Cold fusion becoming commercial?

Lubos Motl is this fellow who regards women as a lower species and lefties and those taking climate change seriously as idiots or criminals. The same fellow believes on more than decade old superstring and M-theory propaganda even after the complete failure of the approach as a physical theory, and has managed to be again and again wrong in his stubborn attempts to interpret the recent particle physics experiments at Tevatron and LHC as successes of super strings or standard SUSY.

Our intellectual hero has now expressed his views about cold fusion. The posting represents standard rhetorics of Lubos, which at best can be said to be entertaining but is rather information free and based on personal insults. The posting is an excellent demonstration about how closed minded a really hard wired theoretician can become. Of course, the audience is happy. There are always those among us who want strong leaders who "know" and react by "Wau!" to any kind of nonsense: otherwise we would not have had the Nazi regime and the terror of Stalin.

As far contents is considered, the posting would not deserve any comments. The basic attitude is that everything about nuclear physics is known and Coulomb wall makes cold fusion impossible. Certainly not a news and certainly not very imaginative.

Personally I have been interested in cold fusion for fifteen years or so. I take the possibility of cold fusion seriously and I am ready and even happy to ask "What if the repeatedly claimed cold fusion is real?". I have no difficulties in imagining for a moment that this could be the case. After all, this is what theoreticians should do: play with thoughts! Imagine rather than slaughter! I am ready to look whether my life work TGD, which predicts a lot of new physics, could provide also explanation for the cold fusion. For me the labeling of experimentalists observing something in conflict with personal prejudices as a crackpots is unethical and demonstrates that the theoretician is not worth of his salt.

At this time the victim of the Lubos was Andrea Rossi, a researcher working in Bologna University. The fatal mistake of Rossi was that his work is making possible first commercial cold fusion reactors. This does not have place in the weird reality of Lubos (do not forget that also intelligent women, climate change, and social justice -how leftist!- are excluded). The following summary taken from the article in the above link describes briefly what Rossi has been doing.

First, a quick summary. Andrea Rossi, associated with the University of Bologna, took research from Sergio Focardi and scaled it up with a nanostructured nickel substrate and an undisclosed (but supposedly inexpensive) catalyst that fuses hydrogen with nickel releasing heat and some gamma rays. A demonstration unit in January took 400 watts in and put 12 kwatts out, boiling some 8.8 liters of water in 30 minutes. He says units have run for months heating his laboratory, designs that don’t need a continuous source of input heat can be built but are unstable and difficult to stop. The reactor produces copper, but it’s still unclear just how hydrogen is overcoming Coulomb repulsion without needing particle accelerators or pressures akin to the center of a star.

The claim is that cold fusion of hydrogen and nickel catalyzed by some unknown catalyst (Palladium in many earlier experiments claiming cold fusion of hydrogen nuclei) produces copper plus energy. The process takes place spontaneously and is so stable that energy can be produced commercially. Two companies are involved.

The atomic weights of Ni and Cu are 28 and 29 so that the hydrogen atom must be able to penetrate the Coulomb wall. This is of course impossible in standard nuclear physics. Experimentalists propose that somehow electron neutralizes hydrogen nucleus in nuclear length scales so that the hydrogen atom does not "see" the nucleus. This provides our simplistic hero Lubos with excellent rhetoric weapons.

What could then make possible to overcome the Coulomb wall? This requires some new physics predicted by TGD. My proposal is discussed in the chapters TGD and Nuclear Physics and Nuclear String Hypothesis of the book "p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis and Dark Matter Hierarchy".

1. The basic vision is that dark matter corresponds phases in which the Planck constant (its effective value in the simplest realization supported by the basic mathematical structure of TGD) is integer multiple of the standard value of Planck constant. The basic implication is that the quantum size of particle given by its Compton length scales as hbar. More generally, quantal length scales typically scale like some positive power of hbar. For large enough values of hbar the size of the particle is so large that the dark particles overlap in quantum sense and form various macroscopic quantum phases: Bose-Einstein condensates, super conducting phases, etc... This is crucial for understanding living matter as a macroscopic quantum system. During last years the hypothesis that living systems are macroscopic quantum systems have gained increasing experimental support.

2. Dark protons and dark nuclei formed by strings of dark protons are fundamental in TGD inspired quantum biology. The model for dark nuclei leads to the astonishing conclusion that the states of dark nucleus can be arranged naturally to multiplets in one-one correspondence with DNA, RNA, tRNA, and aminoacids and vertebrete genetic code is reproduced in simple and natural manner (see this and this). The implications are revolutionary since genetic code would be realized already at the level of hadron physics! Biological realization would have emerged later than this realization. The conclusion is that water is some kind of prebiotic life form and the strange experimental findings of HIV Nobelist Montagnier supporting the reality of water memory and giving evidence for a new realization of genetric code plus much earlier discoveries of Peter Gariaev's group find explanation in this picture.

3. Consider now the mechanism of cold fusion. Dark protons have size scale of order single DNA nucleotide and therefore larger than atomic length scale, which is of order Angstrom. Therefore the quark charges inside proton are delocalized in a volume with this size scale. In this state Ni nucleus does not see proton as point charge but as a charged sphere much larger than the nucleus itself so that Coulomb wall effectively disappears. Dark hydrogen nucleus has no difficulty in enclosing inside itself the Ni nucleus. If a phase transition reducing the value of Planck constant to its standard value contracts proton to its ordinary size, cold fusion can take place.

   This is of course only a rough description: I have proposed a more detailed model for what might happen here. I do not of course claim that the model is the final truth: a lot of experimental an theoretical work would be required to develop the model to a real quantitative theory of cold fusion.

4. Note that the proposal of the experimentalists that electron somehow neutralizes the dark nucleus could also make sense: electron could be dark or ordinary electron. I have not considered this possiblity in my proposal.

The work of cold fusion pioneers and various forms of cold fusion are discussed in the second chapter about TGD inspired nuclear physics. For instance, evidence for cold fusion in living matter has been discovered long time ago. Note that cold fusion could provide not only a new manner to produce energy but it would also allow to manufacture metals and other technologically important elements from lighter ones. The technological impact of cold fusion cannot therefore be over-estimated.

It is amusing that despite the systematic refusal of the academic world to support cold fusion research, cold fusion is being now being commercialized. Of course, the colleagues receiving monthly salary still refuse to take it seriously! They have read from their dusty text books about Coulomb wall and that's enough for a simple enough mind. At the same time they are ready to take seriously even this incredible M-theory landscape and multiverse nonsense. I am not the only one seeing the situation in theoretical physics as catastrophic. It is really tragic that theoreticians like Lubos having absolutely neither real understanding nor required open mindedness and basing their arguments on personal insults are so influential. Even many professionals can take the menacering of Lubos seriously.