Bush, et al. vs. Huizenga

The research work of Dr. Robert Bush, Dr. Robert Eagleton and student James Djunaedy was the subject of an article published in Dr. Eugene Mallove's magazine, Infinite Energy, number 12, 1997.  I was working for FAA when I received this issue and it strongly influenced me to attempt a Mills replication.  The article describes a situation that is not supposed to happen.  It was one thing to believe that Fleischmann and Pons blew it and claimed experimental results of excess heat that could not be reproduced.  I do not believe that to be the case, but it is believable to most people.  In this instance, at Cal Poly, was a team producing results in a robust and highly reproducible fashion, if their reports are to be accepted.  Why would someone not find their reports credible, or at least worthy of consideration?

This group reported strong calorimetry results using light water electrolytic cells, run at sufficient input power to exclude the possible confounding factors associated with recombination.  They also reported nuclear products and adhered to the cold fusion basic hypothesis, even though using a cell type that emulated the Mills electrolytic cell (light water and nickel electrodes).  Given the controversy that a substantial amount of research was finding empirical evidence in support of excess heat and the great importance of finding a source of energy that might be clean, cheap, environmentally friendly and essentially limitless, one might expect the standard-bearers of education to at least check it out, given such a convenient opportunity.  One would be sorely disappointed, unfortunately.  Awaiting the granting of permission to believe the evidence of their own senses and the thinking of their own minds, almost all academics will bleat to the sound of sycophancy.

So, I admire Bush, et al., and wonder why lenr.org did not include them in the list of authors.  This database is supposed to be inclusive of cold fusion and Bush says it was cold fusion they were doing.  Perhaps they were excluded because these scientists did not flatly reject Randell Mills, a pariah among pariahs.  They hardly agreed with his hydrino hypothesis, but were not the only ones to report the light water excess heat.  Years later, a former head of the US Navy Research Lab and professor at George Washington University, David Nagel, described efforts to study such effects in a field without an acceptable explanation for their observations.  They admit they cannot explain it within the limitations imposed by quantum mechanics after Schrodinger.  Yet, there is no mention of Mills in Nagel's article.

Bush was asked in the IE interview about support from his colleagues.  The picture is one of respectful ostracism and abandonment of curiosity.  I expect that many people at the school wondered if they were really finding what they were reporting.  If I was there, I would like to believe I would attempt to at least express my curiosity to the scientists and take a careful look and read their reports.  What an opportunity for gaining what might be the most valuable knowledge on the planet!  Were the experiments such that the results would be highly questionable?  Reporting of nuclear products is fraught with the possibility of contamination.  Even when the concentration of the reportedly anomalous nuclear product (like 4He) is above atmospheric concentration, one might imagine some unknown mechanism for concentrating the contaminant to produce an erroneous signal.  I find highly anomalous isotope ratios in any report to be interesting because concentration of a particular isotope that is very different from environmental abundances is hard to explain, and if it is real, potentially quite commercially valuable.

However, reporting of excess heat is a very well established practice that forms the basis of a great part of the body of empirical evidence in chemistry.  As Bush put it, "... the excess heat discovery of P&F will, in my mind, eventually be seen as far overshadowing any mistaken nuclear interpretation that P&F might have made."  Prior to my development of skills for performing calorimetry, I had little appreciation for what was involved.  After numerous attempts at demonstrating successful calibration on my calorimeters, I developed a strong appreciation for real experts in calorimetry.  I could feel very confident that my calorimeter would detect excess heat if it was there, but I never saw it, which proves nothing.  The other side of the experiment, an apparatus that was producing excess heat, required knowledge that I lacked.  There are many forms of calorimetry and some are much more prone to error than others, particularly when measuring transient excess heat signatures.  Such calorimetry is complicated and not easily understood without some background education.  However, when measuring a reaction that runs for long periods in a steady-state condition, exhibiting pronounced excess heat, far beyond any conceived error source, this is easily understood and a highly credible result.  Such steady-state calorimetry is not uncommon in measuring excess heat of cold fusion or Mills type experiments.

The conditions at Cal Poly were such that a large mass of people with technical education, who all wished to pursue careers in technical fields, who would have no trouble understanding the calorimetry performed by Bush, et al., were in position to share in the observations, but did not do so, despite the value of knowing, with certainty, if such measurements were correct.

I came at this from the standpoint of a technical person who spent much of his work time in the performance measurement of equipment used in the control of air traffic.  Based on such measurements, the equipment was deemed to be certifiable for use in ATC.  I was immersed in a culture of people who did the same sorts of things.  We knew if a system was really safe to use.  So, the idea of knowing if a calorimeter is really producing excess heat, if given sufficient time, understanding and quality equipment, the question of excess heat must be something that can be determined beyond doubt.  To suggest otherwise is like denying that you can drive your car to work after you have been driving your car to work for years.  When I see scientists, as in this 60 Minutes video, simply say that they refuse to accept the excess heat is real, yet who have no interest in seeing for themselves, and believe that they are standing on firm ground in disputing credible scientists who have created much empirical evidence, I call FRAUD.

