March
26, 2004 Report from Mike McKubre, following the 5th ASTI
and the first ISCMNS meetings.
I
have just returned from two meetings in Italy; one in Asti
and the other in Frascati. Since these were
important meetings, both scientifically and societally, I
thought I would make a summary and report to the US
community. Only John Dash was present with me in
Asti and I attended the Frascati meeting as the solo
Americano.
Focusing first on science: Dr. Iwamura (MHI) gave two
excellent talks on the Isotope mutation effects, the one
at INFN Frascati being more extended and with more time
for questions. These were similar to his results
presented in Cambridge but the work is becoming even more
compelling as he and his team work through the systematics
and uncertainties and do more experiments to observe
physical trends. MHI is presently collaborating with
NRL to replicate their study. This work also is
supported by results of Ni to Cu transmutation being
obtained by Dr. Violanti at ENEA Frascati just across the
road. I had the opportunity to spend the day with
Dr. Violante and his team including some excellent
students. In addition to the laser stimulated NiH
transmutation experiments, this group is also working to
follow up the Case heat-helium results that we reported on
in Lerici. The Energetics (Israeli) group presented
a summary of results at both Asti and Frascati. For those
of you who have not heard me say it, I think that the
Energetics glow discharge work has produced the most
important new heat results in the field in recent years,
particularly in terms of scale-up towards a practical
device. Their work on novel waveforms for D and H
loading and heat generation also has enormous potential
significance.
Many beautiful results were presented at Asti, the most
remarkable by Dr. Mizuno (who has often stunned me with
the elegance and unexpectedness of his results). He
reported a clear signal of neutrons from a small pyrex
tube containing nothing except D2 gas in a strong magnetic
field at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Unless the
walls are involved it is very hard to see how this can be
a coherent effect. But the system is so simple that
it is harder to see how this could be measurement error
and even harder to imagine how this could be a result of
two-body hot fusion. Stay tuned. Medals
newly minted to honor Giuliano Preparata were awarded by
the chairman of the local organizing committee, Dr.
Francesco Celani, to Drs Iwamura, Mizuno and Antonella de
Ninno. A medal was also voted for Peter Hagelstein
who was unable to be present as he was helping Scott Chubb
defend the fort at the APS meeting in Montreal.
One of the primary purposes of conducting this (possibly
last?*) Asti conference was to begin to tackle the tasks
of creating a Condensed Matter Nuclear Science
International Society. Most will know that the
Cambridge (10th) meeting of the ICCF steering committee
(the only International organizing body our community has
had to date) appointed Scott Chubb and Vittorio Violante
to begin the process of organizing an International
society ultimately to control the conference series, the
Journal, and anything else we choose to pursue. At this
same time Peter Hagelstein was asked to enact and edit the
new Journal (first issue due soon), and Jean Paul Biberian
was accepted as Chairman of ICCF-11.
Unfortunately, organizing the legal and logistical details
of a fledgling International Society is a lot of work of a
type rather different from that normally undertaken by
cold fusion researchers. Since August 2003 this task has
been worked on largely by Bill Collis with support from
the Italian community: Francesco Celani, Antonio Spallone
and Vittorio Violante. All are to be greatly thanked
and congratulated for their effort. The idea is to
incorporate a society to provide legal protection for its
officers, to wield bank accounts, to solicit funding,
support conferences, student travel etc. There are
many good reasons for this eloquently described by Bill in
Asti. He has or shortly will incorporate the society in
England (also for sufficient and explained reasons).
For details you should contact Bill or look at the website
http://www.iscmns.org/news.htm
A society needs a president and two very fine candidates
were presented: Professors Xing-Zhong Li and Akito
Takahashi. It is a measure of their stature that the
vote was as close as it could be to a dead heat in the 34
cast. As a result of this voting Prof. Takahashi
will be the founding president of the ISCMNS and Prof. Li
will be our first Vice President.
The new society also plans to have an Executive Committee
to assist with specific tasks, provide overall guidance
and continuity. We did not vote members to this
committee although there was some discussion of it.
An important goal in forming the new society is that we
all feel part of it; to do this we need more thought and
more discussion than so far has been possible.
However, we needed somebody to do something, and Bill has
made an excellent start. We also need to preserve
flexibility so that we can all be proud to participate and
contribute. I urge you all to read through the
proposed constitution, volunteer members for the Executive
Committee, make suggestions of features that you would
like included or not.
In terms of the Executive Committee it seems that we
really already have a good one to take us to ICCF-11 where
we can constitute a formal body. Scott Chubb and
Vittorio Violante were asked at ICCF-10 to do this job so
they already were the committee. Likewise Peter
Hagelstein as outgoing conference Chairman and Editor of
the Journal, and Jean Paul Biberian as incoming Chairman
must be included on the committee, and is my proposal
(here) that those titles be always represented on the
Executive Committee to support the President (Akito
Takahashi) and Vice President (Xing-Zhong Li). It is
also very clear that Bill Collis must be on the Executive
Committee as Secretary (and Treasurer?). He is
almost single handedly responsible for getting us this far
and is the only one of us to have demonstrated the drive
and skills to get the tasks done. A full and new
voting will occur in Marseilles, but if we don't support
Bill I believe this effort will flounder.
With this committee we demonstrate a very good
International character and have represented: the US,
Italy, France, Japan, China, and the UK. I feel we do need
to expand and enforce this Internationalism, and the
National representatives should take on the responsibility
of communicating their committee and society activities in
their home countries. In terms of expansion I feel
we need to select representatives from Russia and Israel,
and it will be important in the future to have
representation from Germany and/or Eastern Europe. All of
us need to think how this committee should be constituted,
how big it should be, how numerously the different nations
should be represented, what the assigned tasks should be.
This committee will really decide the future of our
society.
In terms of added features I have a suggestion that I want
to discuss further. I would like to propose a
bicameral Executive Committee with an upper body
constituted to increase the society stature and recognize
the past contributions of our most senior members.
The people from overseas who spring to mind immediately
are Martin Fleischmann, Franco Scaramuzzi and Yoshiaki
Arata. These men all have the highest stature in the
world of science, that I hope they would agree to lend to
our new society. They also have all made fundamental
contributions to the development of condensed matter
nuclear science that simply must be recognized, and
we would greatly benefit from their wisdom. If you
agree with the principal I invite you to consider others
in this category. There are one or two from the US
whom I would like to see in this role, although the
numbers should be few since the necessary stature must be
very high, and working members should be selected for the
regular Executive Committee.
As a final point, the functioning of our fledgling society
must be completely transparent to avoid rancor and
suspicion. I believe there should be no secrets not
even in voting. Bill Collis is in the process of
implementing a system of electronic communication so all
can be informed and involved. I encourage you all to
participate strongly and enthusiastically to make a
society that works for the benefit of all.
Ciao
Mike McKubre
* The Asti meeting originally was a small working group
sponsored by Fiat. A prize was presented (a head
sized truffle). Much food and wine were consumed.
After Fiat reduced then dropped their sponsorship Bill
Collis was able to secure support from a local bank, and
with a great deal of work on his part, and remarkable
success, he has transformed the workshop into a small
conference that has received a considerable following
primarily from the Italian and Japanese cold fusion
workers. Rather than continuing to rely on Bills
good will and hard work, the idea is to incorporate the
conference as an International Society activity. The
reason to hold it always in Asti now is lost and Dr.
Fulvio Frisone has volunteered to consider including the
next meeting under the aegis of his Foundation newly
created by the Sicilian government to study in the area of
CMNS. This is a very generous offer, and a very good
idea.
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