
be to increase the reliability in obtaining anomalous heat in a single attempt.
 Outlook 289

The version developed by Preparata is a large volume flask with a long

wire Pd cathode that is threaded up and down as it progresses around the in-
side periphery of the flask. A platinum anode is at the center. This unique ex-
periment uses two power supplies to operate it. One is connected to the anode
and cathode in the usual manner. The other power supply is connected to
each end of the cathode wire. It maintains a current along the length of the
palladium cathode wire during the time of the experiment. Preparata uses this
second current to obtain high loading. By avoiding the sorting and selection
process for palladium, he claimed to have obtained 100% reproducibility in
building the electrolytic cells.2
The Scaramuzzi group came close to total reproducibility in 1996 with a
system it developed to evaluate palladium samples for suitability, “Repro-
ducibility is still an important issue, but much progress has been made, and I
think that it is at hand.”3
We have seen how Melvin Miles took several months to learn how to
build cells that would generate excess heat, and how he later visited the NHE
laboratories in Japan and was successful there in doing so. He found it neces-
sary to sort the palladium samples that were available to him to find those that
were suitable for generating excess heat. He has been quite successful in this
endeavor. He now reports that more than half of the cells he constructs obtain
anomalous power generation, which is about on a par with mammal cloning
experiments.
After many years of experimentation by Mengoli, the reproducibility ap-
pears to be good (Figure 15.2). His experiment meets the one success out of
two attempts requirement that was discussed in Chapter 10, p. 141. Only the
considerable investment of starting a large number of trials will demonstrate
that an acceptable level of reproducibility has been achieved. His experiment
appears to be transportable and communicable. It is the experiment I would
recommend to a laboratory that was planning to start work in this field. From
all appearances, it is the experiment that should bring the highest likelihood of
success.
Other developments in the field promise higher quality heat, and heat
without a source of excitation. The Fleischmann and Pons cell itself resists
commercialization. The greatest obstacle is the tendency of the electrolytic cell
to cover its cathode with gunk. This build up takes a week to a month de-
pending on the laboratory skill levels employed to prevent it. Continuous cell
operation depends on constant technical nursing that might be possible only
with a large-scale industrial application.
One of the most promising experiments emphasizes the heat after death
phenomenon. Mengoli operated his Fleischmann and Pons cells at 95C to ob-
tain fast startup of heat generation, and observed astonishing performance af-
290 resolution

ter the cell current ended. The cell demonstrated heat generation without the
confusing factor of excitation input power. The demonstration seemed to last
indefinitely, stopping only when the high temperature bath was allowed to re-
turn to room temperature. Such a demonstration is especially persuasive of the
reality of anomalous power.
Mizuno investigated the use of ceramic proton conductors. Oriani cor-
roborated his experimental results by generating anomalous power at 400C,
and in one case without excitation. An operating temperature of 400C offers
high quality heat for running turbines and generators. It is a long develop-
ment pathway to first perfect the ceramic, then the heat generating system,
then to scale the whole thing up to a high power level. This caliber of invest-
ment probably can not be undertaken in the U.S. because the Patent Office
will not issue patents to protect cold fusion investments. But a technological
promise of sorts is there, nevertheless, for whomever may exploit it.

Governments
In these paragraphs, I tell the disquieting story of attempts to develop com-
mercial product applications. Product development had to build almost solely
upon the observation of anomalous power in the electrolytic cell. The odds
were heavily against success in such a venture because the scientific basis for
the heat was not known. Also, product development under these conditions
tends to be done by scientists instead of by engineers.
Stanley Pons occasionally indicated that commercial products could be
fashioned quite promptly from his laboratory device. This unwarranted opti-
mism is a common weakness of research scientists who know little of the strict
demands of the marketplace, not to mention the prior demands of manufac-
turing. Such statements of ready commercialization ought to be dismissed out
of hand.
Historical examples exist of useful products embodying high technology
design that were developed without the prior establishment of a scientific base
for the technology. The flash strobe lamp of the kind seen in cameras and on
high towers, for example, became an article of commerce in the 1930s before
its scientific basis was complete.
During the first twelve years, several attempts were made by agencies of
various governments to develop the anomolous heat phenomenon as a power
source. The organizations that engaged in such research are worth looking at
briefly. These government-sponsored programs were in the news frequently
and the demise of each was widely reported.
No one or two persons were to blame for the failure of National Cold
Fusion Institute (NCFI). The Utah legislature allocated $5,000,000 for its
 Outlook 291

founding.* From the beginning, it was impossibly chartered to achieve an arti-

cle of commerce, a product design. Fleischmann and Pons were given consid-
eration in terms of what they might contribute to it only after the institute
was established. They were perfectly straightforward about their interests and
pointed out that they were not product development engineers. They were at
heart academic researchers and intellectual gadflies. Their relationship to the
new organization was that they were available but their commitment was al-
ways oblique. They also harbored a suspicion that the organization’s associates
would leak information on the research to their commercial friends. In fact,
the Institute never had their undivided support. Their principle activity while
they were there was to set up a factorial† cell experiment, part of which was in
the chemistry department with the rest located at NCFI.
The NCFI staff undertook experiments independently of Fleischmann
and Pons. While they reported the generation of tritium, they were never able
to make a cell produce anomalous power. The fact that the NCFI was unable
to achieve that first milestone marked the defeat of their purpose. It closed its
doors in June of 1991.
A Japanese student of Martin Fleischmann’s approached the two chemists
at the 1991 Electrochemical Society meeting in Kyoto to broach the topic of
alternative employment should they leave their positions at the University of
Utah. This opportunity blossomed into a friendship between the two and
Minoru Toyoda, doyen of the Toyoda clan, founder of the Toyota automobile
company and sponsor of Technova. As employees of Technova, Fleischmann
and Pons picked up and continued their Utah research in a laboratory de-
signed for precision calorimetry. The laboratory, IMRA Europe, was located
in a technology park environment in Provence, France, not far from Monaco.
The research they started in Utah was completed there to a considerable
extent. The materials problem with cathodes was brought under a great deal
more control and the calorimetry was established at a high level of accuracy.
Their basic experiment was advanced to a higher power level by operating at
100C, a temperature at which the electrolyte boils continuously. The calori-
metric part of this work was extensively published.
After the death of Minoru Toyoda, Technova management wanted to see
progress towards a power-generating device, an article of commerce. While
Fleischmann and Pons were essential to the research function, it is unlikely
that they were the right people to head a commercial development effort.
* Fleischmann says that he and Pons spent only $350,000 of it.
† This efficient method for doing a large number of experiments when each individual experi-
ment was long running is described in a Chapter 5 footnote (see page 76). When the experi-
ment is finished, the results of the many cells were then analyzed mathematically to sort out
the results for each of the several variables, each measured against its control value. The advan-
tage of this approach is that each of the five variables and its control got many experimental
runs, not just one.
292 resolution

Fleischmann retired from the operation in August 1995. Pons did the same in
early 1998, and the facility was closed. An estimated $40 million was spent,
and no product of any sort was in sight. Technova had provided a setting
where Fleischmann and Pons could advance and complete their anomalous
power experiments begun in Utah.
The Japanese culture does not tolerate the kind of personal assault that
America witnessed at Baltimore and Los Angeles in May 1989. There was a
refreshingly wide range of opinion about cold fusion studies in Japanese scien-
tific circles. Opinions were less extreme and more open to the possibilities for
at least two or three years rather than for two or three months. The Japanese
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to try its hand
at research in the field in 1993.
MITI did not have a national laboratory facility where a proposed pro-
gram could be shaped into a realistic plan by an established research staff.
Rather, space was rented, technical people with the appropriate skills were
hired, and the facilities were filled with the best equipment. The form was
perfect. The operating plan called for a series of milestone achievements lead-
ing to a prototype commercial power device in five years.
In retrospect, the entire time and effort of the five-year program were de-
voted to their first objective, obtaining anomalous power generation. Their
cells were of their own design, because the cells made by Fleischmann and
Pons could not physically fit into their calorimeters. They used a double calo-
rimeter around their cells and it eventually produced conflicting data. The in-
side calorimeter showed the presence of anomalous power, but the outside cal-
orimeter did not. With that kind of difficulty to be resolved, the laboratory
suffered from its lack of an extended laboratory facility, staff, and manage-
ment, the reserve of skills that are found at a national laboratory. The labora-
tory had been established without including a single electrochemist of Ph.D.
rank. Staff was shuffled in and out in six months stays from sponsoring com-
panies. No one of sufficient intellectual training that had the confidence of
program management was available to resolve the conflict in the calorimeters,
and to direct the research to completion.
The laboratory spokesman stated that, in their own cells, they never expe-
rienced anomalous power episodes. Fleischmann has made a presentation of
MITI data showing that they did indeed get excess heat. Storms, who had
done extensive investigations of the palladium metallurgy, said, by way of cri-
tique, that they did not take advantage of much that was known about select-
ing suitable palladium. MITI had little choice but to bring its efforts to an
end. MITI did not conclude that there was no such thing as anomalous
power; it had no grounds for doing so. It was simply that this research was too
sophisticated for the scope of its program. Political considerations naturally re-
quired that it also terminate much of the other cold fusion research it was sup-
porting in various academic laboratories throughout Japan.
 Outlook 293

Thus ended three attempts to move towards a commercial product with-

out an available scientific base of knowledge. The money spent in those three
cases was not wasted. Knowledge about the anomalous power phenomenon
accumulated from the work at NCFI, Technova, and MITI and most of it was
published.
Scaramuzzi spoke to an interpretation of these closures.

One could be tempted to interpret the closure of these three impor-

tant projects as a demonstration that CF research is failing in its ob-
jective to become a well-defined discipline in science. I am person-
ally convinced that this interpretation is definitely wrong. Let me
explain why . . . it was to be expected that enterprises that were born
with the aim of having a practical fall-out in a short time had to give
up. I am still convinced that a lot of basic research is needed, in order
to better understand the science underlying CF, before practical ob-
jectives can be seriously addressed: this [scientific objective] can be
better pursued by small groups that proceed with this clear idea in
mind.
And this approach in my opinion is what is beginning to hap-
pen. Let me mention a few events which show this tendency . . . : At
Grenoble, in France, there is a laboratory funded by the French CEA
(Commisariat a l’Energie Atomique) and by the Grenoble Institut
Polytechnique which has started a research project in CF. The SRI
group . . . is presently active in CF research with funds from the US
agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). In
Italy a new initiative is starting now: a cooperation between ENEA,
INFN, LEDA that will allow the creation of a new laboratory at
ENEA Frascati with a research program on CF, funded by the Italian
Government for the next three or more years.4

This is an example of the sort of support that is needed and appropriate.

During the 1990s the U.S. Government supported cold fusion research
through the Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) of the Department of Defense. This was always done in a tiptoeing
and whispering sort of manner, always fearful that they would be discovered
and hounded to abandon their projects. By 2000, this quiet approach had
spent about all the dollars for research on the new science that they felt was
possible without attracting more attention than they could handle.
To everyone’s surprise, the DOE then got back into the act. The reader
will recall it was this same department that wrote cold fusion research’s obitu-
ary in 1989. One of their offices initiated a project to find and to fund “Break-
through Energy Physics Research” possibilities. “The ultimate objective is to
develop and validate new scientific principles . . . that will enable revolution-
294 resolution

ary advances in energy generation. . .” “The implementation approach . . . in-

volves partnering . . . to identify . . . anomalous effects and to extend theory
development . . . to the point of supporting validation experiments.”5
In an earlier attempt at this kind of indirect approach to our topic, the
DOE had awarded Professor Miley a $100,000 contract to do further work on
his thin films to generate excess heat and produce transmutations. The con-
tract was specifically to conduct a “Scientific Feasibility Study of Low Energy
Nuclear Reactions for Nuclear Waste Amelioration.” The cold fusion skeptics
went on the attack. According to Science journal, an organization called the
Nuclear Control Institute wrote to the Secretary, “The credibility of DOE will
be irreparably damaged unless funding for this cold fusion proposal is imme-
diately withdrawn.” The DOE’s Office of Science put together a six person,
secret panel of peer-reviewers that specialize in the fundamental sciences.
This review unanimously recommended that the contract not be funded, and
Miley’s funding was withdrawn.
The new program, BEPR, accepted pre-proposals and also searched the
scientific literature for possible breakthrough topics. It searched separately and
in a similar manner for theories and for anomalous effects. The criteria for the
latter are listed below along with the points for scoring the different ideas.6

1. Anomalous effects that are published in peer-reviewed scientific or tech-

nical journals +10.
2. Anomalous effects that are published in non-peer-reviewed journals or
are in non-published pre-prints +7.
3. Anomalous effects that are privately published +4.
4. Anomalous effects that are unpublished manuscripts +1.
5. When two or more anomalous effects are published by independent
researchers which correlate add points.
6. For each published challenge that is unanswered by a rebuttal ⫺5.
7. For each published challenge that is answered by a rebuttal ⫺3.
8. When one theory and one anomalous effect are published which cor-
relate add points.

In this fashion, the DOE selected those (1) theories, (2) effects, and (3)
theories combined with effects which deserve development support. The of-
fice says that an ongoing database of the reports offered for this survey will be
maintained and augmented so as to be continuously available in the years
ahead.
At the most preliminary level, the BEPR program in October 2000 rated
Miley at their “acceptable level” to investigate LENR.7 The program describes
their measure of Miley’s work to date thus.
 Outlook 295

Another emerging area in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that

describes a potential method for novel energy conversion, genera-
tion, storage, and use involves a phenomenon known as Low-Energy
Nuclear Reactions (LENR’s). Various researchers have published
papers in the scientific literature on the phenomena. This effect is
different from the so called “Cold Fusion” effect which described
anomalous heating effects in deuterated metals. LENR’s have identi-
fied nuclear reaction products that are attributed to hydrogen or
deuterium interactions with the metal electrode (rather than D-D
type fusion). A growing body of experimental evidence is cited show-
ing that LENR’s can occur under select conditions in solid lattice
loaded with hydrogenous atoms. For example, the experiments of
T. N. Claytor, and his colleagues at LANL.8 There appear to be vari-
ous reaction regimes leading to different nuclear products. To illus-
trate the LENR effect, recent experiments at the U. of Ill. were per-
formed, where a large number of new elements were observed in thin
films of various metals such as Ni undergoing electrolysis.9
Mounting data supports the reality of LENR in solid state lat-
tices loaded with hydrogenous gases under a variety of conditions.
The situation is complicated, however, by the possibility that
several different reactions regimes exist . . . Should the existence of
LENR’s be verified, the implications could be significant. The power
densities reported in present cells are quite high, such that a simple
volumetric scaling could be used to quickly develop 10–100 kW
power units. There is no obviously fundamental block to going to
yet much higher power levels, but new designs would be required to
handle the extreme heat loads involved. It will take more indepen-
dent experimentation, the refinement of a workable theoretical ba-
sis, and consistent replication to confirm and fully understand this
anomalous phenomenon.

A study of the scientific literature by the DOE thus reveals the presence
of credibly scientific activity in LENR.
It is evident here that no matter what reaction it is that provides the
power for excess heat in a Fleischmann and Pons cell, no one is to associate it
with the term Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. That phrase is now reserved,
apparently for anomalous behavior separate from excess heat. It may be D +
D fusion; it may be something else, but the term LENR must not be sullied
by reference to excess heat. Which leads to the question, How high did the
BEPR score on the evidence for anomalous power in the form of excess heat
energy? Or, was that item disqualified at an early stage to avoid the issue of
cold fusion research?
296 resolution

In any event, the BEPR program is a modest, courageous and worthwhile

start-up endeavor.

Corporations
Why do commercial entrepreneurs try to develop market applications in the
face of these failures? One answer is that the money being committed was
quite modest. The products were relatively simple in their construction, so
they could be tried at each step of development to see if they functioned prop-
erly. A company may well find success if it could continue to make its labora-
tory device generate excess heat while it was engineered into a useful product.
Also, the funding could be arranged to match the development effort step by
step. That course of planning resulted in a reasonable level of risk at each stage
as long as the device under development was relatively small and simple.
The other side of that risk is that the payoff can be particularly great: a
starting place in a newly developing sector of the energy industry. The rewards
may be handsome for those who invest at an early time.
The founder of Clean Energy Technologies, LLC, (CETI), Sarasota, Flor-
ida, Dr. Patterson, received a patent quickly because he was over 70 years of
age, and there are fast response rules in the Patent Office for people over a cer-
tain age. Patterson was cleverly able to avoid the absolute ban on cold fusion
patents by channeling his application to a specific department in the U.S. Pat-
ent Office. He obtained his first patent in 1993 and a dozen or more have fol-
lowed. CETI raised outside money in the low million dollar range, and ex-
panded its technical and management depth accordingly. But these strategies
did not work out. The technical base was simply too thin to sustain them. At
this writing, the company has retrenched greatly.
ENECO, Salt Lake City, Utah, was formed to hold and exploit the origi-
nal cold fusion patents under agreements with Fleischmann and Pons, and the
University of Utah. The continuing refusal of the U.S. Patent Office to con-
sider any submittal and a much later challenge to their European applications
by CETI, combined to make that course of business development financially
untenable. The company turned to product development in the field of cold
fusion research in 1996 along with an accompanying new technology for solid
state conversion of heat to electricity, under the direction of Fred Jaeger, its
president. After several years of research at a cost of $2–3,000,000, the phe-
nomena of excess heat could not be generated in a repeatable manner by its
product device. Further activity in the field cold fusion research was termi-
nated in the fall of 1998.
Blacklight Power Corporation, Cranbury, New Jersey, was founded by
Randell L. Mills who has an M.D. degree from Harvard and an engineering
 Outlook 297

degree from MIT. After the cold fusion episode got underway, he made his
own attempt to understand theoretically what might be going on in the cold
fusion cell. He soon announced an entirely new theory of quantum mechanics
at odds with the textbooks. One result of his calculations was that he pre-
dicted the existence of a new form of hydrogen. This form placed the single
electron that orbits the hydrogen nucleus at a considerably smaller radius to
the nucleus. An electron moves from its usual position to the newly claimed
position by giving up a significant amount of energy. Mills claimed that it was
this change of the hydrogen electron orbit that was the source of the excess en-
ergy he was seeing in experiments with a nickel cathode in light water. His
theory involves no reactions in the nucleus itself.
He established Blacklight Power to exploit his understanding of this new
form of hydrogen, referred to as a hydrino. Previously, Mills had done four
years of experiments with cells to generate anomalous power. The company
considered these to be successful enough so that it started commercial devel-
opment under alliances with one or more electric utility companies. Their
plan was to offer electric water heaters that obtain a large fraction of their
power from the new process and hydrino hydride chemical compounds.
Blacklight has raised capital funds in the low tens of millions of dollars.
Blacklight has been trying to position itself to issue an initial public stock of-
fering, but that market continues to be so volatile as to make such an offering
unpredictable.
One of those strange events that are not uncommon to cold fusion re-
search occurred to Blacklight in the spring of 2000. A patent they had been is-
sued was suddenly retracted by the Patent Office (PTO) without the PTO’s
official investigator being informed of the action. Blacklight took the matter
into federal court where the Patent Office was upheld in its retraction of the
patent.10
Fusion Power, Inc., was founded by Dr. Les C. Case, a chemical engineer
with several degrees from MIT. He has generated excess heat with the concur-
rent creation of helium by means of commercial palladium catalysts in a deu-
terium atmosphere. This achievement, that constitutes a major contribution
to the field, is presented in Chapter 16. Fusion Power, Inc., remains a solo es-
tablishment with limited priorities and direction. Case’s purposes are to de-
velop a self-sustaining reaction, to find ever more suitable catalysts, and to
scale up his generator to that of a commercial prototype.11
Several established companies have had contact with the field of cold fu-
sion research. General Electric negotiated an early participation with the Uni-
versity of Utah. The most substantial critique of the Fleischmann and Pons
paper on their calorimetry was written by Wilson from its Schenectady, New
York, laboratories. The Wilson paper seems to have marked the end of their
interest.
298 resolution

Motorola took a more activist stand by making token investments in sev-

eral small groups to get a look at what was going on.
Italy has been diligent in its cold fusion research from the time when
Scaramuzzi entered the field in 1989. There were three groups planning to
commercially exploit the field. Each had its nuclear theory and its laboratory
demonstrations to support its commitment.
Just two years after validation, by the end of 1996, the Fleischmann and
Pons experiment with its phenomenon of anomalous power had attained the
reproducibility level of 50% or higher for the experienced electrochemist. The
“serum touch,” or what in this case might be called a palladium touch, cer-
tainly was involved to some extent in this achievement. That is, scientists such
as Miles had a way of evaluating a palladium sample that allowed them to ex-
pect a 50% success level for each newly built cell.
Validation and nuclear products have each been given their due consider-
ation in our story so far. Anomalous power necessarily leaves behind it a nu-
clear ash of presently unproved composition, but with evidence accumulating
for the element helium. Society, however, has been given a new source of en-
ergy. Little can be known at this early time of how it will eventually be used.
If one wants to muse in that direction, the best that can be done is to look
carefully at the experimental work underway. From that, the long-term char-
acteristics of this energy source might be estimated.
The useful application of a heat source depends to some extent upon the
temperature at which it is generated. In use, heat is passed through a converter
and out into the ambient surroundings such as the local air or water. The en-
ergy that can be extracted from that heat depends upon the temperature dif-
ference between the source and the ambient. The Fleischmann and Pons phe-
nomena was produced most frequently in experiments well below the boiling
point of water. At such low temperatures, this difference is small and the ther-
modynamic energy conversion efficiencies are relatively low. Heat produced at
these temperatures is referred to as low quality heat.
Low quality heat has its uses. An important application would be in space
and water heating for personal use. Much energy is consumed (on a per capita
basis) to supply a warm room and warm water both in the work place and in
living quarters. In economically developed countries, there is a sizeable invest-
ment in central heating systems to accomplish this, but the cost of such sys-
tems appears as a staggering obstacle for less developed countries. A large frac-
tion of the population resides in the village level at the turn of the twenty-first
century.
Low temperature operation of experimental cells might be embodied in a
product of a size and cost designed to provide for the warming of a room or of
a water supply at the family level of social organization. It is not certain that a
source of electricity will be needed to get such a device started or to sustain its
 Outlook 299

operation. A source of heat such as a small fire might do as well to start it op-
erating. At the village level such a device would supplant the gathering of
firewood and brush, and the use of kerosene.
At the twelve-year anniversary, it is not yet clear whether the heat generat-
ing formulae consumes the palladium or not and, if it does, at what rate. As-
suming for the moment that it does, we can consider the sufficiency of palla-
dium supply* in the words of Fleischmann (October 1999).

[The] experiments with electro diffusion [G. Preparata] pretty regu-

larly get heat [density] releases of 10 kW/cm3 and occasionally 100
kW/cm3. If this can be done reliably, this would allow one to con-
struct systems that would satisfy a large portion of the world’s energy
needs with existing palladium production. This is all low-grade heat
—a lot of the world’s energy is used as low-grade heat.
Increasing the quality of the heat will not be a particularly dif-
ficult problem. You can compress the system [and run it under pres-
sure].12

There is also evidence that the metal niobium can serve the Fleischmann
and Pons phenomena as a substitute for palladium.13 V. A. Filimonov at the
Institute for Physical Chemical Problems, Belarus State University, Minsk, ob-
tained excess heat using niobium cathodes in heavy water electrolysis.14 If his
results are corroborated, niobium can supplement the supplies of palladium.
World reserves of niobium are estimated at 14 million tons.
Mizuno and Oriani obtained heat from ceramic proton conductors at
400C, and Case obtained excess heat at 200C. Those temperatures give high
quality heat of the sort that can, in large quantities, drive turbines to produce
electricity. But the path from these experiments to something of economic
value is a rough and serpentine one. All that can be said with certainty is that
it is a promising area for research investment.
The status in 1997 for the generation of anomalous power is illustrated in
Figure 21.1 by David J. Nagel. The figure of merit used was the power density
in the palladium cathode because in certain fundamental ways power density
is a measure of usefulness. However, the reader should keep in mind that the
power densities to be described were obtained from small cathodes (i.e., small
volumes). The historical progression from wood to coal to nuclear follows that
paradigm of increasing power density. (Oil was prized for its usefulness as a
liquid.) Nuclear power is shown with its power density of 500 to 1,000 watts
per cm3 in a fuel rod.
The range of power density values covered by point A was reported by
* The world’s palladium supply is estimated at 100 tons per year.
300 resolution

s u m m at i o n
The Conflict Between Data and Theory
Resolution:
Fleischmann and Pons resolved the contention between their claim of anoma-
lous power that was essentially without concurrent neutron radiation and their
recognition of contemporary nuclear physics by proposing the hypothesis that a
presently unknown or unrecognized nuclear process provided the heat power
they had measured.
The skeptics resolved the contention by spurning the claims of excess heat
measurements: “anomalous heat was claimed, but no nuclear products were re-
ported.” In this oblique way, they would deny the validity of the laboratory re-
sults by fiat. That denial contrasted unfavorably with the action of Irving
Langmuir and Robert W. Wood, who went bravely into those laboratories that
generated data conflicting with theory and participated in the experimental
work. There, in those laboratories, they defined the term pathological science
by demonstrating what was wrong with the experimental claims. The skeptics
protocol can be seen to be wrong.
Conclusions:
1. It was wrong of the skeptics to offer guidance to the community about the
nature of the cold fusion controversy while they summarily refused to recog-
nize the existence of the experimental procedures that initiated and sus-
tained the research.
2. Their demand for nuclear experimental data as a substitute for the heat data
they spurned was a violation of procedure. The available data has been held
hostage for over twelve years by their demand for the provision of data that
was not available.
3. Because of those demands, the continuing contention between nuclear the-
ory and anomalous heat data was mistakenly omitted from admission into
mainstream science, there to be resolved.
4. That omission provided contemporary nuclear theory with illegitimate pro-
tection from contention. Theorems must be exposed to contention if they
are to be considered falsifiable.
5. That failure to maintain the theorems of nuclear science falsifiable was a vio-
lation of scientific protocol by the skeptics.

Fleischmann and Pons from their research at the University of Utah from
1984 to March 1989. Their continuing research there, after the announce-
ment, resulted in density levels of 100 to 1,000 watts per cm3 and is shown in
point B. Their work at IMRA Europe, 1992 to 1995, resulted in the genera-
tion of anomalous power at the boiling point of water with the additional
phenomenon of “heat after death.” They let the cell boil dry and then ob-
served an enormous release of heat lasting for many hours. The density
achieved, point C, was 4,000 watts per cm3.15
 Outlook 301

The last point was achieved by Preparata. His electrolytic cell used a long,
fine palladium wire for its cathode. A separate current flow is maintained from
end to end through the cathode wire. The experiment generated power at a
level of several hundred watts over a period of tens of hours. “The same [re-
sult] was observed in the about fifty similar experiments that we have con-
ducted.” That result produced a power density of 50 to 100,000 watts per
cm3, shown in Figure 21.1 as point D.16
The small size of the experimental devices used to gather excess heat and
helium data implies that articles of commerce derived from the resulting tech-
nology might also be of small size. This special characteristic is displayed in
Figure 21.2 by Nagel, where it can be seen that a cold fusion derived device
would be uniquely small and portable compared with other nuclear sources of
power. Applications that come immediately to mind are those for space, as
well as water heating in the home and office that were already mentioned.
Transportation applications might also prove practical.
It is noted that the United States may prove an inhospitable country for
such devices because of the enmity towards availability of energy for personal
use that has been emphasized by the leaders of environmental movements in
this country.
The existence of anomalous power as a newly discovered natural phe-
nomenon became sufficiently well documented by the end of 1994 to estab-
lish a continuing field of scientific study, a new science if you will. The signa-
ture of that science is the appearance of anomalous power in the Fleischmann
and Pons electrolytic cell. This phenomenon ought to retain the attention of
science because, in Marie Curie’s words, “it defied all contemporary scientific
experience.” Science cannot properly ignore such an observation.

figure 21.1 Nagel, Naval Research Laboratory, charted the increase of anomalous power
levels since 1989, including points A, B, C by Fleischmann and Pons, and point D by
Preparata.
302 resolution

figure 21.2 Nagel shows the relative sizes and power levels of several types of nuclear
power generators.

The outlook for early development of a successful commercial product

must be considered marginal at best considering that the past activity was car-
ried out at penurious funding levels, without an understanding of the scien-
tific base, without patents to protect an investment, and with the nominal
hostility of the various American scientific establishments and little develop-
ment activity remains.
What is more likely than the achievement of commercial success in cold
fusion research is an hiatus in the development of the field of about one gener-
ation. After the antagonists have left the scene, the large body of technical lit-
erature would be re-discovered, found valuable, and diligently pursued in the
appropriate academic departments. This would be done with the concurrence
of the scientific establishment.
 c h a p t e r t w e n t y - t w o

The Skeptics

I t was a surprise for me to realize that the skeptic, as herein defined, does not
often contribute to the advancement of science. In Chapter 10, p. 133, I
quoted Beveridge in support of this view. The skeptic is one who will not ac-
cept an assumption that is fundamental to a field of study thereby leaving him
blind to the research. Consequently his “criticisms” are not useful to those to
whom they are directed.
The world accepts the implication of Magellan’s ship’s journey circum-
navigating the globe, but Beveridge’s flat-earther does not. A cartographer
puzzles over the paradox of how to design a flat map to depict the spherical
Earth. The distortions implicit in his finished map are ridiculed by the skeptic
as error. The skeptic thus imagines himself a critic. The skeptic, believing the
world to be flat, does not recognize that the cartographer’s mapping problem
exists. His “criticisms” do not help the cartographer.
The data of interest in cold fusion studies imply the existence of anoma-
lous power in the Fleischmann and Pons experiment. Those committed to the
field strive to assess that data with increasing rigor while the skeptic ignores
that same data. The skeptic can criticize them; he can not help them. His
“criticism” is sterile. Nevertheless, skeptics have played a significant, possibly
formative, part in the cold fusion saga. Their part in it must be thoroughly
considered.
The field of cold fusion research suffered from the armchair skeptic. He
was supremely confident of his nuclear theory and so did not venture into the
chemistry laboratory. He somehow knew, a priori, that anomalous power did
not exist.
The source of motivation for the cold fusion researcher as seen by the

303
304 resolution

skeptic is dramatized in the following quotation of May 1991. Park, spokes-

man for the APS, refers to the continuing cold fusion research activity,

If everyone knows it is wrong, why are they doing it? Inept scien-
tists whose reputations would be tarnished, greedy administrators,
. . gullible politicians who had squandered the taxpayers’ dollars, lazy
journalists . . .—all now had an interest in making it appear that the
issue had not been settled.1

Learn Calorimetry?
Learn calorimetry? Surely you are joking. An MIT nuclear physicist who par-
ticipated in the early cold fusion effort there said, “I think to do calorimetry is
one of the hardest things I ever tried to do. I’d rather stick to plasma physics.”2
The subject had the humorous aspect that the most aggressive skeptics were
nuclear physicists who emphatically said they do not like measuring heat or
heat flow.
Early acceptance by all parties of the lack of a high level of neutrons in
the Fleischmann and Pons experiment left unaccountable amounts of energy
remaining as its signature. It followed that if one wanted to criticize the exper-
imental work being done, one must develop some degree of expertise in calo-
rimetry. Almost none of them did. Their pointed refusal to learn the relevant
specialty over a period of twelve years further identifies them as skeptics.

Huizenga’s “Fiasco”
For the reader to come to terms with this field of science—and that is one of
my purposes—it is necessary to briefly revisit some of its most influential
books. John R. Huizenga wrote two editions of his book entitled, Cold Fusion:
The Scientific Fiasco of the Century3.
John Huizenga was the only tragic figure in the cold fusion episode. His
vulnerability was in place from the beginning, in the classical tradition, and
that vulnerability developed into tragedy in an autonomous manner. He be-
lieved in the ascendancy of nuclear physics to an extent that valued other sci-
entific disciplines as expendable. This unfortunate stance led him inevitably to
indulge in exaggerated metaphor. By 1999, he would say to the New York
Times that cold fusion was as dead as it ever was, meaning that it was dead. He
would say that about a field employing over one hundred scientists for more
than twelve years.
As co-chairman of the Panel on Cold Fusion, Huizenga also wrote much
 The Skeptics 305

of its two reports. He spoke at the annual meeting of the American Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science in February 1992, on the subject, “Cold
Fusion Exposed.” To my knowledge, he has not published a single, peer-re-
viewed paper on any aspect of cold fusion studies.4
Fleischmann and Pons hypothesized a nuclear energy source that was
largely without neutron radiation.* The Utah announcement went as follows
(Fleischmann speaking) (This quote is repeated from Chapter 4, p. 53),

. . . the interesting phenomenon about this [generation of heat

power] is that the rate of generation of tritium and the rate of gener-
ation of helium-three is only one billionth of what you would expect
if the fusion reaction were those experienced in high energy physics.
So we have a relatively low rate of production of neutrons.5

From the very beginning, Professor Huizenga was caught in a bind. His
emotional involvement in this claim was clear from expressions like “. . . nu-
clear science is a mature field . . .,” and “. . . fifty years of study of nuclear reac-
tions . . .” The idea of a new class of nuclear reactions, or an extended elucida-
tion those known, was unimaginable to him. His reaction came, not after
extended study of the Utah claims, but from the day of the announcement.
Both editions of his book were written for the professional scientist. His
target reader was qualified to evaluate the data that provided the field’s source
of motivation. Much important anomalous power data was available at his
manuscript closing in June 1991. Yet no figure depicting those results was in-
cluded, and no bibliography of anomalous power was provided. Nor was a
reason offered to the reader for those omissions. Thus the professional scien-
tist was deliberately kept ignorant of the blossoming anomalous power cor-
roborations produced by a variety of laboratories.

