MIT LENR Cold Fusion 101 IAP 2015 Live from Cambridge, MA

Transcript

I think it's a 20 23rd, but his wife would say it's the same number. Doesn't matter. Okay, it's time. Let's Let's get started. There's not so many of us this time, so One thing you might want to know, there's a lot of us.

There's a a live broadcast going on. A live broadcast this time. We're trying it out. Never done it before, but we're gonna see how it goes today. All right.

Nobody's watching right now. So careful those BOE crabs. Okay, we need a barometer over here number. Yeah. So let's get started.

Um welcome fusion 101. Um introduction to accessing flesh and pawns experiment in connection with flesh and pawns experiment. There's a lot of other things that happen. Um, tridium's been seen. Low level nuclear radiation's been seen.

Um, elemental anomalies have been seen. We're going to be focusing mostly on excess heat in the next few days. Um, Mitchell doesn't like this, but I feel compelled to have a warning in connection with this presentation. um people working in the field have noticed difficulties. Um their careers been impacted, their funding's been impacted, their ability to publish has been impacted.

So if you're thinking about working in the field, don't do so lightly. This this remains even in 2015 pretty dangerous field to be in. Why a new course? Well, lots of reasons. Um, people are close to having technologies that one would reasonably consider commercializing at this point. So, we need some understanding in order to move the field forward and to move towards commercialization.

Um, we need to understand things better in order to evaluate claims that can be made. Um, over the years, uh, I've been contacted quite a few times by folks wanting to move technology forward and work on commercialization and they say, well, can you recommend people that we could hire? So, there's no courses in the field. Nobody's trained up except for the few people working in the field. So we need a course to begin thinking about training workers. The areas controversial issues aren't settled and there's a lack of acceptance by the social community at MIT in the classroom.

I I note that controversial issues get as a matter of course. Um areas controversial coion not so much. um objectives of the course. Well, we're interested in why it's important. A big issue that's going to face us during the next few days is to separate the issues of known science from new science for cold fusion to work at all.

There has to be some new physics uh involved. On the other hand, we're going to be uh you'll be impressed by how much mileage you can can make on the problem by taking advantage of known science and non physics. Um there's going to be big implications for condensed matter physics and nuclear physics based on the experimental results that we're going to talk about. So let's get started. And the place to start in this day and age of course has to be Wikipedia.

According to the internet, cold fusion is a hypothetical type of nuclear reaction. Hypothetical not experimental hypothetical um which can operate near room temperature. Um hot fusion, conventional fusion study in nuclear physics, nuclear engineering science and engineering requires much higher temperatures. Um no current theoretical model as we will see. Um Wikipedia is not done.

Um if you Oh, a quick question. Will we be able to have the slides during the course or or after? Um, if if you email me, I'll send you a draft of I wasn't planning on posting. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt. That's okay.

Inter. Um so the article's long and talks about a lot of things and changes from year to year but we have it on the best of internet authority that in the flash and pawns experiment the rate of inferred excess heat generation in excess power it's in the range of 10 to 20% of the input power and that this could not reliably be replicated by most researchers. We've also got a plug for Nate Lewis who figured out that the excess heat in questions original paper is not even measured. That's that's pretty damning. um Shanahan working publishing from an ARM energy lab reports tells us that there's a lot of positive results recorded but the big headache is the signal to noise ratio that the signals are small the noise is large and cold fusion calorimetry is at or near limit of accuracy and precision.

So this would give you reason to doubt positive results for anyway the takeaway message from this of course the obvious takeaway message is if you can't trust with the PD then who can you trust um these days everybody already knows about co fusion they all know about flesh and pond's experiment in fact a few years ago my my wife was uh teaching um at the public school level and um one of the packets that was um made available was one that talked about cold fusion. Cold fusion was an example could be used to illustrate how bad science works. Um so cold fusion as a field has been discredited. Um if you work in the field, if you take an interest in it, other science will take advantage of you. Um and this gives us reasons why we have to spend some time think about it.

Then I get to the takeaway message first in the presentation. This is a time for me to pause and catch my breath and to entertain questions. if there's thoughts or comments or questions. If you could back up one slide, the top sentence there talks about um a high signal to noise ratio. That's actually a good thing.

Uh I think I think that's a typo. I think that was my only question then. Yeah, we can move on. Oh, no. I I have typos.

I'd like to get them fixed. I see typos, point them out. Other comments or thoughts or questions? Okay, let's think a little bit about the experiment. Here are flash bonds and here is the cell that's uh attracted so much controversy. If we look inside the cell, we see a cathode cathode.

We see a platinum anode wrapped around. Um you see uh inlets for um air for connectors. Uh gas comes out. In electrolysis you separate hydrogen and oxygen from water. In this case it's heavy water.

Um heavy water oxide. Um I think the Okay. Well, um, in this case, I I was looking to see if this was a dork in the original and I I don't remember later on. So, here's an example from the 1990 publication of a temperature uh excess. So, at this point, so there's a law starting at t equals z.

This is time in millions of seconds. So loading is occurring. Um at some point the the currents initially low for reasons which we'll be talking about a little bit later on. Currents raised up to a higher level and at some point um in this experiment a thermal effect is seen. So the temperature increases temperature in this case increases by a maximum of 27° centigrade and it goes on.

Um I guess the thing to note is that even back in the early days of call fusion in the experience of functional plots the effects were large effects mainly Shanahan tells us that the signal to noise ratio is is basically poor but there's lots of noise the signals are very small in this case the noise looks to be pretty Oh,