Back to Morrison Index
(Source: New Energy Times)
Brief - mainly intended for people who live in the USA.
Dear E632 and WA84 Colleagues,
Have been told by Moshe Gai of Yale that tomorrow (30th),
There will be the Nova film on Cold Fusion - "Fusion in a Jar". This is based
on the BBC film. The Nova version has a bit more about the States (am told I now
appear once instead of twice).
While most people around CERN keep saying to me that they thought Cold
Fusion is dead, there are enthusiasts worldwide who continue. On Sunday April
14th, the NYT had a major article entitled "There still may be something
scientific about Cold Fusion" (Dick Garwin reminds me that the writer (William
Broad, whom I like) does not write the headline). The article lists many
positive results. What made me jump was when they said that there has just
been a meeting in Russia where 45 papers had been presented and that the
Soviet Academy of Sciences was going to spend 15 million rubles on Cold Fusion
over the next four years. Now at the end of May I should talk at the First
Intl. Sakharov Physics meeting in Moscow on "Pathological Science - Cold Fusion
and Other Examples" - this because Sakharov was so interested when I told him
about it and he had contributed to the subjects of fusion and muon-catalysed
fusion. The NYT article also quoted David Worledge of the Electrical Power
Research Institute as saying that EPRI had spent almost $3 million on Cold
Fusion. David had attended the meeting in the Soviet Union.
Many people feel that Frank Close's book finished Cold Fusion yet again,
but in May Frank's book will be published in the States and so will a book by
Gene Mallove, Chief Science Writer at MIT who believes in Cold Fusion and his
book "Fire from Ice; Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor",
approx. 350 pages, will support Cold Fusion. It will be interesting to
compare the reviews of the two books(welcome copies). Which book will sell more?
Expect that Gene's book will do better as many people WANT to read that
Little Science can beat Big Science, and that there is a plot against the
little people. John Huizenga's more authoritive book will be later and
Gary Taubes book seems to have been delayed until the end of the year.
From time to time new postive results are released, in particular the
result of work at the Navel Weapons Research Lab in California attracted
attention from believers. Also there was some interest in a new theory
with new particles "Hydrons". Skeptics were not impressed by these but
Believers were. On the other hand, the results of the joint Moshe Gai - Steve
Jones Collaboration experiement which tried to reproduce the positive findings
of Steve's experiments has been published, Phys. Rev. C 43(1991)1298. This is
the first experiment in Cold Fusion between a believer and a Skeptic. Steve
is not an author of the paper. No positive effects are reported.
All this will be presented and may even be discussed at the Second Annual
Cold Fusion Conference to be held at the end of June at Como with help from
some important local physicists. Another conference in September at which Cold
Fusion results will be presented is Project Hydrogen '91. This is a serious
subject and John Bockris of Texas A&M is one of the gurus of it. It is
sponsored by the International Association of Hydrogen Energy, the American
Academy of Science, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Best Wishes,
Douglas.
