14
Jul
2006
A fascinating book I came across in the engineering library. It seems to have been republished under the title “The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief, and their Lightbulb.” Starts of with Tesla (undoubtedly the greatest inventor in modern history – practically created electricity & radio – no, it wasn’t Marconi, and died broke & lonely), goes on to cover fascinating portraits of the characters since him, and along the way covers how the MIT fusion center sabotaged experiments testing the claims of Pons/Fleischmann’s cold fusion, in what Arthur C. Clarke has called “the biggest scandal in the history of science.”
Describes T. Henry Moray and his experiments with his energy device – excerpts from The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats are available here.
Portrays the late Paul Brown, discoverer of the Nucell nuclear-powered battery using strontium-90. The company turned into Nuclear Solutions and dropped research due to problems sustaining the materials… but the science seems to be sound. His idea of photodeactivation of radioactive waste lives on, though. Don’t know if it’s had succesful tests yet. He says he had to give up research:
“I began to receive threats; securities fraud charges were then filed against my company and myself; then the tax man; i lost control of my company; my home has been robbed three times… ; twice now I have been accused of drug manufacturing… my advice is to keep a low profile until you have completed your endeavour; be slective in choosing your business partners… know that the nightmare stories are true.”
Apparently the Hollywood producer Brian de Palma had a brother, Bruce, who taught at MIT and retired early to pursue research – his N-machine relied on antigravity effects and “claimed an efficieicny of 2820% or 28.2 times over-unity.” In essence, he was claiming it was a perpetual-motion machine. However, independent tests by the stelle group reported that the machine had “back torque,” i.e. friction, debunking such a claim. Prof (emeritus) Robert Kincheloe tried to replicate the experiments, but I can’t find a word of mention of him on the web. Did he ever try to “close the loop” and actually make it a perpetual motion machine? No – why not, you ask? Because “I would get my head blown off,” i.e. would be killed.
This part is so amazing I’m going to quote it at length:
“
The story of the Methernitha community and its electrical generating machine called the Thesta-Distatica reads like a bizarre modern folk tale. in the late 1950s a small group of Swiss citizens came together to establish a new community based on christian ideals and a concern for the environment,.. bought land up in mountains, wanted to be free of dependencies on outside resources.” They claimed to have created a machine that could produce energy seemingly from the ether, in the form of a “single rotating whell a number of antennae, magnets and coils, pair of glass leyden jars.” “Paul Baumann, the main inventor, has little scientific training, and is an ex-watchmaker.”
”
But they “kept it secret, as it could be used for good or bad, and the world wasn’t ready for it yet.”
“NASA offered them an undisclosed sum for secrets of machine… got requests from all over world,” from people who “would not be forgiven if they failed to carry out a due diligence test – especially if this turned out to be the technology that would end the oil economy.”
In fact, it mentions that Pons/Fleischmann were pressured into announcing to world, because some other guy threatened to do so before them. In their words “It was a singularly unfortunate time to make this announcment. it was the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission, and the o fusion brigade were just gearing themselves up to ask for a lot more money…. I wanted to have it published in The Annnals of Utah Science, of which i believe they only print seven copies.”
The employee at MIT’s press office resigned and called for an investigation (never convened) after he discovered apparent scientific misconduct in the reporting of the fusion center’s findings on cold fusion – “they preferred to get rid of a scientific claim in which they did not believe, and which threatened their federally funded program, by playing politics with the media, trivializing their experiments, and ultimately foisting on the world highly flawed data.”
He claims that cold fusion is a misnomer for “what actually happens when youput differen types, sizes, and thicknesses of palladium and platinum electrodes in jar of deuterium oxide (heavy water) and run an electric current through it.”
SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) apparently is still working on cold fusion and “has an informal collaboration of four of five major research institutions in the U.S. … the sponsors of these institutions may not want their involvmenet to be known.”
By far the most promising technology seems to be that of Blacklight Power, founded by Dr. Randell Mills; normally “hydrogen burned gives off energy, but never give you more energy than it takes to get the hydrogen in first place…. with Mills, hydrogen with potassium-based catalyst gives up hundreds of times the amount of energy released thru simple burning.”
Jim Griggs did hydrosonic pump cavitation, where shock waves heat water in a similar manner to “sonoluminesence” – the water bubbles give off light & heat when hit by high freq. sound.
The Japanese are obviously pursuing this as well, at the forefront of their efforts are yoshiaki Arata and Ye-Chang Zhang. “Such is the level of respect that professor Yoshiaki Arata commands at Osaka University that he even has a building named after him. A university booklet takes some forty pages to list his academic and scientific accomplishments. He is the only physicist in Japan ever to have been awarded the emperor’s medal.” Wow.
Also, something that popped up again: palladium. Turns out it’s one of the most expensive materials in world, used in catalytic converters (in cars, among others) Could be a significant barrier in scaling up these efforts. We “have to be way to use titanium or nickel or other metal as catalyst.” I wonder who’s researching how to solve this…
The field now goes by the name of “low-energy nuclear reactions” and has yearly conferences.
The best resource for finding out more is Infinite Energy magazine. Not the kind of mainstream publication you’ll find at your local bookseller.
