The excess heat got me

I am an engineer.  Engines run on heat.  Sources of energy in any form are of basic interest to scientists and engineers.  Cold fusion experiments were supposed to be producing heat in quantities that exceeded what would be caused by the power used to drive them.  This was ridiculed as perpetual motion, but if a reaction of a type that was formerly unknown is occurring, it is not perpetual motion.  It is a discovery.

My life during and since high school was in the shadow of the awareness that civilization consumes an extreme and steadily increasing amount of energy and that we live on a finite planet with an expanding population.  If we do not find a different way to power civilization, we may prove Malthus correct and discover a real need to reduce population by a large amount, or drastically decrease energy consumption per capita and that is potentially a very dismal prospect.  Even if we can get all the energy we need to live comfortably, the environmental destruction is an unacceptable cost.

My understanding is that these experiments were producing evidence of anomalous reactions.  It was generally assumed that the reactions were of the nuclear type.  Dr. Edmund Storms (LANL, ret'd) almost always included a caveat in his reports that the reaction might be of an unknown chemical type.  He invented the term, "chemically assisted nuclear reactions", CANR.  He reported seeing repeatable and clear evidence of excess heat on very many occasions.  His expertise with calorimetry was well established, which was why he was assigned to investigate the Fleischmann-Pons claims.  He had developed some calorimetry refinements that only long experience in a lab and glass blowing skill would make.  Charles Beaudette wrote the book, Excess Heat, which focuses on just the excess heat evidence produced by the cold fusion experiments because it is the bulk of the evidence and he wanted to make a strong case and avoid straying into esoteric areas of physics.  He is an excellent thinker and writer.

From Amazon:

Charles Beaudette was born in Boston in 1930. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., where he majored in electrical engineering and held the position of managing editor of The Tech, the official student newspaper. He was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1952.

In 1958 he started Dychro Corporation and sold it to a computer company in 1961. From 1963 to 1973 he was employed by EG&G Corporation in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in the capacity of senior engineer and engineering manager. It was during this time that he participated in the technology development for what eventually became the office facsimile, and which work included development of what is now the PC modem. From this activity, Mr. Beaudette was issued a patent on image processing for variable speed page scanning and transmission. {end of Amazon quote}

Once again, we see that the data is credible enough to attract some very credible people. 

There were other evidences of nuclear reactions involving particle physics from these experiments.  There were claims of transmutations.  But, the reactions that produce those particles are supposed to produce a lot of radiation.  There was the undead graduate student problem, which was that if the reactions producing the excess heat were real, the student standing nearby would be dead.  Dr. Julian Schwinger, who shared a Nobel with Feynman and Tomonaga for working on elucidating the nature of spin in the standard model of the electron, had an interesting explanation for the undead student.  It is an established fact that in the Mossbauer Effect the energy released from a nuclear decay reaction is coupled to the lattice of the surrounding material, manifesting as heat.  There is no deadly gamma radiation or high energy neutron.  Schwinger was speculating that perhaps a hydrogen fusion or hydrogen with hydrogen isotope fusion within the palladium lattice was able to transfer the energy produced by the fusion to the palladium lattice.  These controversies muddied the water, and they did provide enough reason for the flag of "dual use" to be raised, i.e. these discoveries may find utility in both commercial and defense industries.  

The CIA got involved.  At the 14th International Conference for Cold Fusion, the US Navy Research Lab was celebrated for their dispositive evidence of nuclear reactions in an electrolytic cell.  It was very highly repeatable.  It was producing nuclear particles that were detected on standard detectors in common use in the nuclear industry, a piece of plastic like the plastic in eyeglasses acts like a Wilson cloud chamber to record particle paths and collisions.  It is developed like film after expose to the cathode.  After celebrating the NRL's achievements using this detector, it was announced that a new boss was going to be directing the lab.  He had just transferred over from the CIA.  The youngest Navy experimenter sitting near me was visibly shaken and trying hard to avoid making a scene as she was comforted by a co-worker.  I was snapping photos.

What shook me was the response by the audience to the introduction of the new leader.  It was vigorous applause.  I felt a little queasy and the editor of the magazine that I was representing there had what might be called a severe anxiety reaction, and I could hardly blame him.  I will not go into details, but it was a very nerve wracking experience.  To my knowledge, the NRL stopped publishing data from experiments that were being so highly praised.

My basic justification for spending so much effort trying to understand what is happening to produce excess heat was not some certainty that the excess heat was real.  Drs. Mallove and Storms had decided that if there was any chance it was real, that it had to be pursued.  I am of a similar mindset.  I have discovered that there is much more than a chance that anomalous excess heat is real and of substantial quantity and quality, albeit poorly understood by most or possibly all of the people trying to understand.  

