Message sent to wikipedia editor

[Jed Rothwell]

Subject: Your article on cold fusion has a strong POV, for obvious reasons

Dear Mr. Wales,

Greetings.

I work as an editor and translator for a group of roughly 200 retired scientists and university professors who are working on cold fusion energy. I maintain a web page on the subject:

http://lenr-canr.org/

(It has a contentious headline at present, but that is only temporary. For the past two years we have avoided political statements of this nature, and we expect our disagreement with the DoE to be resolved soon.)

Your article on cold fusion expresses a strongly partisan point of view, which is contrary to your published policy. This is probably unavoidable. Cold fusion is a very contentious field, and most professional scientists believe the effect does not exist. Although your article is more open-minded and comprehensive than statements published by the Scientific American and some other mainstream journals, cold fusion researchers still feel it is biased.

Some of my colleagues have attempted to change the article, but these changes have been deleted by skeptics. I understand that you can "lock" articles, making them read-only, and you can impose a measure of informal editing or peer-review. Because cold fusion is so controversial, and there is such hostile skeptical opposition to it, and because those who support it are a small minority in the scientific community, I suggest you do so in this case.

I am in contact with all of the major researchers in this field, including the discoverer Professor Martin Fleischmann. If you can offer reassurances that contributions written by these researchers will not be erased or defaced, I would be happy to write some material representing their point of view. Here is what I propose to do:

I will write a revised version of your article, but before I upload it, I will circulate it to the researchers whose papers I cite in the footnotes, to confirm that I have accurately described their work. I will not delete any of the skeptical comments now in your article, although I may modify them slightly for clarity and to show that they are, in fact, skeptical. I would be quite willing to circulate the draft to whoever wrote the skeptical comments, to be sure their point of view is accurately represented.

This would be a lot of work. Frankly I am not inclined to do it unless you can offer assurances that my efforts will not be trashed and erased. Nor will I ask these busy researchers to take time out of their work to review the paper that will probably be erased.

Here is one example of what I think needs to be said. The article now reads:


"Energy source vs power store

While the output power is higher than the input power during the power burst, the power balance over the whole experiment does not show significant imbalances. Since the mechanism under the power burst is not known, one cannot say whether energy is really produced, or simply stored during the early stages of the experiment (loading of deuterium in the Palladium cathode) for later release during the power burst.

A "power store" discovery would yield only a new, and very expensive, kind of storage battery, not a source of abundant cheap fusion power."



I would change that to something along these lines:

Skeptics claim that while the output power is higher . . .

. . .

Cold fusion researchers point out a number of flaws in this argument:

1. There is no significant chemical fuel was present in the solution. The potential chemical energy and chemical storage of cells has been carefully inventoried [McKubre, Bockris] and it shown to be less than 500 joules, whereas cold fusion cells have produced between 50 and 300 million joules.

2. No chemical process can produce (or store) more than 10 eV per atom of reactant, [cite elementary chemical bond article] whereas many cold fusion reactions have produced between 1,000 and 100,000 eV per atom.

3. Many cells have produced significant excess heat after a short incubation period, so if there were energy storage, it would show up quite clearly as an energy deficit (an endothermic reaction). Small endothermic reaction such as the initial formation of palladium deuteride are readily observable with most calorimeters. For example, with some cells, about a week after the experiment begins, 10% to 30% excess heat begins and it continues for about a month continuously. If this were caused by a storage mechanism, there would have to be an energy deficit large enough to capture all of the heat during the one-week start up phase. Roughly 60% of the input energy would have to be absorbed by the palladium, presumably in the formation of an exotic deuteride. As far as anyone knows, this scenario is chemically impossible, and there is absolutely no evidence that such deuterides have been formed, but if they were, the 60% deficit would show as clearly as the 30% positive excess does (at sigma 50 to 90, depending on the calorimeter).

4. Some cold fusion reactions have started up with little or no incubation time, sometimes as short as 20 minutes, and many occur without any significant input energy, especially with gas-loaded, cavitation and ion-beam loading, or with finely divided (powder) metal targets.


. . . and so on. (I believe I can find two or three other reasons in the literature to refute this skeptical claim.)

Please let me know if you would be interested in a contribution of this nature.

Sincerely,


Jed Rothwell