Groups doing the wrong experiment in 1989 and 1990
Here is a list of U.S. and Canadian research
groups that published papers in 1989 and 1990
describing cold fusion experiments in which they
looked for neutrons, particles or x-rays only,
without looking for excess heat or tritium, and
which produced no positive results, or results
they considered within the noise.
The first author of the paper is listed, followed
by the number of authors and co-authors, and the
name of the institution. Authors are listed
alphabetically. This list is not exhaustive;
there were other reported experiments, such as
the one at Georgia Tech., but we have no paper in our database from this group.
One or two groups reported ambiguous or
interesting results. They are not listed here.
Other groups not listed here reported looking for
excess heat and/or tritium and not finding any.
This is right experiment, although in most cases
they did it the wrong way; i.e., they did not run
electrolysis long enough. A few of these
researchers went on to report positive results later on.
As far as I know, only one group in this list
also looked for excess heat: Albagli et al., MIT.
They reported no excess heat but in fact they
probably did see trace levels of excess heat. As
is well known they manually changed the graph to erase this evidence.
I did not include Salaman et al., U. Utah,
because they monitored cells run by Fleischmann
and Pons. They did not detect any particles.
Incidentally, Pons was so upset by this, he
threatened to sue them. (See Fire from Ice, p. 233) This tells us two things:
1. Pons was also expecting conventional nuclear evidence in 1989.
2. Pons has a disagreeable side to his
personality. But who wouldn't, under the kind of duress he suffered from?
Since Fleischmann and Pons reported that they did
detect neutrons and gammas, it was reasonable for
these researchers to look for them. But it is a
shame that so much effort went into the search
for products that we now know are almost never
detected from cold fusion reactions.
In his book, Storms reported that there were many
upset researchers in 1989 who felt the have been
wasting their time. He wrote: However, the many
failures and the serious errors found in the
Fleischmann and Pons paper fueled a growing doubt
about the original claims. Too many people had
spent too much time to get so little. They were
beginning to feel they had been had. This list
shows how many people there actually were or at
least the lower bounds of the number of people
looking for the lower bounds of fusion reactions.
Most of these papers are in the Britz collection.
Here is a nicely formatted table that will
probably come out all wrong on Vortex:
Number
First author Of People Institution
Albagli 16 MIT
Anderson 11 Yale
Campbell 2
Lawrence Livermore N. L.
Deakin 5
Florida State U.
Dignan 4
San Francisco State U.
Ewig 4
Sandia N. L.
Faller 3
Env. Monitoring Systems Lab.
Fleming 5
AT&T Bell Labs.
Guilinger 9 Sandia N. L.
Hayden 10
U. British Columbia
Hill 11
Iowa State U.
Kashy 10
Michigan State U.
Porter 8
U. California Berkeley
Rehm 3 Argonne N. L.
Roberts 12 U. Michigan
Rugari 7
Yale/Brookhaven
Schirber 8 Sandia N. L.
Silvera 2 Harvard U.
Southon 4 McMaster U.
Wiesmann 1 Brookhaven N. L.
Totals: 20 groups, 135 people
- Jed