To my way of understanding, I cannot find a way to explain that the excess heat is not real.  I do not purport to be the scientist to know the science, but I can read scientific papers and contact the authors and ask questions.  The evidence is overwhelming in volume and some of the quality is definitive, but it must be readily reproduced.  If you want to find somebody who you should believe, do not look at me as a guiding light.  People claiming to know are not hard to find.  Remember that a lot of people heed the voice of authority in anticipation of becoming the voice of authority.  What an achievement, the blind leading the blind! A much better approach is to understand the challenge to fundamental understanding.  Study the problem instead of seeking to find the right expert.  When you develop some basic understanding of the problem and perhaps get some ideas about what might explain what is happening, then see what other people have to say.  This is how you can see through a lot of sophistry.

Science has been described as the process of working to become less wrong.  This is a useful way of looking at it because scientists are routinely wrong.  The reason they publish (really!) is to subject their ideas and data to others who will hopefully take enough interest and be competent enough to provide valuable comments, which they better be prepared to learn are probably harsh criticisms.  It is hard to do, to roll your baby out to the park and listen to the criticisms offered by strangers, and learn to appreciate it.  The baby is a bad analogy, but the emotional pain it can arouse is similar.  It is not surprising, in fact it is ordinary, for scientists to prefer to see their journal published articles as accomplishments deserving praise, but the praise is likely to fuel their egos into leading them astray.  The scientist NEEDS good criticism.

What is dishonest about the Wikipedia article on Mills is not the factual statements made.  It is the lack of airing of the replies from Mills, which he published, and the voices of qualified others who formed opinions opposite to what is found in that screed.  Mills sought criticism first from people he knew could understand, who were not cheerleaders or offering emotional support.  People like Haus, Phillips and Ferrell.  He opened up to more general audiences and found that they either did not know or did not care what he was trying to do, but they could see that he was questioning the foundational concepts that they had accepted as givens very early in their development of their understanding of quantum mechanics.  If you have never questioned the basis of your knowledge that makes you an esteemed expert, and you have made a career of teaching a way of understanding that you would then need to put into doubt in order to question the basis of your knowledge, this can be a very disturbing and unwanted experience.  It is much easier and more satisfying to react emotionally and the Wikipedia article captures a lot of that.

Science is not the thoughts extruded when a bunch of brainiacs are compressed by a deadline.  Science is a work in progress, always.  However, as Kuhn brought to our attention, a hazardous incomplete understanding during times of normal science is that the science is known and the work of science is to understand better what is known.  This is correct, but it obscures that all knowledge is subject to change when challenged properly and a better understanding is shown to be correct.  The dogmatic approach to science (normal science) is needed for younger students who are learning to understand scientific thought and gain the basics in their chosen fields of study.

It is clear that science grows by developing an understanding based on what is known or accepted to be a correct understanding, and questioning it in careful and responsible ways.  So, what was the basis upon which SQM was based?  I tried to answer that and everywhere I looked, it was the same, the Schrodinger Equation.  Well, where did Schrodinger get the idea for his equation?  I had no idea, but I also had no idea what was Maxwell's basis for his equations.  So, are these divine revelations?  No.  

There are a lot of ways to develop an equation that at least seems to explain some data.  Curve fitting is extremely useful in engineering, but I learned that Maxwell did not develop his equations by curve fitting.  Maxwell was an aether theorist and I found that to be stunning news.  In school, aether was portrayed as something silly that was left behind by the introduction of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, but there it was as the foundation of Maxwell's theory, which was a foundation of Einstein's theories.  Then I learned that Einstein actually did not exclude the possibility of aether.  In a lecture delivered in 1920 at U of Leyden, Einstein said that an aether was admissible if it was Lorentz invariant.  This may be a trivial point (or not!), but it illustrates the need to be circumspect and avoid satisfaction with (without despising) dogma.  

The aether theory that Maxwell used is explained as "scaffolding", like the temporary structure used to build the real structure.  Maxwell was OK with this.  It did not need to be part of the theory, even though it was of the essence of the model.  Physics can be philosophically challenging.  The plot gets really twisted.  Einstein based his Special Theory of Relativity on the work of others, principally Lorentz and Poincare.  By declaring the non-existence of the aether, the absolute reference frame was removed and total relativity of motion was illustrated.  Yet, Einstein seemed to change his mind 15 years later at U of Leyden and admit a need for an aether, of a very specific type.

The stuff that is in the space where there is thought to be a void (the vacuum of deep space) is not nothing.  It has physical properties like impedance.  The standard model has no explanation for dark matter, dark energy or even gravity!  Why are they taught as being real?  Because an explanation is needed to present physics as a coherent subject.  I accept that, but the danger that such pedantry poses is that it creates a facade of certainty that is false and tends to exclude consideration of ideas from people like Mills and obscures the very real crisis in physics that is a century old.

If science was operating properly, one might expect that ideas from apparently competent minds would be at least considered, if not actively sought.  Mills has an apparently competent mind.  His first journal article was published in Nature magazine.  I was under the impression that nobody gets their early work published in a top-tier journal, but the impression that people got from young Mills was very positive.  His ideas for medical instruments were really good.  But, when he proposed theory that threatened the paradigm, he was suddenly seen as an incompetent boob.

