Cold Fusion -Pons & Fleischman Style

["H.B. Knowles" <hbknowles@hbknowles.com>]

The major problems with Cold Fusion, University of Utah-Chemistry style , 
were the following:

	I. Theoretical:
		a. Basic Concept
		The original idea being pushed by Profs. Pons and Fleischman was that a 
block of Palladium could be electrochemically "stuffed" with Deuterium to 
such an exrtent that the barrier leakage between deuterium ions would cause 
the formation of  a He-4 + energy. Now the wave function of the 
neutron-proton separation in a deuteron is an exponential with an 
exponential decay length of (according to my notes ) 4.17 x E-12 cm It is 
simple to estimate from this value what the average deuteron-to-deuteron 
distance would have to be to produce any significant heat, and find  a 
loading of deuterium many orders of magnitude greater than what a Pd 
structure could maintain without rupture. So their basic explanation is 
nonsense

	b. Reaction and Hazard
		Something else that is wrong is their nuclear physics. The reaction 
suggested has never been observed (they were talking about "an entirely new 
kind of nuclear physics", and boy, was it!). The observed reactions are:

	D + D > T + P       and  D + D > He-3 + N

which occur in about equal proportions. The He-4 formation would 
necessitate a gamma emission, which is at least two orders of magnitude 
less probable than either of these, because it is an electromagnetic-force 
driven reaction. So if real nuclear physics occurs (as I postulate) every 
second cold fusion reaction produces a fast neutron, and, at the rate P & F 
claimed it occurred, anyone in the same room for a couple of hours would 
have been fried by the neutron flux, and DOA. They asserted that they had 
spent hours together in the same room with the "reaction", a few feet away.

	II Exprimental

		No one could (as stated) really replicate the effect. I will quote 
myself,  teaching nuclear physics to a class of seniors:"Neutrons are very 
difficult to count when you want to count them, and very easy to count when 
you don't want to count them."  After the first announcement, a lot of 
chemists and engineers (and maybe theologians) went to the local physics 
department and borrowed neutron counters and tried to replicate the 
results, not realizing  how tricky such counters can be. There is some 
testimony to this effect in other letters.
	
                III Political
		a. When P & F announced their discovery, they used a press conference. 
(not a letter to Phys Rev or other acceptable venue.)
		b. When asked several questions , such as what kind of Palladium they 
used, they refused to answer. This is not open science, but witchcraft.
		c. Most damning, as far as I was concerned, was that reaction of a 
Professor Jones (?) at BYU, who had been collaborating with P & F for some 
time. Weeks before the afore-mentioned press conference, Jones withdrew 
from the collaboration, and published a hastily thrown-together paper 
including a lot of similar phenomena, but mostly based on geological 
pressures that might have, for example, produced a tiny excess of tritium 
over natural abundance in the gases which came out of volcanos.( Observed) 
It was not as good a paper as might have been possible, given more time, 
but it was clear that he had rushed it to dissociate himself from the U 
Utah pair. This fragmentary work sort of validates Schwinger's suggestion 
about low-level  cold fusion.

Comment
The continuing fascination of  people with cold fusion is understandable: 
it is something for nothing. This is why industrial firms, all of whom 
worship only the bottom line and really do not want to believe the results 
that hard science produces, especially if the latter deny the prospect of a 
free lunch. I know of three or four industries (bet there are more) who, 
have tried to make cold fusion work, enlisting the support of 
(former)scientists who are trying to make a big hit with management. A guy 
was blown through a wall and thoroughly killed a few years ago in pursuit 
of this pot of gold.

I always get a bit defensive about cold fusion, because I was completing my 
doctoral thesis out of Luie Alvarez' office when the first fusion of  a 
proton plus a deuteron was discovered in a bubble chamber exposed to 
negative muons. Having just spent a lot of time correcting particle ranges 
from the existing calculations and data, I stated that the ejected muons of 
"anomalous range" were simply the results of  poorly understood 
range-energy correlations. In this simpleminded manner, I missed the chance 
to be one of the 25 or so persons who reported the cold fusion process in 
Phys Rev. Letters. The annoying thing was that I had all the data to have 
discovered it myself.
H.B. Knowles, PhD, Physics Consulting
4030 Hillcrest Rd, El Sobrante, CA 94803
Phone (510)758-5449
Fax (510) 758-5508
<hbknowles@hbknowles.com>
<www.hbknowles.com>

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