Rich,
I would be interested in any more comments that you have on this. I may bring this up to someone that I would prefer not to think of me as a "unicorn" believer.
Physics is probably near the bottom of my knowledge but my understanding is copper (of all things) is being produced as part of the reaction.
As Angela said, I am more interested in this from the perspective of the parallels of CFS and other things. Cold fusion got put in the category of cranks, snake charmers, etc and hardly anyone is talking about it despite there being some evidence that something might be there.
Best,
Andrew
Hi, Andrew, Angela and the group.
I understand your point about these unfortunate episodes in the history of science, and I think it's an important one to keep in mind.
I think it's in the nature of scientific research and human nature that these things are going to happen sometimes, even when everyone involved is well-meaning and trying to discover the truth. And incidentally. my experience as a working scientist over a period of 40 plus years is that generally speaking scientists are motivated to find the truth, even though they are subject to succumbing sometimes to the same failings that all humans have, including pride, fear, greed and the rest.
I think that the reason these episodes occur in scientific research is a combination of the "groping in the dark" nature of it, combined with a developed body of theory that people are tempted to believe is complete and correct. When you are trying to find out what's true in an area that no one yet understands, you don't have much to go on, and you just have to try things and observe carefully what happens. If you find something unexpected, you have to be willing and able to track it down to see if it is real, or if you have made some kind of a mistake, and this is not always easy to find out. If you can't attribute it to a mistake, and you have tried everything you know of to find that out, then you have to have the courage to tell others what you have found, risking that they might find an error in what you've done and prove to the whole world what an idiot you really are! If that happens, you will probably find it difficult to get funding for your next research proposal! That's why scientists don't share much about their unexpected results except with close friends until they are more sure of it. It takes guts to come out publicly with something really new and unexpected. Look at the gauntlet Judy has had to run!
From the theoretical perspective. it should always be kept in mind that all scientific truth is tentative. It's true unless and until new evidence from observation or experiment in the natural universe shows it to be false. This statement risks making the entire scientific enterprise look more "shaky" than it actually is, though. We are pretty sure of some scientific principles. Few of us are ready to challenge Newton's law of gravity (as modified by Einstein, of course) by jumping off a cliff. But there are other scientific principles that are less tested and less certain, and we need to maintain some kind of a balance between being open-minded but not "having a hole in our heads." That's not an easy thing to do, and I've made mistakes on both sides of that.
With regard to the particular episode that came to be called "cold fusion," it looks as though one fundamental problem that led to this debacle was that it was called fusion.
This was not possible for a valid theoretical reason; namely that fusion involves two nuclei coming together to form a heavier one, with the release of some energy in the form of energetic particles (neutrons in the case of the fusion of hydrogen isotopes).
The fact that the two nuclei have positive charges means that they will strongly repel each other initially according to Coulomb's Law (the so-called Coulomb barrier), and it's only when they get quite close together that they will attract each other by means of what is called the "strong nuclear force." To get them close enough together to be able to experience this attraction, you have to get them moving very fast, so that they will penetrate the Coulomb barrier when they collide and be able to experience the attraction due to the strong nuclear force, so that they will stick together and not just fly apart. (A rather clumsy analogy might be your girlfriend playing "hard to get" at first, until you make greater efforts to demonstrate your sincere interest!
)
Anyway, the only ways that have been found to do this are to accelerate one of them in a nuclear accelerator ("atom smasher") and slam it into the other one, or heat a gas containing both of them to a very high temperature while keeping it confined, so that they will bang against each other (plasma fusion) or laser fusion or the hydrogen bomb. Plasma fusion uses confinement by strong magnetic fields. Laser fusion and the H bomb happen fast enough that the reactants are inertially confined, i.e. they started out being close to each other, and don't have a chance to fly apart before they react by fusion.
So when Pons and Fleischmann claimed that they had achieved nuclear fusion basically in a test tube at room temperature, there was a good theoretical reason to doubt that. How could they have overcome the Coulomb barrier? And of course, the answer is that they hadn't, and what they were doing was not nuclear fusion, cold or hot.
There turned out to be good experimental reasons to doubt the claim of fusion, also. There were no externally observed gamma rays or neutrons, and there was considerable doubt as to whether any radionuclides were produced.
So there was no nuclear fusion, hot or cold, in these experiments, and that's where the matter stood.
But then there continued to be claims of excess heat being produced in experiments of the type initiated by Pons and Fleischmann, which were continued by a few "die-hards." Most scientists in the fusion field didn't take them seriously, suspecting that there was something wrong with their calorimetry (accounting for all the inputs and outputs of energy and heat). Doing accurate calorimetry in an open system is known to be very difficult.
But then, as I now understand it, a couple of guys who understood theoretical physics took these reports seriously, and started looking for other possibilities to explain how a nuclear reaction could be going on, even though the temperature was low and no neutrons or gammas seemed to be coming out.
They abandoned the notion of nuclear fusion and the involvement of the strong nuclear force, I would guess for the reasons I cited. That left only the weak nuclear force (there are only two nuclear forces known, at least, so far!
). How could the weak force be involved? I don't know how they came to it, but they decided to consider reaction of a proton (which is what a hydrogen nucleus is, and hydrogen was one of the two main constituents of the chemical systems being studied, the other being palladium) and an electron (free electrons (that is, electrons that are not tightly bound to nuclei in atoms) are abundant in metals, such as palladium). It was well-known that a neutron by itself is unstable, being held together by the weak nuclear force) and will decay by splitting into a proton and an electron. They got the idea that maybe this reaction could be reversed at a useful rate under the conditions of this type of experiment. (That was a real leap of faith, and if it pays off as it sounds like it might, I think they will be a shoo-in for the Nobel prize in physics.)
But then they went beyond this. What would happen to the neutron? Well, it would have very low predicted kinetic energy, and that would mean it would have a very high probability of being captured by nuclei in the area (a high "capture cross-section"). So that could explain why you don't find neutrons coming out of the test cells.
But when neutron captureeactions occur, the resulting nucleus becomes too rich in neutrons and moves out of the "valley of stability" on the chart of the nuclides. The result is expected to be that the nucleus will undergo beta decay, emitting an energetic electron. And the resulting nucleus will usually be in an excited state, so it will also emit gamma rays to get rid of excess energy and get down to its stable "ground state." So why don't we see betas and gammas coming out?
Well, they figured out an explanation for that, too. The betas and gammas are absorbed in very short distances under the conditions that exist at the interface of the metal and the hydrogen. I don't have a good grasp of this part yet.
Anyway, what it amounts to is that the experimental configuration used by Pons and
Fleischmann now appears to be able to produce excess heat output from a nuclear reaction that occurs under relatively low temperature conditions, but the reaction is not nuclear fusion, which involves the strong nuclear force, but nuclear reactions between electrons and protons, which involve the weak nuclear force. So those of us who maintained that nuclear fusion could not be induced in the system they were using were correct. The problem was that none of us (including Pons and Fleischmann) understood that this other nuclear reaction was involved and was even possible under their experimental conditions.
So what can we learn from this that can be applied to ME/CFS and the retroviruses? Well, I think we have to keep doing careful experimental work, keep our minds open to new theoretical developments, pray a lot (!) and hope for the best. I'm glad that the Lipkin study and the blood working group study are continuing. Note that the reason new developments came to light in the "cold" nuclear reaction field is that some die-hard experimentalists kept banging on it, even though most of their colleagues told them they were nuts, and some guys who understood theory were willing to stretch their minds into a previously unknown area.
Best regards,
Rich