23A018 Research, Awaiting Liberation by Jim Davies, 5/2/2023

Everything government touches, it spoils; and university research is no exception. That fact alone will mean that humanity's never-ending hunt for new knowledge will take a leap forward when the former is tossed into history's ash can.

The example that prompts this edition of the ZGBlog is that of Professors Pons and Fleischmann in 1989. They specialized in electrochemistry and worked together at the University of Utah on an experiment to achieve nuclear fusion at room temperature, rather than Sun-like ones of several million degrees. In March of that year they held a Press conference to announce success.

In a jar, which they described as an enhanced test tube, they had measured a heat output much greater than the power put in to the apparatus, yet without chemical reactions taking place. Electricity was entered via platinum and palladium rods, and the electrolyte was deuterium oxide ("heavy water") and they claimed that there had been fusions of the nuclei of two atoms of deuterium into one helium-4 atom, with the release of energy, oxygen, and some neutrons, tritons and gamma rays, though not many. That is, cold fusion. According to existing atomic theory that was impossible; so they were breaking wholly new ground.

Once scaled up, it would translate to abundant safe energy, so cheap as to be "hardly worth billing" and eventually put the entire worlds's oil, gas and coal industries out of business, as well as retiring power generators based on nuclear fission, with their by-products available for H-bombs. Watch that Press conference, and catch the... electricity in the room, the excitement of the reporters!

A third of a century later it still hasn't been scaled up, because the experiment proved resistant to replication; many labs did obtain "excess heat", but a larger number found none. Perhaps Pons & Fleischmann made a mistake, or were outright frauds, or what they observed was a transient part of some yet-undiscovered and much bigger phenomenon. Nobody yet knows, except that the first two of those options are extremely improbable. But what did happen in 1989 showed what a travesty government has made of Science.

Qualified scientists everywhere went at once into high gear to try to replicate the cold-fusion process, some at the highly prestigious Massachussetts Institute of Technology, MIT. There, the Chief Science Writer was Dr Eugene Mallove, whom I later met, and he was at the center of the storm. The task was assigned to a department in MIT already devoted to hot fusion research. They tried (or claimed that they tried) to do what the Utah professors had done, but failed. After a month, they declared it all a mistake, or a hoax. They even threw a party, calling it a "wake" for cold fusion.

Gene, meanwhile, after initial skepticism had come firmly to believe that Pons & Fleischmann were correct, so he was horrified - until he realized that his hot-fusion colleagues were being invited to cut the ground, and government funding, from under their own feet. He pointed out the now-obvious bias to the MIT President, but was brushed off. $25 million/yr stolen from America's taxpayers was not a sum these hot-fusioneers would lightly discard. In 1991 Gene quit his valuable job in disgust.

Add to that the enormous influence, over FedGov funds, of the hydrocarbon industry. Its lobbyists needed only to whisper to each Congresscritter that money for his next re-election campaign might not be forthcoming if he voted to fund research into what might undermine its entire future.

In the 33 years since those events, billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into hot fusion research, and in December 2022 there was a breakthrough: at long last a device was demonstrated that yielded 50% more energy than it absorbed. Pons & Fleischmann had already shown more than 50% in 1989, but there is still no theory to explain it and while many attempts to replicate their work have shown an even greater net output, none have done so with consistent reliability. Cold fusion is therefore still on the cusp of a new understanding of physics.

Recall: 70 years elapsed between Ben Franklin's dangerous experiments with lightning and the systematic discoverers of the nature of electricty in the 1820s by Ampère, Faraday and Ohm. In research, it sometimes takes a while.

It doesn't matter whether the Utah experiment could have led to huge benefits or not; the key is that money to fund any and all experiments comes not from investors who set out to exploit them on a small scale and then to plow back profits to develop larger applications, but is controlled by a political process which with-holds or grants it on grounds that have nothing to do with the potential merits involved. That sad situation will probably continue for as long as government does. One more good reason for it to be boiled off.