Huizenga’s Credo
The outstanding characteristic of Huizenga’s credo (see Summation, page
306) derives from the absence of any separate statement of his about anoma-
lous power without simultaneous reference to nuclear products. Calorimetric
technology appeared in this manner at least partially hidden behind a veil of
nuclear comment. The importance of anomalous power got quickly shuffled
offstage, so as to not retain the reader’s attention. He found it necessary to

* The original announcement claimed 104 neutrons/second, and this was quickly revised down-
ward. Even 104 would be a factor of a billion fewer neutrons than would be needed if conven-
tional nuclear fusion processes were providing the measured heat power.
306 resolution

s u m m at i o n
Huizenga’s Cold Fusion Credo
John Huizenga spells out his position in a credo at the very end of his published
works. The one paragraph passage appears three pages from the end of the sec-
ond edition of his book. That credo should be examined in order to accurately
understand his position. It consists of a paragraph of six statements.
1. “The term ‘cold fusion’ as presently used encompasses a mélange of claims as
discussed in previous sections of this chapter.”
2. “The more avid proponents of cold fusion continue to argue that the excess
heat in many experiments is so large that the source of energy must be nu-
clear fusion or some other unknown nuclear reaction (sic).”
3. “A fraction of these proponents takes the more conventional point of view
and admits that if the process is truly nuclear, there should be a commensu-
rate amount of nuclear ash.”
4. “The task for these advocates is clear cut: find the nuclear products.”
5. “If the reported intensity of nuclear products is orders of magnitude less
than the claimed excess heat, then the excess heat is not due to a nuclear re-
action process.”
6. “Furthermore, if the claimed excess heat exceeds that possible by other con-
ventional processes (chemical, mechanical, etc.), one must conclude that an
error has been made in measuring the excess heat.”*
*Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), p. 285.

direct his own interest, without exception, to nuclear considerations. This ap-
proach to cold fusion studies was typical of Huizenga’s influence in the field,
and it was a principal source of the confusion that racked the field from its in-
ception. I consider this demand for nuclear product data with the heat data,
implicit or otherwise, to be a corruption of conventional protocol.
The principal motivation for those working in the field was the well repli-
cated demonstration of anomalous power. Huizenga’s leadership of the scien-
tific community was exercised to lead it away from an evaluation of those
claims. This misdirection was one reason that searching criticisms of the calo-
rimetry were paltry during the first six years.
Looking at the credo as itemized in the Summation one sentence at a
time, he confirms in sentence 1 that “cold fusion” is only a name and should
not be taken literally.
Sentence 2 is at the core of Huizenga’s emotional involvement. Note that
when he wrote the words “unknown processes” he felt it necessary to follow
them with the notation “(sic)”. He finds it difficult to discuss that topic even
as an hypothesis.
 The Skeptics 307

Sentence 2 is a diversion. The contention is not that some “continue to

argue”; it is about scientifically measured data. The use of the verb “argue”
takes the topic of claimed excess heat to a distance where the obligation to
evaluate the claim will pass by unnoticed.
Sentence 3 is incorrect. Proponents of cold fusion research accept that nu-
clear ash must exist commensurate with the amount of heat generated. No
one is looking for this ash as the product of conventional nuclear fusion. The
challenge is that nuclear ash from presently unknown reactions can be devil-
ishly hard to find because you do not know what you are looking for nor
where to look for it.*
Which brings us to sentence 4, “The task for these advocates is clear
cut: find the nuclear products.” Here, the reason is revealed why conventional
protocol requires evaluation of the observation. Those “advocates” who offer
such claims are generally chemists with expertise in electrochemistry and calo-
rimetry and occupy laboratories equipped to suit such pursuits. Proper proto-
col calls for their work to be reviewed and criticized by the scientific commu-
nity to see if it was done sufficiently well to withstand the rigors of peer
examination.
Huizenga has no interest in this process. He subverts it by demanding
that these same scientists learn experimental nuclear physics and undertake
the re-equipping of their chemistry laboratories with nuclear facilities. Mean-
while, they are to grow old in this alternative pursuit. Should they die without
finding the source, then their discovery of excess heat is to be buried with
them. Sentence 4 expresses this fatal distortion imposed upon the most ordi-
nary methodology.
Sentence 5 is ambiguous. “. . . the reported intensity of nuclear prod-
ucts . . .” refers to nuclear products as though they were evident, thus carefully
stepping over any reference to the products of unknown processes. Obviously,
cold fusion scientists do not report that which is unknown to them. Huizenga
deftly steps over this logical element in his public arguments.
In sentence 5, he implicitly denies the possible existence of unknown pro-
cesses by allowing it no place in the logic of his presentation. For those readers
who do not notice the missing element, his statements lead to a pervasive con-
fusion about the field.
The final sentence 6 is coupled tightly to sentence 5. Five denies the
availability of conventional fusion sources, and six denies the availability of
non-nuclear energy sources. Voilà, there is no such thing as anomalous power.
What sentences 5 and 6 assert is that nuclear measurements are science,
and calorimetric measurements are not science. Throw away their measure-
ments and keep mine.† I wonder if there can be found in science a more nar-

* This expression includes the phenomenon claimed by Randell Mills, where the ash is postu-
lated to be a reduced hydrogen atom.
308 resolution

row, a more provincial view of one’s professional specialty than is held in these
sentences.
It is generally accepted in science that claims of discovery must be formu-
lated in language that permits the claim to be exposed to possible falsification
by future experimental work. Similarly, it would enervate science to protect
theory from critical exposure to further experimental results. All theorems and
formulae secured by experiment are properly held falsifiable; they should
always be positioned so that they must contend with new data.
Sentences 5 and 6 serve to protect current knowledge of nuclear science
from contention with the new data that, in proclaiming the existence of
anomalous power, appear to defy all contemporary scientific experience.
What we have seen is how the principal and in many ways most influen-
tial skeptic has carefully avoided the most relevant data. As far as Huizenga is
concerned, calorimetric claims go straight to the dustbin. Oh, they can be left
on the desk for a decent interval first, but let no one dare to draw conclusions
from them. The full dismissal in principle of calorimetric data has been
Huizenga’s hallmark from the beginning. The following quote is worth repeat-
ing again:

Although the McKubre experiment is considered by many advocates

to be the premier evidence for excess heat, no nuclear reaction prod-
ucts were reported!6

This denial of a scientific observation is based on attitude, not science. He

shows no interest in learning what McKubre has done in his laboratory, nor
does he show any interest in whether McKubre did it well or poorly. In either
case, it is to be ignored.
I visited a bookshop on the edge of Stanford University after a visit to
McKubre’s laboratory in 1995. There I found the second edition of
Huizenga’s book. It was on my flight east that I read it and came to this credo
at the end. After reading it, I felt affronted. During the first six years of the
cold fusion controversy, he had simply assumed that all of the calorimetry was
faulty, without exception. At that moment, I realized he had no grounds for
this assumption. He offered no expertise in calorimetry on which to base his
judgement. It was merely a professional habit, and hazard.
Huizenga maintained this assumption, out of view, from 1989 through
his manuscript closing in 1993. Even then, his credo was buried in the appear-
ance of an ordinary paragraph of commentary. After my realization of his

† Huizenga from time to time has supported this position by talking about the difficulties of
measuring heat flow. Such talk of imponderables comes from a person with no claimed exper-
tise in the subject and with no record of time spent in a calorimetry laboratory familiarizing
himself with how it is done.
 The Skeptics 309

weak, unsupported assumption, I was sure that my nascent manuscript was

moving along the right track.
Huizenga also spoke to the matter of data interpretation in the following
categorical language.

In the cases where the fusion products were reported to be many or-
ders of magnitude less than the excess heat, nearly all the excess heat
was assumed to be due to an unknown nuclear process. This point of
view was first stated by Fleischmann and Pons.7 Their assumption
that the reported excess heat was due to some unknown nuclear pro-
cess puts the responsibility on them to delineate the characteristics of
such process.8

Again, Fleischmann and Pons did not make an assumption about unknown
processes. They formed an hypothesis, one based on scientifically acquired data
pertaining to anomalous heat sans radiation. The hypothesis followed from
the data. There was no other reasonable explanation for their data. Certainly
Huizenga can suggest no better explanation, nor does he volunteer that the
law of conservation of energy be set aside, Karl Popper fashion.
Huizenga was also wrong about the assignment of responsibility. Other
scientists with the appropriate skills and laboratory facilities would be more
than willing to take up the nuclear delineation research once Fleischmann and
Pons’s anomalous power claims have been recognized and evaluated by main-
stream science. Contrary to what Huizenga asserts, Fleischmann and Pons
bear no responsibility to undertake learning experimental nuclear physics, nor
need they go to their grave without claiming credit for the anomalous power
that they spent ten years measuring. What was needed was the communal ef-
fort to review their calorimetric work, and Huizenga’s loud skepticism has
stood athwart that most natural, historical, conventional, and appropriate di-
rection of scientific method.
Huizenga occasionally asserted that evidence of excess heat power was
due to systematic error in all heat experiments. He may be right; after all, peo-
ple who merely guess are sometimes right. But to support his point, he should
quote citations from the extensive literature on calorimetry if only because it is
outside the fields of expertise he claims as his own. Exactly what might those
systematic errors be? Put them down in a paper and submit it for editorial re-
view, and for peer review, and if the quality of the analysis is sufficient, his
claim of systematic error will be published for evaluation by the cold fusion
community. This is the scientific method. Science does not give the skeptic or
the critic a free ride.
It is curious how Huizenga got his science backwards. He was indignant
that two chemists would dare to advance the hypothesis that an unrecognized
310 resolution

mode of nuclear process might exist, and demanded the nuclear products as
proof of their heat claim. On the other hand, if that proof were forthcoming,
he would then be willing to entertain the hypothesis that a Fleischmann and
Pons electrolytic cell might generate excess heat power. He has placed the cart
before the horse.
I am afraid that his approach to this field followed most like that of a
pedant. As the Ichabod Crane of cold fusion studies, Huizenga stood before
his class of unruly “believers” brandishing a fresh birch switch, demanding
that Masters Fleischmann and Pons stand and recite their nuclear products.

Publications
Jerry E. Bishop, an intrepid science reporter for the Wall Street Journal, re-
ported frequently on developments in the field of cold fusion research starting
one day prior to its announcement in Utah. His reports came more often and
were generally longer than those of most major newspapers, and he was not al-
ways writing as a skeptic as were other science reporters.
He was selected in March 1990 by the American Institute of Physics
(AIP) as the winner of their annual science writing award for the year 1989.
The announcement by the AIP, a professional umbrella group that includes
the APS, that their annual award for excellence in science writing would be
given to Bishop greatly annoyed the skeptics. I quote from Huizenga’s book to
sample the atmosphere of this little tempest.

. . . I immediately contacted Professor Peter W. Trower, a physicist

and one of the judges for the AIP award. In addition, I contacted the
Office of Public Affairs of the APS [Park]. I was upset and particu-
larly interested in learning about the criteria that were applied in
making the Award . . . On March 20, 1990, Dr. Robert L. Park, Ex-
ecutive Director of the Office of Public Affairs of the APS wrote a
letter to the Manager of AIP declining his invitation to attend the
luncheon honoring Bishop for the AIP Science Writing Award. In
addition, several other officers of the APS boycotted the ceremony (I
declined my invitation to attend.)9

Kenneth W. Ford, the executive director of the AIP, had to plan his award re-
marks with special care. “. . . because the award was controversial, I wrote out
my remarks with care and followed the text.”10
I present the entire award text here so the unhurried reader may savor its
ambiguities.
 The Skeptics 311

It is my pleasure to present to Jerry Bishop of the Wall Street Journal

the AIP Science Writing Award for the best writing on Physics for
the general reader by a journalist in 1989.
Jerry Bishop is a transplanted Texan who has been a distin-
guished science writer and reporter for several decades. His work has
been recognized by numerous prizes in the past—by the American
Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the National
Association of Science Writers, and the AAAS. This year he won the
American Chemical Society’s Grady-Stack Lifetime Achievement
Award. And this is his second AIP award. He won our science writ-
ing prize also in 1972.
His award this time is presented for his 1989 series on cold fu-
sion in the Wall Street Journal. Jerry Bishop broke that story, with a
one-day jump ahead of the now famous press conference held by
Pons and Fleischmann at the University of Utah last March. During
the weeks immediately following that announcement, he reported
frequently on the claims emanating from Utah and from various
other laboratories. The articles were well written, often under dead-
line pressures, and they conveyed to the general reader what nuclear
fusion is about and what some of the cold fusion advocates were
claiming. Beginning in May, it became increasingly clear that the
Utah claims were without substance. Jerry continued to write on the
subject and covered both sides of the controversy, although in the
opinion of many (including, I must admit, my own opinion), he did
not give as balanced a coverage as we would have liked, nor draw at-
tention to the fact that the Utah researchers were violating accepted
codes of scientific conduct.
I mention this concern because, as Jerry himself knows, and
as many people in this room know, this particular award has be-
come controversial. There are some, including the excellent panel of
judges, who think that the clarity of his writing, and his consistent
attention to an important and newsworthy topic, justify the award.
There are others who greatly regret that he did not use his reportorial
and writing skills to make clear to his readers—at least after May
1989—that there is no credible evidence for the claims of cold fu-
sion. So I have to express the hope, Jerry, that you will not abandon
the subject yet. It needs to be brought to closure, so that general
readers understand what nearly every scientists now understands—
that cold fusion as a practical power source is an illusion.
I am sorry for the roundabout route to this award presentation,
but I could not let the disagreements that it has generated pass with-
out notice. Whatever one thinks of this particular series, one must
312 resolution

recognize Jerry Bishop as one of the finest science writers in America,

with a long list of accomplishments. It is therefore my pleasure, Jerry,
to present you with this award—consisting of a check for $3,000, a
certificate, and a handsome chair guaranteed to encourage creative
effort.11

This “hole” in the AIP’s procedure was quickly mended after the presen-
tation. As Huizenga explains it, “In response to the concerns of many of us,
the AIP has changed its rules on the journalism award. In the future the
awardee selected by the AIP judges will have to be approved by the AIP Board
of Governors.”12 However, there is a footnote to his remark in the second edi-
tion of his book as follows “The AIP later reversed its decision on approval.”
The zigzag was indicative of the anxiety generated within the physics commu-
nity by a distinctly threatening experiment created by scientists working in a
different discipline. It also indicated that the outspoken skeptics were not nec-
essarily representative of opinion within the APS and the AIP.
Bishop continued to report comprehensively on the field called cold fu-
sion until the end of 1991. Reports on the emerging evidence for helium-four
as the long sought for nuclear product were reported from the summer of
1991. The results of B. Bush and M. Miles experiments in series one were
published. After that, WSJ reports became sporadic and then petered out
within a year.
There are four scientific journals that are read by a broad audience. Scien-
tists follow significant events in fields other than their own through these pub-
lications. Developments in cold fusion research were not known by most sci-
entists because these four publications had maintained a silence on cold fusion
developments for many years. I found in my travels and interviews that mem-
bers of university physics departments were unaware of developments after
1989. It is appropriate, therefore, to illustrate some of the positions taken by
these publications during the first ten years.
The critique of the Utah claims in Nature was aggressive, the journal be-
coming an immediate player in determining the destiny of the field. It was
more patient than some of its audience in that it permitted itself twelve
months before committing itself to an outlook dominated by the nuclear
physics point of view. The failures were counted as well as the successes ob-
tained by various experimenters, and thereby the journal obtained a useful
measure of the experiment’s reproduciblilty, which was poor, but not of its va-
lidity, which was good.
The journal gave preemptory consideration to particle and gamma ray
detection, thus directing attention away from excess heat as the experiment’s
signature. It gave full credit to Fleischmann and Pons for their initial recogni-
 The Skeptics 313

tion of the very low level of neutron (and other) emissions compared with the
excess heat. In the meantime, though, it had to protect the world of science
from them.
Professor Oriani’s experiment (Chapter 14) that was eventually published
in Fusion Technology was first submitted to Nature magazine in September of
1989.13 It was the first full-length report corroborating Fleischmann and Pons
excess heat phenomenon. The journal submitted his manuscript to two refer-
ees who responded with apparently reasonable comments and questions. They
could see no errors in the material submitted although they decried the fact
that only 15% excess power was claimed. They were unhappy with the paper’s
statement, “although we do not understand the origin of the excess heat, we
do not claim that some form of nuclear fusion is involved.” They recom-
mended the paper be published provided the raw cell data were included,
more details on the calorimetry were presented, and more nuclear measure-
ments were made. Oriani resubmitted his paper after amending it accordingly.
In January he received a rejection letter signed by the U.S. editor. The reasons
were that the sporadicity of positive results made the whole field suspect and
there was an absence of theoretical understanding of the alleged phenomenon.
Oriani’s paper ought to have been published in Nature to corroborate the
Fleischmann and Pons claim for anomalous power. The scientific community
then might have taken a more balanced view of the whole episode. Nature re-
jected it based on two wrong reasons: lack of theoretical underpinning and
difficult replication. The first reason indicates failure to abide by conventional
protocol. The second reason brought to mind the fact that within the decade
Nature reported the several “Dolly” episodes as mainstream science, even
though reproducibility in that kind of experiment ranged from one success in
50 tries to one in 227 tries.
After one year had passed, Nature, March 29, 1990, published an edito-
rial, “Farewell (Not Fond) to Cold Fusion,”14 the result of a poor sense of pro-
tocol and the many null reports of neutron particle emission. It is amusing to
note how incredulous the editor was about the first Annual Cold Fusion Con-
ference planned for that same week in Salt Lake City. “But there is a limit to
people’s patience, which has probably been reached with the organization of
the first ‘annual’ cold fusion conference.” Nature’s principal conclusion was
that, “What has irretrievably foundered is the notion that cold fusion has great
economic potential.”
The Washington office of the journal played a strong role in the cold fu-
sion saga, as might be expected. David Lindley, their Washington correspon-
dent and associate editor, had a commentary of two-page length in the same
issue. It was titled “The Embarrassment of Cold Fusion.” He reviewed the
current peccadilloes of the field, afterwards attempting to define a cleavage.
314 resolution

On one side, non-believers see the negative results of Salamon, et

al.,* as incontrovertible proof that nothing unusual is happening
[in the cells]; on the other, believers take the same results as affirma-
tion that cold fusion indeed demands new physics, which they knew
already.
The two sides are separated by a matter of faith, not one of
science.15

This simplistic analysis overlooks the anomalous power data, and libels those
who do not overlook that data as belonging to a new cult of “believers.”
Lindley cannot incorporate the actual presence of anomalous power into the
claims of the previous twelve months. He apparently required an explanation
for the source of the measured power. His “believers” tentatively accept the
anomalous power data as an empirically valid measurement. The two sides,
then, were separated not by differences of faith but by differences of science—
the recognition or non-recognition of a well-measured observation based
upon scientifically acquired data.
He brought his extended commentary to an end compounding his rea-
sonable error of understanding by assertion of the ethical error of ridicule,
“Would a measure of unrestrained mockery, even a little unqualified vitupera-
tion have speeded cold fusion’s demise?” This is hubris.
In 1994, the retired editor of Nature, John Maddox, physicist, was
interviewed.

I think it’s inevitable that it too has a persuasive, articulate, charis-

matic man who believes that he’s neared a very important discovery
that challenges scientific orthodoxy. It’s inevitable that his students,
his colleagues will have to take a view, are we for him or against him?
And in a way it becomes quite quickly like the funding of the litera-
ture. You have a charismatic leader who persuades some people who
become his followers and that they have seen the true light. And
there’s a large element of that, I fear, in what’s happened to cold
fusion.
I think it will turn out that this is just . . . unconnected with
anything to be called nuclear fusion. And I think it’s come, broadly
speaking, it’s dead. And it will remain dead for a long, long time.16

He evidenced a complete lack of interest in the successful demonstrations and

replications of anomalous power. All attention was directed towards evidence
for the fusion reactions of nuclear physics.

* A null result from particle and gamma-ray measurements of some of Fleischmann and Pons’s
operating cells.
 The Skeptics 315

Scientific American shares its articles with sister publications in several

other countries. The Nikkei Publishing company produces the Japanese ver-
sion under the name Saiensu (Science). Saiensu devoted a two-page news arti-
cle in its March 1992 edition to the research of Kyoto University scientist
Akito Takahashi, a hot fusion nuclear physicist. He had recently announced
success with a cold fusion cell that generated substantial heat along with con-
tinuous neutron emissions at a low level.
A cold fusion advocate in America garnered the signatures from several
scientists to add to his letter to Jonathan Piel, editor of Scientific American,
asking why it did not report similarly on the Takahashi experiment. The mag-
azine’s published commentary and Piel’s letter response illuminate the isola-
tion that was imposed upon cold fusion research by this reputable journal.
The editorial, “Japan, Cold Fusion, and Lyndon LaRouche,” is worth reading
in its entirety, but I was not given permission to reproduce it.17 It appeared in
the May 1992, issue as a half-page box. The final paragraph of the editorial
below gives the tone of their commentary.

Fleischmann, when pressed, reluctantly confirms that he and Pons

are indeed supported by Technova. Although he declines to reveal
details about his work, he does note that “good information” on cold
fusion can be found in 21st Century Science & Technology, a journal
published by followers of Lyndon H. LaRouche. LaRouche, who is
now simultaneously running for president and serving a fifteen-year
sentence for fraud, has previously claimed the existence of an inter-
national drug cartel run by the Queen of England.

21st Century Science & Technology is in fact superior to Scientific American if

one wished to follow developments in cold fusion research, not withstand-
ing arguments usually referred to as guilt-by-association. This editorial com-
mentary leaves the magazine’s subscribers ignorant of the provenance of the
editorial—what caused it to be published. Nor are its readers informed of the
availability in peer-reviewed journals of Takahashi’s work and the work of
Fleischmann and Pons. It employs the words secret and mysterious for matters
that were not secret or mysterious.
The letter petition to the editor included as its second paragraph a state-
ment of the current status of cold fusion research. Piel’s letter reply (December
3, 1991) was brief.

I am struck by the final clause of the first sentence in the second

paragraph of your petition: “. . . even though its precise physical
mechanism is not fully understood at present.” Such a characteristic
is typical of another kind of event in science, one that Irving
316 resolution

Langmuir accurately described in a classic paper in the 1950s. You

should look up the reference.18

The petitioner promptly replied listing the six Langmuir criteria, pointing out
that “the mechanism is not fully understood” was not among them.19 (His let-
ter kindly overlooked the fact that there exists no such classic paper in the
1950s by Langmuir.)* Those familiar with the field of cold fusion studies will
recognize well what Piel did then in response to the reply. Without notice, he
abruptly abandoned the correspondence.
Piel’s letter, its flippancy, its disdain, its intellectual indolence, and its
rude discontinuance shows well why the American scientific community does
not know about progress in cold fusion research since 1989.
Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, has been the most straightforward in its sparse reporting of the cold
fusion news. An early editorial by its then editor, Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., was
one of the best.20 It discussed the factors and considerations important in eval-
uating the Utah claims. It was the first to recognize the importance of “. . . the
relentless detail of electrochemical experiments and heat balances.” The edito-
rial gave appropriate allowance to the impossibility of the two chemists hiding
the experiment from publicity until the answers were in. It did assume, how-
ever, that the experiment could be tested promptly. “The bigger the result the
more quickly it is going to be checked.” And it, “. . . will be checked in a very
short period of time.” The editorial was one of the most knowledgeable of the
period.
Science has also provided coverage of developments better than the other
broad-audience scientific journals. Its report of the Physics Letters A (May
1993) article describing Fleischmann and Pons operation of a cell at the boil-
ing point for a period of time at an excess power of 144 watts, or greater than
1,000 watts per cm3 of the palladium cathode, a level commensurate with
commercial electric power generators.21 The report said the power was four
times the excitation, but did not mention the high level of the claimed power,
or the power density, both important matters.
Unfortunately, the report was framed in such a way as to continue the
sterile debate—does cold fusion exist?—instead of allowing itself to move be-
yond that to the question of the existence of anomalous power. The article
points out that the editor of the referenced article, J. P. Vigier, would not allow
any mention of cold fusion in the Physics Letters A article—fine. Why not have
Science do the same in its report? Treat the Physics Letters A report as an elec-

* Langmuir gave a symposium that was audio recorded. The symposium record has been recon-
structed and published in recent years, especially with the advent of cold fusion claims. It con-
tains much that can instruct the skeptic.
 The Skeptics 317

trochemical experiment. Was it well done? Ask those qualified to answer in

that discipline and in the discipline of calorimetry. Thus, the journal might re-
port on the science in cold fusion research instead of helping to maintain a
well-balanced antagonism.
A new editor was announced for Science about the time of publication of
the first edition of this book. A copy was sent to him by a Harvard classmate
of his who, like the new editor, also had lived through the vicissitudes often
experienced by university presidents. Enclosed with the book were reprints
from Goodstein, whom the editor knew, and quotes from Scaramuzzi, whom
Goodstein introduces. A thoughtful reply was received in due course indicat-
ing the topic would be looked into. From time to time thereafter, one of the
more interesting technical reports from the field would be sent along. Nothing
was published on our topic in Science during the subsequent year after the ini-
tial contact. Never has this journal informed the professional scientists of
widely corroborated empirical data as in the prolific corroboration of the
anomalous power event.
The magazine Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), is published by
the American Chemical Society. It is a principal source of information about
what was going on in other specialties. It expressed bewilderment as the events
of 1989 unfolded, generally following the orthodox line of argument. It has
differentiated itself during subsequent years, however, by giving its readers at
least a little information on progress in the cold fusion ghetto.
That information was regularly smothered under what can only be de-
scribed as a poverty of expression. It suffered from two stylistic postures that
dominate its pieces on cold fusion research. The writers who were assigned to
this difficult field used sarcasm freely, which did not promote understanding.
And for information conveyance, they used a style disparagingly referred to as,
“. . . the he-said/she-said form” of presentation.22 I have not noticed any in-
stance where the technology was presented. The casual reader would get the
impression that those working in the field have obtained no scientifically in-
teresting results.23
The four publications stuck closely to the establishment position. Evi-
dently, the editors wanted to remain a part of the scientific establishment. If
they accurately reported on cold fusion science from year to year, they might
face derision from the establishment and the other journals. This reaction
might have effected their advertising prowess. And there was always that desire
to be comfortable, to be a part of the orthodoxy.
The best summary of Frank Close’s book, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for
Cold Fusion (1991) (Princeton University Press), was given by him at a press
conference broadcast over BBC as a “Science Now” program for August 28,
1992. The occasion was the appearance of Martin Fleischmann as an invited
and honored guest at the annual meeting of the British Association for the
318 resolution

Advancement of Science, which took place at Southampton that year. He ap-

peared with Fleischmann to be questioned by the press. The press actually
questioned Fleischmann, with Close having the occasional remark to add.
Close made the following summary comment as the meeting neared its end. It
seemed to express his philosophy concerning cold fusion more succinctly than
any summary he offered in his book.

What I heard this afternoon, by and large, was very much the same
as I could have heard two years ago. We were told that many people
are finding heat; we are told that people are finding neutrons, tri-
tium, and helium. But what was not said is that individual experi-
ments do not see heat and neutrons, tritium, or helium in amounts
that would be required if a nuclear process is going on. When ques-
tions were asked to specify precisely who was doing this and who was
doing that, no clear answer that I was aware of was really given to
that. And, my summary still is the same that I concluded when I re-
searched the first eighteen months of this episode, that there are no
experiments in test tubes at room temperature producing watts of
power from a nuclear process.24

The complaint parallels that of Huizenga. What Close wants to see in the
Fleischmann and Pons electrolytic jar is nothing less than a nuclear power
plant of reduced size, but otherwise fully functional, as might appear in a
snow-shaker paper weight.
Beveridge describes a characteristic of the skeptic that seems to fit Close
and those others who were watching the first Annual Cold Fusion Confer-
ence. As he puts it,

It is not uncommon for opponents of an innovation to base their

judgement on an “all or nothing” attitude, i.e., since it does not pro-
vide a complete solution to the practical problem, it is no use.25

This characteristic was illustrated in the account Close gives in the case of
a nuclear physics paper from 1934.26 The various fusion reactions were then
being sorted out from one another. We have previously noted that one of
Rutherford’s assistant’s, Philip L. Dee, prepared a paper that described a fusion
reaction that seemed to happen at exceptionally low excitation energies.*
Fleischmann introduced that paper as evidence at the ACCF-1, March

* Using a cloud chamber Dee had noticed that occasionally d-d fusion gave tritium and a proton
that left trails at 180 degrees from each other. This implied that the incident deuteron carried
little energy, and the resulting fusion event was caused by a low energy source.
 The Skeptics 319

1990, as evidence that nuclear reactions can be excited at low energy levels.
The reaction by Close is illuminating, although he was not there and Dr.
Petrasso took his place. I quote below Close’s explanation of the significance of
it followed by Petrasso’s actual comments at the meeting.

. . . there is [a] much sharper reason why these pictures from the past
offer no succor to aficionados of test-tube fusion. The fact that the
images show clear proton and triton tracks emerging from the [solid]
with their full energy shows that the usual fusion has occurred—the
products have not been hidden from view.27

At ACCF-1 Petrasso explained it thus.

Dee’s work has nothing to do with test-tube fusion for the reason
that (in Dee’s photographs) the triton and proton [fusion] products
come out and escape with their full energy.28

(In both cases the emphasis is in the original.) The point being that known
nuclear processes cause high velocity particles to fly away from the reaction
that caused them, but the Fleischmann and Pons cell has no corresponding
particles flying out of the cell. Therefore Dee’s account is of no help. This is
the all or nothing attitude referred to by Beveridge.
It was Fleischmann’s purpose in offering the paper to the conference to
help solve merely a small piece of the source question. He is quoting Dee’s pa-
per only to illustrate that there exists an example of a nuclear reaction being
instigated by a low energy source in the early nuclear physics literature. This is
a thoroughly interesting and worthwhile contribution. Did it offer succor by
illustrating a case of low energy nuclear excitation? Yes. Was it meant by
Fleischmann to appear as the whole solution? Certainly not.

Taubes’s Book
During late 1991 and early 1992, the ebb tide of cold fusion studies ran fast:
no further public or professional support could be expected in the United
States, the Japanese moves were not yet known, and developments in Italy,
Russia, and India were not yet well reported. In late 1992, Gary Taubes an-
nounced the end of the cold fusion saga when he closed his manuscript and
gave it the title, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion
(1993).* But cold fusion did not have a short life, nor were its times weird,
nor was its science bad.

* Random House. N.Y., 1993.

320 resolution

Taubes’s contribution was considerable. He did the heavy legwork needed

to write the who-struck-John part of the story. Without his book, the history
of the saga would have lost much.
Taubes assumed the establishment attitude that there was no such thing
as excess heat. This assumption leads to the conclusion that each report of a
successful experiment must be the result of either incompetence or fraud. His
writing necessarily produced a classic muckraking investigation. Taubes dis-
plays this attitude most clearly by referring to the lack of neutrons commensu-
rate with the heat as an admission on the part of Fleischmann and Pons.29
Taubes draws some odd conclusions after reviewing the first newspaper
reports of the Utah announcement. He asserts that “A belief in cold fusion re-
quired an act of faith from the start.”30 There seems to be no awareness that
Fleischmann and Pons were faced for four years with two elementary facts:
they measured gross amounts of unexplainable energy, and they measured pre-
cious few neutrons. They were absolutely confident of both sets of measure-
ments. Their data showed heat without neutrons. There was no act of faith
there. I have to conclude that Taubes’s book is unresponsive to the sheer intel-
lectual force of experimental science.
Taubes did not seem to understand why Fleischmann and Pons advanced
the hypothesis of unknown nuclear processes. He says, “From this evolved the
working hypothesis for CF that something almost magical happened to the
fusion process within the cold molecular lattice of the Pd.”31 He then waxes
eloquently about the invariability of the natural laws. What would Taubes
point to as a more likely source of the measured energy, or would he suggest
that the new energy is appearing from out of nowhere? He did not see the
challenge.
Taubes had published an article prior to the appearance of his book as-
serting that scientific fraud had been committed in a cold fusion research lab-
oratory at Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas. It was the labora-
tory of John O’M. Bockris who was conducting numerous experiments on the
Fleischmann and Pons phenomenon. These experiments reported the genera-
tion of excess heat as well as tritium.
Bockris’s career had been distinguished indeed. Much of the current gen-
eration of electrochemists had been raised on his twelve textbooks on the sub-
ject. (They are written in a style unusually clear and straightforward in literary
structure for a scientific textbook.) Bockris reported generating tritium, an ex-
periment of considerable significance as tritium can only be made in a nuclear
reaction.
Taubes wrote an article about this for Science. In it, the suggestion was
advanced that the tritium in Bockris’s laboratory was coming not from inci-
dental contamination or electrolytic enrichment from the heavy water, as his
 The Skeptics 321

critics claimed, but from the deliberate addition of tritium from a laboratory
supply of tritiated water, in other words, fraud.32
The story is developed further in his book. A finger is pointed at Nigel
Packham, a graduate student who was responsible for supervising the cells
in question. The only evidence offered was that the tritium generation events
seemed to be timed coincident with contract funding renewal intervals. The
school conducted an inquiry and exonerated everyone involved. Certainly, the
school’s inquiry was superficial, but then Taubes offers us no substantial evi-
dence either. So the matter was a tempest in a teapot but with much collateral
destruction.
Taubes was incredulous at the lack of control cells in the Fleischmann
and Pons experiment, as well as in other experiments. There was no hint in his
text that the presence of an unrecognized nuclear process made the matter of
finding a suitable control problematical. The alternative control method of
balancing the energy in and out was not mentioned, nor that of using calibra-
tion pulses in an active cell.
Fleischmann demonstrated with a drop of red dye how well the contents
of his flask was mixed by the bubbling action. Taubes comments on that dem-
onstration as follows. “The demonstration was impressive; however, it was bo-
gus . . . The temperature gradient in the flasks simply had nothing to do with
what could be called the red dye gradient.”33 The video demonstration of how
the dye quickly mixed was much more persuasive for the critics. One of them
realized that the outside of the liquid was well insulated by the vacuum of the
Dewar flask to allow the rapid mixing to eliminate temperature gradients.
That demonstration was the best that could be done in one week’s time with
the available resources. Fleischmann and Pons published a paper two years be-
fore the close of Taubes’s manuscript whose purpose was to answer such ques-
tions.34 It states, “. . . (using ensembles of 5 thermocouples which could be
displaced radially and axially) showed that the temperature was uniform to
within ±0.01 degrees throughout the bulk of the cells.”
Taubes’s argument on this matter led to another question: the responsibil-
ities of the experimentalist and the skeptic. He said at one point, “It was no
longer a scientist’s responsibility to defend his research but the scientific com-
munity’s task to defend its criticism. Cold fusion existed until proven other-
wise.”35 Not at all. Defense of the research would come from replication of its
results in at least one independent laboratory within the first six months. In
the meantime, the standard for presenting one’s arguments in the literature
holds the same for both parties. Just any incidental chatter, as occurs con-
stantly on the e-mail circuits, does not constitute scientific criticism. Stan-
dards as to what constitutes scientific discourse apply to all parties.
The double standard of limited and formal laboratory procedure,
322 resolution

s u m m at i o n
Errors Made in Response to the Utah Claims
The errors made in the evaluation of the Fleischmann and Pons claim of anom-
alous heat are as follows.
Errors of a technical nature.
1. The Department of Energy’s failure to evaluate the anomalous heat experi-
ments.
2. The careless assumption of calorimetry error in all the successful heat experi-
ments.
3. The adoption of Irving Langmuir’s name and terminology “pathological sci-
ence” without invoking his technical criteria.
4. The criticism of cold fusion without commitment to a laboratory based,
hands-on evaluation of the claim in question.
5. The inability of the scientific community to understand the proper place of
failed experiments.
6. The scientific significance of difficult replication was woefully exaggerated.
Entirely surprising to those involved in the original announcement was error
in the matter of scientific protocol.
7. The trumpeting of absolute appraisal exclusively to the press that were based
upon uncertain experiments and analysis.
8. The early polarization of the evaluation process by means of ad hominem
commentary.
9. Inordinate haste.
10.The animated attention given the claim of nuclear fusion to the virtual ex-
clusion of the separate claim of significant power generation.
11.The scientific community beset those exploring this field with the slander-
ous accusation of “believer.”
12.Finally, and most corrupting of all, was the precipitous institutionalization
of opinion that there was no new science in the field:
a. During the first six years Nature, the Wall Street Journal, and Scientific Amer-
ican have adopted a rigid stance against reporting advances in cold fusion re-
search.
b. The APS publicly and officially ridiculed the field for the first six years.
c. The Patent Office was absolutely rigid in refusing to consider patent appli-
cations on their merits.
d. The Department of Energy was utterly deaf to accomplishments after 1989.
e. In their 1995 publication “On Being a Scientist” the NAS makes several ref-
erences to cold fusion research as an example of how science should not be
done, but offers no comment about the proper conduct of scientific evalua-
tions.
13.While the scientist is responsible for the correctness of what he has pub-
lished, no member of the DOE Panel has argued that a further review was
needed in light of the work done after 1989.
 The Skeptics 323

by which many scientists survive, could be misinterpreted by the science re-

porter. I believe that was what happened in the following quote from Taubes’s
book.

