http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Denergy-catalyzer%E2%80%9D-and-the-%E2%80%9Cneutron-barometer%E2%80%9D/#comments
The sun, Rossi’s ”energy catalyzer” and the “neutron barometer” One hundred years ago the sun’s source of energy was a complete mystery. The famous professor Svante Arrhenius is said to have asserted that the sun’s energy output could not be due to combustion and that there was no other explanation. Today our knowledge of physics allows us to explain why the sun can radiate energy for millions of years – hydrogen is transformed to helium. .... To use a hydrogen nucleus to transform nickel into copper requires a particle accelerator that can give the hydrogen nucleus energy sufficient to approach a nickel nucleus close enough for absorption. Putting nickel and hydrogen in a tube under pressure as described by Rossi does not create the conditions required for this nuclear reaction. [ That's just gratuitously naive -- nobody's suggested that it's a gas-solid interaction depending on pressure. ] ... The only thing we know with certainty is that there must be a physical explanation for the catalyzer’s energy output. One hundred years ago it was possible to state that the sun is radiating more energy than could, at that time, be explained. Despite their ignorance of nuclear physics the scientists of that time could, nevertheless, make measurements to support that statement. As scientists we are naturally frustrated that we are not allowed to know all the details of Rossi’s experiment. [ At least he doesn't seem to be outright denying that there IS energy output. ] ... an amusing anecdote on Pons and Fleischmann ... [ I love this comment : ] Paul Fernhout says: May 21, 2011 at 1:48 am It’s interesting that you referenced historical issues about understanding if the sun, because there are alternative theories like the sun is a ball of nickel/iron and/or effected by an electric universe. We might find in the end that “hot fusion” is the thing that does not exist, as proven by decades of failure to duplicate it, and that cold fusion at the boundary of a mass of nickel is what powers the Sun, heats the Earth, and maybe heats the gas giants, too. That would be a big irony about the eCat discovery, to overturn all the dogma about hot fusion that has suppressed cold fusion work for so long. (See the book “Disciplined Minds” by an editor of Physics Today, Jeff Schmidt, for more on group think in the physics community and other parts of academia.)
