At 03:19 PM 12/26/2011, Vorl Bek wrote:
> Vorl Bek <vorl....@antichef.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Nobody ever closes the loop.
> >
>
> That is incorrect. Many people have closed the loop, starting
> with Fleischmann and Pons. In cold fusion jargon, "closing the
> loop" is called running in "heat after death" mode. Fleischmann
> once called it "fully ignited," borrowing the term from the
> plasma fusion scientists.
Why didn't F&P, and all the other people who closed the
loop, arrange demos, public or private, to interest investors?
After 22 years, and all those loop-closing experiments, why do we
still not have a Mr. Fusion water heater?
Because nobody has figured out how to harness the FPHE to make a
reliable water heater.
After less than a decade of investment, the large institutional
investors who funded some of the early cold fusion research realized
that, even if this worked, it was far from being a commercial
possibility in the short term.
Cold fusion is real, but classifying Pons and Fleischmann as "free
energy promoters" is really offensive. They were scientists, and the
research they were doing was not initially aimed at commercial
applications, they were simply studying the predictions of the
approximations of standard quantum mechanics to the situation in
condensed matter. They imagined that any difference would be small,
probably below detection.
They were surprised, then, when one of their cells melted down. It
took them five years to get to the point where they were seeing
measurable excess heat in one cell out of about six, and that's when
intellectual property issues caused the University of Utah to force
them to announce. They were not ready.
If you look at more recent surveys of cold fusion results, there are
approaches that produce excess heat nearly all the time, but the
amount varies greatly.
Rumors existed in the community regarding Rossi's work, but most
researchers didn't really believe it, so far was this from what was
well-known. And that's where we are at, for we have no "proof"
regarding Rossi, in any way that allows true scientific examination
of it. If Rossi is real, then PdD is probably little more than a
scientific curiosity, of little commercial value, because the
approach is so fragile and the materials so expensive. Still,
Fleischmann and Pons really deserve a Nobel Prize, ultimately.
Even if no usable commercial energy is produced by the FPHE.
Rather, they showed us (together with the work of hundreds of
scientists who succeeded in replicating the effect) that what we
thought we knew about nuclear reactions was shallow. Very accurate,
to be sure, as long as we confine ourselves to two-body, plasma
interactions. But unable to accurately predict the behavior of
condensed matter.