The assumption seems to have been that there are two levels of scien-
tific data; one that can be defended against a roomful of reporters
and one that can be defended in a scientific meeting.36

There were indeed two levels, but they applied to the self and to peers as
the respective audiences.
Taubes seemed to believe that science is some sort of a game, although I
confess I cannot figure out exactly what kind of a game he had in mind. The
straightforward idea somehow escaped him that two accomplished scientists,
who reasonably enjoyed great confidence in their own laboratory techniques,
had created an experiment whose data revealed the observation of a new world
of scientific interest.
Considering its timing, the book provided a large audience with enjoy-
able reading, but otherwise had little tangible effect on the field.
This review of Taubes’s book completes our presentation of what the
skeptics had to say during the first six years. In all, they were successful. Their
outspoken and oblique comments maintained the field of cold fusion studies
in an intellectual ghetto.

After Twelve Years

As the tenth anniversary of the Utah announcement rolled around, Dr. Park,
spokesman for the APS, reviewed a new book on cold fusion practice. Les-
sons from the preceding chapters are well illustrated by the form of the review.
The book, Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion by Tadahiko
Mizuno, tells of Mizuno’s personal journey into the successful generation of
huge amounts of anomalous power, and the subsequent search for the source
of it. The latter led him into a claim of discovery of the transmutation of
elements that was presented in Chapter 19 from his and other’s technical
reports.
The review in full is quoted below from Park’s column, “What’s New,” as
published in the Bulletin of the APS.

THE UNDEAD: A REVIEW OF “NUCLEAR TRANSMUTA-

TION.” The subtitle of this thin volume . . . is “The Reality of Cold
Fusion.” The publisher is Infinite Energy Press, which probably tells
you everything you need to know. This year marks the tenth anni-
324 resolution

versary of the announcement by the University of Utah that Stanley

Pons and Martin Fleischmann had achieved dueterium fusion in a
simple electrolytic cell . . . Within a matter of weeks, a DOE panel
officially pronounced cold fusion dead, amidst revelations of altered
data and suppression of evidence. But the corpse does not rest peace-
fully. This personal account by one of a small corps who have not
given up on cold fusion is wonderfully revealing—but not for what
it tells us about science. “If you limit your goal to finding fusion
products,” Mizuno snorts, “anyone can see you will not learn much.
This is why the focus is now on transmutation.” He says of his fellow
believers, “They have been treated like heretics by the rest of the sci-
entific community. This has formed a bond of solidarity between
them. Working with practically no funding against a tide of opposi-
tion . . . they have slowly but surely brought about a new discovery.”
It is an eloquent statement of how pathological science survives. In
the final chapter Mizuno asks rhetorically, “What sort of reaction is
cold fusion? As you have seen in this account, we still have no clear
idea.” After ten years, nothing has changed.37

If the nuclear equation has not changed, then nothing has changed. Is this a
provincial attitude that only physics is science? What about Mizuno’s results
in chemistry and calorimetry? Pierre Curie also could have said, “What sort of
reaction caused radium’s warmth, I have no clear idea.” Curie was awarded the
Nobel Prize.
Park makes no reference to the excess heat that Mizuno achieved and de-
scribed. He suffered, as did Piel, from a misunderstanding of both cold fu-
sion research and of pathological science. The criteria of the field called cold
fusion was characterized by the well-measured phenomenon of anomalous
power followed by the search for its source. The substance of pathological sci-
ence did not incorporate a lack of knowledge of the source of the questioned
observation. In the review, Mizuno’s accomplishments are not even alluded to.
The review pretends that Mizuno accomplished nothing. It is in this way that
the scientific community has been kept ignorant of progress in cold fusion re-
search.
In his recent book Voodoo Science, The Road from Foolishness to Fraud,38
Park announced its purpose: “This book is meant to help the reader to recog-
nize voodoo science” (page 10). He includes Pathological Science under his
umbrella title of Voodoo Science, and under Pathological Science he includes
what he calls “cold fusion.” Unfortunately, he never does realize his promise to
help the reader recognize voodoo science except, of course, by following his
markings. Park simply answers the question, Can it be explained by science?
If it cannot be so explained and yet claims to be of science, then it is labeled
 The Skeptics 325

voodoo science. He does not explicitly tell the reader that his definition of
voodoo science is about any claim to scientific certainty that is not explainable
by science.
Presumably, he does this to avoid bringing attention to an important
weakness in his theme. In the special, but important, case of the advent of
new science, how does Park separate real science from his voodoo science? The
answer is that his method cannot help him. His method would be helpless
evaluating Curie’s 1903 claim of radium running warmer than its environ-
ment, a claim that defied all contemporary scientific experience. The 1989
“cold fusion” announcement at Utah claimed new science: a radiation-less
source of nuclear energy that produced anomalous heat in the Fleischmann
and Pons experiment. Park’s method is helpless in the face of such a claim.
 c h a p t e r t w e n t y - t h r e e

Un Cri du Coeur

B y the end of 1994 it was clear to the few attentive observers that a new
area of research had emerged, even if it remained ensconced in a scientific
ghetto.
David Goodstein, vice-provost at Caltech, was one of those attentive ob-
servers. His institute played a determining role at the outset of the new field,
although he had no part in that activity. As a provost, he was in a position
to appreciate the potential for his institution to suffer disrepute in the cur-
rent circumstances. I mentioned previously an article by him referring to Karl
Popper’s philosophy of science that appeared in The American Scholar in
the Autumn 1994 issue. Goodstein chose to write at a time almost precisely
after the anomalous power phenomenon had become well validated. No other
article about cold fusion research was written at that critical point by an or-
thodox scientist of his academic rank and intellectual capacity. If we are to un-
derstand the orthodox position, his views are worth considering at some
length.
Caltech’s contribution to the cold fusion saga was extensive. It provided
the chairman for the DOE’s Energy Research Advisory Board, one member of
its Panel on Cold Fusion, an historian of science who wrote a damning arti-
cle for the New Yorker magazine, two professors who led the charge at
Baltimore, tacit authorization for their ad hominem assault, and an extra-
ordinary profusion of institute resource in support of their experimental
program.
Goodstein describes one instance of Caltech’s role, which was quoted ear-
lier in part. His full statement gives an accurate assessment of the Baltimore
event.

326
 Un Cri du Coeur 327

For all practical purposes, [cold fusion] ended a mere five weeks after
it began, on May 1, 1989, at a dramatic session of The American
Physical Society, in Baltimore. Although there were numerous pre-
sentations at this session, only two truly counted. Steve Koonin, Na-
than Lewis (speaking for himself ), and Charles Barnes, all three from
Caltech, executed between them a perfect blocked shot that cast
Cold Fusion right out of the arena of mainstream science.1

Goodstein explained what nuclear fusion was and the various reasons
why it was difficult to achieve. He then introduced Dr. Francesco Scaramuzzi,
a highly esteemed nuclear physicist. Scaramuzzi worked as a senior scientist in
the government laboratory at Frascati (Rome), Italy. Goodstein tells us of the
significant contributions he made in the field of hot fusion. Goodstein knew
him personally and vouched for him. Why did a highly esteemed scientist
need vouching for by Goodstein? Scaramuzzi needed it because he had known
sin: he practiced cold fusion research.
Goodstein was in something of a quandary about this circumstance. He
told of a trip to Rome where he visited Scaramuzzi who had just returned
from the fourth international conference of cold fusion scientists (ICCF-4,
December 1993) at Maui, Hawaii. He sat in on Scaramuzzi’s report of that
meeting to fellow physicists. Goodstein was fascinated that scientists at ICCF-
4 had found that a D/Pd ratio of 0.85 was necessary for the Fleischmann and
Pons cell to work.* He expressed astonishment at hearing clear and precise sci-
ence conveyed from a cold fusion conference. His article continued wonder-
ingly, “I have looked at [Scaramuzzi’s] cells, and looked at [his] data, and it’s
all pretty impressive.” This was his quandary.†
There would be no quandary if cold fusion activity had promptly died
away as expected in 1989: the University of Utah would have suffered a public
failure, Fleischmann’s and Pons’s reputations would have been destroyed, and
Caltech would have become a home for heros. The episode did not play out in
that way.

Personal Exposure
A serene observer might have expected to see Goodstein take a continuing ac-
ademic interest in what he had discovered through his Italian friend. If there

* The ratio is considered to be slightly higher now, nearer to 0.90 D/Pd ratio although there is
some evidence it is lower at elevated temperatures (250C) and in certain palladium alloys, e.g.,
boron.
† Goodstein was acting as a critic. The skeptics of cold fusion research do not allow themselves
to get in a position where they witness the data gathering. By this means, they avoid the quan-
dary.
328 resolution

was science enough in the field for Scaramuzzi, Caltech’s chemistry or physics
departments might beneficially find space for a graduate student or two in
these studies. A step of this kind, however, would seriously undermine the his-
toric position of Caltech in the cold fusion annals. Goodstein explains that
Koonin, and Lewis “. . . are my faculty colleagues, and I count them all among
my personal friends of many years.” The stakes were high for him. If he were
to write that his colleagues were wrong at Baltimore, Goodstein would jeopar-
dize his social, professional, and economic position, both at his university and
in his field. He, his family, and those who chose to remain his friends, would
suffer the effects of a sort of personal combat. He wisely decided to turn aside
from his nascent interest in cold fusion studies.
When describing the field, Goodstein fell into the same elephant trap as
have other physicists: he lacked appropriate expertise for the subject matter.
He reiterated the difficulties governing the fusion of two deuterium nuclei in
an extended argument of thirteen paragraphs. There was not even one sen-
tence about calorimetry, the measuring technique employed by Scaramuzzi to
collect his “pretty impressive” cell data.
Goodstein states, “All parties agree that . . . the primary event would have
to have been the fusion of the two deuterium nuclei . . .” Does this statement
reveal a lack of scholarship? There are four sources for knowledge about
Fleischmann and Pons’s claims: the Utah press release, videos of the event, pat-
ent applications, and the Preliminary Note. These four sources make it clear
that the claims find conventional D+D fusion a small part of the processes
generating the anomalous power, roughly one part in a billion. This scholarly
aberration is best understood if Goodstein is viewed as writing only to the or-
thodox scientific community, where it would be correct to say that all parties
were so agreed. It seems that he did not consider cold fusion researchers to be
a part of his audience.
Goodstein’s article might have caused a turning point: a reconsideration
of the field by establishment scientists. The cold fusion research community is
eager to show its results, but events at Baltimore served to prevent that possi-
bility. The orthodox scientist might tout its achievements, but he will simply
get bounced over the fence and into the ghetto: poor David, he finally fell for
that cold fusion story. To open discussion within the orthodox community, he
will have to speak to the assertions of Drs. Park and Huizenga directly: Is cold
fusion dead, as they assert? Goodstein is properly fearsome of the stiff price
such a challenge will exact.
Goodstein did not study-up on his interest in cold fusion before visiting
Scaramuzzi and before writing his article. He would have known then about
the D/Pd ratio’s minimum value. It had been in the literature since June 1991.
It is strange that he felt comfortable writing in the Phi Beta Kappa journal an
article about the cold fusion episode without first reading up on the subject.
 Un Cri du Coeur 329

To understand him in this matter, we have to consider what might happen if

he were to display a knowledge of that field, of its citations, its accomplish-
ments, and its scientists? Would Goodstein not appear to be a turncoat? It is
not surprising that these circumstances have in them the element of fear.
What did Goodstein learn from his visit to Scaramuzzi? A great deal, even
though he was burdened with a misunderstanding of the role of ready replica-
tion and experimental recipes. He learned that the deuterium loaded titanium
that was temperature cycled had produced evidence of neutron emission, that
the Fleischmann and Pons type of electrolytic cells really do generate anoma-
lous power, that Scaramuzzi considers cold fusion studies to be a valuable field
in which to do research, that Lewis’s criticisms of Fleischmann and Pons’s
excess heat measurements were repudiated, that light water as a control does
not allow the generation of excess heat (using a palladium cathode rod), and
that there is a threshold of 0.85 D/Pd ratio below which no anomalous power
is generated.

The Silence
What did Goodstein do with this newfound knowledge? Did he, for example,
write to one of the four broad-audience scientific journals advising them that
their avoidance of cold fusion achievements was inappropriate? Did he, as
vice-provost, inform the dean of science that research in cold fusion study ar-
eas might be undertaken as circumstances permitted? Did he inform the heads
of the departments of physics and chemistry they might consider introduc-
ing graduate level thesis research in this area of study? It is not likely that
he did any of these things. Instead, he wrote an ambivalent and maundering
article.
When Goodstein learned, inadvertently, about the solid scientific work
going on in cold fusion research his response was not unique. Earlier, I men-
tioned the three experienced electrochemists who visited the McKubre labora-
tory at SRI, Menlo Park, California, during the years 1990 through 1994.
They were A. Bard, (University of Texas, Austin, Texas), H. Birnbaum, (Uni-
versity of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois), Richard Garwin, (IBM, White Plains,
New York), and N. S. Lewis, (Caltech). Each spent several days examining
McKubre’s laboratory practice in detail.2 They found no procedural error with
the measuring technique or data reduction techniques used to evaluate the op-
erating performance of the cold fusion type cells. They had no contractual ob-
ligations either to reveal or to keep the things they learned confidential. Nev-
ertheless, they chose to say nothing to the scientific community.
Dr. John O’M. Bockris, distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas
A&M University, College Station, Texas, ran cold fusion cells during the sum-
330 resolution

mer and fall of 1989. He reported excess heat and tritium, but the results were
sporadic. At last, he came to a point where he had a cell that ran continuously
for three weeks. It was time to call in some of his critical colleagues in the de-
partment who knew what he was attempting to do, so they could witness his
results. The first one to be invited explained that he was busy moving from
one house to another and could not spare the time. The second explained that
he was simply too immersed in an examination schedule to break away, and
the third just happened to be leaving on a trip shortly, so sorry. This inference
of fear was a continuing pattern.
Dr. Huizenga visited the cold fusion laboratory at California State Poly-
technic University, Pomona, California, on February 28, 1997. At this time,
he was retired. He was visiting at the invitation of the physics department to
speak against the cold fusion heresy that was alive in their department.
Drs. Robert Bush and Robert Eagleton, full professors in the department
of physics, were running light water cells. Bush was Huizenga’s host in the lab-
oratory. In Bush’s words, one cell was, “. . . evidencing excess power. And,
while the gain (Pout/Pin) was rather modest at that time (about 1.12), the excess
power was well outside the possible error bars . . .”3 Huizenga was invited to
spend time taking data. Huizenga demurred. Bush invited him to return on
another date and do so. Huizenga demurred. Bush then offered him a fellowship
to cover the expense of a return visit. Huizenga demurred. He refused all offers
to participate in the experimental work in accordance with the manner of Drs.
R. W. Wood and Irving Langmuir in the cases of Blondlot and Barnes respec-
tively.
These illustrations of avoidance of the laboratory are representative of the
intellectual climate ten years after the Utah announcement. If the reader feels
that I have belabored my theme too long, let me say that, prior to his Italian
visit, Goodstein represented the intelligent, knowledgeable, and cosmopolitan
American physicist in his ignorance of cold fusion research after 1989, and in
the audacity with which he has written and spoken about it without troubling
to read up on the subject beforehand. What Goodstein learned was that, ex-
cept for Petrasso’s well founded criticism of Fleischmann and Pons’s nuclear
measurements, Baltimore was bogus. Cold fusion research was not a pathologi-
cal science. The assault of Koonin and Lewis was mistaken: Fleischmann and
Pons were not incompetent and delusional. Indeed, evidence of a new means
of generating energy had been found in the flow of anomalous heat power that
defied contemporary science.
Did Goodstein continue his learning about cold fusion science to see
what more the field had to offer? Did he recommend that other scientists look
at the field? He seems to have denied his scholarly faculties the leeway to re-
solve his quandary. For an accomplished scholar, his article is without intellec-
tual resolution. I conclude that the article in its essence asks, How can I
 Un Cri du Coeur 331

(Goodstein) look further into cold fusion research without being consumed
by the consequences of doing so; if I announce that Koonin and Lewis were
wrong at Baltimore, and that in their hubris they did lasting damage, not only
to Fleischmann and Pons, but to Caltech and to an incipient science, how do I
survive in one piece?
The article is un cri du coeur from a member of the scientific establish-
ment: what have we wrought with our antics, and what are we to do about re-
pair? So far, the answer to his article has been a comprehensive silence from
the scientific community in the United States.
I have concluded that fear is an important force in preventing scientists
from looking into cold fusion studies even as an academic exercise. Progress
will have to be made in the ghetto without help from orthodox scientists, even
those with open minds. There is one source of help, though, from outside the
ghetto. The silent partner in this controversy made provision that anomalous
power would continue to register on the calorimeters even as their accuracy
was much improved. Presumably that help will continue.
It is my thesis that this climate of fear was put into place at Baltimore by
the mistaken attack on Fleischmann and Pons’s mental acuity and by the sav-
age and ignorant criticism of their calorimetry. After those eminently success-
ful attacks, who else dared to risk suffering from such public ruthlessness?
The scientists who constitute the cold fusion field of study have been
introduced earlier to the reader. The scientist’s employer is also of interest to
this account, be it corporation, university, government agency, or institution.
None of these institutions came forth to endorse cold fusion studies in spite of
the presence of 100 or so technicians devoted to the field.
This difference between the individual and the institution derives from
the ability of the individual to behave in a coherent manner, even about com-
plex affairs. Institutions generally lack this ability; they suffer from institu-
tional incoherence. The individual can more or less simultaneously take into
account his career, his relationship with his peers, his family, and altogether ar-
rive at a commitment to devote some years to cold fusion research while
accepting the associated contumely. For an institution to make a similar
commitment would require the alignment of the multitudinous interests of
dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of officers, ranking staff, the board of trustees,
and possibly a board of regents. This is an impossible task with such an hereti-
cal topic.
Imagine the doctoral degree candidate with a dissertation that had been
fulfilled under a professor who was active and successful in cold fusion re-
search at Grand University.* The candidate accepts the reality of anomalous
power, as he had measured it in his own experiment. He thus produced inter-

* This illustration is derived from an actual instance.

332 resolution

esting and publishable results in the course of his studies. These were incorpo-
rated into his thesis and dissertation. In due course, he successfully defended
his dissertation, the last step towards his degree. While you might then expect
the candidate would be awarded the degree, institutional incoherence stood
athwart that outcome despite the quality of the candidate’s work.
Consider the plight of the department head who planned to approve the
degree award. He would be questioned by the department’s members: does
our department really believe that cold fusion is true; does the department as-
sert that nuclear fusion can actually be sustained in a jar sitting on a bench
top; is it really so much smarter than Harwell, MIT, Yale, and Caltech who
demonstrated that it does not work; is it possibly suffering from pathological
science; does the department head understand that the vast majority of scien-
tists in America know that cold fusion studies are a farce; and, always, should
the department risk its hard earned reputation?
Imagine that this department head is an unusually stalwart fellow who
was willing to accept that departmental burden, and then proceeded to affirm
the Ph.D. degree award. Each of these same questions then devolve upon the
dean of science from an ever-widening audience. If the dean bravely affirmed
the award, then the same burden fell on the president. If the president decides
to support the degree award, then the trustees would soon be asking, why was
Grand University standing alone in seeing the “truth” of cold fusion studies;
something must have gone wrong. What about the reputation of our univer-
sity? The regents, philanthropists, and alumni would inevitably be forced to
reconsider their support of the university. The recognition process would
progress in this manner with any institution of established rank and reputa-
tion, be it a government agency or a private corporation. Several hundred sci-
entists could each be dedicated to the field of study, but institutional incoher-
ence will work to insure that not a single institution would acknowledge the
legitimacy of the field.
Institutions develop coherence as a reflection of opinion expressed by the
scientific establishment and in the mass media. This is why the public assault
at Baltimore and in the New York Times Sunday Magazine did such lasting
damage to the evaluation of the Utah claims. After those assaults, who would
be so reckless as to engage their institution, as an institution, in the study and
evaluation of the Utah claims?

Science Reporting
Much of my reading in the preparation for this book included stories written
by science reporters who covered the cold fusion episode. The Baltimore
meeting was a supreme science story with 100 of America’s most distinguished
 Un Cri du Coeur 333

science reporters present. I expected to see a kind of reporting that was differ-
ent from what I usually read in newspapers and magazines. I was disap-
pointed.
The elements that appear in a scientific article ought to include those
things that make science unique. There are the claims, the procedural proto-
cols, and there are the experimental outcomes. A science reporter can be ex-
pected to have a well developed sense about protocols, and to allow for their
presence in his reporting.
Reporters Deborah Blum and Mary Knudson edited the book, A Field
Guide for Science Writers. Could they offer reasons why reporters were not
more effective in explaining the episode of cold fusion as it was played out?
One of the protocols involved the review of a scientist’s work by his peers.
Here was what one of the book’s science reporters had to say about the peer-
review process.

Is it good science? Here the single most useful guideline is science’s

own peer review system. The system is not perfect, but it’s the best
that’s available . . . Why it is critically important to find out whether
a scientific claim or advance has survived the peer review process. It
is incredibly easy for scientists . . . to come to believe passionately
and honestly that something is true when, in fact, it is false. The peer
review system is a time tested way . . . Science writers who ignore the
system risk misleading their readers and embarrassing themselves.4

All in all, a fine statement. It continues a few sentences later.

One of the most famous instances of non-peer reviewed science get-

ting into the mainstream press was “cold fusion.” Two scientists
claimed to have invented a tabletop device that caused nuclear fusion
at ordinary temperatures, yielding more energy than was consumed
in the process. Ordinarily a scientist would repeat the experiment
and, . . . submit a paper to a peer reviewed journal. Only after it was
accepted and published would the press hear about it.5

My readers know that the two scientists had been working on the experiment
for five years and that they had no trouble repeating it. Their Preliminary
Note did pass peer-review, and so forth. The writer of these quoted para-
graphs, while he recognized that, “the [peer-review] system is not perfect,” did
not warn of those situations where it actually breaks down. In this case, a new
sub-specialty of science was being created by their claims. Where do you find
someone qualified to review the claims of anomalous power?
Continuing the above quote, “But not these two scientists. Amazingly,
334 resolution

they called a press conference before they had even figured out how to repro-
duce their own results.”6 The reporter was incautious here. He did not realize
that some experiments were difficult to reproduce, but those experiments were
still science and possibly important science. As noted earlier, the first cloning
of the sheep Dolly involved 227 failed attempts and only one success.
Continuing. “. . . most good science writers conducted their own peer-re-
view process, asking physicists to comment, . .” I infer from this that chemists
need not be consulted. Here the reporter had uncritically embraced the nu-
clear physicist. He should have positioned himself better to see if those physi-
cists were responding to the real claims, or whether were they putting up a
straw man, perhaps in order to protect their hot fusion funding. A reporter
can best maintain his self-orientation by developing a direct knowledge of the
original claims, which were available to him. From that stance, he could report
insightfully about the evaluation of those claims.
To continue his description of the reporting, “. . . notes of skepticism at-
tended most of the cold fusion coverage, except for that in the Wall Street Jour-
nal, which to the astonishment of many science writers, climbed aboard the
bandwagon.” The reporter misunderstood what the WSJ was doing. It did not
climb aboard the bandwagon. It consulted not only with physicists but with
chemists as well. That was the essential difference.
In my own reading of the science reporting, I saw mostly political report-
ing about a scientific subject. It involved a substantial explanation of the sci-
ence that was followed by an in-depth report on how the sides were divided,
on whose side had the big guns, and the preponderance of votes. The political
reality was that, “. . . the vast majority of experts long ago dismissed it . . .”

Getting It Right
There are a few cautionary rules for reporters once the chase is underway. Do
not assume that the scientific establishment is as pure as the driven snow, that
it has no other purposes than to help sort out the science. I have run into
themes of punishment for slights, noble motives of protecting the public, pro-
tection of funding, and myriad other reasons for putting down the claimant,
all of them quite separate from the question of the validity of the claims.
Scientists are people subject to human failings. The institution of science
is as likely to fail as any other social institution. We take it for granted that ca-
tastrophes occur even in our most important and carefully run institutions:
major banks occasionally collapse in bankruptcy; schools fail to educate chil-
dren; a surgeon cuts off the wrong leg, a house is built on the wrong lot. Most
of the time our institutions function well, but no one thinks they are perfect.
For some strange reason, reporters have convinced themselves that the profes-
sion of science alone has somehow achieved perfection.
 Un Cri du Coeur 335

There is wide variety in science. It stretches from the physicist, to the ge-
ologist, to the biologist, and beyond. The nuclear physicist may demand a rec-
ipe for replication of an experiment, but that demand may be peculiar to nu-
clear physics. To a considerable extent, the nuclear physicist does not look
upon the “Dolly” event as following the protocols required for science. The re-
porter who must jump from field to field in his reporting should be keenly
aware of this variety of protocols. He may find a number of the references in
this book helpful in that regard.
According to another science reporter, “[Science reporting] often requires
the skills of a good police reporter”.7 I would emphasize that comparison. The
police are often constrained in their actions because they cannot get away
from the fact that a crime has been committed, and something has to be done
about it. A comparison, if it is not driven too hard, will help to elucidate the
rules. There was an old tradition attached to the “police blotter,” a genre
sometimes called crime reporting. The reporter’s job was to do much more
than print the official statements passed out by the police department or the
mayor’s office. The reporter had to learn the circumstances of a crime, and
watch the police behavior with a critical eye. There was no suggestion in this
that the “crime” reporter knew better than the police, only that he was inde-
pendent. He had to keep the whole picture in mind, and think about how
things fit together. This kind of analysis of the content and sequence of events
was not evident in the large volume of reporting on the cold fusion saga dur-
ing 1989.
The best way for a reporter to learn exactly what the claims were was
to read what the proponents said. These claims could then be followed to see
if the scientific community was seriously evaluating them, or merely grand-
standing for its own diverse purposes.
Another step in the right direction comes with identification of the sci-
ence sub-specialty of interest. This should be done with care if the reporter
wants valuable consultations. The global warming debate has been marked by
such choices made by the different sides when planning interviews. The
choices in the matter of cold fusion were largely between physics and chemis-
try, but the choices between nuclear physics and solid state physics, calorime-
try and electrochemistry were also important.
It is particularly worthwhile to report about critical experiments pub-
lished in serious journals, especially when the matter is controversial. No one
field of science has a direct channel to interpret natural phenomena and can
know for certain who or what is right. The sophisticated reporter is always
aware of nature as a hidden partner in science; she can trump any argument
mankind might devise.
The influence of the science reporter was a strong one as the cold fusion
episode entered its twelfth year. The American scientific community remained
ignorant of the experimental developments in the field. The reporter would
336 resolution

recognize the fact that professors of chemistry and physics in the most presti-
gious research institutions are quite unaware of what has been achieved in the
years since 1989. Reporters making inquiry can be careful in selecting the ex-
pertise they need to consult. They can, for example, ask the expert interviewee
the extent of his familiarity with cold fusion literature and research, and pass
that on to the reader. The best source will be a scientist who is up to date on
the literature.
This is the place to turn, finally, to a resolution and conclusion regarding
the many contentions in the field of study called cold fusion.
 c h a p t e r t w e n t y - f o u r

Resolution

T he Utah announcement in March 1989 defied all contemporary scientific

experience. The claim for discovery of anomalous power elicited re-
sponses that were immature in their haste, ignorant in their assumptions,
wrong in their conclusions, and, ultimately, corrupt in their protocol. The
claim to have measured neutrons, conversely, attracted criticism of an entirely
proper form—an error of procedure in measurement enabled the skeptics to
correctly declare that the claim, as presented, was in error. For the principle
surviving claim, that of anomalous power, the skeptics assumed that a flaw
would be found in the calorimetry measurements. When that expectation
failed them, they dissembled. They pretended for years and years afterwards
that mankind did not know how to measure heat flow. A hoary and notorious
protocol of science sustained their pretense: the empirical evidence of the
chemistry laboratory would be spurned, as earlier skeptics spurned Galileo’s
telescope. The skeptics refused the laboratory and its literature of excess heat.
How did skeptics go about their dissembling ways where data sets that dem-
onstrated anomalous power were available during the 1990s in some abun-
dance? How did they refuse empirical evidence while keeping their respect-
ability intact within the halls of orthodox science? Entreaties from the curious
about anomalous power measurements were answered by demands for con-
comitant nuclear data. The skeptics held the proffered heat measurements
hostage to unavailable nuclear data. This pattern of behavior hid from the
professional scientist the aggregating empirical evidence for anomalous power.
Much in the manner described by Ludwik Fleck, the genesis and develop-
ment of a scientific fact unfolded during the decade of 1984–1994: discovery of

337
338 resolution

the anomalous power phenomenon—excess heat. The Fleischmann and Pons

experiment further required years of development to attain reproducibility,
much as have the recent cloning experiments in biology. Physicists particularly
have refused an allowance of time for the attainment of reproducibility. Their
strict protocol produced a false negative evaluation, and doomed the field to a
decade and more of confusion and obfuscation. The wrong paradigm of scien-
tific methodology led astray the evaluation process.
Aristotelian argument rejected things it did not understand so as to limit
its discourse to topics it believed it did understand. The extensive corrobora-
tion of the phenomenon of anomalous power was rejected by critics on the ar-
gument that it was not understood: Where is the reaction equation, or its
products? This dismissal vitiated the protocols of post-Aristotelian science.
Galileo announced that he had seen mountains on the moon in the
knowledge that he did not know how they came to be there. In this an-
nouncement, he let out the first bawl of modern science. From that moment,
not only would science admit into its sanctum things it did not understand, it
would make those things be objects of its most devoted attention.
It required expertise in calorimetry and data reduction to critique the
many excellent excess heat reports that emerged in 1990–1994. We have the
Fleischmann and Pons’s seminal paper of July 1990, the Wilson, et al., cri-
tique published simultaneously with Fleischmann and Pons’s defense in July
1992. These three papers are a quintessential expression of the proper meth-
odology of science, and I commend them to the professional scientist.
That mode was rejected by the skeptics. Their names as authors appear
no where on peer-reviewed papers of that period (with one exception)1. When
there emerged extensive sets of measurements that purported to demonstrate a
new source of energy, the American scientific establishment failed to evaluate
them. The APS and the ACS, for example, have not provided technical review
committees of experts.
Individual physicists, acting as skeptics, undertook to represent the scien-
tific community. They set aside the measurements of anomalous power with-
out argument. Nature journal led the pack when it wrote, “Both sides in the
debate seem to accept that the heat measurements will probably not prove
convincing one way or the other, and that the presence or absence of nuclear
products is the crucial evidence.”2 Huizenga referred to a list of experiments
reporting excess heat by insisting, “This list, however, doesn’t contain a single
entry where the claimed heat is accompanied by commensurate numbers of
fusion products.”3 With that, the representatives of the scientific community
would ignore excess heat measurements regardless of their quality.
A review of the skeptical writings over the past twelve years shows a lack
of comment on the topic of anomalous power. Books by the skeptics include
no bibliographic reference to empirical data after September 1989. One skep-
 Resolution 339

tic, who purchased his copy of this book in May 2000, reported to the fusion
physics community that its title was “Why Cold Fusion Prevailed,”4 and
thereby revealed to all a lapse of intellectual integrity. We have mentioned pre-
viously how a tenth anniversary newspaper article reported that McKubre pro-
claimed the abundance of anomalous power reports that are “virtually without
challenge,” in the peer-reviewed literature, while Huizenga declared that the
field of cold fusion is dead.5 In the manner of these four examples, various dis-
sembling mechanisms successfully locked out empirical evidence from evalua-
tion by professional scientists.
Pierre Curie announced his empirical evidence for anomalous power dis-
charge from radium and was awarded a Nobel Prize. Similarly, the empirical
evidence for an astonishingly rapid expansion of the universe is recognized as
requiring explanation by the cosmologists.6 There was no assertion from sci-
entists that these two examples were pathological because of the lack of causal
information. The empirical data in these two examples was not hidden from
view pending some additional knowledge. Science requires only that there be
no procedural error in the measurements.
A skeptic’s wary thought process illustrates a concern with undetected
error.

