Paradigm shift in cold fusion?

 Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of “X,” the unknown metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing apparatus and bottles of chemicals on its way, and was even now disappearing through the open window.

—E. E. “Doc” Smith, The Skylark of Space

Chapter 5 of "Flying Car" opens with this quotation from the iconic space opera. I then proceed to compare the rambunctious events in the novel to the almost-as-rambunctious events of the first few years of the cold fusion saga. There was enough of an amusing similarity to inspire the comparison -- in the novel, Seaton was an electrochemist doing electrolysis experiments with platinum-group metals, for example -- and to include the science fiction novel in the discussion of an extended episode of actual science.

But at this point it is worth our time to consider the differences. In real life, Fleischmann and Pons, after their original startling burn-through event and subsequent more careful experiments involving heat gain, continued doing exploratory experiments, with spotty results. Other experimenters got similarly spotty results, occasionally getting excess heat and sometimes, as with Mizuno in Japan, run the current for months and get nothing, then suddenly get 10 times as much heat out as you were putting in, and sometimes the reactor would produce power for days even after the input power was turned off. There were even, thankfully rare, explosions.

Mizuno's "Heat after Death" reactor

In the novel, by contrast, Our Hero does not continue experiments but instead sits down to work out the basic theory of the thing before fooling around with it. Meanwhile the bad guys try to steal the discovery, run off and do experiments without any theoretical understanding, and blow themselves up. 

Sorry, but that's the difference between a SF novel and reality. In real life, science proceeds by the slow, groping-in-the-dark methods of the experimenter. The first version of "Flying Car" came with an appendix listing all the experimenters who had died in the quest for flying machines. The names filled a page. It is only after the accumulation of knowledge from experiment that we know enough to form useful models. Even Newton, genius though he certainly was, needed both the painstaking observations of Tycho and regularities worked out by Kepler to make the breakthrough into a modern understanding of solar system dynamics.

People have been trying to understand cold fusion phenomena for 35 years and don't seem to have made an awful lot of progress. A lot of detail has been collected but nothing you could call a set of generally applicable organizing principles. It's not that there isn't a theory; it is that there are hundreds of theories and none of them has shown enough overall explanatory power to displace the others.

It's my experience that when you get into a situation like this, it's because you just have the wrong model of what's going on, and you aren't interpreting your evidence appropriately. God isn't sending lightning to strike your church because the congregation is sinning; Maxwell's equations are sending lightning to strike your church because it is the tallest pointed object in the area. All the squabbling over who's sinning the most is, to steal a phrase, not even wrong.

 Thomas Kuhn would have said that anomalies are accumulating and a paradigm shift is eminent. 

I recently attended IWAHLM-16 (a conference in memoriam of Bill Collis) in Strasbourg. The workshops are perhaps second to the main ICCF conference series. I hadn't expected much, but Strasbourg has 99 Michelin-rated restaurants and it fit into my schedule; I thought I would get to say Hi to some old friends. 

I was pleasantly surprised. There were two new things, one of which I had known about and one I had missed, even though if I had been paying close attention I might have picked up on. 

First, the one I knew about, is Peter Hagelstein's (an MIT physics prof) quantum mechanics-based theories of how a fusion (or other nuclear) reaction might spread its resulting energy out over a (very) large number of things, such as a lot of atoms' motions comprising heat, instead of spewing protons and neutrons and gamma rays around as happens when you achieve fusion in a particle accelerator. This work had advanced significantly, there is a whole group of grad students and researchers involved in it, and a "big paper" is expected soon. 

The other new thing wasn't really new, and indeed I had been seeing it for some time but filtering it out. Cold fusion tends to attract enough people with way-out theories, so much that you would waste way too much time if you tried to seriously consider all of them. So one develops mental filters to make a first cut and allow you to spend your time thinking about the things that have a greater chance of turning into useful and explanatory theories.

Among the things I had been filtering out were "strange radiation" and "exotic vacuum objects" or "EVOs". They might as well have been saying "UFOs" as far as I was concerned.  So before I proceed, lest you have the same reaction, let's state a few things that are well-known, incontrovertible, mainstream physics.

• Plasma is the 4th state of matter, and indeed almost all the matter in the universe is plasma: stars. Lightning is also plasma. 
• Fusion occurs in plasma; indeed most of the mainstream experimental fusion reactors use plasma.
• The Z-pinch (sometimes ζ-pinch) effect is a phenomenon of bog-standard electromagnetic theory: although stationary like charges repel, moving charges (currents) in parallel produce magnetic fields that tend to attract. (Which force wins depends on details.) The ζ-pinch effect is used in virtually every plasma-based experimental fusion reactor.

And here are some things that are not so well-known, but which are well-supported by historical and experimental evidence:

• A plasmoid is a (more-or-less) stable configuration of plasma, currents, and magnetic fields; the most well-know example is ball lightning.
• Plasmoids can be created in the laboratory in sizes ranging from ball lightning down to microscopic. This has been done by multiple researchers over the 20th century, all of whom named them something different!
• Microscopic plasmoids in contact with metal surfaces leave characteristic craters and other surface deformations.
• Working, i.e. heat-producing, cold fusion experiments are typically found to have left similar stigmata on electrode surfaces.
• In a series of successful cold fusion experiments at SPAWAR, IR videos of the electrodes showed that the process was characterized by the twinkling of thousands of points of heat on the electrode surface.

The hypothesis is that microscopic plasmoids form an environment that supports fusion. I had seen the talk by Gordon linked above, at ICCF-21, and a talk by Jaitner at ICCF-22 laying out the hypothesis, but hadn't made the connection. It wasn't until I ran into Jaitner again at IWAHLM-16, when he had moved from theory to experimental results, that I made the connection.

Will all this constitute a paradigm shift? I think it could. Condensed plasmoids could explain why fusion occurs and the MIT down-conversion quantum mechanics why it provides energy in a way that keeps the plasmoid going without external power. (Why "condensed"? Next post (here), or just watch the talk!)