Interview with Dr. Mike McKubre

Dr. McKubre, head of new energy research at SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute – interesting, as part of the severence agreement that came out of Vietnam war protests, Stanford was entitled to 1% of SRIs profits in perpetuity – ie forever) was kind enough to give me some of his time to ask about his 17+ years of work on cold fusion. Some of the interesting tidbits:

* underestimated the amount of time & money it would take
* there was real excess heat – not some calorimetry problem
* some of his early funding came from EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, MITE (the Japanese Ministry of Economy & Trade?), and DARPA. Collaborate with ENEA in Italy and the Naval research lab.
* calorimetry is BORING and experiments typically last a month
* mentioned a company in New Jersey, energetics, with some new superwave function
* quoted Max Born? who said “Physics advances one funeral at a time”
* 50% of the cold fusion papers he throws out, the rest he has reservations about
* most of the papers are theoretical, even though they’re all mutually exclusive theories (they can’t all be right!)
* they’ve spent 70 man-years, but only about 1% of that has been fruitful
* neutron detector is one of the flakiest instruments known to man, due to the fact that you can’t actually measure neutrons and have to rely on second-order effects
* his team searched for all sorts of products of a potential fusion reaction, including helium-4, x-rays, gamma rays, and charged particles
* found unmistakable evidence of tritium, though many of the results weren’t consistent or time-correlated (ie didn’t happen at the same time as the reaction itself)
* electrochemistry is very, very sensitive
* the claim that you can’t differentiate between helium-4 and D2 is a lie
* why does he work on it – the public paid for his education, and if cold fusion has the capability to solve the world’s problems with even the slightest probability, he owes it to the world to work on it.

Then I got a tour of his lab, with a lot of plumbing, bulletproof plexiglass, and a big container where the actual experiments would take place.

the Yosemite Puzzle and Bill Gates

Driving down to Yosemite National Park for Thanksgiving, I reached the area depicted in the diagram and stopped at the red traffic light, noticing the sign that read “expect to wait 5 minutes” or something of that sort. Within a minute of the arrival of two police cars through the diversion road, the light changed to green and the police cars parked on the side of the road. Nothing special, right?

Then I noticed that the diversion road was in fact one-way and single-laned, and started to think about what the police cars were doing; my best guess is that they had to ensure that there’s only traffic going in one direction on the diversion road. I’ve thought of two ways of ensuring this, and one of them has something to do with Bill Gates’s first company (that’s right, a little-known fact, but Microsoft was his second company).

The most obvious, but tedious, is probably what the cops were doing: As soon as the light turns red from one side, they come across the diversion to make sure that no car is still en route – as they are the last ones to get across, if they don’t see anyone along the way, the route must be clear; as soon as they reach the other side, the light on the new side can be switched to green as there are no cars coming in the opposite direction. repeat ad infinitum.

The smarter way to do this would be to employ what I’ve seen on the roads coming in to Stanford’s campus: car-counting machines which are basically just a box connected to a thick wire strung along the road that registers a vehicle whenever one passes over. Put one at each traffic light, only change the traffic lights when both have the same tally, and you’re done. this was incidentally the idea for Gates and Paul Allen’s first company which they started in high school, which never got anywhere to the best of my knowledge.