I have often looked at experiments which gave results that appeared

to violate the laws of Nature . . . the fact that I had not detected the
flaw, did not mean that the experiment was correct and that the laws
of Nature had been violated.7

But if it were necessary to violate the laws of nature to generate excess

heat, then none would be generated. On the other hand, if the measurements
are incorrect, then an avid pursuit of the “science” must in due course explic-
itly and particularly reveal that incorrectness. “Undetected error” may be a
stopping point because of penury or fatigue, but it is not a scientific stopping
point.
Cold fusion research is a respectable scientific activity founded upon the
empirical phenomenon of anomalous power. This new field warrants the ful-
some attention of science and the government because of the importance of a
malleable type of low energy nuclear reaction to science, of a possibility of ra-
dioactivity remediation, and of a potential source of energy for society.
In America, to hide important information from the public is now re-
ferred to as a “cover-up.” When the excess heat did not disappear with the
introduction of precise calorimetry, skeptical physicists adopted a cover-up be-
havior towards it. Huizenga’s book omitted references to the topic for occur-
rences after June 1989. F. Close did not include such references in his book.
Nor did the DOE Panel report them after September 1989. Morrison omitted
340 resolution

the words “excess heat” when reporting the title of this book to the fusion
community. Even Goodstein refers to Scaramuzzi’s “impressive data” without
allowing one sentence to reveal that he too had obtained excess heat from the
electrolytic cell. In this manner, the extended corroboration of the discovery
of anomalous power has been kept hidden from the professional physicist and
chemist, and from the public. No cover up like this has happened before. It is
a profound scandal in American science.
There has been virtually no controversy in the science itself, while at the
same time there has been great controversy in the public domain. A scientist
performs the electrolytic cell experiment after the example of Fleischmann
and Pons, and successfully demonstrates the generation of excess heat. He
submits a report of his experiment to an established journal of science where it
passes peer-review and is published. During subsequent years the publisher re-
ceives no assertion of procedural error to invalidate the published paper. The
report is established as valid science. However, let that same scientist try to use
a government auditorium to discuss his results with a peer group, or let him
try to patent his innovative cell configuration, or let the government try to
award a research grant to this scientist to extend his experimental work, and it
is likely that the sky will fall down. The arousing cry from the skeptics will be
“almost all scientists agree there is no such thing as cold fusion.” With that
demagoguery and follow up efforts, permission to use the auditorium will be
revoked, the patent office will refuse the patent, a select panel will be ap-
pointed to revoke the grant award. In this strange fashion, the controversy has
been played out for twelve years, violating the most ordinary, well-established
scientific methodology. Thus peer-reviewed publication counts for nothing,
and demagoguery counts for everything.
And the skeptics response to determined questions asserting the presence
of published, peer-reviewed, yet unscathed, reports of excess heat, after dis-
missal of the “where are the nuclear products” gambit, generally turns to ru-
mor-mongering those reports: the peer-review was incestuous, the reports are
incomplete, the experiment is not reproducible. These are criticisms that the
skeptics dare not address to the publishers for review and publication.
The indictment against the skeptics is perfectly straightforward. It is not
that the skeptics ought to accept the calorimetric data as valid; it is perfectly
proper for them to reject it if that is their considered conclusion. What is
unconscionable is that they have hidden their decision from the scientific
community. Their decision does not appear anywhere in the peer-reviewed lit-
erature of science where it can be properly acknowledged and critiqued by
other professional scientists. This is another of the skeptics errors of scientific
protocol. I have on occasion seen Park’s book, Voodoo Science, used as a refer-
ence in such matters. But Park is only guessing. There is no methodology in
his book wherein he is enabled to separate pseudo-science from new science.
 Resolution 341

s u m m at i o n
Skeptic’s Errors of Protocol
1. Avoidance of Peer Review
Publication of empirical data in peer-reviewed journals is left un-responded
to by the skeptics. That data stands virtually unchallenged in the scientific liter-
ature. The skeptics have nothing to say about cold fusion research in those ven-
ues that require editorial-review and peer-review of a critque. They carefully
avoid exposing their opinions to the most accepted of scientific procedure.
2. Expression of Contempt
The skeptics, in their arguments with cold fusion practitioners, quickly re-
sort to expressions of contempt. This behavior necessarily closes the doors to
dialog. Personal attack, along with the use of slander and ridicule, are serious
violations of scientific ethics and are harmful to science.
3. Lack of Evaluation
With the proper experimental conditions well-met, and with an exceptional
experimental result, the scientific community has failed to evaluate the pub-
lished work. Instead, it has allowed a demand for nuclear products, better repli-
cation, theoretical underpinning, and intellectual understanding override nor-
mal protocol.

A Retrospective View
This book was written by one who loves science. I wrote it in the hope that
this new field of scientific research, misnamed cold fusion, might become
known to mainstream science rather than being known only to a small cadre
of scientists working in an intellectual ghetto.
Throughout history, a lack of available energy to substitute for human
power has been the source of much human misery. A technology that made
available a local source of heat energy for family use would bring about a revo-
lution in human well being. It would solve one of the world’s worst environ-
mental hazards: the scraping bare of the wooded growth of the landscape for
fuel. So far, the study of excess heat offers a potential technology in low qual-
ity heat sufficient to substantially augment world energy resources.
Do I anticipate that those scientists who have followed my narrative this
far will agree that a well-measured observation of anomalous power began in
1984–1989? No, perhaps not. The history of science is replete with many
who have gone to their graves refusing the latest turn in the course of discov-
ery. Some will find my extended concern with the methodology of science to
be an unfortunate digression. Others will be dismayed at my recognition that
the strict criterion does not bind all of science. As for the rest of us, What was
learned?
342 resolution

To answer that question, it is best to look at what was announced, while

investing that look with the power of retrospection. At the University of Utah
in March 1989, there were in effect three announcements, each independent
of the other two. First, Fleischmann and Pons claimed that a sustained deute-
rium-deuterium fusion was achieved. Their measurements were poorly done,
their claim was reasonably dismissed, and the two chemists turned to a rede-
sign of the experiment. They later published data showing neutron emission
from their excess heat experiment, but that experiment has not been corrobo-
rated.
The second independent claim was that of the appearance of massive
amounts of unexplained heat energy in their cell—megaJoules of energy. That
claim of excess heat was well corroborated during subsequent years. They pos-
tulated that the source of that energy must be an as yet unrecognized or undis-
covered nuclear process. Studies undertaken to find a nuclear source reaction
for the heat production concluded with evidence for the generation of he-
lium-four in amounts that corresponded to the excess heat, as though that re-
action were the only branch of deuterium-deuterium fusion with its 23.8
MeV energy discharge and the discharge were absorbed by the lattice as heat.
The third claim was for recognition and hypothesis of a class of nuclear
reactions that release useful amounts of energy while not producing the well-
known lethal radiation usually associated with nuclear power. That lack of
penetrating emissions continued to be a characteristic of the field during the
ensuing decade.
Any one of these three claims standing by itself would justify a major
public announcement and, if confirmed, be considered revolutionary by the
scientific community. For one press conference to announce all three simulta-
neously was simply beyond belief. That the three claims were intertwined with
one another assured confusion on the part of the most level headed scientist.
There were at least two additional sources of confusion. Fleischmann and
Pons presented a classical chemistry experiment that now had the word fusion
bonded to it. The strict criterion of the nuclear physicists would unfortunately
be applied to a discipline foreign to them, namely chemistry, with disabling
consequences: those who would speak for the orthodox position of the nuclear
community failed to develop a functional acquaintance with the experiment.
They knew, a priori, that there was no need to get their hands wet in the labo-
ratory.
The second source of confusion resided within the Fleischmann and Pons
cell. The cathode consisted of a piece of commercial palladium rod or sheet
metal. As such, it could not be exactly reproduced, thereby limiting the
reproducibility of the experiment. Without exact reproduction, the strict cri-
terion produced a false negative response to the second and third claims. Once
the skeptics were wedded to this conclusion, there was the natural tendency, as
 Resolution 343

satisfactory reproducibility was attained during the ensuing years, for them to
avoid public admission of an error in evaluation.
The outspoken nuclear scientists stood on their demand for only nuclear
data; the cold fusion scientists were confined to their empirical results in the
discipline of chemistry. The chemistry profession, as such, was nowhere to be
found. The two schools of scientists, in the essence of each, did not contend
with one another; they merely took different kinds of stands: “Cold fusion is
as dead as it ever was,” and “the existence of anomalous power is virtually
without challenge.”8 The strict criterion placed anomalous power outside of
science, namely, in chemistry, although none of the skeptics would say so for
the public record. They merely repeated the statement that cold fusion was
dead. The scientific community was thoroughly confused by this. The contro-
versy was not really a scientific controversy when articulated in this way. It was
one of attitudes and manners.
If the cold fusion contention were about the quality of the excess heat
measurements—were they definitive, and if not, why not—about, for exam-
ple, the need to subtract two large numbers to obtain the claimed excess, there
would be no story to be told and no book to be written. The issue would have
been about the proper interpretation of a succession of measurements—about
science. Unfortunately, the contention was political, not scientific.
The skeptics did not say that the excess heat measurements were inade-
quate; they simply ignored them as though the laboratory work did not exist
and the scientists doing that work were dead. The experiments were not re-
ported in the books by Close, Huizenga, Taubes, in essays by Park, or in ICCF
reports by Morrison. In this way, they created and maintained a circle of si-
lence around the cold fusion ghetto, one recognized by all involved as a pro-
found refusal of orthodox scientists to communicate in any reasonable way
with the practitioners. They characterized the controversy not as one about
the adequacy of the observations but as one carried on between science and
foolishness.
A scientific controversy about cold fusion would have been a continuing
debate about calorimetry, its capabilities and limitations: how to measure heat
accurately. But the skeptics always expressed themselves in such a way that the
heat claim was not directly referenced. They spoke in ambiguous language:
one was never sure whether the term “cold fusion” was meant literally or as the
name of the field. Other professionals and science reporters saw fit to not en-
ter the fray with questions aimed to lay bare these meanings. The result was a
political controversy involving clever maneuver, rather than a scientific con-
troversy about the quality of the calorimetric measurements.
Nature, Science, Scientific American, and Chemical & Engineering News
ought to have started reporting the many corroborations of heat after the ag-
gregation of evidence became clear at the end of 1994. American science was
344 resolution

harmed by the indefinite delay in publication that allowed the scientific com-
munity to remain unaware of that advancing state of the art in the generation
of anomalous power.

Due Discipline
For the last time, we revisit the keenest expression of the confusion. The fol-
lowing quote comes from a book whose manuscript closed in July 1991.

. . . it missed the heart of the controversy, where the reported magni-

tude of the fusion products was more than 8 orders of magnitude
(108) less than the reported magnitude of the heat. All critical scien-
tists, including both chemists and physicists, realized the importance
of this very large and damning inconsistency.9

The power measurements, with no radiation, were evidence of a new kind of

nuclear reaction whose products were unknown. The attention of the scien-
tific community was turned away from its duty to evaluate the claim of well-
measured anomalous power. That led, in turn, to a perpetuation of confusion
about the legitimacy of the anomalous power claims.
My insistence that it was the most conventional duty of the scientific
community to evaluate these claims does not constitute an idealistic and
impractical attitude. Confusion reigned because of a failure to follow conven-
tional protocol, thereby thwarting science. Enforcement fell on the profes-
sional societies, professional journals, and science reporters. They were sup-
posed to adhere to what might be called due discipline.
Some of the most senior scientists in the United States jumped precipi-
tously to the conclusion that the anomalous power claims were pathological.
Why was that conclusion not held to a review of Langmuir’s criteria? Six
months into the fray only one prominent physicist had publicly rejected the
Langmuir criteria as not appropriate to cold fusion studies. He dismissed it in
an unspoken manner so that the rejection was not obvious though it was pre-
sented in a New York Times Sunday Magazine article. Orthodox science failed
to be sufficiently self-critical of its own judgements.
The statistical underpinnings of Fleischmann and Pons’s cells fooled some
of the more ardent nay-sayers when many cells failed to display anomalous
power. One outspoken skeptic assumed a smooth statistical distribution for
his evaluation of the failures. He went on to “explain” the significance of the
geographical distribution of experiments counted as failed and as successful
experiments. The journal Nature compared the acceptance of excess heat to
the acceptance of religious belief on the same grounds. The slander of labeling
practitioners of cold fusion research as “believers” may have derived from that
 Resolution 345

assumption. That folderol continued for many years without self-correction

by the scientific community.
Science was belittled when it failed to evaluate a well-measured claim that
was of scientific importance. The most damning behavior was the insistence
that an unconventional protocol replace normal procedures. No instance
came to my attention where orthodox scientists (or science reporters) ques-
tioned this egregious substitution. When superconductivity was discovered,
when radium was found to be warmer than its ambient, these were accepted as
interesting scientific observations subject only to the demand that the observa-
tions be well performed. This was routinely done because the experiments
were readily reproducible. An assertion of thorough evaluation was set forth
by the presentations at Baltimore, but that assertion did not hold up to its cri-
tique. In this matter, no scientist of orthodox persuasion stepped forward to
demand that the anomalous power demonstrations be adequately evaluated.
While the DOE Panel made a gesture in that direction, necessary funding to
support it was specifically ruled out.
For eight years McKubre maintained a laboratory to demonstrate anoma-
lous power. There were a total of three informal, but substantial, evaluations
by recognized experts from outside the cold fusion community. They found
no procedural error, but they remained silent.
For the first time, orthodox science decided that there be no communica-
tion with those working in cold fusion research. Professional journals were
discouraged from publishing such research. Skeptics would not participate in
laboratory experiments. Scientific journals would not accept paid advertise-
ments for books supportive of the field. These were anti-intellectual positions.
The broad-audience magazines of science have assiduously maintained a wall
around the cold fusion research ghetto even unto 2002. This refusal to listen,
look, and report should be treated with the contempt such attitudes ordinarily
attract.
For the first twelve years, skeptics, upon inquiry, told the press that cold
fusion research was as dead as it always was and that it would remain dead for
a long, long time. We see that such talk was merely an expression of hubris:
nuclear physics is science; conflicting data when obtained from other disci-
plines, like chemistry, are to be ignored. That arrogance harmed science by de-
laying the scientific community’s evaluation of anomalous power evidence for
a decade or more.

Hold Falsifiable
In March 1989, the community saw its duty clearly to evaluate what had been
announced. Unfortunately, its time horizon, was too short. The two or three
months allotted to the task proved inadequate. Twelve years later, science
346 resolution

needed to return to its duty even when long term emotional commitments
made that difficult. Its duty was to follow the evolution of a significant claim
of discovery, one that intimated a new source of energy for society. The semi-
nal paper of July 1990 by Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, Mark R. Ander-
son, Lian Jun Li, and Marvin Hawkins, remained essentially unread by the
scientific community eleven years after publication. Professional disciplines es-
sential for undertaking that task include electrochemistry, calorimetry, and
modern data reduction methodology.
Scaramuzzi articulated this failure. “How is it possible that after 10 years
the extreme positions about CF have not softened, . . . I have just stated that
reproducibility has been ‘almost’ reached. Why, then, has nothing changed?
. . . One often has the feeling that any attempt to restart communications is
doomed in advance.”10 One could say the same about the evidence for helium-
four which now assumed the tentative role of nuclear ash that was once
thought by the skeptics to be so terribly important.
The governments of France, China, the U.S., and Italy, in that order,
have established what are meant to be scientific research programs. They rep-
resent a more mature realization of how a possible new science ought to be
evaluated.
The outspoken nuclear physicists continued to insist that the nuclear
products be identified before the field could be recognized as a science. But
was that really their purpose? Bressani catalogued remarkable progress in iden-
tifying helium-four as the long demanded nuclear product. The outspoken
physicists evidenced no interest in this, and the broad-audience scientific jour-
nals did not report on it. Were the demands for nuclear products disingenu-
ous? If they had demanded it, why then did the skeptics not demand research
funding to complete exploration of helium-four as the possible nuclear prod-
uct associated with anomalous power? In fact, that line of research persisted
and recognition of helium-four as the nuclear ash appears imminent. Would
the scientific community at large now be informed of this achievement?
The skeptics were protecting their economic, professional, and scientific
turf with insatiable demands. They would either have to be overridden, or sci-
ence would have to wait for their passing before the data for anomalous power
and its nuclear ash could be admitted into mainstream science. Only then can
its proper contention with the formulae from past nuclear experience get un-
derway. Until then, the skeptics maintain that the evidence for anomalous
power resides outside of science because it conflicts with nuclear theory. To
protect a theory from possible experimental falsification by refusing new data does
harm to science.
What remains of the controversy can be watched with curiosity and plea-
sure. No one can know for certain what will be found for the energy-source
reaction, nor when. It is not possible to know for certain what will be the early
 Resolution 347

applications of an ensuing technology. Nor is it known which skeptics will be

converted, and which will go to their graves unpersuaded. It will prove a fine
spectator sport.
Who might qualify to serve as the continuing sports commentator? Most
likely not a fusion physicist. His expertise resides in high-energy physics that
seems to play no role in the anomalous power phenomenon, not to mention
that a conflict of interest might exist in the competition for funding between
hot fusion and cold fusion research.
From a strictly technical point of view, an electrochemist is the appropri-
ate commentator for the sport. He should be intimately acquainted with the
experimental work, of course. Another commentator might be a solid state
physicist to follow the evolution of theory about where the energy comes
from. He will need to be familiar with contemporary laboratory evidence of
nuclear activity that a theory will have to satisfy as well as with established nu-
clear theories with which it may have to contend. How long will this com-
mentary last? If the source reaction is a multi-body, coherent process and if
only a meager resource is devoted to finding it, historical comparisons would
imply that the elapsed time may be twenty or more years to completion.

Validation
Early on, Fleischmann and Pons reported output power 20 times the input
power during a 48 hour burst. W. Hansen, after analyzing cell data produced
by the Utah chemists, reported, “. . . a profound energy source.” McKubre ob-
served 0.9 watts generated over 7 days, amounting in all to a half megaJoule.
Huggins, in a remarkable cell and calorimeter design, recorded a peak gener-
ated power of 5.6 watts. Arata reported the production 200 megaJoules over
four months with a 125 watt power maximum. Fleischmann and Pons later
produced 100 watts for 32 days, and during 158 days generated 300 mega-
Joules of energy, equivalent to 80 kilowatt-hours of energy.
A laboratory researcher only needs to make an observation to add an in-
teresting new fact to the inventory of scientific data. Galileo implicitly estab-
lished that premise when he reported mountains on the moon and moons or-
biting Jupiter. He could not explain these things and he knew he was not
obliged to do so. Science could spend a millennium, if need be, handling the
perplexing data his observations brought into the realm of science. That di-
chotomy of protocol is a mantram of this narrative. I earlier referred to it as
the stand-alone quality of an observation. The immediate demands for causal
relationships are perfectly reasonable as separate demands because they will
serve to spur research by the scientific community, but those demands must
not be permitted to hold the observations hostage from validation.
348 resolution

The saga of anomalous power began with its first recognition in the win-
ter of 1984–1985. That happened with the “meltdown” experiment in Room
1113 of the north Henry Eyring building at the University of Utah. By the
summer of 1988, Fleischmann and Pons had a tightly specified experimental
cell and instrument that was designed to demonstrate the effect in a well-mea-
sured manner. That type of cell demonstrated anomalous power in a consider-
able number of experiments without failure up to and including the day of the
Utah announcement. By the end of 1994, some two dozen independent labo-
ratories had reported the detection of anomalous power in full-length reports.
A scientific fact was validated in this manner. Nearly 100 such demonstrations
and reports were completed by 1999. It is not unlikely that by now excess heat
has exhibited itself in a laboratory cell more than a thousand times.
As replication of anomalous power phenomenon turned the evidential
tide against them, the skeptics found that they did not have to declare mea
culpa, simply because no one was watching. They need not say anything. Cold
fusion research had been so stigmatized during 1989 that nothing reported by
its researchers was noticed. This lack of watching and noticing was particu-
larly true of the broad-audience science journals and the professional societies.
Even the Wall Street Journal gave up watching.
Two summary statements are appropriate at this point in our review. In
October 1999, McKubre said, “The evidence in my view for the appearance
of an anomalous unaccounted excess heat in the deuterium-palladium system
is essentially overwhelming. There is something there. It is larger by more
than one order of magnitude, in some cases by more than two orders of mag-
nitude, than the sum total of all possible chemical reactions.”11 Previously,
Arata had written in the Proceedings of Japan Academy, “[We] have duplicated
many times the principle, structure and functions of [the] “DS-Cathode” [in
the deuterium-palladium system] which generates helium and tremendous ex-
cess energy as reaction products with 100% reproducibility sustained over sev-
eral thousand hours.”12
Once the existence of the excess heat phenomenon is accepted then there
is a new theoretical area to be explored. We have noted the statement by theo-
retician Hagelstein, when he took his place at the rostrum, registered the
proper form: “I accept that excess heat energy exists.” He would then proceed
with his theoretical paper. Guiliano Preparata, Department of Physics, Uni-
versity of Milan, Italy, published a theoretical exposition in 1996 offering
his analysis and construction of a theory to support the experimental out-
comes.13
The preamble to the DOE Panel’s report gave cold fusion studies its vali-
dation criterion. It said that even a single short but valid cold fusion event
would be revolutionary. Huizenga comments that cold fusion consists of a
 Resolution 349

“mélange of claims.” I resolve these two positions with the assertion that even
a single short but valid anomalous power event would be revolutionary. The
validation steps have followed the most universal of protocols, replication in
an independent laboratory.
Only one question was raised in the literature about the true indepen-
dence of the laboratories that have reported anomalous power. It was that the
inadvertent recombination of the oxygen and hydrogen gases in the cell might
provide the power that was then misconstrued as anomalous power. A review
of the reports, however, shows that for experiments in a variety of laboratories
such recombination was not inadvertent at all. Some experiments have mea-
sured the recombination and allowed for it, while others have incorporated
into the experimental design the deliberate recombination of all the gases.
Finally, there are the control experiments that demonstrate no anomalous
power even though they are subject to the recombination claim. Oriani, in his
corroborating experiment that was submitted to Nature (September 1989),
provided a cylindrical, perforated glass wall between the cathode and anode to
prevent recombination.
After 1994, the remaining concern was the attainment of reproducibility
with the Fleischmann and Pons cell. During these years, a high order of
reproducibility was brought within reach. Several experimenters had achieved
50% reproducibility of excess heat generation. Some had developed particular
variations of the cell design that claimed 100% reproducibility and awaited
only the additional steps of funding and fulfillment in order to attain the im-
primatur of an established institution. Arata’s and Preparata’s versions of the
experiment may prove highly reproducible.14
There will be a long wait until there is available for anomalous power
some avenue by which a proof may be acquired. It may come in the form of
an experiment that is tolerant of the variety of palladium metallurgy. It may
require that the palladium cathode be constructed one atom at a time in ac-
cordance with a tight specification.
The experiment moved quickly to much higher power levels. These op-
erated at 50 to 200 watts output power, and achieved extraordinary power
densities, although the highest of those densities were achieved in wires of ex-
ceedingly small diameter. Evidence of nuclear activity continued with many
experiments reporting a number of different kinds of particle and radiation
emission. Scaramuzzi declared that the bewildering variety meant that the
source of the heat and emissions must be a coherent, multibody nuclear reac-
tion.15 Finally, the Mengoli run of seven days without cell excitation current
gives virtual proof of the phenomenon of excess heat if mankind knows how
to measure the presence of heat at all.
What about blame for the damage that was done, the damage to Fleisch-
350 resolution

mann and Pons, to the American scientific community, to the development of

science in this new area? I am sometimes asked, if I had 100 milliliters of
blame to allocate, how would I apportion it.

Apportioning Blame
A first dollop of blame for what ensued, ten milliliters, goes to the University
of Utah for a poorly executed press presentation. Peterson and Brophy spoke
in generalities correctly leaving the heavy work for Fleischmann and Pons, nei-
ther of whom had their statements prepared beforehand. It was unconsciona-
ble to expect them to stand before a national audience and extemporaneously
compose the principal announcement. The press release was cut back by attor-
neys to a skeleton of what was needed to inform the scientific community and
the public. The administration needed to overrule the specialists, and it failed
to do so.
The university’s faculty agonized during the summer of 1989 quite cer-
tain that the developing contention would do permanent harm to the school.
They were concerned that it would become difficult to attract the best faculty
and graduate students. The statistics show that these concerns were misplaced.
The graphs of these numbers continued their growth in a straight line show-
ing no dip that could be attributed to the cold fusion episode. This was a les-
son to be learned by the administrators of other research institutions.
I allocate another ten milliliters of blame to Fleischmann and Pons. I ac-
cept that they had a tiger by the tail and no way to let go. They were inexperi-
enced in matters of public communication. A part of their science was in er-
ror. They ought to have renounced that data promptly, and it was wrong that
they did not share cell data with their colleagues at the university.
The Baltimore APS presentations get thirty milliliters for the comprehen-
sive errors in descriptions of Fleischmann and Pons’s experiment and of the
two chemists’ persons. The claim that they were incompetent and mentally
ailing was unethical as well as wrong. The significance of the number of failed
experiments was grossly exaggerated. To ascribe Langmuir’s pathology to the
announced claims can be seen to be wrong.
The four press conferences also get thirty milliliters for their intense, ag-
gressive purpose, and for their successful impact. The assertion of “absolute”
knowledge that was offered to the cream of the nation’s science reporters was a
knowing attack. The further assertion that the Caltech experiments were more
sophisticated than those done in Utah was unnecessary as well as wrong. The
four press conferences turned the scientific community away from its duty to
evaluate what was claimed and redirected its interests to the mean practice of
politics.
 Resolution 351

Nature’s rejection of Oriani’s corroboration of excess heat in January 1990

gets an award of twenty milliliters of blame. His paper fit the proper protocol
of a corroborating experiment. That rejection was explained as due to the dif-
ficulty of anomalous power replication in general and because there was no ev-
idence of nuclear products. While each of these reasons was of great interest,
an answer to them was not required according to the usual standards of scien-
tific corroboration. The fact that the corroboration was published in another
place does not subtract from this aliquot of error. The various publications are
not of equal stature.
Mother nature proved adequately stubborn. Twelve years later, more than
100 technical people were still devoted to the field. While the skeptics success-
fully stopped some of the research, and treated the researchers as if they did
not exist, those same skeptics, fortunately, did not take to burning the pub-
lished papers. These are still available in libraries. Even if, at the twelve-year
anniversary, all research monies were to disappear and all cold fusion research
were to end, there resides in the published citations many experiments of suf-
ficient stature for subsequent generations to pick up and pursue, to a comple-
tion of the scientific base.

An Ordeal of Passage
The ordeal I speak of does not involve the extended effort Fleischmann and
Pons devoted to the defense of their scientific claims. That belongs in another
category. Research that was done with their type of cell involved the most or-
dinary sort of scientific activity. The kind of electrolytic cell work that Fleisch-
mann did in his cold fusion experiments, he had done frequently during his
professional life. As he put it: “It’s been said that we have gone off the wall
with our ideas, but that’s absurd. Actually, we are extremely conventional sci-
entists. I always say we are so conventional, it is painful.”16
The personal side of resolution sees the two principal protagonists as ac-
complished scientists continuing the work of a lifetime, but being forced in
their mature years to endure an ordeal of passage, one which society tradition-
ally reserves for its prophets. The best that can be done by way of offering
some emotional resolution of this matter is for the reader to turn to the words
of Koonin in his 1989 retrospective interview, and to the words of Fleisch-
mann in a 1994 interview. In his retrospective of the Baltimore events,
Koonin offered the consolation, “That we said these things just won’t mat-
ter . . .”
With reference to his own ordeal during this period, Fleischmann offered
the following thesis.17 “If you have any integrity at all, you do what you have to
352 resolution

do, and you take the consequences.” The ordeal consisted of punishment, to
state it bluntly. Koonin at Baltimore accused Fleischmann and Pons of being
incompetent and possibly delusional. N. Lewis responded to a question asked
by a reporter: Should reporters ignore claims of excess heat? Lewis answered
“absolutely,” while his own experiments lay percolating just outside the pa-
rameters of interest. The APS Bulletin reported about that meeting, “The
Corpse of Cold Fusion will probably continue to twitch for a while even after
two nights of assault.”18 In April 1991, the APS Bulletin announced in a refer-
ence to Pons, “CF Huckster Resigns Position at Univ. of Utah.”19 The slander
of the label “true believers” was continued for more than six years. At an of-
ficial meeting of the APS in 1995, in his official address Park said, “To be sure,
there are even today true believers among the cold fusion acolytes, just as there
are sincere scientists who believe in alien abductions, psychokinesis, creation-
ism, and the Chicago Cubs.” The sarcasm even went into the title of his talk,
which was, “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves.”20
I visited with Park in the autumn of 1996. He spoke at some length and
with passion of the University of Utah’s refusal to release an assay report for
helium in a palladium cathode, “Fleischmann and Pons had agreed the test
was critical.” I also inquired about his refusal to attend the AIP ceremonial
lunch for Jerry Bishop, reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Was this not how
a conformist society was built—with punishment by ostracism? His reply was
to the point, “Many things are punished by ostracism. Especially, withholding
information within the scientific community gets punished.”21
I turn to Robert Frost, the New England poet, to consider the impact of
the ordeal on Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. Frost viewed the matter
of a scientist’s self-esteem with some penetration.

“Have you ever thought about rewards,” I was asked lately . . . I don’t
know what I was supposed to think unless it was that the greatest re-
ward of all was self-esteem. Saints like John Bunyan are all right in
jail if they are sure of their truth and sincerity. But so also are many
criminals. The great trouble is to be sure. A stuffed shirt is the oppo-
site of a criminal. He cares not what he thinks of himself so long as
the world continues to think well of him. The sensible and healthy
live somewhere between self-approval and the approval of society.
They make their adjustment without too much talk of compromise.
The scientist seems to have the advantage of [the artist] in a
court of larger appeal. A planet is perturbed in its orbit. The scientist
stakes his reputation on the perturber’s being found at a certain
point in the sky at a certain time of night. All telescopes are turned
that way, and sure enough, there the perturber is as bright as a but-
 Resolution 353

ton. The scientist knows he is good without being told. He has a

mind and he has instruments, the extensions of mind that fit closely
into the nature of the Universe.22

Indeed, Fleischmann and Pons had their minds and their instrument, their
cell, which did fit closely into the nature of the universe. But so far the greatest
reward of all had been denied them—esteem from the community of scien-
tists.
Scientific discovery often follows from the development of advanced lab-
oratory instruments, as was the case with Galileo’s telescope. Fleischmann and
Pons showed how they could calculate the power balance of their cells to
within one tenth of one percent in their paper of July 1992. This indicated
that they were masters of electrolytic cell design and its concomitant use as a
calorimetry instrument. It was rightly so that they were the ones to discover
the phenomenon of anomalous power.
What place will Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons hold in the halls
of science? Fleischmann had received many awards in his specialty of electro-
chemistry, and he was elected to the Royal Society, England’s most prestigious
scientific honor. What additional awards they might be graced with or denied
cannot be anticipated, but there is a way to give the matter some consider-
ation.
Jeremy Bernstein, a physicist, had a word to say about comparisons that I
found apt. He compared the poet Stephen Spender (who was very good) with
renowned poet W. H. Auden, and compared the physicist Robert Oppen-
heimer (who also was very good) with Paul A. M. Dirac who founded the sci-
ence of quantum mechanics. Bernstein concluded, “That is what great poetry
and great physics have in common, both are swept along by the tide of unan-
ticipated genius as it rushes past the merely very good.”23 Great chemistry, I
am sure, gets swept along as well by the tide of unanticipated genius.
Expressing his summary views of the Baltimore event one week later,
Koonin had two separate conclusions. The first was, “I feel that we did a good
job,” and the second I mentioned above, “That we said these things just won’t
matter.”24
Fleischmann was fulsome in his summary view.25

If it had been anything else, we would have said, Oh . . . People don’t

want us to do it; forget it; just leave it alone. But this is not in that
category. This is interesting science. New science, with a hint of a
possibility of a very useful technology. Therefore, if you’ve got any
integrity, you don’t give it up. You give it up if you find you are
354 resolution

wrong. But as long as you believe that you are right, you have to con-
tinue with it. And you have to take the consequences.

Is this not similar to the response of the Swedish chemist Svente Ar-
rhenius with his discovery of the mechanism of electrolytic conduction more
than one hundred years ago? He believed he was right and he persevered for
twenty years before receiving the recognition that was his due. One can only
wonder why discovery seems to be so punished. Why, so often, must the next
Columbus be brought home in chains?
 Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the scientists involved in cold fusion research and those who
attended the ICCF conferences for the attention they gave to my interroga-
tions and interviews. In a number of instances, I have asked them to review
those paragraphs in the manuscript that described their own work. Any mis-
takes or omissions are mine alone.
The manuscript was finished September 9, 1998, although much editing
was done during the ensuing seventeen months before the printer got to it.
Margaret S. Montague tackled the initial editing task of transforming my
writing into a readable text. The manuscript for the Second Edition got
wrapped up on September 28, 2001.
I first met David J. Nagel when he appeared by appointment for breakfast
in the 7:00 a.m. darkness of a winter’s morning in Washington, D.C. We rated
the best window table for our breakfast in the otherwise empty dining room.
David accomplished a knowledgeable, line by line review of the text. When I
asked him later if he would write an introduction to follow Arthur Clarke’s
foreword, he accepted immediately. I am grateful for his support. Arthur
Clarke’s gracious willingness to add to his incredibly busy schedule to provide
a Foreword for this manuscript will always be remembered.
Cornell University maintains a Cold Fusion Archive, a large and histori-
cally important collection (#4451) located in the Carl A. Kroch Library for
Rare and Manuscript Collections (whose building is situated 80 feet below
ground surface). Professor Bruce V. Lewenstein of the Departments of Com-
munications and Science and Technology Studies is the technical coordinator
for the archive. Mrs. Elaine Engst, University Archivist, manages the collec-
tion. Both gave freely of their time and interest to help me find the things I
was looking for, not only during my visits but in response to requests at other
times as well.
Scott and Talbot Chubb, Richard A. Oriani, and Mitchell Swartz were al-
ways ready to explain matters and answer naïve questions. Peter Hagelstein
read my manuscript and made several important points of criticism. I am in-
debted to Edmund K. Storms for a careful review and comment on my work
in progress. Thomas O. Passell was always helpful in finding elusive docu-

355
356 excess heat

ments. I was pleased to find a place for the important work done by George
Miley and T. Mizuno. B. F. Bush and M. H. Miles gave freely of their time to
help sort out the early detection of helium.
Several Japanese scientists that have made significant contributions to the
field were cordial in responding to my entreaties and agreeable to being inter-
viewed. Dr. Xing–Zhong Li was always ready to inform me about activities
in China. I was awed by the fine scientific work accomplished in Italy. At
Frascati, F. A. Celani, Vittorio Violante, Antonella De Ninno were always cor-
dial and helpful. Tulio Bressani always responded to my inquires promptly
and fully. The excellent work of Guiliano Mengoli, Padua, entered this book
with the second edition. I first met Franco Scaramuzzi at the Hokkaido meet-
ing and I am pleased to see that his analyses and descriptions of the cold fu-
sion saga find an important place in this edition.
Chase and Grethe Peterson were gracious hosts for my several visits to
Salt Lake City. At the University of Utah, Theodore Eyring escorted me about
so that I could see whatever laboratories or rooms were of interest. The senior
faculty, staff of the university, officers and trustees were always cordial and co-
operative. In a like manner, faculty members and former officers at Brigham
Young University helped me to understand the events that took place twelve
years ago.
To Martin Fleischmann I owe special thanks for being patient with me
during two long and difficult interviews and for pleasantly fielding questions
at other times. John O’M. Bockris overwhelmed me with information about
his fine work and unfortunate controversies, only a small fraction of which
found space in the text. Marvin Hawkins helped put together the early labora-
tory events of 1988–1989. Fred Jaeger’s close association with Fleischmann
and Pons provided much background color.
My friends at Cold Fusion Technology, Inc., saw the manuscript for the
first time in March 1999. There, Jed Rothwell proved an excellent text editor
as well as contributing up to date information on cold fusion research. Eugene
F. Mallove reviewed it also and offered comments on a number of points for
which I am thankful.
To those many others that gave assistance when asked, my thanks and ap-
preciation for your comments and judgements.
I thank my wife, Kate, and my son, Carl, for suffering with my trials and
tribulations during the writing and production of the book.
The large commercial publishing houses found the manuscript too tech-
nical and the subject matter too heretical for their interest. For this kind of
book, the commercial and intellectual advantages resided with publishing the
book through my own Oak Grove Press, LLC, and thereby retaining all copy-
right rights. I asked the Infinite Energy people if they would be interested in
distributing the book. Fortunately, they were pleased to do so.
 a p p e n d i x

The Wilson Critique

The following is a continuation of the Wilson, et al., critique from Chapter 9.

