The World is about change. I have a story to tell you. A fantastic story that may change your life. It will probably change all our lives. The story doesn't have an ending yet, but we can all watch it unfurl before our eyes over the coming months. If what I’m about to tell you is true, we’re about to witness the greatest scientific discovery for 100 years. But first a bit of background... In 1989 two renowned and respected scientists amazed the world when they announced they had re-created nuclear fusion in a bottle. Fusion is the process that powers the sun - it is a nuclear reaction that combines (fuses) atomic nuclear together with the release of large amounts of energy. It has been a goal of many scientists for decades, spending billions of dollars on vast and complex machines to try and create the conditions of the sun on earth. To date, after spending an estimated 40 billion dollars they have produced not a single excess Watt of power (i.e. more energy out than they put into the machines). The announcement by Pons and Fleischmann might have amazed the public, but the scientific establishment was simply incredulous. A 20 th  Century Scientific Scandal What happened next was one of the scandals of the late 20th century, and probably not for the reasons you might think. Just how much of a scandal will become apparent. The Pons and Fleischmann experiment was soon dubbed Cold Fusion, because it could be done on a desktop and didn’t require the 100 million degree temperatures that the traditional ‘hot’ fusion scientists believed necessary. It’s called ‘hot’ Fusion because, at the huge temperature of the sun, Hydrogen atoms can fuse together to form Helium. In converting Hydrogen into Helium a small amount of matter is converted directly into energy, and thanks to Einstein’s famous E=MC² equation, a tiny amount of matter converts into a huge amount of energy. So since everything we knew about Nuclear Fusion, and that was quite a lot really, told us huge temperatures were required, you can understand just how startled the scientific world was by the Cold Fusion claims.  Within weeks scientists all over the world tried and failed to repeat the Pons and Fleischmann experiments.  So, not only was their claim pretty unbelievable, no one else could make it work. Not surprisingly the whole scientific establishment turned on Pons & Fleischmann. Cold Fusion was soon deemed a joke, junk science.    Here's what the New York Times had to say about it. It was typical of most of the press coverage at the time. Pretty hard hitting, and despite one or two exceptions, a pretty categorical ‘incompetent’ accusation of Pons & Fleischmann. I suspect this was doubly bad because their claims were so fantastic, offering the world so much, and yet were soon dashed. So where’s the scandal? The scandal was not what Pons & Fleischmann claimed, although they have since agreed they went about publicising their claims the wrong way. No, the scandal was how they were treated, and how every other scientist or claim in this area has been treated over the last 20 years. The scandal was not that a couple of incompetent scientists made a mistake. In fact they were top of their professions and had been repeating their experiments for quite a few years. You see it’s not true to say ‘all scientists failed to repeat the original Cold Fusion experiment’, although that’s what most people believe now. The scandal was the power and influence of a few well placed, but arrogant, scientists with an agenda and how they influenced the press and subsequent mass perception against Cold Fusion. The scandal was that for the last 20 years few scientists researching in this area have been taken seriously, no matter how illustrious their record and past. The result has been that a blinkered oppressive scientific establishment has prevented true science being done.  Not just any science, but perhaps the most important science to mankind. A growing number of people are coming to the same conclusion. Hover over the right- side panels to see what two Nobel winning physicists have to say about it. A few other scientists arrogant enough to believe that because they couldn’t repeat the experiment, the Cold Fusion effect didn’t exist, and they made sure the world knew it. The mud stuck. Cold Fusion was tarnished as ‘Junk Science’. Ask most scientists today about Cold Fusion and you’ll get an almost universal, and negative, if not outright hostile, opinion. That’s the power of a few influential people within the scientific establishment and the wider media (who don’t have much of an understanding of scientific matters anyway). The constant repeating of ‘it didn’t work and was never reproducible’ stuck. That’s what the majority of engineers and scientists believe to this day. It was what I believed until recently. But researching this whole area over the last few months I’ve been amazed to find just how much evidence there is for Cold Fusion, or at the very least, for inexplicable effects that ‘shouldn’t be possible’ according to current theory.  What’s more surprising, shocking even, has been the blinkered, even hostile reaction to much of this research. Science is all about curiosity. The world’s greatest discoveries have often been as a result of things not working as planned or expected; side effects or accidental discoveries while pursuing some other goal. Instead of just claiming, nose in the air, “impossible” and walking away, what good scientists should have done is ask questions. They should have been curious. Why did Pons & Fleischmann get it so wrong?  How come they claimed to have repeated the experiment over a period of years showing ‘impossible’ energy releases? It transpired that very occasionally, perhaps one in 50 times, other experimenters got results when trying to reproduce the Cold Fusion effect. Very occasionally other scientists reported small, but nonetheless inexplicable results. More heat was being produced than could be explained by any known process. A good scientist should have said ‘hang on a second, this is interesting, something very odd is going on. I need to look into this’. Unfortunately some have the opposite view and said ‘if it's not reproducible, it’s not science’.  This couldn’t be more wrong. Most new science starts as a subtle, usually not understood, anomaly. It’s nearly always unrepeatable, precisely because it’s not understood. Many of the greatest scientists have been experimentalists who try to work out why things are not repeatable, doing experiment after experiment, and slowly deducing more, learning more, until they have a theory of what might be happening.  With a theory they can do more experiments, to prove their theory. And if it doesn’t work they try to come up with another explanation. THAT IS SCIENCE. It’s all about Energy So the scientific establishment not only ran Pons & Fleischmann out of town and country, they strangled at birth what could have been a totally new branch of science. An area of research that is potentially the most valuable and important to humanity - energy. Energy isn’t just about how to heat your house, it’s oil and petroleum, coal, and gas. It’s transport, manufacturing, industry and even farming. It’s the heart of civilisation - everything that the modern world is built upon. But the unfortunate side effect of our unbridled demand for energy is that many people believe we’re damaging our planet, possibly beyond repair. So you can hardly exaggerate the importance of finding alternative energy solutions, especially clean and low cost ones. For the last twenty years if you had wanted to do some research into Cold Fusion not only would you not get taken seriously by the wider scientific community, you wouldn’t get funding and you wouldn’t be able to publish the results, no matter what your discovered. The ‘scientific establishment’ made sure the status quo was maintained, that the billions of dollars of funding continued to flow into ‘safe’ science that was understood, such as ‘hot fusion’ (and usefully employed tens of thousands of scientists around the world). It looks to me that the closed mindedness of the scientific establishment has done untold damage to human advancement. That is one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time. But the story doesn’t end there.  It looks as if things are about to change.... E=MC ² Energy = Mass times the speed of light (C) squared In simple terms, a very small amount of matter has a truly vast amount of energy locked up inside. The H-bomb is the perfect demonstration of how much energy. Brian Josephson said... Julian Schwinger said... When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Arthur C Clarke Although better known as a Science Fiction writer, Clarke was an excellent scientist and engineer, and the originator of the idea for Geo- stationary satellites in 1948. © Charles Moir 2011 Nobel physicist Julian Schwinger felt that cold fusion research was being suppressed and academic freedom violated. Wikipedia