Cold Fusion

This year marks the 21st anniversary of the announcement of Cold Fusion, of which volumes have been written, mostly defamatory of Pons, Fleischmann, and the dead graduate student.

He is known as the dead graduate student because the radiation from the cold fusion cell at the power density levels claimed by P & F, would have killed him, if the reaction followed the conventional hot fusion rules. Hot fusion, by the way, most have been misled to believe, is low in radiation - nonsense!

I followed CF for sometime and even went and spoke with Steven Jones, while I was a student at BYU. He was pretty dismissive of a lowly undergraduate student, but those were the heady days were deaths threats to the researchers were not unknown. So, maybe he was having a bad day.

The Dead Graduate Student, on the other hand, is very friendly and personable. Thus, in my opinion, as mortals, P, F and the dead graduate student may have been mistaken, but after spending $100,000 (in 1989 dollars) of their own baksheesh, I would be the last to accuse them of fraud.

And, yes, I do hold out the hope of one day understanding what the phenomenon was all about and maybe some Newton-like genius from China or India will day reproduce it at will and package it for sell at Wal-mart. (Now, that should strike fear into the hearts of every WWF, Greenpeace, and Club of Rome misanthrope.)