The considerable power levels that Fleischmann and Pons measured in their
seminal article (July 1990) claiming anomalous power generation were re-
viewed in Chapter 4. During the following year R. H. Wilson, J. W. Bray, P.
G. Kosky, and H. B. Vakil, of General Electric Co., Schenectady, New York,
and F. G. Will, of the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of
Utah, offered a substantial critique of that article.
The Wilson group was active in cold fusion experimental work from the
beginning. Their paper was submitted for publication in June 1991 and ac-
cepted for publication that December. A copy of their manuscript would then
have been sent to the original paper’s authors for preparation of a response.
Fleischmann and Pons responded, and the two papers were published together
in July 1992, in the normal manner of professional publications.
Wilson summarized his critique as follows.

We evaluate the data and methods of Pons, Fleischmann and co-

workers and, where sufficient data are available, conclude that they
overestimate significantly the excess heat. This is in part because in
their calibration they did not include calculation of the change in in-
put electrochemical power to the cell resulting from the calibration
heater power. An additional significant overestimate of excess energy
occurs when the calibration is made at cell temperatures above 60°C,
owing to the increased evaporation of heavy water during the cali-
bration.*

* Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-

chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992).

357
358 excess heat

The Wilson critique had two purposes. It discusses Fleischmann and

Pons’s seminal paper, and it reports on research with its own electrolytic cells,
none of which produced excess heat. The concern here is with that part of the
report that discusses the Fleischmann and Pons paper. (The question of the
significance of failed experiments was evaluated in the Chapter 8, page 107.)
Wilson’s criticism of Fleischmann and Pons’s paper was limited to the fol-
lowing concern expressed in the paper’s abstract “. . . in their calibration they
did not include calculation of the change in input electrochemical power to
the cell resulting from the calibration heater power.” Their criticism of inade-
quate data treatment concerns the consequences of using the calibration pulse
to determine cell performance. The impact is a reduction in the amount of
calculated excess power reported in the original Fleischmann and Pons article.
Wilson accordingly recalculates the generated power for the Fleischmann and
Pons cells.
The recalculated excess power in one case amounts to minus 0.43 watts.*
This result implies that there is a thermodynamic black hole in that cell which
swallows 0.43 watts of power thus causing energy to disappear from exis-
tence. This unexplained disappearance is fully as remarkable as the original
Fleischmann and Pons announcement where they claimed the unexplained
appearance of power. The Wilson critique is incomplete on this point.
Fleischmann and Pons respond as follows to these criticisms of their cal-
culations.

The central assumption in the paper by Wilson is that one can as-
sume the systems to be in a steady state at the point in time at which
they are calibrated . . . and at which the values . . . are to be evalu-
ated. In point of fact there is no such steady state . . . as can be seen
from . . . the paper by Wilson, . . . The magnitudes of [those] terms
. . . are in fact comparable to those of the corrections . . . introduced
in deriving the heat transfer coefficients . . .†

In other words, a principal assumption of the Wilson paper introduces an er-

ror equal in size to other significant corrections being proposed.
Consequently, Fleischmann and Pons note that the integral form of the
differential equation must be used for computation, as follows,

It is well known in many fields of research that accurate values of the

parameters of the differential equations which model the systems can

* Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-

chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), p. 10.
† Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of Experiments on
Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells, R. H. Wilson, et al.,” (Journal of Electro-
analytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), p. 38.
 Appendix 359

only be obtained by comparing the integrated forms of the equations

with the experimental data. (p. 38)

Fleischmann and Pons continue by cautioning on the limitations of this tech-

nique. The process of integration will smooth values over time thus reducing
mathematical errors in the computed coefficients.
After identifying the various methods used to calculate results from the
cell data as methods one through six, Fleischmann and Pons offer the follow-
ing assessments of Wilson’s work.

Wilson does not deal with any of these evaluations: they regard
Method 2, which was outlined . . . as “very complicated and very dif-
ficult to follow in detail.” However, this method, together with low
pass filtering, . . . is the standard method of modern data processing.
(p. 40)
The filters which have been used . . . take full account of the
evaporation of the [electrolyte] . . . the assertion that we did not take
this into account can be seen to be incorrect . . . We observe that the
results of the independent investigation using filtering were pre-
sented to the group at GE during 1991; their omission of reference
to this work shows that they also reject this method of data process-
ing in addition to Method 2. (p. 40)

Clearly, the Wilson team had not achieved a review of calorimetric data reduc-
tion; they were not evaluating each of the possible ways to get the optimum
information out of the cell data reading. It was up to Fleischmann and Pons to
explain to the Wilson team what needed to be done.
Fleischmann and Pons provided a tour of the six computational methods
and then got down to the nitty-gritty.

We are therefore reduced to examining the claim that the method

put forward by Wilson, Method 5, provides an accurate means of
evaluating [excess power]. The authors imply that as the results ob-
tained by their Method 5 differ from those obtained by our own ap-
proximate method, Method 1, it is our method which must be
judged to be incorrect. (p. 40)

Fleischmann and Pons’s conclusion is reached after several pages of equations

and tables.

We conclude that [the two methods] are comparable but that they
give the [heat] balance at different [times of the cell’s operating cy-
cle]. (p. 44)
360 excess heat

After rejecting the possibility of maintaining the electrolyte level perfectly

constant, they promptly continue to a way of dealing with this intrinsic
artifact.

The answer lies in making the [equation’s] term . . . part of the evalu-
ation [calculation] and this in itself dictates the strategy that the
whole [period of the variables] be fitted to the integrated forms of
the . . . equations which model the calorimeters, i.e. it dictates the
use of methods such as Methods 2 and 4. It is not surprising that
such methods can give precise results as a matter of routine. (p. 47)

Fleischmann and Pons touch upon two summary items that are of inter-
est to us. One concerns the general accuracy of calorimetry, and the other con-
cerns the results of the Wilson heat generation effort.

The information on this issue [of calorimetric accuracy] which was

contained in our original paper and in the related papers has been ig-
nored by Wilson. They have also ignored the fact that we showed
that it is possible to achieve at least 99% heat accuracy by the meth-
ods we have used . . . ; we have never claimed an accuracy better than
±1% or ±1 milliwatt whichever is the greater. (p. 47)

They gave the following assessment of Wilson’s recalculation regarding their

cells’s performance.

. . . They also do not discuss the fact that even on the basis of their
own evaluations[,] the excess [power] for a 0.2 cm diameter x 10 cm
length Pd cathode polarized at 128 milliamperes for each square
centimeter of surface area has reached [approximately] 50% of the
[power] input after 15 days of [operation] . . . Presumably they be-
lieve that the errors have now reached 50% to explain away these ef-
fects? It should be noted the these [power] outputs are of the order 4
watts/cubic cm . . . and that over the duration of the experiment
shown[,] the total [energy] released is of the order of 4 MegaJoules
per cubic cm . . . which hardly lies in the province of chemistry.
(p. 47)

Wilson does not mention their own recognition from their own calculations
of the existence of excess energy as presented in the Fleischmann and Pons
original paper. They are also unwilling to face up to the implication that the
amount greatly exceeds what can be explained by measurement inaccuracies.
 Chronology

T he following chronology is not meant to be a cold fusion history. It in-

cludes primarily those items referenced in the text.

1866 First investigation of hydrogen in metals by Thomas

Graham.
1903 Pierre Curie discovers that radium is always warmer than
its environment.
1926 Paneth and Peters report fusion of hydrogen to make
helium. The following year they retract the report as
mistaken.
1929 Cöhn demonstrates that hydrogen in metals migrates
toward the negative terminal.
1935 Ludwik Fleck published his definitive account of the
difficult-to-replicate scientific experiment: the
Wassermann Test for syphilis. His account is titled,
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
1950 Fleischmann awarded Doctorate in Chemistry by the
Imperial Collage of the University of London.
1967 Fleischmann accepts Faraday Chair in electrochemistry at
Southampton University.
1972 Fleischmann collects together materials to drive
deuterium into palladium very hard. The effort is
abandoned for lack of time.
1975 Pons admitted to postgraduate studies at Southampton
University. Receives Doctorate two years later.
1983 Pons accepts position in the chemistry department at
University of Utah.
Fleischmann and Pons begin their collaboration

361
362 excess heat

1984 Fleischmann and Pons plan to try an electrolytic cell

experiment to fuse deuterium inside a palladium lattice.
Electrolyte temperature rise is to be the parameter to
watch.
1985 Fleischmann elected member of the Royal Society of
London.
Winter Large release of energy from early cold fusion experiment
in laboratory in the north Henry Eyring Building at
University of Utah.
1986 Pons appointed a full professor.
1987
July Scientific American magazine published “Cold Nuclear
Fusion” by Jones and Rafelski.
1988 Pons becomes Chairman of the Chemistry Department.
August Two Utah chemists submit proposal to fund their cold
fusion studies to the DOE.
September DOE selects S. Jones at Brigham Young University (BYU)
to evaluate the proposal.
Fall M. Hawkins, graduate student in the Department of
Chemistry, begins experiments with the Fleischmann and
Pons designed Dewar cell.
1989
February Fleischmann and Pons undertake nuclear measurements
to back up excess heat results.
March 22 Preliminary Note manuscript received by the Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry.
March 23 Press announcement of cold nuclear fusion at the
University of Utah.
April 10 Publication of the Preliminary Note.
April 18 F. Scaramuzzi announces the detection of neutron
emission from titanium infused with deuterium gas and
then temperature cycled.
April 24 Secretary of Energy Admiral James Watkins forms a panel
on cold fusion under joint chairmanship of J. Huizenga
and N. Ramsey.
Baltimore The American Physical Society spring meeting at
May 1 Baltimore, MD.
 Chronology 363

4:00 p.m. First press conference. Nothing transpires. There have not
yet been any presentations.
5:00 p.m. Second press conference. N. S. Lewis asserts there is
absolutely nothing to the claims of excess heat.
7:00 p.m. First special session on cold fusion.
- Koonin reports no possibility of d-d fusion producing
the excess heat and comments on the mental and
professional status of Fleischmann and Pons.
- N. S. Lewis reports no evidence of heat or nuclear
effects from his experiments at Caltech. He also reports
that Fleischmann and Pons did not obtain excess heat in
their experiments in Utah. Their faulty results are
attributed to a lack of stirring in their cells.
May 2
10:00 a.m. Third press conference (conducted by S. Koonin).
7:00 p.m. Second special session on cold fusion that ended late in
the evening. (This was the end of the APS special
program on cold fusion research.)
Los Angeles American Electrochemical Society meeting session on cold
May 8 fusion research at Los Angeles, CA.
5:00 p.m. Session on cold fusion research. N. S. Lewis and M.
Fleischmann speak.
9:00 p.m. Fourth press conference: Bockris, Appleby, Fleischmann,
and Pons. (N. S. Lewis takes a microphone, stands on
chair and asks “loaded” questions.)
May 18 Petrasso report in Nature shows fatal flaws in Fleischmann
and Pons claim to have detected neutrons.
May 23 DOE sponsored meeting on cold fusion reports.
Santa Fe, N.M.
July 12 Interim report of the DOE Panel.
August 17 N. S. Lewis’s report published in Nature.
September Oriani submits anomalous power corroboration report to
Nature.
September 15 Deadline set by the DOE Panel for receipt of reports
about cold fusion research. Presumably its final report
reflects nothing that developed after this date.
September 24 New York Times Sunday Magazine published the Crease
and Samios lampoon about Fleischmann and Pons and
their claims.
364 excess heat

October 16 EPRI/NSF meeting in Washington. N. S. Lewis hears

Fleischmann report on excess heat generation and raises
no argument about the validity of the work.
November 11 Final DOE Panel report issued.
December 21 Fleischmann and Pons manuscript of anomalous power
measurements received by its publisher, the Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry.
1990 Nature decides to not publish Oriani’s confirmation of the
January anomalous power phenomenon first reported by
Fleischmann and Pons.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jerry Bishop receives award from
the AIP for his reporting of cold fusion events during
1989.
January 26 Oriani informed referees do pass his paper for
publication, but Washington, DC, editor rejects it.
March First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion.
- Huggins reports 5.6 watts peak power generated.
- McKubre reports a D/Pd threshold effect.
March Nature says “farewell” to cold fusion.
July 25 Fleischmann and Pons’s 56-page seminal paper is
published. It describes anomalous power generation and
its calorimetry.
1991 W. Hansen, professor of physics at Utah State University,
Spring Logan, prepares an important report for the Utah State
Fusion/Energy Council supportive of excess heat.
June Second ACCF held at Villa Olmo, Como, Italy.
1992 Wilson, et al., publish substantial critique of the
July Fleischmann and Pons paper of July 1990.
Fleischmann and Pons’s defense is published
concurrently.
October 21 ICCF-3, Nagoya, Japan
November Storms reviews the field to date in an extensive summary
article in Fusion Technology (20, 1991, p. 433).
1993 Fourth ICCF at Maui, Hawaii.
December More definitive data on D/Pd loading threshold is
presented.
1994 The American Scholar publishes article by David
Autumn Goodstein, “Pariah Science.”
 Chronology 365

December By this time, anomalous power (excess heat) was widely

confirmed by replication in many independent
laboratories using different types of cells and calorimeters.
1995 Dr. Edmund Storms reviews the field to date in the
Spring Journal of Scientific Exploration (10, no. 2, 1996,p. 185).
Spring Dr. G. Preparata published QED Coherence in Matter
(World Scientific Int. Publisher, May 1995).
Spring Dr. N. Hoffman’s book, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced
Nuclear Effects, is published.
April Fifth ICCF held in Monaco.

Glossary
Some of the abbreviations used in the chapters, references and appendix are as
follows.

AAAS American Association for the Advancement of Science

ACCF Annual Conference on Cold Fusion (This form was used
for the first two conferences
ACS American Chemical Society
AIP American Institute of Physics
ANS American Nuclear Society
APS American Physical Society
C&EN Chemical and Engineering News
DOE Department of Energy
DOI Department of the Interior
EPRI Electric Power Research Institute
ERAB Energy Research Advisory Board (of the DOE)
ICCF International Conference on Cold Fusion
NAA nuclear activation analysis
NASW National Association of Science Writers
NCFI National Cold Fusion Institute, Salt Lake City, Utah
NSF National Science Foundation
NYT New York Times
Panel The DOE/ERAB Panel on Cold Fusion
WSJ Wall Street Journal
 Anomalous Power Citations

As was mentioned earlier, several books written to the professional scientist

on our subject conveniently omitted bibliographic references to anomalous
power reports. This list has as its purpose, in addition to repairing the previ-
ous absence of reports, to provide the reader with a list of the more significant
publications pertaining to the measurement of anomalous power. Some of the
reports include the measurement of helium and neutrons.
Buehler, David B., Lee D. Hansen, Steven E. Jones, and Lawrence B. Rees, “Is Re-
ported “Excess Heat” Due to Nuclear Reactions?,” (ICCF-3 Nagoya Conf. Proc.,
Frontiers of CF, 1993), p. 245.
Case: Russ George (Saturna Technologies), “Production of Helium-four From Deute-
rium Using Nano-Particle Palladium,” (Cold Fusion Times, Spring 1999 (May
6)), p. 1.
Fleischmann, Martin, Electrochemistry Newsletter, The, “Carte Blanche to Martin
Fleischmann,” (The Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, London,
W1V 0BN, 1990).
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Reply to Morrison,” ([email protected];
Nwsgrps: sci.physics.fusion;).
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Calorimetry of the Palladium-Deuterium
System”, (Proc. First Annual Conf on CF, SLC, March 28, 1990), p. 1.
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Our Calorimetric Measurements of the Pd/
D System: Fact and Fiction,” (Fusion Technology, 17, 669, July 1990).
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Concerning the Detection of Neutrons and
[Gamma]-Rays from Cells Containing Palladium Cathodes Polarized in Heavy
Water,” (Il Nuovo Cimento, vol. 105, A, no. 6, June 1992), p. 763.
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of
Experiments on Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells, R. H. Wil-
son, et al.,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), pp. 33–53.
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Reply to Critique by Morrison Entitled:
‘Comments on Claims of Excess Enthalpy by Fleischmann and Pons Using Sim-
ple Cells Made to Boil’,” (Elsevier, Physics Letters A, April 18, 1994), p. 276.

366
 Anomalous Power Citations 367

Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Calibration of the Pd-D2O System: Effects
of Procedure and Positive Feedback,” (J. Chim. Phys. Phys.-Chim. Biol., vol. 93,
no. 4, 1996), pp. 711-730.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, Marvin Hawkins, and R. J. Hoffman, “Measure-
ment of Gamma-Rays from Cold Fusion: [two items],” (Nature, 339, June 29,
1989), p. 667.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, and Marvin Hawkins, “Electrochemically In-
duced Nuclear Fusion of Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261
April 10, 1989), p. 301.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, Monique Le Roux, and Jeanne Roulette, “Calo-
rimetry of the Pd-D2O System: The Search for Simplicity and Accuracy,” (Fu-
sion Technology, 26, 323, 1994).
Fleischmann, Martin, and Bartolomeo, et al., “Alfred Coehn and After: The Alpha,
Beta, and Gamma of the Hydrogen-Palladium System,” (ICCF-4, Trans. Fusion
Technology, vol. 26, December 1994), p. 23.
Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O System: From
Simplicity Via Complications to Simplicity,” ((Elsevier) Physics Letters A, 176,
May 3, 1993), pp. 118–129.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, and Marvin Hawkins, “Electrochemically In-
duced Nuclear Fusion of Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry,
261–2A, April 10, 1989), pp. 301-08.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, and Marvin Hawkins, “Errata,” (Journal of
Electroanalytical. Chemistry, 263, 187, May 10, 1989).
Fleischmann, Martin, “More About Positive Feedback: More About Boiling,” (ICCF-
5, Proc. of the Fifth Inter. Conf. on CF, April 9, 1995).
Fleischmann, Martin, “The Experimenter’s Regress,” (ICCF-5, Proc. of the Fifth
Inter. Conf. on CF, April 9, 1995), p. 152.
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, Mark R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and Marvin
Hawkins, “Calorimetry of the Palladium—Deuterium—Heavy Water System,”
(Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 287, 293, July 25, 1990).
Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, and Preparata, “Possible Theories of Cold Fu-
sion,” (Il Nuovo Cimento, vol. 107A, no. 1, Gennaio, January 1994), p. 143.
Hansen, Lee D., David S. Sheldon, J. M. Thorne, S. E. Jones, “An Assessment of
Claims of ‘Excess Heat’ in ‘Cold Fusion’ Calorimetry,” (Thermochimica acta,
297, 1997), pp. 7–15.
Hansen, Lee D., Steven E. Jones, J. E. Jones, David S. Shelton, and J. M. Thorne,
“Faradiac Efficiencies Less Than 100% During Electrolysis of Water Can Ac-
count for Reports of Excess Heat in CF Cells,” (Journal of Physical Chemistry,
vol. 99, 1995), pp. 6973-79.
Hansen, Wilford N., “Report to the Utah State Fusion/Energy Council on the Analy-
368 excess heat

sis of Selected Pons Fleischmann Calorimetric Data,” (ICCF-2, Como, Italy,

June 1991).
Lewis, Nathan S., G. M. Miskelly, et al., “Analysis of the Published Calorimetric Evi-
dence for Elecrochemical Fusion of Deuterium in Palladium,” (Science, vol. 246,
November 10, 1989), pp. 793–96.
Lewis, Nathan S., C. Barnes, et al;, “Searches for Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium in Palladium,” (Nature, vol. 340, August 17, 1989), pp. 525–530.
Lonchampt, G., L. Bonnetain, and P. Hicter, “Reproduction of Fleischmann and
Pons Experiments,” (ICCF-6, vol. I, October 1996), p. 113.
Mengoli, G., M. Bernardini, C. Manducchi, G. Zannoni, “Anomalous Heat Effects
Correelated with Celetrochemical Hydriding of Nickel,” (Il Nuovo Cimento 20
D, 1998), p. 331.
Mengoli, G., M. Bernardini, C. Manducchi, G. Zannoni, “Calorimetry Close to the
Boiling Temperature of the D20/Pd Electrolytic System,” (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, 444, 1998), p. 155.
Miles, Melvin H., and Kendall B. Johnson, “Improved, Open Cell, Heat Conduc-
tion, Isoperibolic Calorimetry”, (China Lake, CA: NAWCWD).
Miles, M. H., B. F. Bush, and D. E. Stillwell, “Calorimetric Principles and Problems
in Measurements of Excess Power During Pd-D2O Electrolysis,” (Journal of
Phys. Chemistry, February 17, 1994), p. 1948.
Morrison, Douglas R. O., “Comments on Claims of Excess Enthalpy by Fleischmann
and Pons Using Simple Cells Made to Boil,” ((Elsevier) Physics Letters A, Febru-
ary 28, 1992), p. 498.
Press, W. H., B. P. Flannery, S. A. Teukolsky, and W. T. Vetterling, Numerical Recipes,
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Shelton, David S., J. M. Thorne, S. E. Jones, and L. D. Hansen, “An Assessment of
Claims of ‘Excess Heat’ in ‘Cold Fusion’ Calorimetry,” (Thermochimica acta,
297, 1997), pp. 7-15.
Staff, “ACS Meeting in Dallas,” (Nature, 338, 605, News, April 20, 1989).
Storms, E. K., “Cold Fusion Revisited,” (Infinite Energy, 4, no. 21, 1998), p. 16.
Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O
Electrochemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992),
pp. 1–31.
 Books for Reference

The critical reader will find these books helpful in developing an understand-
ing of the cold fusion saga. Some are helpful in offering insight; others are
helpful by offering views that can be seen to be unsatisfactory.

Achinstein, Peter, and O. Hannaway, eds., Observation, Experiment, and Hypothesis in

Modern Physical Science, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Bauer, Henry H., Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage
Books, 3rd edition, 1957).
Blum, Deborah, and Mary Knudson, eds., A Field Guide for Science Writers, (New
York: National Association Science Writers, Oxford University Press, 1997).
Churchland, P., and C. Hooker, Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Close, Frank, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1991).
Crawford, Elisabeth T., Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect, (Can-
ton, MA: Watson Pub. Int./Science History Publications/USA, 1996).
Crawford, Elisabeth T., The Beginnings of the Nobel Institute: The Science Prizes 1901–
1915, (Adventures in Science, 1990).
Curie, Marie, Pierre Curie, (New York: Dover Publications, 1963/1923).
Dewdney, A. K., Yes, We Have No Neutrons, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).
Drake, Stillman, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, (New York: Dover Pubs.
Inc., 1978).
Drake, Stillman, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, (New York: Anchor Books/
Doubleday, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1957).
Esterlin, Nancy, and Barbara Riebling, eds., After Poststructuralism, (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1993).
Feynman, Richard, The Character of Physical Law, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1965).

369
370 excess heat

Fermi, Laura, and Gilberto Bernardine, 1961, Galileo, and the Scientific Revolution,
(New York: Basic Books, 1961), p. 9.
Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, trans., 1979).
Footlick, Jerrold K., Truth and Consequences: How Colleges and Universities Meet Pub-
lic Crises, (American Council on Education/Oryx Press, 1997).
Franks, Felix, Polywater, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
Frisch, Otto R., Atomic Physics Today, (New York: Basic Books, 1961).
Gower, Barry, Scientific Method: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction, (New
York: Routledge, 1997).
Hazen, Robert M., and James Trefil, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy,
(New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, Dell Publishing, 1991).
Hazen, Robert M., Breakthrough: The Race for the Superconductor, (New York: Sum-
mit Books, 1988).
Hoffer, Eric, The Ordeal of Change, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
Hoffman, Nate, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, (American Nuclear
Society & EPRI, 1995).
Holton, Gerald, Science and Anti-Science, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993).
Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Jaffe, Bernard, Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry, (New York: Dover, 1976).
Kevles, Daniel J., The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern
America, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971/1995).
Kozima, Hideo, Discovery of the Cold Fusion Phenomenon, (Tokyo: Ohotake Shuppan,
Inc., 1998).
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition, (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1970).
Laudan, Larry, Beyond Positivism and Relativism, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1996).
Mallove, Eugene F., Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor,
(New York: Wiley Science Editions/John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1991).
Mayo, Deborah G., Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge, (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996).
Mizuno, Tadahiko, trans. by J. Rothwell, Nuclear Transmutations: The Reality of Cold
Fusion, (Concord, NH: Infinite Energy Press, 1998).
Park Robert, Voodoo Science, The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, (Oxford University
Press, 2000).
 References 371

Peat, F. David, Cold Fusion: The Making of a Scientific Controversy, (Chicago: Con-
temporary Books, 1989/1990).
Preparata, Giuliano, QED Coherence in Matter, (World Scientific Int. Publisher, May
1995).
Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1986).
Sarasohn, Judy, Science on Trial: The Whistle Blower. . . ., (New York: St. Martin Press,
1993).
Seabrook, William, Doctor Wood, (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1939).
Shamos, Morris H., Great Experiments in Physics, (New York: Dover Publications,
Inc.).
Somoriai, Gabor A., Chemistry in Two Dimensions: Surfaces, (New York: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1981).
Taubes, Gary, Bad Science, (New York: Random House, 1993).
 Endnotes

Chapter 1
1. Frisch, Otto R., Atomic Physics Today, (New York: Basic Books, 1961), p. 5.
2. Curie, Marie, Pierre Curie, (New York: Dover Publications, 1963/1923), p. 56.
3. Fleischmann, Martin, “The Present Status of Research in Cold Fusion,” (The Science of Cold
Fusion: Proceedings of the II Annual Conference on Cold Fusion, Bologna, Italy: Italian Physi-
cal Society, June 1991), p. 475.
The experiment of Figure 1.1 used electrolysis of D2O in 0.6M Li2SO4 solution at Ph
10 with a palladium rod cathode (0.4 × 1.25 cm). Cell current 400 ma, bath temperature
was 30.00C, room temperature was 21C.
4. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O System: From Simplicity Via
Complications to Simplicity,” ((Elsevier) Physics Letters A, 176, May 3, 1993), pp. 118–129.
5. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research, S. R. Chubb and A. E. Shamoo, eds. Philadelphia, PA: Gorden & Breach Pub-
lishers ISSN 0898-9621 Vol. 8, #1, May 2000), p. 12.
6. Maddox, John, “What to Say About Cold Fusion,” (Nature, 338, 701, News & Views,
April 27, 1989).
7. Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science; Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American
Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 527.

Chapter 2
1. KUED, University of Utah, “Off the Record, 3–24–89 Fusion Press Conference,” (Univer-
sity of Utah, KUED, March 23, 1989).
2. University of Utah, “‘Simple Experiment’ Results in Sustained N-Fusion at Room Tempera-
ture for First Time,” (Press Release, University of Utah, Thursday, March 23, 1989, 1:00
p.m.ST).
3. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261, April 10, 1989), p. 301.
See errata at: Fleischmann, Pons, Hawkins, “errata,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemis-
try, 263, 187, May 10, 1989).
4. Lewis, H. W., “Fusion Fuss Just Bad Science,” (Portland Press Herald, Portland, Maine,
1989/04/10).
5. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993), p. 201.
6. From an anonymous physicist as retold in Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science: Whatever
Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 532.
7. Scientific American, “Cold Fusion revisited” (http://www.sciam.com/content .html), March
17, 1997.

372
 Endnotes 373

8. Fleischmann claims that he wrote Maddox pointing out that they had such data, but when
they submitted their paper to Nature, such control information was not requested by either
the reviewers or the editor. He says that Maddox refused to publish the letter. (See the
Fleischmann and Pons publication of July 1990, footnote page 313.)
9. Taubes, Gary, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1993), p. 6.
10. Paneth, F., and K. Peters, (Z. Phys. Chem. B, 1, 1928), p. 17.
11. Cöhn, Alfred, (Z. Elektrochem., 35, 1929), p. 676.

Chapter 3
1. Fleischmann, M., and Bartolomeo, et al., “Alfred Cöhn and After: The Alpha, Beta, and
Gamma of the Hydrogen-Palladium System,” (ICCF-4, Trans. Fusion Technology, vol. 26,
December 1994), p. 23.
2. Fleischmann, M., private communication, August 1995.
3. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261, April 10, 1989), p. 301.
4. Ashley, Kevin, private communication, January, 1998.
5. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, Mark R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and M. Hawkins, “Calorimetry
of the Palladium—Deuterium—Heavy Water System,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemis-
try, 287 (1990) 293, July 25, 1990), p. 310.
6. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Concerning the Detection of Neutrons and [Gamma]-Rays
from Cells Containing Palladium Cathodes Polarized in Heavy Water,” (Il Nuovo Cimento,
vol. 105, A, no. 6, June 1992), p. 763.
7. Tinsley, Christopher P., “Interview, 1997, [with Martin Fleischmann]” (Infinite Energy,
Nov-Dec 1996 [March 1997] #11) p. 10.
8. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, M. R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and M. Hawkins, “Calorimetry of
the Palladium—Deuterium—Heavy Water System,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry,
287 (1990) 293, July 25, 1990).
9. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of Experiments on
Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells,” R. H. Wilson, et al., (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992)
pp. 33–53.

Chapter 4
1. Storms, Edmund, private communication, May 1995.
2. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, M. R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and M. Hawkins, “Calorimetry of
the Palladium—Deuterium—Heavy Water System,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry,
287 (1990) 293, July 25, 1990), p. 310.
3. Ibid., Figure 8A, upper image, p. 314.
4. Ibid., Figure 9A, p. 316.
5. Ibid., Figure 10A, p. 317.
6. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261, April 10, 1989), p. 305.
Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, errata, (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemis-
try, 263, 187, May 10, 1989).
7. Crawford, Elisabeth T., Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect, (Canton, MA:
Watson/Science History Publications, 1996).
8. Caldwell, Karen D., private communications, November 15, 1995.
9. Jones, S. E., and L. D. Hansen, “Faradaic Efficiencies Less Than 100% During Electrolysis
374 excess heat

of Water Can Account for Reports of Excess Heat in CF Cells,” (Journal of Physical Chemis-
try, vol. 99, 1995), p. 6973-79.
10. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research (S. R. Chubb & A. E.Shamoo, editors, vol. 8, No. 1–2, 2000, Philadelphia:
Gorden & Breach Science Publishers, ISSN 0898–9621) p. 12).
11. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 243.
12. KUED Station, University of Utah, “Off the Record, 3–24–89 Fusion Press Conference”.
This videotape was purchased from the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl
A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
13. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261, April 10, 1989), p. 305.
Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, errata, (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemis-
try, 263, 187, May 10, 1989).

Chapter 5
1. Bromley, D. Allen, The President’s Scientists, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994),
p. 3.
2. Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986),
Part One.
3. Taubes, Gary, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1993), p. 222. Taubes continues, “Koonin later added that Walling-Simons
represented a type of scientific illiteracy epidemic throughout cold fusion. ‘They’re working
in a field,’ he [Koonin] said, ‘in which they a priori don’t know very much. They write pa-
pers that are really manifest nonsense, or wrong by 20 orders of magnitude, and they think
they are doing something great.’” The dichotomy begins here. One party assumes there is
something of interest to science that needs to be explained, namely, the anomalous power
reported by Fleischmann and Pons. The other party assumes (but does not articulate) that
the measurements were so far wrong nothing needs to be explained. To a large extent, nei-
ther party was aware of the governing part played by this difference of assumption.
4. Seabrook, William, Doctor Wood, (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1939), pp. 233-39.
5. Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986),
p. 157.
6. Franks, Felix, 1981, Polywater, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 122.
7. Langmuir, Irving, “Pathological Science,” (Physics Today, v 42, October 1989), p. 44.
8. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 261, April 10, 1989), p. 301.
9. Morrison, Douglas R. O., “Review of CF,” (Monograph, 27 Sept 1990; CERN/PPE/
5002R/DROM/gm).
10. Morrison, Douglas O., “The Rise and Decline of Cold Fusion,” (Physics World, Feb. 1990),
p. 35.
11. Bishop, Jerry E., “Japanese Funds Warm a Conference Of “Cold Fusion” Die-Hards in
Maui,” (New York: Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1993).
12. Morrison, Douglas R. O., “CF Update #7; ICCF-3, October 1992; Nagoya; The Third In-
ternational Cold Fusion Conference,” ([email protected]).
13. Lewenstein, Bruce V., “The Changing Culture of Research: Processes of Knowledge Trans-
fer,” (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Contract No. 13-4570.0).
14. Morrison, Douglas R. O., “Comments on Claims of Excess Enthalpy by Fleischmann and
 Endnotes 375

Pons Using Simple Cells Made to Boil”, ((Elsevier) Physics Letters A, 28 February 1992),
p. 498.
Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Reply to Critique by Morrison Entitled: “Comments on
Claims of Excess Enthalpy by Fleischmann and Pons Using Simple Cells Made to Boil”“,
((Elsevier) Physics Letters A, 18 April 1994), p. 276.
15. KUED, University of Utah, “Off the Record, 3–24–89 Fusion Press Conference,”
(Universtiy of Utah, KUED, Mar. 23, 1989).
16. Koonin, Steven E., “Personal interview by Douglas Smith,” (Box 3-0, Coll. 4451, Kroch Li-
brary, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, May 8, 1989).
17. Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science; Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American
Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 528.
18. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research (AIR), 1999).
19. Koonin, Steven, personal interview by Douglas Smith, (Box 3-0, Coll. 4451, Carl A. Kroch
Library, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, May 8, 1989).
20. Ibid.
21. Hazen, Robert M., Breakthrough: The Race for the Superconductor, (New York: Summit
Books, 1988), p. 50.
22. Smith, Douglas, “Quest for Fusion,” (Engineering & Science, Pasadena, CA: Caltech, Sum-
mer 1989), p. 2.
23. McKubre, Michael, private interview. May 31, 1995.
24. Koonin, Steven, “Personal interview by Douglas Smith,” (Box 3-0, Coll. 4451, Kroch Li-
brary, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, May 8, 1989).
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. American Physical Society, “APS, Special Session on Cold Fusion, May 1, 1989,” (APS,
Video record in Nine Tapes, (VHS mode), May 1–2, 1989), tape 2.
29. Broad, William J., “Fusion in a Jar: Recklessness and Brilliance—Friends Say Two Re-
searchers’ Enthusiasm Has Few Internal Brakes,” (New York Times, 9 May 1989; pp. B 5 &
B 10).
30. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, ICCF-2, June 1991, “The Science of Cold Fusion, Proceed-
ings of the II Annual Conference on Cold Fusion” (Italian Physical Society, Bologna, Italy),
p. 350.
31. Lewis, Nathan S., C. Barnes, et al., “Searches for Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion of Deu-
terium in Palladium,” (Nature, v 340, 17 Aug 1989), pp. 525–30.
32. McKubre, Michael, et al., “Loading, Calorimetric, and Nuclear Investigation of the D/Pd
System,” (ICCF-4, EPRI, Vol 1), p. 5-1.

