By Haiko Lietz, July 8th, 2004
Copyright 2005 New Energy Times
For over
50 years the annual meetings in Lindau, Germany (http://www.lindau-Nobel.de/), offer students and Nobel laureates the
opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion and exchange.
This year, Professor Brian Josephson, who had received his
Nobel prize in 1973 for the discovery of a superconducting
electronic switch, spoke
about rejection of real empirical phenomena by the
scientific community (http://www.lindau-nobel.de/images/ock/media/downloads/Media_1703187544.htm.) By saying that cold fusion appeared
to be real, and the modern equivalent to continental
drift, the theoretical physicist stirred a controversial
but rather open-minded debate.
In
1912, Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental
drift which says that all continents once began as a
single landmass in primitive times and subsequently
drifted apart. Despite the way the south American and
African coast lines fit together and the agreement of
fossils and rocks on matching places of the two
continents, Wegener's theory was dismissed. The argument
was, it was simply impossible since rocks couldn't move
at that rate. It was not until the 40s that continental
drift prevailed. This shows, according to the Nobel
laureate, "how easily the scientific community can
dismiss an idea despite extremely strong evidence".
Josephson sees the argument, "that no mechanism is
known," being echoed today against cold fusion.
Back
in 1989 chemistry professors Pons and Fleischmann claimed
having reached nuclear fusion at room temperature. An
advisory board to the United States Department of Energy
was mandated to clarify the claims that - if real -
could contribute to the solution of the energy problem in
a revolutionary way. Professor Josephson now accuses the
department of having swept the discovery under the rug.
Once again the argument
was that cold fusion "would be contrary to all
understanding" and "would require the invention of an
entirely new nuclear process" (http://www.newenergytimes.com/government/DOE1989/sec5.shtml)
The physicist regards
this as untenable argumentation: "Sometimes it does
happen in science that discoveries are made contrary to
previous understanding, like superconductivity." As
regards reproducibility, Josephson cited Steven Krivit's
survey
that the average reproducibility of cold fusion
experiments had advanced from 45 to 83 percent in the last
five years (http://www.newenergytimes.com/Reports/ColdFusionReproducibility.shtml.) The reason the scientific community today
doesn't know about this, was that cold fusion was being
blocked from the prominent broad-audience science
journals.
In
fact there are numerous cases of rejections of cold fusion
papers (http://blake.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/cf/88rejections.html.) Three months ago the US Department
of Energy pledged to review the experimental data that has come up since
1989 (http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-4/p27.html.) The Nobel laureate thinks that, if they are honest,
they could presumably only come to the conclusion, that
it's a real phenomenon: "I think it'll be difficult
to come to any another conclusion at this point as long as
they actually look at the work that's being done." If
the DoE will use the argument that "if an experiment
claims success then there must be something wrong with
it," Josephson would hope "that that argument be
rejected."
The
German ministry of research estimates that cold fusion -
if real - would be an "big step towards a worldwide
sustainable energy supply". The review of the American
colleagues is therefore being expected with great
interest. Should there be any evidence that cold fusion
were indeed real Berlin would again deal with this
question.
Dipl.-Ing.
Haiko Lietz
Science Reporter, Germany
Phone: +49 2207 910 213
Fax: +49 1805 39160 25215
hl@haikolietz.de
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