OK, so we go to the laboratory to see if Mills can produce results that confirm his theory.  We see that he claims to have done so.  Good.  Let's see about replications.  Yes, quite a few.  They are all rejected by the authors of the Wikipedia article and the people cited in that article.  So, experimental verification is not accepted as credible by a representative group that has control of the scientific narrative.  Yet, there is a sizeable body of credible people who have replications of many kinds of Mills' experiments, if we are to believe Mills or the writings and voices of those people who have gone on the record.  I have checked them out.  This has been an impasse for many years.  

This appears to be an important controversy for several reasons.  First, it must be of a resolvable type.  Either the excess heat is real or it is not (there are actually many other kinds of evidences of hydrino shown in Mills experiments).  I have done a lot of calorimetry of many kinds and I do not claim to be nearly as well qualified as some of the people who claim to have replicated or approved the calorimetry in these experiments.  In principle, it is pretty easy to understand.  The details can get tricky and some forms of calorimetry, such as comparison of rates of heating or cooling of a system, as opposed to steady-state measurement of heat, require the kind of analysis in which many scientists may not place confidence, simply because of lack of experience, understanding, or some other reason.  Mills uses many kinds of calorimetry.  Dr. Mark Nansteel has a PhD from UCLA and his publications show a great deal of experience in thermodynamic analysis.  My opinion has no weight next to people like that.

The  question of input energy is similarly not a big deal.  Either these experimenters are measuring energy into the apparatus accurately (not so easy sometimes), or not.  In the steady-state studies, this measurement is generally very simple.  Mills realized a mistake in the input power measurement for the early bomb calorimeter studies and published a corrected experiment.  The inductive current measuring probe was coupling to the pulse of electromagnetic wave that was created by the explosion and it was creating significant error.  To my knowledge, nobody criticized him for this, even though it was an easy thing to question.  He questioned it himself.  In my experience, by the time he presents information publicly, it has generally been well scrutinized.  Some things are ambiguous to me (non-scientist), but I can detect no fraud.   

Here is another reason that this is an important controversy at stake.  Physics is in crisis, and has been for a very long time, although they have been disguising it quite well as insufficient funding.  If you do not see why physics in crisis is a problem, I suggest you consult Kuhn.  More money will not solve this problem.  Misspent money has exacerbated the problem by creating perverse incentives. 

Another reason is that experiment trumps theory.  Even if Mills' theory is wrong, the experimental data is of such importance that it must not go on being ignored by the scientific community, just because it has the potential to cause them to realize that the crisis is really upon them.  At one time, it was a joke that no experimental result would be considered unless it confirms theory.  It is funny because it stands science on its head.  Well, it is not a joke.  Pretending inconvenient data does not exist is politics, not science.  When comparing GUTCP to SQM, the former makes sense because it is an extension of classical physics and the other one does not (and is not supposed to), so which one should be preferred, if verified by experiment and if the math is coherent? I am not saying that SQM is not verified by experiment.  Any good curve fit equation can be arbitrarily as close to data as one wants to make it, but making it a perfect fit does not make it any kind of theory.

As sad as it is that Greta Thunberg is exploited for political gains, her frustration is justified.  There is no excuse for not dealing with pollution and energy issues (which Greta and I do not see at all in the same way).  Where are the adults to settle the question that can obviously be settled about the existence of excess heat from these experiments?  Where is the scientific curiosity?   It has been co-opted by the perverse rewards system that creates sycophants dedicated to finding ways to inflate budgets and hide anomalies that threaten reputations.

It must be understood that Mills is not aiming at producing nuclear reactions.  He is testy about this because he kept getting lumped in with cold fusioneers, whom he considers dishonest.  It has caused him a lot of grief.  He does have some interesting ideas of how hydrino reactions might influence nuclear events, which I am not about to try to discuss.  My focus is on hydrino formation for purposes of energy production because that is where his engineering R&D has been for decades.  I appreciate the theory, but that is not my strength.

Mallove tried to not direct my work too much in his lab, which I appreciated.  When I told him that I wanted to do a replication of Mills' electrolytic experiment, which I had tried to do before he hired me in my earliest effort at calorimetry, he told me a harsh truth.  He said that, as a rule, anybody who does anything that suggests that SQM is flawed can watch his career go down in flames.  I do not blame him, because he was being honest and considerate toward me.  He did not tell me to not do it, but I could see that it would spike his already too high anxiety if I began hydrino experiments.  That decision of mine to cooperate with him was a huge mistake.  Mills' electrolytic experiment was the most reliably replicated of all the excess heat experiments that I knew.  I could probably have relied on much support from Thermacore and Mills himself.  Mills was helping Scott Little at Austin Institute for Advanced Research.  Thermacore build a huge number of these electrolytic cells.  They had one with 50W of excess heat, exhibiting long run times and reliable repeatability.

The failure of our lab to have success in replicating an experiment that was showing consistent excess heat (which was all we could measure) was a disaster for Mallove.  I could and did go back to my former career with FAA.  He was on a course that was hard to predict or control, but we desperately needed evidence to support the cause, evidence that could be produced on demand and a standard experimental protocol that could be exported to curious minds worldwide.