Chapter 6
1. APS; Press Conf, “Cold Fusion, parts 1, 2,” Press Conference, (Cornell U/Kroch Library,
#4451 box 3, April 1996).
APS; Press Conf, “Cold Fusion, parts 3, 4,” Press Conference, (Cornell U/Kroch Library,
#4451 box 3, April 1996).
APS; Press Conf, “Cold Fusion, parts 5, 6,” Press Conference, (Cornell U/Kroch Library,
#4451 box 3, April 1996).
2. APS, Press Conference, “Cold Fusion, parts 1, 2; Press Conference,” (Carl A. Kroch Li-
brary, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, #4451 box 3, April 1996).
376 excess heat

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Park, Robert L., “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves,” (San Jose,
CA: American Physical Society, March 22, 1995).
7. British Association for the Advancement of Science, “Fleischmann lecture,” (BAAS,
Southampton, UK, August 27, 1992).
8. Koonin, Steven, “Personal interview by Douglas Smith,” (Box 3-0, Coll. 4451, Kroch Li-
brary, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, May 8, 1989).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid. There may be some question in transcribing the first word “you’re” from the audio-
tape, but I believe that is the word that was spoken.
11. Park, Robert L., “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves,” (San Jose,
CA: American Physical Society, March 22, 1995).
12. Beckmann, Petr, “Instant Experts,” (Access to Energy, June 1989, Editorial), p. 1.
13. Lewis, Nathan S., C. Barnes, et al., “Searches for Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion of Deu-
terium in Palladium,” (Nature, 1989, vol. 340, August 17 1989), pp. 525–30.
14. Lindley, David, “More Than Scepticism” (Nature 339, May 4, 1989), p. 4.
15. Footlick, Jerrold K., Truth and Consequences: How Colleges and Universities Meet Public
Crises, (American Council on Education, Oryx Press, 1997), p. 41.
16. Gieryn, Thomas F., “The Ballad of Pons and Fleischmann: Experiment and Narrative in the
(Un)Making of Cold Fusion”, (The Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin, No-
tre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, (1992)). On February 2, 1999, I read this
reference item. On page 237, Gieryn uses the same term to describe the effect of the NYT
Magazine article. Our uses of the same expression here were independent acts.
17. Crease, Robert P., and N. P. Samios, “Cold Fusion Confusion,” (New York: New York Times
Sunday Magazine, Sept 24, 1989), pp. 35–38.
18. Ibid., pp. 35–38.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of Experiments on
Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells, R. H. Wilson, et al.” (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), pp. 33–53.
26. Crease, Robert P., and N. P. Samios, “Cold Fusion Confusion,” (New York: New York Times
Sunday Magazine, Sept 24, 1989), pp. 35–38.
27. Ibid.
28. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (University of Rochester
Press, 1992), p. 151.
29. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 151.
30. Ibid., p. 152.
31. Park, Robert L., “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves,” (San Jose,
CA: American Physical Society, March 22, 1995).
32. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 152.
 Endnotes 377

33. Anderson, G. Christopher, “Clandestine NSF Panel Warms to Cold Fusion,” (The Scientist,
Nov. 13, 1989), p. 1.
34. Anderson, G. Christopher, “Clandestine NSF Panel Warms to Cold Fusion,” (The Scientist,
Nov. 13, 1989).
35. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research, (Accountability in Research, Scott R. Chubb, and A. E. Shamoo, editors, vol. 8,
No. 1–2, 2000, Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers, ISSN 0898–9621) p. 12.
36. Anderson, G. Christopher, “Clandestine NSF Panel Warms to Cold Fusion,” (The Scientist,
Nov. 13, 1989), p. 4.

Chapter 7
1. Watkins, James D., “Grounded in Fundamentals,” (MIT News Office, July 1991, Press re-
lease). Address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Vancouver, B.C.
2. ERAB-Panel on Cold Fusion, Final Report of the Cold Fusion Panel, (Washington, DC: De-
partment of Energy, Nov 8, 1989), p. 37.
3. APS, Bulletin: “CF Huckster Resigns Position at University of Utah,” (APS, Bulletin, vol.
36, No. 4, April 1991).
4. APS; Press Conference, “Cold Fusion, parts 1, 2; Press Conference,” (Cornell U., Kroch Li-
brary, collection #4451, box 3, May 1, 1989).
5. Anderson, G. Christopher, “Clandestine NSF Panel Warms to Cold Fusion,” (The Scientist,
Nov. 13, 1989).
6. ERAB-Panel on Cold Fusion, Final Report of the Cold Fusion Panel, (Washington, DC: De-
partment of Energy, Nov 8, 1989), p. 3.
7. Ibid., p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 39.
9. Ibid., p. 37.
10. Ibid., p. 37
11. Ibid., p. 52.
12. Bard, Allen J., “Review of Calorimetric Data,” (EPRI/NSF Conf. October 1989), p. 14-1.
13. Anderson, G. Christopher, “Clandestine NSF Panel Warms to Cold Fusion,” (The Scientist,
Nov. 13, 1989), p. 4, col 1.
14. Mallove, Eugene F., “Fire from Ice, Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor,”
(New York: Wiley Science Editions/John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), p. 179.
Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 91.

Chapter 8
1. Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science: Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American
Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 532.
2. Lewis, H. W., “Fusion Fuss Just Bad Science,” (Portland Press Herald, 89/04/10).
3. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage Books,
1960), p. 6.
4. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993), p. 217.
5. Ibid., p. 227.
6. Ibid., p. 187.
7. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Reply to Critique by Morrison Entitled: ‘Comments on
378 excess heat

Claims of Excess Enthalpy by Fleischmann and Pons Using Simple Cells Made to Boil,’”
(Elsevier, Physics Letters A, 18 April 1994), p. 276.
Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of Experiments
on Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells, R. H. Wilson et al.” (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol 332, 1992), pp. 33–53.
8. Feynman, Richard P., “Cargo Cult Science,” (Engineering and Science, Caltech, June 1974),
pp. 10–13.
9. Gratzer, Walter, The Undergrowth of Science, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
10. Petrasso, R. D., “Problems with the Gamma-Ray Spectrum in the Fleischmann et al., Ex-
periments,” (Nature; 339, 18 May 1989), p. 183.
11. Salamon, M. H., et al, “Limits on the Emission of Neutrons, Gamma-Rays, Electrons, and
Protons from Pons/Fleischmann Electrolytic Cells,” (Nature, 90/03/29), pp. 401–5.
12. Fleischmann, Martin, personal communications, August 17, 1995.
13. Jones, S. E., private communication, January 7, 1998.
14. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 175.
15. Park, Robert L., “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves,” (San Jose,
CA: American Physical Society, March 22, 1995).
16. D. T. Thompson, D. R. Coupland, M. L. Doyle, J. W. Jenkins, J. H. F. Notton, and R. J.
Potter, “Some Observations Related to the Presence of Hydrogen and Deuterium in Palla-
dium,” (The First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion, March 1990), p. 299.
17. Park, Robert L., private communication, September 26, 1996.
18. Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science; Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American
Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 531.
19. Taubes, Gary, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1993), p. 341.
20. Fleischmann, Martin, private communications, August 17, 1995.
21. Lewis, Nathan S., C. Barnes, et al., “Searches for Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion of Deu-
terium in Palladium,” (Nature, vol. 340, August 17, 1989), pp. 525–30.
22. Fleischmann, M., “More about Positive Feedback; more about Boiling,” (ICCF-5, Proc. 5th
Int. Conf. on Cold Fusion, April 9–13, 1995, Monaco), p. 140) page 146, Figure 1.
23. Fleischmann, Martin, Stanley Pons, Mark R. Anderson, Lian Jun Li, and Marvin Hawkins,
“Calorimetry of the Palladium—Deuterium—Heavy Water System,” (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 287, Jul 25, 1990), p. 319, Fig. 12.

Chapter 9
1. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century,” 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 220.
2. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Our Calorimetric Measurements of the Pd/D System: Fact
and Fiction,” (Journal of Fusion Technology, 17, 669, July 1990).
3. Lewis, Nathan S., C. Barnes, et al., “Searches for Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion of Deu-
terium in Palladium,” (Nature, vol. 340, August 17, 1989), 530.
4. Ibid., p. 525.
5. Albagli, David, Mark S. Wrighton, Ronald R. Parker, Richard D. Petrasso, Ron Ballanger,
Vince Cammarata, X. Chen, Richard M. Crooks, M. Richard , Catherine Fiore, Marcel P. J.
Gaudreau, I. Hwang, and C. K. Li, “Measurement and Analysis of Neutron and Gamma-
Ray Emission Rates, Other Fusion Products, and Power in Electrochemical Cells Having Pd
Cathodes,” (Journal of Fusion Energy, Plenum Pub, vol. 9, no. 2, 1990), p. 133.
 Endnotes 379

6. Gai, M., et al., “Upper Limits on Neutron and Gamma-Ray Emission from Cold Fusion,”
(Nature, vol. 340, July 6, 1989), p. 29.
7. Williams, D. E., et al., “Upper Bounds on ‘Cold Fusion’ in Electrolytic Cells,” (Nature, vol.
342, 11/23/89), p. 375.
8. Fleischmann, Martin, “The Experimenter’s Regress,” (ICCF-5, Proc. of the Fifth Interna-
tional Conference on CF, April 9, 1995), p. 152.
9. Mallove, Gene, “MIT and Cold Fusion: A Case Study of Fudging,” (21st Century (maga-
zine), Fall 1991), p. 54.
Infinite Energy, Vol. 4, Issue 24, 1999, has a large section about the MIT experiment.
Fleischmann, Martin, “The Experimenter’s Regress,” (ICCF-5, Proc. of the Fifth Interna-
tional Conference on CF, April 9, 1995) p. 152.
10. Hansen, Wilford N., “Report to the Utah State Fusion/Energy Council on the Analysis of
Selected Pons Fleischmann Calorimetric Data,” (ICCF-2, Como, Italy, June 1991), p. 512.
11. Ibid., p. 518.
12. Ibid., p. 523.
13. Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-
chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), pp. 1–31.
14. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of Experiments on
Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells, R. H. Wilson, et al.,” (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), pp. 33–53.
15. Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-
chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), p. 1.
16. Ibid., p. 2.
17. Lewis, Nathan S., C. Barnes, et al., “Searches for Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion of Deu-
terium in Palladium,” (Nature, vol. 340, August 17, 1989), pp. 525–530.
Lewis, Nathan S., G. M. Miskelly, et al., “Analysis of the Published Calorimetric Evi-
dence for Electrochemical Fusion of Deuterium in Palladium,” (Science, vol. 246, Novem-
ber 10, 1989), pp. 793–96.
18. Hansen, Wilford N., “Report to the Utah State Fusion/Energy Council on the Analysis of
Selected Pons Fleischmann Calorimetric Data,” (The Science of Cold Fusion, the Italian
Physical Society, Bologna, Italy, June 29, 1991), p. 491.
19. Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-
chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), pp. 1–31.
20. Morrison, Douglas R. O., “Comments on Claims of Excess Enthalpy by Fleischmann and
Pons Using Simple Cells Made to Boil,” (Elsevier, Physics Letters A, February 28, 1994),
p. 498.
21. APS; Press Conference, “Cold Fusion 5, 6,” (Cornell U/ Kroch Library, #4451 box 3, Au-
diotape, April, 1996).
22. Hansen, L. D., S. E. Jones, J. E. Jones, D. S. Shelton, and J. M. Throne, “Faradaic
Efficiencies Less Than 100% During Electrolysis of Water Can Account for Reports of Ex-
cess Heat in CF Cells”, (Journal of Physical Chemistry, vol. 99, 1995), p. 6978.
23. Although the Washington office of Nature refused approval to publish Oriani’s paper, it was
later published in Fusion Technology as follows: Oriani, R. A., John C. Nelson, et al., “Calo-
rimetric Measurements of Excess Power Output During the Cathodic Charging of Deute-
rium into Palladium,” (Fusion Technology, 18, December 1990), p. 652.
24. Hansen, Lee D., Steven E. Jones, J. E. Jones, David S. Shelton, and J. M. Thorne, “Faradaic
Efficiencies Less Than 100% During Electrolysis of Water Can Account for Reports of Ex-
cess Heat in CF Cells”, (Journal of Physical Chemistry, vol. 99, 1995), pp. 6973–79, p. 6977.
25. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, Monique Le Roux, and Jeanne Roulette, “Calorimetry of the Pd-
380 excess heat

D2O System: The Search for Simplicity and Accuracy,” (Trans. Fusion Technology, 26, 323,
1994), p. 335.
26. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Calorimetry of the Palladium-D-D2O System,” Proceed-
ings: EPRI-NSF Workshop on Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Metals, (Washington, DC:
NSF & EPRI, October 16–18, 1989). See also article endnotes 12, 13.
27. Buehler, David B., Lee D. Hansen, Steven E. Jones, and Lawrence B. Rees, “Is Reported
‘Excess Heat’ Due to Nuclear Reactions?,” (ICCF-3 Nagoya Conference Proc., Frontiers of
CF, October 1993), p. 251.
28. Jones, Steven E., private communications, Jan 7, 1998.
29. Hansen, Lee D., Steven E. Jones, J. E. Jones, David S. Shelton, and J. M. Thorne, “Faradaic
Efficiencies Less Than 100% During Electrolysis of Water Can Account for Reports of Ex-
cess Heat in CF Cells,” (Journal of Physical Chemistry, vol. 99, 1995), pp. 6973–79.
30. Lindley, David, “Noncommittal Outcome; NSF-EPRI Conference,” (Nature, vol. 341, Oc-
tober 26, 1995), p. 679.

Chapter 10
1. ERAB Panel on Cold Fusion, Final Report of the Cold Fusion Panel, (Washington, DC: De-
partment of Energy, Nov 8, 1989), p. 2.
2. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage Books, 3rd
edition, 1957), p. 148.
3. Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science; Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American
Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 529.
4. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993), p. 221.
5. As Hazen explained it, from February 2 to the March 2, 1987, publication date, Chu tried
to keep his discovery a secret while awaiting peer reviewed publication. The paper was sub-
mitted with the wrong formula, to frustrate interlopers, and that wrong formula was re-
peated twenty-four times in the body of the paper. Even then, it was touch and go. Actually,
a Houston University administrator let the cat out of the bag on February 16. It was printed
in the Houston Chronicle that day, but no one in the scientific community noticed. Enough
got out that Chu held his own lecture on February 26 and presented his results along with
the formula of the new superconductor.
There seemed to be two leaks of the secret. A Chinese physicist well versed in supercon-
ductivity was assigned to the Chinese consulate in Houston. The first outright publication
came in the Peoples Daily, February 25. The story also reveals that the source of leaks may
be in the editorial offices where the scientific disclosure was to be published.
Hazen, Robert, Breakthrough: The Race for the Superconductor, (New York: Summit
Books, 1988), pp. 59–74.
6. Ibid.
7. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage Books,
1950), p. 197.
8. National Academy of Sciences, “On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research,”
(Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995).
9. Hagelstein, Peter, At the meeting “Cold Fusion Day at MIT,” January 21,
1995.
10. Bauer, Henry H., Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Urbana and Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 118.
11. Curie, Marie, Pierre Curie, (New York: Dover Publications, 1963/1923).
 Endnotes 381

12. Sarasohn, Judy, Science on Trial, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, October 1993), p. 243.
13. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993), p. 238.
14. Miley, G., private communications, October 16, 1996.
15. Miley, George, “Comments: Fusion Technology,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 16, December
1991), p. 521.
16. Miley, G., private communications, October 16, 1996.

Chapter 11
1. Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-
chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992), pp. 1-31.
Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Some Comments on the Paper Analysis of Experiments
on Calorimetry of LiOD/D2O Electrochemical Cells, R. H. Wilson, et al.,” (Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992),
pp. 33–53.
Dagani, Ron, “Cold Fusion Anomalies More Perplexing Than Ever,” (C&EN, ACS, Nov
6, 1989), p. 32.
2. Stanley, Dick, “U. TX Chemist *Al BARD* Doubts Fusion but Hasn’t Given Up Hope,”
(Austin, TX: American-Statesman, May 7, 1989).
3. Lonchampt, G., L. Bonnetain, and P. Hicter, “Reproduction of Fleischmann and Pons Ex-
periments,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, Published by the Institute of Ap-
plied Energy, October 1996, paper O-044).
4. Mizuno, Tadahiko (Trans. by J. Rothwell), “Nuclear Transmutations: The Reality of Cold Fu-
sion,” (Concord, NH: Infinite Energy Press, 1998), p. 56 and cont.
5. Bishop, Jerry E., “Some Scientists Press Search for Cold Fusion Despite Failure of ’89:
Though Idea Is Much Derided, Intriguing Lab Results Just Keep Showing Up,” (New York:
Wall Street Journal, July 19, 1994).
McKubre, Michael, private communications, May 31, 1995.
6. Crawford, Elisabeth T., Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect, (Canton, MA:
Watson Pub. Int./Science History Publications, 1996).
7. Ibid.
8. Jaffe, Bernard, Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry, (New York: Dover, 1976), p. 166.
9. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 1 (1970) 296.
Britannica 15th edition (biography vol. 2, p. 39) (Chemical Kinetics, MP vol. 4),
p. 138.M
10. According to Jaffe, the young Arrhenius sent copies of his thesis to the German scientists
Rudolf Clausius, Lothar Meyer and Wilhelm Ostwald, and to the English scientist Oliver
Lodge.
11. Crawford, Elisabeth T., The Beginnings of the Nobel Institute: The Science Prizes 1901–1915,
(Adventures in Science, 1990).
12. Caldwell, Karen, private communication, November 15, 1995.
13. With the excitement of the moment, each of the three participants in this conversation has
a different recollection of the conversation. In selecting what to present, the author has
taken some license.
Fleischmann, Martin, private communications, August 17, 1995.
14. Bauer, Henry H., “Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method,” (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 111.
15. Crews, Frederick. Preface. After Poststructuralism. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, eds.
382 excess heat

(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. viii. Crews is to be acknowledged

for his metaphor that poststructuralism does not travel well.
16. Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, (University of Chicago Press,
trans., 1979).
17. Ibid., p. 150.
18. Ibid., p. 19.
19. Ibid., p. 2.
20. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation (New York: Vintage Books, 3rd
edition, 1957), p. 144.
21. Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, (University of Chicago Press,
trans., 1979), p. 52.
22. Ibid., p. 53.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 69.
25. Ibid., p. 72.
26. Wood, Dr. Lowell L., private communication, May 20, 1999.
27. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research ((Accountability in Research, Scott R. Chubb, and A. E. Shamoo, editors, vol. 8,
No. 1–2, 2000, Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers), p. 2.)), p. 2.
28. Wood, Dr. Lowell L., private communication, May 20 1999.
29. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970).

Chapter 12
1. Hazen, Robert, Breakthrough: The Race for the Superconductor, (New York: Summit Books,
1988), p. 259.
2. Ibid., p. 96.
3. Ibid., p. 8.
4. “..he [Langmuir] drew up an informal list based on his own experiences. We have drawn up
our own, based on ours.” Crease, Robert P., N. P. Samios, “Cold Fusion Confusion,” (New
York: New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 24, 1989), pp. 35–38.
5. Park, Robert L., “Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves,” (San Jose,
CA: American Physical Society, March 22, 1995).
6. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage Books,
1950), p. 11.
7. Ibid., p. 19.
8. Bauer, Henry H., Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Urbana and Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 25.
9. Ibid., p. 25.
10. Ibid.
11. Canadian Broadcasting Company, “Too Close to the Sun,” (CBC/BBC, 1994).
12. Bishop, Jerry E., “Japanese Funds Warm a Conference Of “Cold Fusion”
Die-Hards in Maui.” (New York: Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1993),
p. B7.
13. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage Books,
1950), p. 23.
14. AIP News Release, “Cold Fusion,. . . . . . . . at the Baltimore Meeting,” (College Park, MD:
AIP, May 15, 1989, 6 pages).
15. Bauer, Henry H., Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Urbana and Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 26.
 Endnotes 383

16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 27.
19. Feynman, Richard, The Character of Physical Law. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
20. Bauer, Henry H., Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Urbana and Chi-
cago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 27.
21. Huizenga, John, “Cold Fusion Unmasking,” (AAAS meeting Feb 1992, audiotape, Carl A.
Kroch Library, Cornell University, February 6–11, Chicago).
22. Lindley, David, “Noncommittal Outcome; NSF-EPRI Conference” (Nature, vol. 341, Oc-
tober 26, 1995).
23. Hoffman, Nate. “A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects; A Guide for the Perplexed
About Cold Fusion,” (Amer. Nuclear Society, La Grange Park, Illinois USA, (& EPRI)
1995). Quote is from the Foreword by Dr. T. R. Schneider, EPRI, pg. x. Schneider was at
times manager of EPRI’s CF support.
24. Morrison, Douglas, “Report on Eighth ICCF,” (Sci.Physics.Fusion/Mail Gateway, 11 July
2000).
25. Fleischmann, Martin, “Nuclear Reactions in the Pd/D System: The Pre-History and His-
tory of Our Early Research,” (Infinite Energy, Issue 24, 1999), p. 25.
26. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (University of Rochester
Press, 1992), p. 259, p. x.
27. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 243.
28. Close, Frank, “Science Now,” BBC Radio, (BBC Radio, August 28, 1992).
29. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 98.
30. Jones, Steven E., private communication, January 7, 1998.
31. ABC Nightline News, “N/A,” (New York: ABC News, February 7, 1996).
32. Close, Frank E., “Cold Fusion Research”, (C&EN, Letters, 70, 15, April 13, 1992), p. 2.
33. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 265.
34. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (University of Rochester
Press, 1992), p. viii.

Chapter 13
1. ERAB Panel on Cold Fusion, Final Report of the Cold Fusion Panel, (Department of Energy,
Washington, DC, Nov 8, 1989) 2.
2. Caldwell, Karen D., private communications, November 15, 1995.
3. Stanley, Dick, “U. TX Chemist *Al BARD* Doubts Fusion but Hasn’t Given Up Hope,”
(American-Statesman, Austin, Texas, May 7, 1989).
4. Caldwell, Karen D., private communications, November 15, 1995.
5. Somoriai, Gabor A., Chemistry in Two Dimensions: Surfaces, (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1981) p. 26.
6. Science, “Where’s the Beef?,” (Science, Jan 30, 1998, p. 647).
7. Rabinowitz, M., Y. E. Kim, V. A. Chechin, and V. A. Tsarev, “Opposition and Support for
Cold Fusion,” (Proceedings, ICCF-4, Vol. 1, pp. 15–1, December, 1993) pp. 15–2.
8. Caldwell, Karen D., private communications, Nov. 15, 1995.
9. Fleischmann, Martin, private communications, August 17, 1995.
10. Stanley, Dick, “U. TX Chemist *Al BARD* Doubts Fusion but Hasn’t Given Up Hope,”
(American-Statesman, Austin, Texas, May 7, 1989).
384 excess heat

Chapter 14
1. Oriani, Richard A., private communications, August 1998.
2. Hansen, Wilford N., “Report to the Utah State Fusion/Energy Council on the Analysis of
Selected Pons Fleischmann Calorimetric Data,” (ICCF-2, The Science of Cold Fusion,
Como, Italy, 1991) p. 491.
3. Ibid., p. 512.
4. Ibid., p. 518.
5. Ibid., p. 523.
6. Wilson, R. H., et al., “Analysis of Experiments on the Calorimetry of LiOD-D2O Electro-
chemical Cells,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 332, 1992) pp. 1–31.
7. McKubre, Michael, private communications, May 31, 1995.
8. Ibid.
9. McKubre, Michael, et al., “Isothermal Flow Calorimetric Investigations of the D/Pd Sys-
tem,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 368, 1994) p. 61.
10. McKubre, Michael, private communications, May 31, 1995.
11. Oriani, R. A., John C. Nelson, et al., “Calorimetric Measurements of Excess Power Output
During the Cathodic Charging of Deuterium into Palladium,” (Fusion Technology, 18,
(1990), Dec.) p. 652.
12. Schreiber, M., T. M. Gur, G. Lucier, J. A. Ferrante, J. Chao, and R. A. Huggins, “Recent
Measurements of Excess Energy Production in Electrochemical Cells Containing Heavy
Water and Palladium,” (NCFI, The First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion (Proceedings))
p. 44.
13. Ibid.
Schreiber, M., T. M. Gur, G. Lucier, J. A. Ferrante, J. Chao, and R. A. Huggins, “Recent
Experimental Results on the Thermal Behavior of Electrochemical Cells in the Hydrogen-
Palladium and Deuterium-Palladium Systems,” (Proc. CF Symposium. 8th World Hydrogen
Energy Conference, July 22, 1990) p. 71.
Gur, Turgut M., Martha Schreiber, George Lucier, Joseph A. Ferrante, Jason Chao, and
Robert A. Huggins, “Experimental Considerations in Electrochemical Isoperibolic Calorim-
etry,” (NCFI, First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion, Proceedings, March 28, 1990)
p. 82.
14. Miles, Melvin H., and Stillwell Park, “Electrochemical Calorimetric Evidence for Cold Fu-
sion in the Palladium-Deuterium System” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 296,
1990) p. 241.
Miles, Melvin H., D. E. Stillwell, et al., “Electrochemical Calorimetric Studies of the
CF Effect,” (NCFI, First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion, Proceedings, Mar 28, 1990)
p. 328.
15. Arata, Yoshiaki, and Yue-Chang Zhang, “A New Energy Caused by ‘Spillover-Deuterium’”
(Proc. Japan Acad. 70, Ser B, 1994) p. 106.
16. Ibid.
17. Arata, Yoshiaki, and Yue-Chang Zhang, “A New Energy Generated in DS-Cathode with
‘Pd-black’,” (Koon Gakkai Shi [J. of High Temp. Soc.] 20(4), 1994) pp.148–155 (In Japa-
nese with English Abstract and captions.)
18. Arata, Yoshiaki and Yue-Chang Zhang, “Anomalous ‘Deuterium-Reaction Energies’ Within
Solid,” (Proc. Japan. Acad. 74 B, 1998) pp. 155–158.
19. Klein, Bruce, 1995, “A Development Approach for Cold Fusion,” (Proceedings of the 5th In-
ternational Conference on Cold Fusion).
20. McKubre, Michael, “Anomalous Heat Production from Hydrogen Saturated Palladium,”
 Endnotes 385

(Preprint; SRI International; 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario Convention
Center, CA, 8 October 1999).

Chapter 15
1. Bush, Robert T., “Cold ‘Fusion’: The Transition Resonance Model Fits Data on Excess
Heat, Predicts Optimal Trigger Points, and Suggests Nuclear Reaction Scenarios,” (Fusion
Technology, vol. 19, 1991) pp. 313–356).
Bush, Robert T., “A Light Water Excess Heat Reaction Suggests that ‘Cold Fusion’ May
Be ‘Alkali-Hydrogen Fusion’,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 22, September 1992), p. 301.
2. Swartz, Mitchell R., “Optimal Operating Point Characteristics of Nickel Light Water Ex-
periments,” (Proceedings of the ICCF-7, April 1998) p. 371.
3. Mizuno, T., T. Akimoto, K. Azumi, M. Kitaichi, and K. Kurokawa, “Excess Heat Evolution
and Analysis of Elements for Solid State Electrolyte in Deuterium Atmosphere During Ap-
plied Electric Field,” (Journal of New Energy, vol. 1, No. 1, Jan. 1996), p. 79.
Mizuno, T. T. Akimoto, K. Azumi, M. Kitaichi, K. Kurokawa, and M. Enyo, “Anoma-
lous Heat Evolution from a Solid-State Electrolyte Under Alternating Current in High-
Temperature D2 Gas,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 29, May 1996), p. 385.
4. Oriani, Richard A., “Verification of Mizuno on Proton conducting Oxide,” (Infinite Energy,
Mar-Apr, 1996, No. 7), p. 5.
Oriani, R. A., “A Confirmation of Anomalous Thermal Power Generation from a Pro-
ton-Conducting Oxide,” (Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, 1996, ICCF-6).
5. Yamaguchi, E., and T. Nishioka, “Direct Evidence for Nuclear Fusion Reactions in
Deuterated Palladium,” (Frontiers of Cold Fusion, Universal Academy Press, Tokyo, Japan
1993) p. 179.
6. Case, L. C., “Catalytic Fusion of Deuterium into Helium-4,” (ICCF-7, Proceedings, Van-
couver, Canada, April 1998) p. 180.
7. McKubre, M. C. H., W. B. Clarke, B. M. Oliver, F. L. Tanzella, and P. Tripodi, “Search for
He-3 and He-4 in Arata-Style Palladium Cathodes II: Evidence for Tritium Production,”
(Submitted to Fusion Technology, 2001).
McKubre, M. C., F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi, and P. Hagelstein, “The Emergence of a Coher-
ent Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd Systems: Evidence for He-4
and H-3 [Tritium] Production,” (Accepted by ICCF-8, Lerici, Italy, May 2000).
McKubre, Michael, “Anomalous Heat Production from Hydrogen Saturated Palladium,”
(Preprint, SRI International, 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario Convention
Center, CA, 8 October 1999).
8. McKubre, M. C., F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi, and P. Hagelstein, “The Emergence of a Coherent
Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd Systems: Evidence for He-4 and
H-3 [Tritium] Production,” (Accepted by ICCF-8, Lerici, Italy, May 2000).
McKubre, Michael, “Anomalous Heat Production from Hydrogen Saturated Palladium,”
(Preprint; SRI International; 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario Convention
Center, CA, 8 October 1999).
9. Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O system: From Sim-
plicity via Complications to Simplicity,” (Physics Letters A, 176, May 3, 1993) pp. 118–129.
10. Lonchampt, G., L. Bonnetain, P. Hicter, “Reproduction of Fleischmann and Pons Experi-
ments,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, October 1996, paper O-044).
11. Pons, Stanley, T. Roulette, and J. Roulette, “Results of Icarus 9 Experiments Run at IMRA
Europe,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, Proceedings, Institute of Applied En-
ergy, Hokkaido, Japan, vol. I), p. 85.
386 excess heat

12. Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Our Calorimetric Measurements of the Pd/D Sys-
tem: Fact and Fiction,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 17, 669, July, 1990).
13. Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O System: From Sim-
plicity via Complications to Simplicity,” (Elsevier) Physics Letters A, 176, May 3, 1993)
pp. 118–129.
Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, “Heat After Death,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 26, No. 4T, Pt. 2,
1994), pp. 87–95.
14. Mizuno, Tadahiko, “Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion,” 1998, Infinite
Energy Press, Concord, N.H., (Trans. by Jed Rothwell) pages xviii, and 69.]
15. Mengoli, G., M. Bernardini, C. Manducchi, and G. Zannoni, “Calorimetry Close to the
Boiling Temperature of the D2O/Pd Electrolytic System,” (Journal of Electroanalytical
Chemistry, 444, 1998) p. 155.
16. Mengoli, G., private communication.
17. Miles, M. H., M. Fleischmann, and M. A. Imam, “Calorimetric Analysis of a Heavy Water
Electrolysis Experiment Using a Pd-B Alloy Cathode,” (Naval Research Laboratory, Wash-
ington DC, NRL/MR/6320–01–8526, March 26, 2001) p. 22, section A.9.
18. Ibid., p. 142, Column 9 bottom.

