Many thanks to Barry Simon for submitting the following report about the 2014 Short Course 101 on Cold Fusion at MIT.
In a word, Cold Fusion 101 at MIT was inspiring. The lectures started off with Peter Hagelstein discussing the early days of Pons and Fleischmann and why their first experiments were not successfully replicated. (Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed.) He also covered the most widely accepted CF theories, including his own, and went into a lot of scientific detail.
Unless you have the mathematical language to understand formulas (which I don’t), a lot of Prof. Hagelstein’s info will fly over your head (which it did mine). His lectures are surely for heavyweights. Ruby Carat via Jeremy Rys has already put up some of the lectures on Cold Fusion Now. http://coldfusionnow.org/2014-cold-fusion-101-video-lectures/
He started each lecture with the warning that the field of Cold Fusion can be a career killer. In that statement you can sense his struggle, and how ending up as the lone Cold Fusion wolf at MIT after 25 years has taken a toll on his spirit. He didn’t go into the politics and spoke with respect about his CF adversaries, even calling for a moment of silence for John Huizenga on the last day of class. I would challenge any physicist to explain to him why CF can’t work. By the way, MIT just got $22 million for Hot Fusion research, for Cold Fusion $0.
Peter Hagelstein’s approach was Einsteinian, whereas Mitchell Swartz was more like Edison. PH is trying to figure out how and why CF works, while MS spends much of his time in the workshop, working on improving his CF devices. His lectures were easier on a layman such as myself, and the evolution of the NANOR Cold Fusion device is fascinating.
Highlights for me were:
- Mitchell Swartz has started a new company called Nanortech where they will be selling or leasing NANORS. If anyone seriously wants one, I recommend you act now before the waiting list grows.
- He showed an early experiment of a Phusor (name before NANOR) running a Stirling engine (an engine that runs from heat rather than chemical fuel).
- The latest NANOR series, for there have been many, will efficiently work with 1 watt input. People have criticized the NANORs for being low-milliwatt devices. This is a myth. NANORs can also be chained together.
- In 2012 the NANOR ran at MIT for 4 months, left MIT and ran for another 8 months of testing (though the actual running time would have been 10% or 1.2 months), reaching a peak of 14 COP (14 times more energy than (electrical) input power).
- In 2013 a NANOR reached 80 COP for 30 minutes.
- In 2014 the NANOR Series 8 has reached new efficiencies that are soon to be reported and are now on the market.
- Dr. Swartz, like Edison, prefers to spend his time in the workshop rather than yakking about his findings on the internet. He is willing to openly share his data and methods to the community at large. He is very thorough in his research, wanting to test and retest x20 to be on the safe side, and his findings almost have to be dragged out of him. Like–who knew a Stirling engine has already been hooked up to a CF device? By the way, he tried to patent it, but the US Patent Office refuses all things “Cold Fusion.” Can’t wait to show it. It looks like something that will someday have a place in the Museum of Science.
Peace, Barry Simon