When most people hear of Cold Fusion or LENR they immediately think of Fleischman-Pons’ press conference of 1989. However, LENR had been in the Science field for decades before that. The term Cold Fusion was first used by Physicist Luis Alvarez’s in 1956, but the phenomena of excess heat itself was first discovered in 1909 by Chemist Irving Langmuir, the inventor of the blowtorch that was the first to create Atomic Hydrogen. Later, as Quantum Physics progressed in the 1940′s the world of science lost interest in the Weak Nuclear force & jumped onto the strong Nuclear force bandwagon. Today, Scientists are revisiting the Weak Nuclear force for answers to the conundrum of excess heat generation seen in LENR experiments.
According to the Widom-Larsen theory that we discussed earlier, LENR experimental results are actually the result of a combination of condensed matter phenomena known as many-body collective effects. Guess what, in 1951, a young Phd Student known as Srernglass observed some interesting neutron production in his experiments and phoned Albert Einstein for assistance in understanding what was happening. Einstein simply looked at Sternglass’ data and then immediately realized that the observed neutron production involved some sort of many-body collective effects, and this was at a time when very few physicists really had any idea what collective effects were. Unfortunately, Sternglass didn’t heed Einstein’s strong advice to publish the deeply anomalous results and as a result Sternglass’s bizarre experimental discovery was lost and soon forgotten. Einstein, the only contemporary scientist who had any real understanding of what might be happening in Sternglass’ puzzling experiments died just four years later.
Fleischman & Pons 1989
In 1989, at the University of Utah, two well respected Physicists, Fleischman and Pons, announced at a press conference that they had discovered a phenomena they termed cold Fusion that could produced the power of the sun in a jar at room temperature. The whole world was fascinated but as scientists scrambled to replicate the reaction, none was able to produce any excess energy and so the idea of Cold Fusion was ridiculed and thrown into the dustbin of science. The careers of Fleischman and Pons immediately ended in disgrace as they themselves could not even explain the phenomena. Since then, LENR has become a fringe science, not accepted in any respected peer review journal and certainly not eligible for funding.
Over the years however, numerous scientists all over the world remained curious about the science and continued striving to produce the excess heat. During these years, the scientists did encounter excess heat but only erratically. They also experimented with various metals until eventually settling on Nickel as the best candidate for LENR. One of these scientists, Randell Mills in USA, discovered that grinding the Nickel to a powder aided the reaction by increasing the reaction surface area, while another, Andrea Rossi, discovered that applying pressure also made a major difference.
In January 2011, Andrea Rossi announced at a press conference in Italy that he had managed to control the LENR process and reproduce it at will using a secret catalyst he discovered during his years of experimentation, seemingly bringing to an end the question of whether LENR is real or just fringe science.