Chapter 16
1. Hoffman, Nate, A Dialogue on Chemically Induced Nuclear Effects, (American Nuclear Soci-
ety & EPRI, 1995).
2. Rabinowitz, M., Y. E. Kim, V. A. Chechin, and V. A. Tsarev, “Opposition and Support for
Cold Fusion,” (Proceedings, ICCF-4, December 1993, vol. 1), pp. 15–1.
3. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2d edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 129–30.
4. Walling, Cheves, and Jack Simon, “Two Innocent Chemists Look at Cold Fusion,” (Journal
of Physical Chemistry, vol. 93, no. 12, June 15, 1989) p. 4694, Endnote 5, middle of left col-
umn.
5. Close, Frank, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1991), p. 141.
6. Dagani, Ron, “Hopes for CF Diminish as Ranks of Disbelievers Swell: After Eight Weeks of
. . .,” (C&EN, News Focus, May 22, 1989), p. 20 (top/center). “[Fleischmann and Pons]
backed away from some of their earlier [helium detection] claims.”
7. Liaw, Bor Yann, P. Tao, and B. E. Liebert, “Recent Progress on Cold Fusion Research Using
Molten Salt Techniques,” (The Science of Cold Fusion, ICCF-2,) p. 55.
Liaw, Bor Yann, P. Tao, B. E. Liebert, “Helium Analysis of Palladium Electrodes After
Molten Salt Electrolysis,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 23, 1993), p. 92.
8. Bush, B. F., private communications, April 7, 2001.
9. Miles, M. H., private communication, April 13, 2001.
10. Bush, B. F., J. J. Lagowski, M. H. Miles, and G. S. Ostrom, “Helium Production During
the Electrolysis of D2O in Cold Fusion Experiments,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemis-
try, (Preliminary Note) vol. 304, 1991), pp. 271–278.
Bush, B. F., M. H. Miles, G. S. Ostrom, and J. J. Lagowski, “Heat and Helium Produc-
tion in CF Experiments,” (Proc. ACCF-2, The Science of Cold Fusion, Como, Italy, 1991),
p. 366.
Bush, B. F., J. J. Lagowski, M. H. Miles, R. A. Hollins, and R. E. Miles, “Correlation of
Excess Power and Helium Production During D2O and H2O Electrolysis Using Palladium
Cathodes,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 346, 1993), pp. 99–117.
 Endnotes 387

Bush, B. F., and M. H. Miles, “Search for Anomalous Effects Involving Excess Power and
Helium During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathodes,” (Frontiers of Cold Fusion,
ICCF-3, U. Academy Press, 1993), p. 189.
Bush, B. F., M. H. Miles, and J. J. Lagowski, “Anomalous Effects Involving Excess
Power, Radiation, and Helium Production During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cath-
odes,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 25, July 1994), p. 478.
Bush, B. F., and M. H. Miles, “Heat and Helium Measurements in Deuterated Palla-
dium,” (Trans. Fusion Technology, vol. 26, 1994), pp. 156–159.
11. Bush, B. F., J. J. Lagowski, M. H. Miles, and G. S. Ostrom, “Helium Production During
the Electrolysis of D2O in Cold Fusion Experiments,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemis-
try, (Preliminary Note) vol. 304, 1991), p. 275, Table 2.
12. Miles, M. H., and B. F. Bush, “Search for Anomalous Effects Involving Excess Power and
Helium During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathodes,” (Frontiers of Cold Fusion,
ICCF-3, U. Academy Press, 1993), p. 192.
13. Miles, M. H., B. F.Bush, “Heat and Helium Measurements in Deuterated Palladium,”
(Trans. Fusion Technology, vol. 26, 1994), pp. 156–159.
14. Ibid., p 156–159.
Bush, B. H., M. H. Miles, M. C. McKubre, private communications, fall 2001.
15. Bush, B. F., private communication, December 20, 2000.
16. Miles, M. H., B. F. Bush, “Heat and Helium Measurements in Deuterated Palladium,”
(Trans. Fusion Technology, 26 (1994) p. 156–159).
Miles, Melvin H., Benjamin F. Bush, Kendall B. Johnson, 1996, “Anomalous Effects in
Deuterated Systems,” (NAWAC, China Lake, CA, September 1996, NAWCWPNS TP
8302) p. 43.
17. Jones, Steven E., and Lee D. Hansen, “Examination of Claims of Miles et al. in Pons–
Fleischmann Type Cold Fusion Experiments,” (Journal of Physical Chemistry, vol. 99, 1995),
pp. 6966–6972.
18. Miles, Melvin H., “Reply to ‘Examination of Claims of Miles et al. in Pons-Fleischmann
Type Cold Fusion Experiments’,” (Journal of Physical Chemistry B, vol. 102, 1998),
pp. 3642–3646.
Jones, Steven E., Lee D. Hansen, and David S. Shelton, “An Assessment of Claims of Ex-
cess Heat in Cold Fusion Calorimetry,” (Journal of Physical Chemistry B, vol. 102, 1998),
p. 3647.
Miles, Melvin H., “Reply to ‘An Assessment of Claims of Excess Heat in Cold Fusion
Calorimetry’,” (Journal of Physical Chemistry B, vol. 102, 1998), p. 3648.
19. McKubre, M. C., F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi, and P. Hagelstein, “The Emergence of a Coherent
Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd Systems: Evidence for He-4 and
H-3 [Tritium] Production,” (Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Cold Fu-
sion, Lerici, Italy, May 2000) p. 4, Fig. 1.
20. Arata, Y., and C. Zhang, “Achievement of Solid-State Plasma Fusion (“Cold Fusion”),”
(Koon Gakkai Shi ⫽ Journal of High Temperature Society, 21(6), 1995), pp. 303–306 (ISSN:
0387–1096), [In Japanese with English Abstract and Figure Captions].
21. Gozzi, D., P. L. Cignini, M. Tomellini, S. Frullani, F. Garabaldi, F. Ghio, M. Jodice, and
G. M. Urciuoli, “Multicell Experiments for Searching Time-Related Events in CF,” (Proc.
ACCF-2, Como, Italy, June 29, 1991 The Science of Cold Fusion, vol. 33, T. Bressani, E. Del
Giudice, and G. Preparata, eds.) p. 21.
Gozzi, D., P. L. Cignini, L. Petrucci, M. Tomellini, and G. De Maria, “Evidences for As-
sociated heat Generation and Nuclear Products Release in Pd Heavy-Water Electrolysis,” (Il
Nuovo Cimento, vol. 103, 1990), p. 143.
388 excess heat

Gozzi, D., R. Caputo, P. L. Cignini, M. Tomellini, G. Gigli, G. Balducci, E. Cisbani, S.

Frullani, F. Garabaldi, M. Jodice, and G. M. Urciuoli, “Helium-4 Quantitative Measure-
ments in the Gas Phase of CF Electrochemical Cells,” (EPRI, Proceedings: ICCF-4, vol. I),
pp. 6–1.
Gozzi, D., et al., “Calorimetric and Nuclear Byproduct Measurements in Electrochemi-
cal Confinement of Deuterium in Palladium,” (JEAC, 380, 1995), p. 91.
Gozzi, D., et al., “X-ray, Heat Excess, and Helium-Four in the Electrochemical
Confinement of Deuterium in Palladium,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, vol.
I), p. 3.
22. E. Botta, T. Bressani, D. Calvo, C. Fanara, and F. Iazza, “Measurements of 4-Helium Pro-
duction from D2 Gas-Loaded Pd Sample,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, Oct.
1996, vol. I), p. 29.
E. Botta, R. Bracco, T. Bressani, D. Calvo, V. Cela, C. Fanara, U. Ferracin, and F. Iazzi,
“Search for Helium-four Production from Pd/D2 System in Gas Phase,” (ICCF-5, Proceed-
ings of the Fifth International Conference on Cold Fusion), p. 233.
23. McKubre, Michael, “Anomalous Heat Production from Hydrogen Saturated Palladium,”
(Preprint, SRI International, 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario Convention
Center, CA, 8 October 1999). Anomalous Heat Production experiment type #2.
McKubre, M. C., F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi, and P. Hagelstein, “The Emergence of a Coher-
ent Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd Systems: Evidence for He-4
and H-3 [Tritium] Production,” (Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Cold Fu-
sion, F. Scaramuzzi, ed., Lerici, Italy, May 2000) p. 3.
Clarke, W. B., B. M. Oliver, M. C. H. McKubre, F. L. Tanzella, and P. Tripodi, “Search
for He-3 and He-4 in Arata-style Palladium Cathodes II: Evidence for Tritium Production,”
(Submitted to Fusion Technology).
24. McKubre, M. C., F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi, and P. Hagelstein, “The Emergence of a Coherent
Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd Systems: Evidence for He-4 and
H-3 [Tritium] Production,” (Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Cold Fusion,
Lerici, Italy, May 2000) p. 3, Description/geometry #3.
25. Case, L. C., “Catalytic Fusion of Deuterium into Helium-4,” (Proceedings of the Seventh
International Conference on Cold Fusion, Vancouver, Canada, April 1998) p. 180.
26. Clarke, W. B., “On the Production of 4He in the ‘L. C. Case Experiment’,” (Submitted to
Fusion Technology, Spring 2001).
27. McKubre, M. C., F. Tanzella, P. Tripodi, and P. Hagelstein, “The Emergence of a Coherent
Explanation for Anomalies Observed in D/Pd and H/Pd Systems: Evidence for He-4 and
H-3 [Tritium] Production,” (Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Cold Fusion, F.
Scaramuzzi, ed., Lerici, Italy, May 2000) p. 5, Fig. 3.
28. Bressani, T., “Nuclear Physics Aspects of Cold Fusion Science: Scientific Summary After
ICCF-7,” (Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion, Vancou-
ver, Canada, April 1998), p. 32.
29. Close, Frank, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1991), p. 187.

Chapter 17
1. Storms, Edmund, and Carol Talcott, “Electrolytic Tritium Production,” (Fusion Technology,
vol. 17, July 1990), p. 680.
2. G. H. Lin, R. C. Kainthla, N. J. C. Packham, O. Velev, and J. O’M. Bockris, “On Electro-
chemical Tritium Production,” (Int. Journal of Hydrogen Energy, vol. 15, No. 8, 1990),
pp. 537–550.
 Endnotes 389

3. Szpak, S., P. A. Mosier-Boss, and J. J. Smith, “On the Behavior of Pd Deposited in the Pres-
ence of Evolving Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, vol. 302, 1991),
p. 255.
4. Dale G. Tuggle, Thomas N. Claytor, and Stuart F. Taylor, “Tritium Evolution from Various
Morphologies of Palladium,” (Trans. of Fusion Technology, vol. 26, Dec. 1994), p. 221.
5. Bockris, John, et al., “A Review of the Investigations of the Fleischmann-Pons phenomena,”
(Fusion Technology, vol. 18, August 1990).
Scott, C. D., J. E. Mrochek, T. C. Scott, G. E. Michaels, E. Newman, and M. Petek, “A
Preliminary Investigation of CF by Electrolysis of Heavy Water,” (ORNL/TM-11322, Oak
Ridge N. L., 1989).
Scott, C. D., E. Greenbaum, J. E. Mrochek, T. C. Scott, G. E. Michaels, E. Newman,
and M. Petek, “Preliminary Investigation of Possible Low-Temperature Fusion,” (Journal of
Fusion Energy, 9, 1990), p. 115.
6. Bush, B. F., and J. J. Lagowski, “Methods of Generation Excess Heat with the Pons and
Fleischmann Effect: Rigorous and Cost Effective Calorimetry, Nuclear Products Analysis of
the Cathode and Helium Analysis,” (ICCF-7 Proceedings, April 1998), formula (1) p. 42.
7. This equation was developed by T. Ward of DOE.
8. Arata, Yoshiaki, and Yue-Chang Zhang, “Solid-State Plasma Fusion (‘Cold Fusion’),” (High
Temperature Society, Special Issue, vol. 23, 1997), pp. 1–56.
Arata, Y, and Y. C. Zhang, “Helium (4/2He, 3/2He) Within Deuterated Pd-black,”
(Proc. Japan. Academy, 73 B, 1997), pp. 1–6.
9. Arata, Yoshiaki, Yue-Chang Zhang, “Solid-State Plasma Fusion (‘Cold Fusion’),” (High
Temperature Society, Special Issue, vol. 23, 1997), p. 22, Fig. 22-B.
10. W. B. Clarke, B. M. Oliver, M. C. H. McKubre, F. L. Tanzella, and P. Tripodi, “Search or
He-3 and He-4 in Arata-Style Palladium Cathodes II: Evidence for Tritium Production,”
(Submitted to Fusion Technology, 2001) p. 13.
11. Ibid., pp. 25–26.
12. Ibid., p. 26.

Chapter 18
1. Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Concerning the Detection of Neutrons and
[Gamma]-Rays from Cells Containing Palladium Cathodes Polarized in Heavy Water,” (Il
Nuovo Cimento, vol. 105, A, No. 6, June 1992), p. 763.
2. C. D. Scott, J. E. Mrochek, T. C. Scott, G. E. Michaels, E. Newman, and M. Petek, “The
Initiation of Excess Power and Possible Products of Nuclear Interactions During the Elec-
trolysis of Heavy Water,” (Proceedings, NCFI, First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion,
1990), p. 164.
3. C. D. Scott, J. E. Mrochek, T. C. Scott, G. E. Michaels, E. Newman, and M. Petek, “Mea-
surement of Excess Heat and Apparent Coincident increases in the Neutron and Gamma-
Ray Count Rates During the Electrolysis of Heavy Water,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 18, Au-
gust 1990), p. 103.
Scott, C. D., J. E. Mrochek, T. C. Scott, G. E. Michaels, E. Newman, and M. Petek,
“The Initiation of Excess Power and Possible Products of Nuclear Interactions During the
Electrolysis of Heavy Water,” (Proceedings, NCFI, First Annual Conference on Cold Fu-
sion, 1990), p. 164.
Scott, C. D., E. Greenbaum, J. E. Mrochek, T. C. Scott, G. E. Michaels, E. Newman,
and M. Petek, “Preliminary Investigation of Possible Low-Temperature Fusion,” (Journal of
Fusion Energy, vol. 9, 1990, p. 115.
4. Wolf, K. L. in EPRI document Appendix [McKubre, et al.], “Development of Energy Pro-
390 excess heat

duction Systems from Heat Produced in Deuterated Metals: Volume 2,” (EPRI, Palo Alto,
CA, 1999, TR-107843-V2).
Passell, Thomas O., “Charting the Way Forward in the EPRI Research Program on
Deuterated Metals,” (ICCF-5, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cold
Fusion, April 9–13, 1995), p. 603.
Wolf, K. L., J. Shoemaker, D. E. Coe, L. Whitesell, “Neutron Emission from Deute-
rium-Loaded Metals,” (AIP Conference Proceedings 228, 341, 1991).
5. Akito Takahashi, Toshiyuki Iida, Takayuki Takeuchi, and Akimasa Mega, “Excess Heat and
Nuclear Products by D2O/Pd Electrolysis and Multibody Fusion” (International Journal of
Applied Electromagnetics in Materials, vol. 3, 1992), pp.221–230.
A. Takahashi, T. Iida, T. Takeuchi, H. Miyamaru, and A. Mega, “Anomalous Excess Heat
by D2O/Pd Cell Under L-H Mode Electrolysis,” (Universal Academy Press, Frontiers of
Cold Fusion, H. Ikegami, ed., 1993), p. 79.
6. A. Shyam, M. Srinivasan, T. C. Kaushik, and L. V. Kulkarni, “Observation of High Multi-
plicity Bursts of Neutrons During Electrolysis of Heavy Water with Palladium Cathode
Using Dead-Time Filtering Technique,” (Proceedings of the 5th International Conference
on Cold Fusion, April 9–13, 1995), p. 181.
7. Mizuno, T., Tadashi Akimoto, Tadayoshi Ohmori, Akito Takahashi, “Neutron and Heat
Generation from a Palladium Electrode by Alternate Absorption Treatment of Deuterium
and Hydrogen,” (Japan J. Applied Physics, 40 (2001) L989-L991, September 15, 2001).

Chapter 19
1. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2d edition, (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993), pp. 98, 299.
2. Wolf, K. L. in Appendix to EPRI document: McKubre, et al.;, “Development of Energy
Production Systems from Heat Produced in Deuterated Metals: Volume 2,” (EPRI, Palo
Alto, CA, 1999, TR-107843-V2).
Passell, Thomas O., “Charting the Way Forward in the EPRI Research Program on
Deuterated Metals,” (ICCF-5, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cold
Fusion, April 9–13, 1995), p. 603.
Wolf, K. L., J. Shoemaker, D. E. Coe, and L. Whitesell, “Neutron Emission from Deute-
rium-Loaded Metals,” (AIP Conference Proceedings 228, 341, 1991).
3. Passell, Thomas O., “Charting the Way Forward in the EPRI Research Program On
Deuterated Metals,” (ICCF-5, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cold
Fusion, April 9–13, 1995), p. 611.
4. See review article “Cold Fusion Researches in Russia,” by Vladimir Tsarev of the Lebedev
Physical Institute, Moscow, published in Frontiers of Cold Fusion, Universal Academy Press,
Inc., Tokyo, p. 341.
5. Karabut, Alexander B., “Excess Heat Registration in High Current Density Glow Discharge
with Various Cathode Materials,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, October
1996), p. 463.
6. T. Mizuno, T. Ohmori, and M. Enyo, “Isotopic Changes of the Reaction Products Induced
by Cathodic Electrolysis in Pd,” (Journal of New Energy, vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1996), p. 31.
T. Ohmori, T. Mizuno, H. Minagawa, and M. Enyo, “Low Temperature Nuclear Trans-
mutation Forming Iron on/in Gold Electrode During Light Water Electrolysis,” (Int. Jour-
nal of Hydrogen Energy, vol. 22, No. 5, 1997), pp. 459–463.
T. Ohmori, and M. Enyo, “Iron Formation in Gold and Palladium Cathodes,” (Journal
of New Energy, vol. 1, No. 1, Jan. 1996), p. 15.
T. Mizuno, T. Ohmori, T. Akimoto, K. Azumi, M. Kitaichi, K. Kurokawa, M. Enyo, K.
 Endnotes 391

Inoda, and S. Simokawa, “Isotopic Distribution for the Elements Evolved in Palladium
Cathode After Electrolysis in D2O Solution,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy,
vol. 2, 1996), p. 665.
7. Tadahiko Mizuno, and Michio Enyo, Sorption of Hydrogen on and in Hydrogen-Absorbing
Metals in Electrochemical Environments, Ralph E. White, ed., (New York: Plenum Press,
1996).
8. I highly recommend Mizuno’s personal account of some of his research reported in his
book, Nuclear Transmutations: The Reality of Cold Fusion, (Concord, NH: Infinite Energy
Press, 1998). It was popular in Japan with science students, and we are fortunate to have
available an excellent translation by Jed Rothwell.
9. Mizuno, Tadahiko (Trans. by J. Rothwell), Nuclear Transmutations: The Reality of Cold
Fusion, (Concord, NH: Infinite Energy Press, 1998).
10. T. Mizuno, T. Ohmori, and M. Enyo, “Isotopic Changes of the Reaction Products Induced
by Cathodic Electrolysis in Pd,” (Journal of New Energy, vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1996), p. 31.
T. Mizuno, T. Ohmori, and M. Enyo, “Anomalous Isotopic Distribution in Palladium
Cathode After Electrolysis,” (Journal of New Energy, vol. 1, No. 2), p. 37.
11. Miley, G. H., and J. A. Patterson, “Nuclear Transmutations in Thin-Film Nickel Coatings
Undergoing Electrolysis,” (Preprint for 2nd International Conference on Low Energy Nu-
clear Reactions, College Station, TX, Sept 13–14, 1996).

Chapter 20
1. P. I. Dee, (Nature, vol. 133, 1934), p. 413.
P. I. Dee, (Proceedings of the Royal Society—A, 148, 1935), p. 623.
2. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research, Scott R. Chubb and A. E. Shamoo, eds., vol. 8, No. 1–2, 2000, Philadelphia:
Gorden & Breach Science Publishers, ISSN 0898–9621) p. 10.
3. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, 3d edition, (New York, Vintage
Books 1957), p. 6.
4. Koonin, Steven, “Personal Interview by Douglas Smith,” (Box 3–0, Coll. 4451, Kroch Li-
brary, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, May 8, 1989).
5. Hagelstein, Peter, “Anomalous Energy Transfer,” (ICCF-7, April, 1998) p. 140.
6. Chambers, G. P., G. K. Hubler, and K. S. Grabowski, “Evidence for MeV Particle Emission
from Ti Charger with Low Energy Deuterium Ions,” (Washington, DC: Naval Research
Laboratory Memorandum Report 6927, 1991), pp. 1–30.
7. Cecil, F. E., D. Ferg, T. E. Furtak, C. Mader, J. A. McNeil, and D. L. Williamson, “Study
of Energetic Charged Particles Emitted from Thin Deuterated Palladium Foils Subject to
High Current Densities,” (Journal of Fusion Energy, vol. 9, 1990), p. 195.
8. Kasagi, J., H. Yuki, T. Itoh, N. Kasajima, T. Ohtsuki, and A. G. Lipson, “Anomalously En-
hanced D(d,p)T Reaction in Pd and PdO Observed in Very Low Bombarding Energies,”
(Proceedings, ICCF-7, Vancouver, Canada, April 1998), p. 180.
9. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research, Scott R. Chubb and A. E. Shamoo, eds., vol. 8, No. 1–2, 2000, Philadelphia:
Gorden & Breach Science Publishers, ISSN 0898–9621), p. 13.

Chapter 21
1. I am indebted to Scaramuzzi for the phrase “attainment of reproducibility.”
Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountabil-
392 excess heat

ity in Research, Scott R. Chubb and A. E. Shamoo, eds., vol. 8, No. 1–2, 2000, Philadel-
phia: Gorden & Breach Science Publishers, ISSN 0898–9621).
2. Preparata, Guiliano, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cold Fusion Calo-
rimetry,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, vol. 1, Oct. 13–18, 1996), p. 136.
3. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research, Scott R. Chubb and A. E. Shamoo, eds., vol. 8, No. 1–2, 2000, Philadelphia:
Gorden & Breach Science Publishers, ISSN 0898–9621), p. 12.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. DOE, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Science, and Office of
Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology, “Breakthrough Energy Physics Research,” (BEPR),
(DOE, October 2000), p. ii.
6. Ibid., p. 33.
7. Ibid., p. 31.
8. Claytor, T. N., D. G. Tuggle, and H. O. Menlove, “Tritium Production from a Low Voltage
Deuterium Discharge on Palladium and Other Metals,” (Fusion Technology, vol. 17, 1991),
p. 680.
9. Miley, George H., and J. A. Patterson, “Nuclear Transmutations in Thin-Film Nickel Coat-
ings Undergoing Electrolysis,” (Second International Conference on Low Energy Nuclear
Reactions, College Station, TX, Sept 13–14, 1996), (Journal of New Energy, vol. 1, No. 3,
1996), page 5.
10. Infinite Energy, vol. 6, No. 35, p. 22.
11. Infinite Energy, vol. 6, No. 36, p. 17.
12. McKubre, M. and Martin Fleischmann, “ACS Session on Cold Fusion,” (Video record.
Cold Fusion Session, 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario, CA, October 1999).
Fleischmann, M., M. McKubre, et al., “ACS Session on Cold Fusion,” (Audio record.
Cold Fusion Session, 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario, CA, October 1999).
13. Chubb, Talbot, private communications, December 31, 1999.
14. Filimonov, Veniamin A., Vyacheslav Kobets, Alla V. Skitovich, “Self-Organization Processes
Under Metals Loading by Hydrogen Isotopes (Materials Science Basis for Cold Fusion and
Transmutation Technologies),” (Institute for Physical Chemical Problems, Belarus State
University, Minsk).
15. Fleischmann, Martin, and Stanley Pons, “Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O System: From Sim-
plicity via Complications to Simplicity,” (Elsevier) Physics Letters A, 176, May 3, 1993), pp.
118–129.
16. Preparata, Guiliano, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cold Fusion Calo-
rimetry,” (ICCF-6, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy, vol. 1, Oct. 13–18, 1996), p. 136.

Chapter 22
1. Park, Robert L., “The Fizzle in the Fusion”, (The Washington Post, May 15, 1991), p. B04.
2. Mallove, Eugene, private communications, June 7, 1991.
3. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, (University of Rochester
Press, 1992), p. 259.
Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
4. Huizenga’s name does not appear in the Britz bibliography, or in the Fox bibliography, nor
does his book make reference to any articles of his in professional journals.
5. KUED, University of Utah, “Off the Record,” 3-24-89, Fusion Press Conference, (Univer-
sity of Utah, KUED, March 23, 1989).
 Endnotes 393

6. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2d edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 243.
7. Fleischmann, M., S. Pons, and M. Hawkins, “Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of
Deuterium,” (Journal of Electroanal. Chemistry, 261, April 10, 1989), p. 308.
8. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
9. Ibid., p. 174.
10. Ford, Kenneth W., “Bishop Award,” Private correspondence, September 22, 1992.
11. Ibid.
12. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2nd edition, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 175.
13. Oriani, Richard A., private communication, August 6, 1998.
14. Nature, Editorial, “Farewell (Not Fond) to Cold Fusion,” (Nature, 90/03/29), p. 365.
15. Lindley, David, “The Embarrassment of Cold Fusion,” (Nature, Editorial, 90/03/29),
p. 375.
16. Canadian Broadcasting Company, “Too Close to the Sun,” (CBC/BBC, 1994).
17. Horgan, John, “Japan, Cold Fusion, and Lyndon LaRouche,” (Scientific American, May
1992), p. 53.
18. Piel, Jonathan, ed., Scientific American, personal communications: official letter to Jed Roth-
well, December 3, 1991.
19. Jed Rothwell, private communications, 1991.
20. Koshland, D. E., Jr., “The Confusion Profusion,” (Science, editorial, AAAS, vol. 244, May
19, 1989), p. 753.
21. Amato, Ivan, “Pons and Fleischmann Redux?,” (Science, AAAS, May 14, 1993), p. 895.
Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O System: From Simplicity
Via Complications to Simplicity” (Physics Letters A, 176, May 3, 1993), pp. 118–29.
22. Blum, Deborah, and Mary Knudson, eds., A Field Guide for Science Writers, (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press). Kerr, Richard, “Science Journals,” p. 33.
23. Dagani, Ron, “New Evidence Claimed for Nuclear Process in “Cold Fusion,” (Chemical &
Engineering News, April 1, 1991), p. 31.
Zurer, Pamela, “CF Device Hits the Market,” (C&EN, Nov. 18, 1996),
p. 9.
Dagani, Ron, “Cold Fusion Lives—Sort Of ” (C&EN, April 29, 1996), p. 69.
24. BBC, “Science Now”, (Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library, 4451, Box 2b).
25. Beveridge, William I. B., The Art of Scientific Investigation, (New York: Vintage Books, 3rd
edition, 1957).
26. Close, Frank, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1991), pp. 320–23.
27. Ibid., p. 319.
28. Ibid., p. 323.
29. Taubes, Gary, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1993), p. 441.
30. Ibid., p. 135.
31. Ibid., p. 134.
32. Taubes, Gary, “Cold Fusion Conundrum at Texas A&M,” (Science, AAAS, June 15, 1990),
pp. 1299–1304.
33. Taubes, Gary, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1993), p. 271.
34. Fleischmann, M., and S. Pons, “Our Calorimetric Measurements of the Pd/D System: Fact
and Fiction,” (Fusion Technology 17, 669, July 1990).
394 excess heat

35. Taubes, Gary, Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1993), p. 270.
36. Ibid., p. 273.
37. Park, Robert L., “The Undead: A Review of ‘Nuclear Transmutation’,” (“What’s New” Bul-
letin of the APS, 1999).
38. Park, Robert, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000).

Chapter 23
1. Goodstein, David, “Pariah Science; Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion,” (The American
Scholar, Autumn 1994), p. 528.
2. Passell, T., and M. McKubre, personal communications.
3. Infinite Energy, Jan-Feb. 1997, no. 12, first column, p. 24.
4. Blum, Deborah, and Mary Knudson, eds., A Field Guide for Science Writers, (Oxford, UK:
Oxford, University Press, 1997), pp. 12–13.
5. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
6. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
7. Ibid., p. 87.

Chapter 24
1. Morrison authored one of the four critiques of the Fleischmann and Pons papers on calo-
rimetry.
2. Lindley, David, “Noncommittal Outcome; NSF-EPRI Conference,” (Nature, vol. 341, Oc-
tober 26, 1989).
3. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2d edition, (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993), p. 209.
4. Morrison, Douglas, “Report on Eighth ICCF,” (sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway). Morri-
son’s report to the Newsgroup.
5. Broad, W. (New York Times, Mar 23, 1999).
6. Livio, Mario, The Accelerating Universe, (New York: Wiley, 2000).
7. Morrison, Douglas, “Report on Eighth ICCF,” (sci.physics.fusion/Mail Gateway).
8. Broad, W., (New York Times, Mar 23, 1999).
9. Huizenga, John R., Cold Fusion: Scientific Fiasco of the Century, 2d edition, (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993), p. 59.
10. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research (AIR)) pp. 3, 12.
11. McKubre, Michael, “Anomalous Heat Pproduction from Hydrogen Saturated Palladium,”
(Preprint of SRI International for the 35th ACS Western Regional Meeting, Ontario Con-
vention Center, CA, 8 October 1999).
12. Ibid.
13. Preparata, Giuliano, QED Coherence in Matter, (World Scientific Int. Publisher, May 1995).
14. Preparata, Guiliano, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cold Fusion Calo-
rimetry,” (ICCF-6, vol. I, Oct. 13–18, 1996), p. 136.
15. Scaramuzzi, Franco, “Ten Years of Cold Fusion: An Eye-Witness Account,” (Accountability
in Research (AIR)).
16. Canadian Broadcasting Company & BBC, “Too Close to the Sun,” (Witness CBC/BBC,
aired April 4, 1994).
17. Ibid.,.
 Endnotes 395

18. Close, Frank, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1991). p. 223.
19. APS, Bulletin, vol. 36, No. 4, April 1991.
20. Park, Robert L., Pigs Don’t Have Wings: When Scientists Fool Themselves, (San Jose, CA:
American Physical Society, March 22, 1995).
21. Park, Robert L., private communication, September 26, 1996.
22. Frost, Robert, “Thoughts on Receiving the Gold Medal,” (From Collected Prose, Poems, and
Plays, The Library of America, Penguin Books USA Inc.), p. 779.
23. Bernstein, Jeremy, “The Merely Very Good,” (The American Scholar, Winter, 1997,) p. 31.
24. Koonin, Steven, “Personal interview by Douglas Smith,” (Box 3–0, Coll. 4451, Kroch Li-
brary, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, May 8, 1989).
25. Canadian Broadcasting Company & BBC, “Too Close to the Sun,” (Witness CBC/BBC,
aired April 4, 1994).
 Index

NOTE: Page numbers in bold refer to captions or summations. Lowercase letter n refers to a
footnote or endnote.

AAAS: see American Association for the commercial development of, 290–
Advancement of Science 302
acceptors, 122, 135 critical reviews about, 5
described, 54–55 defined, 23n
versus skeptics, 88 DOE panel and, 95, 97
Access to Energy (newsletter), 197 experiment, described, 6–9
ACS: see American Chemical Society Fleischmann and Pons published papers
AIP: see American Institute of Physics on, 31–32, 328
alchemy, 42n, 263 see also Preliminary Note
aluminum, 197, 198, 210, 257 gamma rays and, 268, 270–271
Amarillo, Texas, laboratory, 231 high heat levels and, 212–214
American Association for the Advancement Huggins and, 196, 199
of Science (AAAS), 15, 79, 303, Huizenga and, 305–309
305, 316, 318 Koonin refutation and, 74
see also Science Lewis and, 72–73, 76
American Chemical Society (ACS), 15, 80, McKubre and, 189, 192–193, 194n,
311, 317 204
see also Chemical & Engineering News measurements of, 4, 11, 14–15, 52–53,
American Institute of Physics (AIP), 310– 177, 212
312 Mengoli and, 216, 290
American Nuclear Society (ANS), 142 Miles and, 200, 289
American Physical Society (APS), 17, 80, Mills and, 297
88, 92 Mizuno and, 323–324
Baltimore meeting of (1989), 16, 44, 68, Oriani and, 195–196, 198, 210, 313
327 palladium cathode and, 299
American Scholar, The, 16, 106, 326 reproducibility of, 165, 169–176, 290–
Anderson, M. R., 346 292, 298
anomalous power, 12, 66, 92–93, 217, 300 Scaramuzzi and, 329
acceptors of, 54–55, 275, 287 skepticism and, 62, 83, 86, 181, 303,
burst of, 45–46 305–325
calibration of, 182–184 source of, 88–89, 288
calorimetry and, 50, 70, 119–123, theory for, 273–275, 283
331 three persuable topics and, 27

396
 Index 397

validity of, 18, 150–152, 157–159, 185– Bard, Allen J., 96–97, 178–180, 329
188, 187, 204–208, 205 Bardon, Marcel, 89, 92
Wilson and, 188 batteries
ANS: see American Nuclear Society automotive, 49
antimony, 269 electrochemistry and, 32–33, 41
Aoki, T., 205 Bauer, Henry H., 139, 151, 163–166
Appleby, A., 205 bead technology, 268–269
APS: see American Physical Society Beckman, Petr, 81
Arata, Yoshiaki, 200–202, 203, 237, 242, Beckman scintillation counter, 22
347–349 believers, 83, 89, 134, 169, 310, 314, 324,
experiment of, 212–213, 235–236, 252– 344, 352
254 versus acceptors, 54
Arrhenius, Anna-Lisa, 148 described, 16
Arrhenius, Ester, 148 skepticism and, 222
Arrhenius, Olav Vilhelm, 148 BEPR program, 294–296
Arrhenius, Sven, 148 Bernstein, Jeremy, 353
Arrhenius, Svente, 100, 145–148, 354 Bertalot, L., 205
Ashley, Kevin, 36 Beveridge, W. I. B., 100, 113, 133, 137,
atoms 152, 162–164, 274, 303, 319
defined, 10n Bewick, Alan, 28
described, 5–6, 27 Bhabha Atomic Research Center (India),
deuterium, 6, 71–72, 202, 221, 223, 259, 260
227, 242, 277, 280 biography
gamma rays and, 265 of Fleischmann, 29–32
helium, 33, 104, 228, 230–231, 233, of Pons, 27–29
236, 239 Birnbaum, H., 329
helium-four and, 224, 225, 229, 232, Bishop, Jerry E., 167, 310–312, 352
243 Blacklight Power Corporation, 296–297
hydrogen, 33 blank cells, 121n
versus ions, 146 Blondlot, René-Prosper, 62–64, 85, 330
lattice of, 35n, 275–276, 278 Blum, Deborah, 333
palladium, 277 Bockris, John O’M., 30, 31, 42n, 182,
perfect environment for, 180 320, 329, 356
plasma physicists and, 62 helium-four and, 225
surface, 179 tritium and, 245–248, 250
tritium, 102, 246, 254 boron, 216, 231, 251, 257
Auden, W. H., 353 Bressani, Tullio, 206, 238, 240, 240, 242–
243, 346
BAAS: see British Association for the Ad- Brigham Young University (BYU)
vancement of Science calorimetry at, 119–123
Baltimore, Md., 59–76 institutional conflict and, 44
American Physical Society meeting of British Association for the Advancement of
(1989), 16, 44, 65, 68–69, 79–81, Science (BAAS), 30, 79, 317
92, 103, 108, 135, 223, 287, 345, Broad, William J., 74
350 Bromley, D. Allen, 61
Koonin and, 68, 69, 73, 75, 351–353 Brookhaven National Laboratory, 106n,
Lewis and, 73, 75, 81, 84, 90, 103 114, 145
Morrison at, 66–67 Brophy, James, 20, 350
press conferences and, 77, 118 Buehler, David B., 122
398 excess heat

bursts, 47–49 criticism and, 99, 101–102, 104, 113–

of energy, 213 114, 116–117
of neutrons, 260–262 described, 5
Bush, Benjamin F., 251–252, 312, 356 DOE panel and, 92, 96
helium-four and, 226–233, 236, 238, of electrochemistry experiments, 222
242 errors and, 322
helium-three and, 251–252 errors in, 73
Bush, Robert T., 205, 209–210, 242, 330 experiments and, 70
BYU: see Brigham Young University Fleischmann and, 31
Fleischmann and Pons cell and, 75n, 76n
cadmium, 269 Fleischmann and Pons experiment and,
Caldwell, Dennis James, 149, 178–180 67, 331
Caldwell, Karen D., 148–149 Fleischmann and Pons publication of,
calibration, 114 25–26
Hansen, W., and, 118, 187 Goodstein and, 328
Huggins and, 198 helium-four and, 221–222, 226, 228,
importance of, 182–184 232, 236, 239, 244
Oriani and, 194 helium-three and, 251
palladium and, 225 Huggins and, 197
Taubes and, 321 Lewis, N. S., and, 82
calibration heater, 38 McKubre and, 95n, 191–193, 212
California Institute of Technology orthodox science and, 9
(Caltech), 82, 99, 106, 110, 114– peer review of, 25, 141
115, 136–137, 145, 223, 274, 288, precision, 291
326–329, 331–332, 350 protocol failure and, 167–168, 170
cold fusion publicity and, 78–80, 82 recombination and, discussed, 11, 50
judgement at, 68–71 Samios and, 85, 87
California State Polytechnic University, science writing and, 335
209, 330 skepticism and, 304, 306–309, 313,
calorimeter, 52–53, 56, 75n, 181, 183, 317, 324
191, 193, 212–213, 292, 347 skeptics and, 62, 134
Fleischmann and Pons cell as, 27, 126, Caltech: see California Institute of
353 Technology
Gozzi and, 238 Calvet calorimetry, 251
Huggins and, 197–198 Cargo Cult Science, 101
isoperibolic, 46n Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, 29
margin of error of, 50, 99 Case, Leslie C., 236, 297, 299
Miles and, 198, 227–228 experiment by, 210–212, 239–244
types of, 176 catalytic processes, 29
see also Seebeck calorimeter cathodes
calorimetry, 9, 25, 31, 62, 67, 70, 73, 75n, anomalous power test and, 112–113
76n, 82, 85, 87, 92, 96, 134, 141, Arata and, 200–202
203, 205n, 287, 291, 297, 328, Arata experiment and, 236–237
331, 335, 337–339, 353 Arata special design for, 212
anomalous power corroboration and, calibration and, 183
205n helium-four and, 224–225, 229–231,
at Brigham Young University, 119–123 233–234, 239
controversy about, 343 helium-three and, 251–254
corporations and, 297 high power levels and, 212–214
 Index 399

niobium, 299 cold fusion, 62

palladium, 71, 131, 177–179, 288– conflicting use of term, 41
289 as fusion at room temperature, de-
posthumous heat and, 209–210, 216 scribed, 24
power burst and, 46, 48n, 48–52 as heresy, 27, 72, 79
reproducibility and, 167, 291 mélange of, 94, 306, 349
secrecy and, 55 neutrons and, 262
tritium and, 248–249 public stage of development of, 287
Wolf experiment and, 257–260 cold fusion cell experiment, complexity of,
see also palladium electrode 130
Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge Univer- cold fusion research, 61, 64, 67–68, 71,
sity; England), 63 109, 111, 177, 201–202, 204, 205,
Cecil, F. E., 280–282 213
Celani, F. A., 205, 356 between 1989 and 1999, discussed, 12–
cells: see batteries; calorimeter; Dewar flask; 14
electrolytic cells; Fleischmann and DOE panel and, 84, 92, 95
Pons cell due discipline and, 344–345, 347
C&EN: see Chemical & Engineering News outlook for, 287–302
ceramic materials, 210, 290, 299 outspoken physicists and, 61
perovskite, 210n pathological science and, 65
CETI: see Clean Energy Technology, Inc. politics and, 98, 292–293
Chadwick, James, 63 press conferences and, 77, 80, 83
Chambers, George P., 280–281 protocols for, 160, 162, 167
Charles Emmanuel, 28 Scaramuzzi and, 298
Charles University (Prague), 212 see also International Conference on
Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), Cold Fusion
15, 80, 135, 317, 343 complex, term discussed, 130n
see also American Chemical Society complicated experiments, 130, 132, 151,
chemists 179, 181, 259
anomalous power measurements and, conservation of energy principle, 53, 55,
222 131, 165, 176, 309
nowhere to be found, 167 described, 51
chronology of events, 361–365 control experiments, 11, 24, 53, 55, 87,
Chu, Paul, 70, 137 112–113, 162, 224, 229, 241,
Chubb, Scott, 355 252–253, 349
Chubb, Talbot, 355 conventional protocol, 133, 168, 234,
Cincinnati Group, 271 306–307, 313, 344–345
Clarke, W. H., 254 described, 4
Claytor, Thomas N., 248–249, 264, 295 Crease, Robert P., 84–87, 161–162
Clean Energy Technology, Inc. (CETI), critics, 19, 99–126
268, 271, 296 Curie, Marie, 3, 301
Clève, Per Teodor, 147–148 Curie, Pierre, 3–4, 10, 44, 87, 130, 172,
clones, 131, 173 324–325, 339
Close, Frank, 221, 244, 317–319, 339, Curie measurement, described, 250n
343
cloud chamber, 318n D: see deuterium
coherent multibody, 347 D2O, 6, 93n, 212, 214, 231, 246
Scarmuzzi comment on, 349 see also heavy water
Cöhn, Alfred, 33, 238–239 Dahlgren, Karen, 148–149
400 excess heat

