The New Fusion World Luckily there were a few good scientists who did wonder about the Pons and Fleischmann claims. This tiny handful, regarded as mavericks by most of the scientific community, continued experimenting. Very slowly at first, they began to understand a little more about the anomalies. They couldn’t get published in any serious scientific journal, so they just carried on regardless. They were almost like an ‘underground’ organisation, quietly getting on with the job of research and experimentation. Year after year the research continued, but progress was slow. After 15 years, not only had hundreds of scientists repeated, in one way or another, the Cold Fusion effect, but they understood one of the main reasons why earlier experiments were so difficult to repeat (lack of hydrogen loading into the metal lattice). Instead of one in 50 experiments working, they got it down to 1 in 10, and in some cases much better repeatability than that. The effects were usually small, but just occasionally, like Pons & Fleischmann the effects were very large. Cold Fusion is real If you research it, as I and many others have done, the evidence for the Cold Fusion effect is overwhelming. If you don’t think so, then you haven’t done the detailed research. Or, more likely, like my original opinion, it just reflects the general perception or ‘common knowledge’ that Cold Fusion is bunk. In fact we were repeating the same old hearsay - the meme if you will.  We’ve been brainwashed by the same misinformation repeated by everyone else. Brian Josephson’s quote (right) is in fact, exactly right. And if that isn’t amazing enough, it gets a lot, lot better. The Italians Although little serious research was done in the USA or UK, ‘the establishment view’ made sure of that, Japan and Italy were a little more open-minded centres of research. In 1994 two Italian scientists published a paper showing excess heat in a new experiment using Nickel and Hydrogen. Quite different from the original Cold Fusion experiments, but claiming much the same result - transmutation (the conversion of one metal into another) and release of large amount of heat. The only possible explanation is some sort of unknown nuclear reaction. To cut a (very) long story short, recently two Italian scientists have not only achieved complete repeatability for their Cold Fusion experiments, but are producing astounding amounts of energy. (One of them, Professor Focardi, being one of the authors of the 1994 experiments. They’ve been at it that long.) The other engineer is Andrea Rossi, and he’s the guy who has made the major breakthroughs. He claims to have, and has demonstrated, not just the first fully controllable Cold Fusion device, but that one that can, on-demand, release very large amounts of energy. So the device is often called the Rossi Reactor. He calls it the ‘Energy Catalyzer’. Of course the sceptics don’t believe it, but there is now abundant and growing evidence that it is real (see next page). The implications of this are astounding. Flying Machines and Cold Fusion Before we go on, a small diversion to the Wright Brothers. There are some striking similarities between the situation of the Wright Brothers in in 1903 and the new Cold Fusion discoveries. The established scientific view in the early 1900s, was that powered human flight was impossible. Just as now the established scientific view is that Cold Fusion is impossible. It’s difficult to imagine a time, not just without flight, but without any belief that it would ever be possible. It’s mostly forgotten now, but the view that flight was impossible was so well established at the time, that it was years after the Wright Brother’s first flight before the scientific community or even the general public accepted it.  Scientific American magazine published an article ridiculing the ‘alleged’ flights four years after the first flight, even though there were plenty of witnesses, and even photographs. And just as it was many years after the Wrights flew, before scientists understood how flight worked, we still do not understand how Cold Fusion works, only that it does, finally, work. The quote, on the right, is a pretty accurate reflection of the path most radical discoveries and inventions have taken throughout history. I think it’s apt. A revolution cometh We are about to take part in a revolution that is as great as the discovery of electricity, or radio, or any of the foundation stones upon which our modern world is built. So why haven't I heard about this, you may ask? Why hasn’t the mainstream media run the story?  For exactly the same reason the established media would not run the stories about the Wright brother flights for years after it was a proven fact. The belief that it was impossible was so entrenched that people simply refused to believe it. And in the case of Cold Fusion people remember the fiasco last time it was hyped. But just as flight became a worldwide sensation when people realised it was for real, I believe the same will happen in the very near future. Cold Fusion is real and within a short period of time it will transform our world.  