So, I argue John Huizenga is a fraud.  Huizenga shared the chairmanship of the Department of Energy's ERAB 1989 investigation into the claims of Fleischmann and Pons and related research.  The Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB) charged Huizenga with the responsibilities enumerated in this letter.  The recommendations that came out of the report produced by the panel recommended against any funding for further cold fusion research.  The other chairman was Norman Ramsey, Harvard professor of physics and recent recipient of a Nobel Prize.  Ramsey had refused to endorse the initial ERAB conclusions, which left open no possibility that the observed effects were real.  The panel knew that without support from their recent Nobel laureate chairman, their public pronouncements would be of little value, so they softened their conclusions to satisfy Ramsey.  Julian Schwinger, another physics Nobel laureate, had expressed great caution against the rush to judgement he was witnessing, saying that not everything was known about under what conditions nuclear reactions might occur, citing the Mossbauer Effect.

So, here is Huizenga in 1997, hawking his book at Cal Poly, condemning efforts to investigate the claims of excess heat and related effects, and he flat refuses an offer to inspect a working cold fusion cell, right in front of him.  This was after the cautions issued by Schwinger and Ramsey which were, in effect, calling for open minds in viewing future evidences because what was available in 1989 was not conclusive.  Is Huizenga not failing in his assigned duty to investigate?  It was on his word that so many people built their opinion.  Citing of the ERAB conclusions was used to reject articles from publication and patents from consideration.

Robert Bush:

... I invited Huizenga to take data with Eagleton and me, indicating that he could take as much time as he liked.  I told him that, if he could show me an error in our work leading to a significant spurious excess power, I would not spend another minute in CF.  At this point Huizenga noted that he is "retired."  My reply was: "Perfect, you have all the time in the world to do this investigation."  Moreover, I opined that we could probably even provide him with a fellowship to cover his expenses for this investigation.  At this, he backed off, indicating that he was not totally retired but, in fact, was doing some consulting for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory up north in the Bay Area.  "Perfect," I exclaimed, "since this will get you over to the West Coast from your retirement home in North Carolina."  At this juncture I could have sworn that I saw Huizenga actually blink!

It is worth noting that Huizenga was professor of chemistry and physics at U of Rochester.  He was very familiar with the nature of the experiment he could have easily witnessed.  In the 60 Minutes video, Dr. Robert Duncan was able to determine to his satisfaction that the excess heat was real in a very short time by witnessing a live experiment.  As someone quite familiar with calorimetry, I was not surprised.

Others may find the nuclear effect evidence to be more convincing than the excess heat.  Still others, such as the skeptics on reddit, may find none of it convincing at all.  How should one approach this?  It is an individual choice.  How do you decide what to believe about anything?  Having built calorimeters from scratch, having seen the pitfalls and sources of errors and seeing what a working calorimeter does and how to know it is doing it, I can understand it.  A theorist who rejects empirical evidence that contradicts the theory he believes is right has that prerogative.  But, we do not live in a theoretical world.  We live in a world we experience and we make it better by using what we know from our experience to devise better ways to live.

From my perspective, getting to the bottom of the issue about whether or not the excess heat is real is much less difficult than determining if smoking tobacco is bad for your health.  Yes, that took many decades, during which tobacco addicts continued to harm themselves and others in the belief that science was on their side.  In that case, the incentives to distort science for profit and to protect entrenched interests and the peace of mind of tobacco addicts provided the cover to keep reality hidden.  With the excess heat question, those hiding reality are academics and people invested in the status quo of energy, a situation that has the world on its knees.  Those people are a lot more powerful and numerous than the ones who were protecting tobacco from disclosure.

The disinterest exhibited by students at Cal Poly and peers of the experimenters speaks of a pervasive understanding that getting curious about the "wrong" thing is bad for your progression in academia. Perhaps sheer apathy explains a lot. Your fellow students might find you to be too weird or nerdy.  What about plain old curiosity about something of great importance for which first class evidence was right there?!?  It just does not seem to matter to the students who have been socialized into a normalcy that quite frankly, horrifies me.

Finally, to bring Mills into the picture, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Jonathan Phillips at a cold fusion conference and he told me about his work in validating the claims of Mills.  He told me about Dean of Engineering Joseph Cecchi, at U of NM, where Phillips worked as a chemistry professor, who learned that Phillips had been working for Mills and had just published a number of papers confirming the claims of Mills.  In 2004, Cecchi ordered Phillips to cease from all such experimentation and publication.  Cecchi cited the dangers of working with unknown forms of hydrogen and revealed in emails that he believed that the results published by Phillips were credible.  Why would Cecchi interfere with such important work?  I cannot speak for him, but obviously, he placed a much higher priority on something other than scientific truth and discoveries of such great importance that might solve existential challenges for humanity.  Phillips told me that he resigned soon afterwards.