Dahlgren, Tore, 148 vacuum in, 6, 8n, 14, 37, 48n, 76, 81,
data sets, importance of, 113–114, 116, 115, 182, 186, 321
171, 186, 246, 279, 337 see also Fleischmann and Pons cell
Davis, Bergen, 63–64, 133 Dirac, Paul A. M., 353
Dee, Philip I., 273, 318–319 DOE: see Department of Energy
definitive experiment, 61, 75, 151, 181 DOE Panel: see Panel on Cold Fusion
degenerate science, 67, 162 Doty, Paul, 140
De Ninno, Antonella, 356 due discipline, 344–345
Department of Defense, 293 Durham, University of, 30, 33
Department of Energy, U.S. (DOE),
322 Eagleton, Robert, 209, 330
energy policy and, 60 ECS: see Electrochemical Society
Fleischmann and Pons proposal to electrical current, 66, 146, 210, 214
(1988), 41 used in Fleischmann and Pons experi-
Panel, 91–98 ment, 7, 37, 38
Santa Fe meeting (1989) of, 83, 213 electrical excitation, 47, 66, 210, 214,
see also Energy Research Advisory Board; 216–217, 268
Panel on Cold Fusion electrical superconductivity, described, 4
deuteride, 75n Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI),
deuterium, 6, 27, 34, 37, 69n, 71–75, 136, 87–90, 92, 95–96, 115, 121, 141,
179, 182, 202, 277, 280, 295, 297, 168–169, 184, 194, 264
328–329, 342, 348 helium-four and, 224, 226n, 235
ceramic materials and, 210 see also NSF/EPRI Conference
fusion and, 27, 108, 110–111 Electrochemical Society (ECS), 77, 81,
helium-four and, 221–225, 224, 227, 104, 213, 223, 291
230, 232–234, 236–239, 241–242, electrochemistry
244 calorimetry and, 222
helium-three and, 251–252, 254 described, 40
hot fusion and, 24 experiment with, 3
and palladium experiment, 31, 34, 247– good laboratory practice and, 110
248, 259–260, 264–265, 268 Hansen, W., and, 203
posthumous heat and, 210–212 helium-four and, 221–222, 227
power burst and, 50 kitchen experiment and, 85
titanium and, 222 reproducibility and, 165–166
tritium and, 245–246, 248–249 science writing and, 335
validation and, 204 skepticism and, 307
deuterium-deuterium fusion, 18–19, 22, surface-catalyzed, 177
62, 88, 94, 232–234, 239, 281 unidentified error and, 170
described, at press conference (1989), 20 electrolysis
gamma rays and, 252 calorimetry and, 119
deuterons, 210, 232 recombination and, 253–254, 259–261,
Dewar flask, 8n, 20–21, 124 269, 295, 299
calorimetric experimentation and, 14 variety of method and, 145
decision about, 37 electrolyte solution, 73, 186, 198, 246, 268
described, 14, 37n heavy water with lithium, 38
described, at press conference (1989), 20 electrolytic cells
introduction of instrumentation and, 14 anomalous power in, 207, 290
 Index 401

basic rule and, 176 ENECO, 296

calorimetry and, 119–120 energy conservation, 51–54
cathode coating and, 289 Energy Department, U.S.: see Department
complex experiments and, 130 of Energy
complicated experiments and, 180 energy policy development, U.S., 59–60
conventional science and, 32 Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB),
decision to use, 35 91, 94, 326
design of, 70 see also Department of Energy; Panel on
dueterium fusion in, 324 Cold Fusion
explanation of, 85 enthalpy, excess, 8
Fleischmann and, 30 epiphany, author’s, 11–12
light water and, 113 Erice, Italy, 69
neutrons and, 255, 259–260 ETEC/Rockwell, 224–225
posthumous heat and, 214 ethical procedures, lack of, 93
transmutation and, 263 excess heat
tritium and, 246 acceptors of, 54–56
types of, 209 basic rule and, 174–175
variety of method and, 144 believers and, 83
electrolytic experiments, 34, 38, 41, calibration and, 182–184
96 cold fusion and, 25
radioactivity remediation and, 271 critics and, 104, 113–123
surface chemical reactions in, 34 data and theory conflict and, 300
with tritium, 246 described, 10n
electrons, 4 empirical evidence for, 209
beam welding and, 202 in Fleischmann and Pons experiment,
beta emission of, 154 38, 40
described, 27 gamma rays and, 258, 264–265
Fleischmann and Pons cell and, 35 generation of, 8
helium-four and, 222 impurities and, 110
hydrogen and, 6, 32–33 loading and, 71–72
power burst and, 45 low-energy nuclear reactions and, 294–
surface chemistry and, 179 297
elements, 6, 35, 71, 147, 202, 228, 252, measurement of, 42–43, 43, 52–53
277–279, 295 in nickel/light water electrolytic system,
described, 27 210
deuterium (D), 6 original claims and, 22
germanium, 43 during original experiment, 22
helium, 222n, 298 orthodox science and, 10
hydrogen (H), 6 posthumous heat and, 209–214, 216–
neon, 238, 238n 217
palladium, 21, 22, 24 press conference and, 78–80, 85
radium, 3–4, 10 reproducibility and, 289, 292
transmutation of, 263–267, 269–271, skeptics and, 134
323 Taubes and, 320
tritium (T), 6, 245–254 theory and, 274
see also individual elements tritium and, 248
Elund, Erik, 147 unidentified error and, 169–171
402 excess heat

excitation, 141, 210, 224, 258n, 278–279, cell of, described, 38–41
289–290, 318–319, 349 cold fusion label and, 25
exothermic reactions, 122n, 278 conventional science and, 32–33
experiments described, 17
in alchemy, 42n, 263 errors during, 43
complicated, 129–132, 173, 177–179, higher excess power levels and, 213
259, 270 lack of controls and, 24
definitive, described, 61 meltdown and, 35–37
failed, 5, 12, 66, 71, 106–110, 109, nuclear measurement and, 42–44, 52–
125, 185, 322, 350 53
see also failed experiments published articles of, 21, 23, 43
reproducibility of, 12 see also Preliminary Note
transport of, 235–239 Footlick, J. K., 82
Eyring, Theodore, 356 Ford, Kenneth W., 310
Frost, Robert, 352
failed experiments, 5, 12, 66, 71, 106–110, funding issues
109, 125, 185, 322, 350 corporations and, 296
pathological science and, 66 described, 53–54
summation of, 109 DOE panel and, 92, 95, 96, 345
false negative results, 15, 132, 158–159, helium-four and, 232, 235
338, 342 hot fusion research and, 74
defined, 15n peer reviews and, 139
falsifiability, 176, 300, 308, 345–347 protection of, 334
Faradaic efficiency, 8n transmutations and, 294
Feynman, Richard, 101, 166 U.S. government and, 59–60
Filimonov, V. A., 299 fusion: see cold fusion; hot fusion; nuclear
fish in a lake analogy, 108 fusion
fission, 51n, 264, 275, 279, 283 Fusion Power, Inc., 297
see also fusion fusion science, 62
Fleck, Ludwick, 151–154, 158, 270, 337 Fusion Technology, 18, 142, 212, 313
Fleischmann, Martin, 205, 356
biography of, 29–32 Gajewski, Ryszard, 41n
doctoral thesis of, 34 Galileo, 14, 55n, 126, 157, 171, 176, 337–
introduced, 6 338, 347, 353
meets Pons, 28 gamma rays, 9, 70, 75, 104, 233, 241,
with Pons, in Millcreek Canyon, 34 244, 252, 275, 279, 312, 314n
at press conference, 20 detector for, 43, 102, 123, 257
see also under Fleischmann and Pons neutrons and, 255, 257
Fleischmann and Pons cell, 38–41 transmutations and, 263–272
commercial value of, 290–302 gamma-ray spectrum, 22
energy from, compared with battery, 49 General Electric Co., 117, 188, 297
neutrons and, 262 Gerischer, Heinz, 203, 227
tritium and, 245 germanium detector, 43, 256
Fleischmann and Pons experiment Goodstein, David, 68, 99, 106, 136, 317,
acceptors of, 54–56 326–331, 340
calorimetric measurements and, 213– Gozzi, D., 238, 242
214 Guruswamy, S., 205
 Index 403

H: see hydrogen heresy

Hagelstein, Peter L., 274–276, 348, 355 cold fusion episode as, 27, 72
Hansen, Lee, 119–123, 234 versus orthodoxy, 13, 17
Hansen, Wilford N., 5, 116, 118, 124, heretical arguments, in general, described,
186–188, 202, 205n, 347 13
Harwell, England, 31, 104, 114, 116, 145, high quality heat, 290, 299
332 Hills, Graham, 31, 189
Hasegawa, N., 205 Hoff, J. H. van’t, 148
Hawkins, Marvin, 21n, 40, 46n, 55, 223, Hoffman, Nate, 135, 222
346, 356 hold falsifiable, 345–347
Hazen, Robert, 160 hot fusion, 24, 258
heat, release of, 23–24 tritium and, 254
heat after death phenomenon, 145, 214– HTO: see tritiated water
217, 289, 300, 340 Huggins, R. A., 121, 196–198, 199, 347
see also posthumous heat Hugo, Mark, 205
heat discharge from radium, 3–4 Huizenga, John R., 67, 87–88, 142, 164,
heat energy 312, 318, 328, 330, 338–339, 343,
calories of, described, 5 348
see also calorimetry cold fusion credo of, 305–310, 306
recombination and, discussed, 11 DOE panel and, 91, 94, 98, 129
see also excess heat fiasco of, 304–305
heat flow measurements helium-four and, 221, 222–223
in Fleischmann and Pons cell, 37, 52– transmutation and, 263–264
53 Hutchinson, D. P., 205
versus nuclear products, 9–11 hydrides, 75n, 190, 227, 297
skills required for, 50 hydrogen
heat radiation Case experiment with, 211
in Fleischmann and Pons cell, 40, 45– cold fusion and, 27, 33
46 electrolytic cells and, 32–33
heavy hydrogen, described, 6 isotopes of, 5–6, 6, 25, 27, 35, 202,
see also deuterium 245
heavy water, 38 isotopes of, defined, 10n
described, 6 involved with nuclear reaction, 262
see also D2O and palladium experiments, 212
helium hydrogen, heavy, described, 6
cold fusion and, 27 see also deuterium
isotopes of, 221, 251 hydrogen in metals, 32
isotopes of, described, 23n
helium-four, 221–244 Il Nuovo Cimento A (Italian science jour-
analysis of, 224 nal), 104, 256
Fleischmann and Pons measurement of, IMRA Europe, 287, 291, 300
23 incoherence, institutional, 331–332
heat correlated, 226–235 India, 13, 79, 145, 259, 319
helium-three, 23n, 27n, 53, 222, 229n, Infinite Energy, 323, 356
237, 305 institutional incoherence, 331–332
measurement of, 224 instrumentation, variety of, 4, 14, 17, 30,
and tritium, 245–254 54, 64, 223–224, 232, 235, 260
404 excess heat

International Conference on Cold Fusion Knudson, Mary, 333

(ICCF) Koonin, Steven E., 62, 68–70, 73–76, 79–
second (1991; Como, Italy), 238 80, 115, 327–328, 330–331, 351–
fourth (1993; Hawaii), 327 353
fifth (1995), 204 Hagelstein and, 274–275
sixth (1996; Japan), 138 Koshland, Daniel E., 316
seventh (1998; Vancouver, Canada), 12, Kucherov, Y. R., 264
138, 211, 282n Kuhn, Thomas, 159
eighth (2000; Italy), 12, 138, 169–170,
238, 245 Langmuir, Irving, 25, 63–66, 67, 84, 86,
proceedings of, 19, 343 95, 133, 149, 161–162, 300, 316,
International Society of Electrochemists 322, 330, 344, 350
(ISE), 31, 74 pathological science criteria of, 65
iridium, 211 lattice structure, described, 35n
isoperibolic calorimeter, 46n Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
isotopes, 266, 269, 275n, 364, 365 (LLNL), 274
atomic measurement of, 10 LENR: see low energy nuclear reactions
of bismuth, 256 Lewenstein, Bruce V., 355
of helium, 23n, 221, 251 Lewis, Derek, 205
of hydrogen, 5–6, 6, 10, 10n, 35, 202, Lewis, H. W., 23, 99
245 Lewis, Nathan S., 68, 70–73, 75–76, 80–
Italy, 13, 79, 145, 193, 287, 319, 346, 348 82, 84, 89–90, 92, 103, 110, 114–
Bressani in, 238 115, 118, 223, 327–331, 352
Cold Fusion Conference in, 12, 138, calorimetry report (1989) by, 5
169 helium measurement by, 223
helium-four and, 236–238 Li, Xing-Zhong, 356
Mengoli in, 216 Li, Liang Jun, 46n
Scaramuzzi in, 298, 327 Liaw, Bor Yann, 224–225
light water
Jaeger, Fred, 296, 356 Arata experiment and, 212, 252n
Japan, 13, 79, 315 Clarke experiment with, 253–254
cloning in, 173, 179 Miles experiment with, 228
Cold Fusion Conference in, 138 potassium salt and, 210
cold fusion research in, 145, 150, 214, Srinivasan experiment with, 259
216, 235–236, 258, 265, 287, see also heavy water
289 limited experiment, 23, 40, 53–54, 277
JEAC: see Journal of Electroanalytical limited experiment, described, 23
Chemistry Lindley, David, 82, 313–314
Jones, Steven E., 41, 44, 69, 104, 119, LiOD, 231
122, 234–235, 280n lithium, 38, 48n
Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry lithium sulfide in heavy water, 8n, 38,
(JEAC), 18, 21, 76n, 118 257
loading ratio, described, 71–72
Kainthla, 205 Lonchampt, G., 75n, 213
Karabut, Alexander, 264–266 London Financial Times, 16, 44
Kasagi, 282n Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL),
Kevles, Daniel J., 60 43, 64, 83, 95
kitchen chemistry, 21, 55 tritium and, 246–247
 Index 405

Los Angeles, Calif., meeting (May 8, miracles, 16, 53, 55, 87, 162, 176, 221–
1989), 77, 81–83, 104, 213, 223, 222
292 Mizuno, Tadahiko, 145, 356
low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), 270, ceramic materials and, 210, 210n, 290,
273–274, 277–278, 294–295, 319, 299
339 gamma rays and, 266, 267n, 269, 271
see also nuclear reaction helium-four and, 260, 261n, 262n
low quality heat, 298 nuclear transmutation and, 323–324
posthumous heat and, 214–216
Maddox, John, 24, 314 transmutation and, 265–266
Mallove, Eugene F., 356 modified Ramsey rule, 131–133, 171,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 177
(MIT), 12, 24, 27, 106, 114, 116, molecular lattice structure, 35
135, 145, 210, 274, 292–293, 297, molten salt electrolytes, 224
304, 332 Morrison, D. R. O., 5, 65–67, 118–119,
McKubre, Michael, 31, 48, 72, 75, 108, 169–171, 339, 343
121, 123, 141, 158, 168–169 Mössbauer effect, 275n
anomalous power and, 239, 339, 345, Motorola, 298
347–348 muon-catalyzed fusion, 41, 243
calorimetry and, 95–96, 212
described, 189–194 Nagel, David J., 110n, 299, 301–302,
electrochemistry and, 189, 191, 193 355
experiment replications by, 212, 241– Nancy, University of, 62
242, 253–254 NAS: see National Academy of Science
helium-four and, 226, 233, 235–236, National Academy of Science (NAS), 61,
236, 239 69, 138–140, 322
instrumentation and, 196, 202, 204, National Cold Fusion Institute (NCFI),
207 287–288, 290–293
laboratory of, 233, 235 National Science Foundation (NSF), 87
nuclear reaction and, 308 see also NSF/EPRI Conference
power bursts and, 181–182 Nature (London), 9n, 24n, 80, 125, 135,
McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), 140, 343
253–254 Fleischmann and Pons response in, 103,
meltdown, 35–37 113
Mengoli, Giuliano, 216–217, 289, 349, 356 Jones and, 44
metal lattice, described, 35n Koonin and, 69
metallurgy, 55 Lewis, N. S., article in, 84, 118
methodology, 13, 50n, 55 Lindley and, 82
Miles, Melvin H., 198–200, 216–217, Maddox and, 24, 314
233–236, 238, 242, 244, 294, 298, Morrison and, 169–170
312, 356 Oriani and, 120, 142n, 185, 232, 313,
helium-four and, 226–235 349, 351
reproducibility and, 289 position of, on cold fusion, 15, 168,
Miley, George H., 142–143, 267, 268– 312–313, 322, 338, 344
271, 294, 356 Salamon and, 103–104
Mills, Randell L., 53n, 296–297, 307n neon, 238, 238n, 248, 251
Ministry of International Trade and Indus- Nesbit, Robert, 20
try (MITI; Japan), 292–293 neutron particle radiation, 21, 41n, 43
406 excess heat

neutron radiation, during original experi- nucleus

ment, 22 described, 5
neutrons, 9, 255–262 hydrogen, 33
described, 5, 10n metal lattice and, 35
detection of, by Fleischmann and Pons,
23, 40 Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL),
lack of, in Fleischmann and Pons experi- 250, 250n, 256, 257n
ment, 36 Okamoto, M., 205
low rate of production of, 21, 66 Onnes, H. K., 87, 160n
Newcastle, University of, 30n, 33 onset of positive feedback, described, 48n
New York Times (NYT), 15, 74, 112, 304 Oppenheimer, Robert, 353
Sunday Magazine lampoon article, 25, Oriani, Richard A., 15, 121, 194–196,
84, 332, 344 265, 290, 355
nickel, 269 ceramic materials and, 210, 299
nickel/light water, 210 Nature submission of, 120, 142n, 185,
Nicolle, Charles, 163n 232, 313, 349, 351
niobium, 265, 299 perovskite ceramics, 210, 210n
nitrogen, 160, 225, 228, 230, 251 posthumous heat and, 217
noble gas, described, 228 Seebeck calorimeter and, 232
N-rays, 62–63, 66 orthodox views, 5, 337, 342–343
NSF/EPRI Conference, 87–90, 96, 115, Arrhenius and, 145–146
121, 141, 184 criticism and, 101, 105–107, 113
see also Electric Power Research Institute; due discipline and, 344–345
National Science Foundation Goodstein and, 326, 328
nuclear ash, 10, 221, 222 Maddox and, 314
nuclear fission: see fission nuclear physics and, 255
nuclear fusion claim Ramsey and, 131
Bush and Miles experiment and, 235 reaction to Utah experiment and, 9–11
described, 4 release of heat and, 23–24
press release for, 21 silent partner and, 331
nuclear physicists orthodoxy versus heresy, 13, 17
as principal skeptics, 10 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 146, 148
proof and, 14 Ota, K., 205
reaction to Utah announcement of, 23 overburden, ten items of, 26
nuclear physics
definitive experiments and, 61 Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNNL;
experiments in, 5, 279 Richland, Wash.), 253
versus other sciences, 13 Packham, Nigel, 246–247, 321
nuclear reaction palladium-deuterium experiments, 265
coherent multibody, 347 palladium electrode, 21, 36, 37
energy conservation and, 51 batch variations and, 55
fusion as, 27, 233–234 energy conservation and, 51
helium-four and, 221 higher excess power levels and, 213
hypothesis about unknown, 9–10, 23, Mengoli experiment and, 216
52–53 power burst and, 48n
see also low energy nuclear reactions palladium-hydrogen experiments, 265
nuclear theory, orthodox views of, 9–10 palladium (Pd), 22, 40
nuclear transmutation, 323 Case experiment with, 211
 Index 407

Cecil experiment with, 280–281 Peterson, Chase N., 20, 68, 114, 350, 356
helium-four and, 224 Petrasso, R. D., 24, 102–104, 319, 330
and hydrogen experiment, 212 phonons, 278
Miles experiment with, 228 described, 276
theory and, 277–279 Physical Review Letters, 275
Panel on Cold Fusion (DOE), 91–98, 119 physicists
Paneth, Fritz, 33 anomalous power measurements and,
Park, Robert L., 17, 80, 104–105, 161– 222
162, 304, 310, 328, 343, 352 hot fusion, 243
voodoo science and, 324–325, 340 physics
Passell, T. O., 264, 265, 355 particle, 61
patents, 138, 150, 290, 302, 322 university curriculum and, 59
Blacklight and, 297 see also nuclear physics
Case and, 211 Physics Letters A, 75n, 118, 316
Close and, 340 Piel, Jonathan, 315–316, 324
DOE panel and, 97 platinum, 34, 38, 211, 266
Hagelstein and, 274 platinum electrode, 21, 37, 260, 268, 289
Huizenga and, 87 polywater episode, 16
Patterson and, 268, 296 described, 64
University of Utah and, 21, 328 see also pathological science
pathological science, 19, 62–65 Pons, B. Stanley
described, 16 anomalous power generation, article on,
Patterson, James, 268–269, 296 46n
Pauli, Wolfgang, 179 biography of, 27–29
palladium-Boron cathodes, 231 calorimetry experiment reviews and, 5
palladium cathodes, 231, 289 commercial products and, 290–302
peer review helium-four and, 223–224
anomalous power corroboration and, introduced, 6
205 meets Fleischmann, 28
cold fusion studies and, 305 at press conference, 20, 223
of Fleischmann and Pons calorimetry, 67 see also under Fleischmann and Pons
Fleischmann and Pons cell and, 49–50, Pons, Joey, 35–36
75 Popper, Karl R., 53, 106–107, 176, 309,
Fleischmann and Pons experiment and, 326
41, 43 portable nuclear power, 302
Huizenga and, 309 positive feedback, onset of, 48n
importance of, 139–143 posthumous heat, 209–217, 235
low-energy nuclear reactions and, 294– see also heat after death phenomenon
295 potassium salt
orthodox science and, 17 light water and, 210
press conferences and, 78 power bursts, 45–56
protocol errors and, 341 described, 47–49
resolution and, 338–340 power (flow of energy), 10n
science writers and, 315, 333–334 Preliminary Note (Fleischmann; Pons), 66
skeptics and, 25–26, 50n, 134 neutron generation and, 255
Penner, Reginald, 71 palladium fused incident and, 36
perovskite ceramics, 210n peer review of, 43
Peters, Kurt, 33 as published article, 21, 23
408 excess heat

Preparata, Giuliano, 288–289, 299, 301, rhodium, 211

348–349 Rockwell International Corp., 230–231
press conference Royal Society (England), 6, 20, 31, 74,
on helium measurement (April 17, 273, 353
1989), 223 RR: see radioactivity remediation
at University of Utah (1989), 20, 44 Rudbeck, Sofia, 148
press releases, for nuclear fusion claim, 21, rumor-mongering, 26, 136, 143
44 ruthenium, 211, 264
proof, defined, 14n
protocol Saiensu, 315
defined, 8n Salamon, M. H., 103–104, 314
differences of, 13 Samios, N. P., 84–87, 161–162
proper, described, 4 Santa Fe DOE meeting (1989), 83, 213
of science, discussed, 8, 11 Sarasohn, Judy, 140
for scientific community, discussed, 4 Savvatimova, I. B., 264
protons Scaramuzzi, Francesco, 8, 51, 69, 89, 136,
described, 5, 10n, 27 156, 206, 298, 317, 340, 346, 356
deuterium and, 210 on coherent multibody, 349
hydrogen, 33 Goodstein and, 327–329
measurement of, 223n helium-four and, 238
laboratory closures and, 293
QMS: see quadrupole mass spectrometer reproducibility and, 289
quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS), theory and, 273, 283
236–237, 252–253 Science (AAAS), 15, 80, 130n, 294, 316–
quadrupole nuclei, 276 317, 320, 343
see also American Association for the Ad-
radiant heat transmission, 38, 40 vancement of Science
radioactivity, lack of, 36, 265 science reporting, 332–336
radioactivity remediation (RR), 270–272 science writer award, 311–312
radium Scientific American, 24, 80, 135, 140, 315,
heat discharge from, announcement, 3 322, 343
self-heating phenomenon of, 10 “Cold Nuclear Fusion” article in, 41
Ramsey, Norman, 91, 94, 98, 129–143, position of, on cold fusion, 15
151, 173, 177 scintillation counts, 22, 63, 246
reproducibility and, 165 Scott, C. D., 250, 256, 257
see also modified Ramsey rule secrecy, 14
recombination, 11, 50 acceptors and, 55
excess heat as, 228 ethical standards and, 136
reduction, data, 31, 118, 134, 186, 329, Fleischmann and Pons experiment and,
338, 346 43–44
replication, 288 in laboratories, 137–139
as a validating methodology, 13 palladium cathode and, 55
reporting, science, 332–336 press conferences and, 77n
reproducibility, 12, 288, 342 reproducibility and, 166
Case experiment and, 212 science writers and, 315
excess heat phenomenon, 210 Seebeck calorimeter, 194, 227, 232, 236,
neutron bursts and, 260–262 251
resolution, 337–354 see also calorimeter
 Index 409

selenium, 269 thermal measurements, 4, 122

silicon, 110 thermistor, 38
silver, 37, 186, 264, 265, 269 thin film experiments, 268–269, 280–281,
silver-deuterium experiments, 265 294–295
Simons, Jack, 61 threshold effect, 71, 107–109
skeptics, 19, 62, 88, 134, 303–325, 341 thulium, 147
anomalous power and, 221–222 titanium, 268
cold fusion research and, 303–304, 307, deuterium and, 136, 222, 280, 329
310, 312, 315–317, 320, 322, 324 tokamak reactor, 55, 62
Southampton, University of (England), 20, Toyoda, Minoru, 125, 291
34, 318 Toyota Motor Company, 125, 291
Fleischmann and Pons meeting at, 28–29 transmutations, 263–272
Fleischmann at, 30–31 tritiated water (HTO), 246, 250
McKubre at, 189 tritium, 6, 27, 246–250
spectrometers, 223, 241 claims for evolution of, 23
Case experiment and, 242 detection of, 246
helium and, 228 as hydrogen isotope, 245
helium-three and, 251–252 measurement of, 224, 225
integral mass, 238 during original experiment, 22, 43
quadropole mass, 236–237 see also helium-four
spectroscopy, 29 Trower, Peter W., 310
Spender, Stephen, 353 21st Century Science & Technology, 315
SRI International (Menlo Park, Calif.),
212, 226n unidentified error, 9, 168–174
Bush at, 226–227 unknown nuclear process hypothesis, 9–10,
EPRI and, 235 23, 52–53, 70, 87, 99, 101, 110,
Srinivasan, M., 259, 260 174–175, 209, 217, 306, 309, 320
Storms, Carol Talcott, 246 Utah, University of, 3–6, 10, 23–24, 34,
Storms, Edmund K., 45–46, 48, 205, 209, 356
246, 355 electrochemistry experiment at, 3–4, 32,
stove burner comparison, 22, 49, 192, 44, 348
212–213, 216 see also Fleischmann, Martin; Pons, B.
superconductivity, 4, 87, 157, 160, 181, Stanley
345 institutional conflict and, 43–44
supernovas, 4 Koonin and, 69
surface catalyzed electrochemistry, 29 Miles at, 227
surface chemistry, defined, 13n Morrison and, 66
sustained nuclear fusion claim, 4 Park and, 105, 352
Swartz, Mitchell R., 210, 355 patent applications by, 21
Szpak, S., 247 patents and, 296–297
Peterson and, 68
T: see tritium Pons at, 29, 31, 34
Takahashi, Akito, 257–260, 315 press conference at (1989), 20
Tandberg, John, 33 press releases and, 17, 19, 20–21, 77–
Taubes, Gary, 19, 274, 319–323, 343 78, 328, 330, 350
Technova Company, 125, 288, 291–293, Walling at, 61
315 Utah State Fusion/Energy Council, 116,
Thalén, Robert, 147–148 186
410 excess heat

vacuum chambers water bath, 8, 14, 22, 38, 40, 43, 45, 102,
experiments with, 14 104, 123, 199
Valdese, North Carolina, 28 Watkins, James D., 91, 94, 96, 98
validation, 185–208, 347–349 Wheeler, John A., 23
of anomalous power, 18 Wilson, R. H., 110, 113, 183, 188–189,
of cloning, 179 234, 297, 338
of cold fusion research, 348, 351 calorimetry experiment review (1992)
deuterium and, 204 by, 5, 76n
of excess energy flow, 44 critique, 117–119, 357–360
of experiments, 51, 181, 288, 294, 298 energy bursts and, 213
measurement of, 176 without exception, 17, 177–187, 306,
summation of, 205–207 308
Victor Emmanuel II, 28 Wolf, Kevin L., 257, 258, 264, 265
Vienna Radium Institute (Austria), 63 Wood, Robert W., 62, 64, 133, 300, 330
Vigier, J. P., 316
Violante, Vittorio, 356 Yale University, 61, 106, 114, 145, 332
Yamaguchi experiment, 211
Wake Forest University, 28 Yang, C.-S., 205
Waldensians, 28 Yun, K-S., 205
Walling, Cheves, 61, 82
Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 15, 84, 310– Zhang, Yue-Chang, 200
311, 322, 334, 348, 352 Zhang, Z. L., 205
Wassermann test for syphilis, 130, 145, Zinsser, Hans, 163n
151–154, 157–158, 173 zirconium, 271
SCIENCE/ENERGY/HISTORY OF SCIENCE

An investigative report prepared for the general reader to explain how the most extraordinary
claim made in the basic sciences during the 20th century was mistakenly dismissed through
errors of scientific protocol.

Excess Heat is not only a superb record of an extraordinary episode, but is also highly
entertaining.

Sir Arthur Clarke, CBE

Author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Excess Heat is a masterful presentation; clearly reasoned and argued.

Michael C.H.McKubre
Director, Energy Research Center
SRI International

Excess Heat a monumental work of scholarship and a great step to bring this very important new
phenomenon into the mainstream of science.
John O'M. Bockris
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry
Texas A&M University (Retired 1998)

Beaudette examines the controversy, and in doing so illuminates both the arguments and
methodology. This is a book that has been sorely needed for many years.
Peter L. Hagelstein
Professor of Electrical Engineering, MIT

Charles Beaudette was born in Boston in 1930. In 1952 he graduated

from MIT with a bachelor of science in electrical engineering. After
selling the instrument company which he founded (Dychro Corporation)
in 1961, he worked for ten years with EG&G Corporation, where he
specialized in image processing. During this time he participated in the
technology development for what became the office facsimile and the
PC modem. Now retired, Beaudette lives in Cumberland, Maine.

$27.95