This website is simply part of that process, publicising something amazing to a sceptical world. The Internet is awash with people’s opinions (yes, I’m contributing to the noise) and it’s very difficult, and time consuming, to separate the wheat from the chaff. There’s a ton of nonsense written about Cold Fusion and unfortunately, for the credibility of the area, many of the ‘free energy’ sites are run by the pathologically gullible, or  conspiracy nuts (in my opinion) who can’t tell an obvious scam from the real thing. On some more serious websites, physics forums and like, the topic is usually dismissed outright and quite often a banned topic - see Brian Josephson’s comment about ‘censorship’ above. Where you can find discussion about it by serious scientists they usually repeat the same old ‘it’s impossible’ arguments. You’ll see comments like 'the Coulomb forces make fusion impossible at low temperature’. I prefer to keep an open mind, weigh the evidence, and if the evidence is strong enough but conflicts with the current theory, then the theory needs to be adapted. That’s the way science should work. The Nobel Physicist Julian Schwinger a supporter of the possibility of Cold Fusion, (who attempted to publish theory papers about it) kept repeating the quote, right, when lesser physicists argued that because hot fusion signatures were missing (e.g. lethal levels of radiation) Cold Fusion was therefore impossible. The point is that, right now, we do not have an adequate theory of how Cold Fusion works. The lack of a theory doesn’t make it impossible, just not understood. For decades no scientist would believe the idea of continental drift - that whole continents could move over the surface of the earth, despite abundant evidence that it was so. Times are a changing There is growing momentum for the acceptance that Cold Fusion is real. See the panels on the right for some quotes from scientists on the subject. Below are some links to addition data you might find interesting if you have an open mind on the subject. In 2009 the US Defence Intelligence Agency did a review, now unclassified, of the state of Cold Fusion (also called LENR). PDF File. Slides from a presentation (PDF file) by Nobel physicist Brian Josephson on how it is that real phenomena gets rejected by the scientific community. ‘The Future Of Energy’ podcast interview with Dennis Bushnell (see quote right). (MP3 file) An old, but good review of Cold Fusion in Wired magazine. 60 Minutes TV programme from CBS on Cold Fusion. Great layman’s summary. There are hundreds of published papers on the reproduction of Cold Fusion Effects. This an old one (PDF file), but unusual in that it’s by NASA in 1996, and doesn’t involve Deuterium but normal water (thus normal H2) and Nickel, and so is a bit closer to the Rossi materials. If you want a fully technical article, here is one by Pons & Fleischmann from 1993 that details large excess heat experiments. This document belies three myths about Cold Fusion; that the effect is always small, that Pons & Fleischmann were incompetent fools, and that no respected Peer reviewed journals published Cold Fusion research. This was published in Physics Letters, a prestigious and peer reviewed journal. Most of the above are dated before the recent Rossi demonstrations, which I believe change everything. From previously patchy, difficult to reproduce effects, we now have something dramatically better. Let’s look at the evidence for the new Rossi Cold Fusion Reactor. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer © Charles Moir 2011 You thought that [Cold Fusion] had been discredited perhaps? Wrong! It is true that a number of teams failed to replicate the experiment, but that does happen sometimes when the experimental conditions are critical. Other people persisted, and got results eventually. Why does one not hear about this? In a word, censorship.... Unlike the sceptics who prefer to criticise from their armchairs, I have gone ahead and visited no fewer than three laboratories where such research is going on, in order to get at the facts. Who will be the first editor of a major journal to bring this lunatic situation to an end, by being brave enough to publish such results as these? Then, maybe, there can be a concentrated effort to realise whatever potential there may be from this new energy source. Brian Josephson, Nobel Physicist, Cambridge A photo of the first flight in 1903 The Circumstances of Cold Fusion are not that of Hot Fusion. Julian Schwinger, Nobel physicist, when answering question as to why most of the expected side effects of hot nuclear fusion are missing from Cold Fusion experiments. There's very strong evidence that low-energy nuclear reactions do occur. Numerous experiments have shown definitive results - as do my own. George Miley, who received the Edward Teller medal for innovative research in hot fusion. I think we are almost over the “we do not understand it” problem. I think we are almost over the “this does not produce anything useful” problem. I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now. If it does, this is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo- economics, geo-politics, and solving climate issues. Dennis Bushnell, Chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center