New Energy News (July 2000)

Scientific Paper
Title	New Energy News (July 2000)
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Patrick G Bailey
Keywords	New Energy, cold fusion, low energy nuclear reactions, torsion fields, charge clusters, superluminal light
Published	2000
Journal	New Energy News
Volume	7
Number	2
No. of pages	35

Read the full paper here

Abstract

(The archive entry carries no author abstract; this item is a complete newsletter issue rather than a single paper.)

Overview

This is the full July 2000 issue of New Energy News (vol. 7, no. 2, ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy (INE), edited by Hal Fox and published alongside the Journal of New Energy. Patrick G Bailey was INE president at the time. It is not a research paper but a survey document: news items, an editorial on scientific method, laboratory notes from the editor's own bench, an extensive abstracts digest drawn from the mainstream literature, book reviews, conference announcements and correspondence.

Its value to this wiki is as a snapshot of what the New Energy community was tracking at the turn of the millennium, and of how that community understood its own relation to institutional science. The issue's governing theme, stated in the editorial and repeated in the editor's reply to a letter at the back, is that discovery precedes modelling — that the way past academic resistance is not argument but working hardware. Its most substantive content is an unusually long digest of peer-reviewed abstracts on low-energy nuclear reactions, torsion fields and gravity, drawn from journals such as Nuovo Cimento, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Physical Review D, Physics Letters A and the Proceedings of the Japan Academy.

Contents

Superluminal light

The issue opens with a syndicated report by Jonathan Leake (Sunday Times, London) on Lijun Wang's experiment at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, in which a light pulse sent toward a chamber of specially treated caesium gas emerged and travelled a further 60 ft before it had fully entered — a result Wang described as propagation at 300 times c. Wang is quoted confirming only that "our light pulses did indeed travel faster than the accepted speed of light." The item notes supporting comment from Raymond Chiao at Berkeley, a parallel Italian National Research Council result propagating microwaves 25% above c, and Günter Nimtz's claim that information can be sent superluminally — with Nimtz's own caveat that causality survives because interpretation time consumes the saving. Cambridge's Neil Turok is quoted on the sceptical side: "I doubt this will change our view of the fundamental laws of physics." The report is reproduced without editorial endorsement of the interpretation.

Editorial: "What is Science?"

Fox's editorial is the issue's clearest statement of position. Science, he argues, is neither the protection of the status quo nor a body of mathematics: "The essence of science is discovery: the finding of new, previously unknown, facts," where a scientific fact is "the close agreement of a series of observations of the same phenomena." He gives a careful account of the demarcation that founded the scientific method — the agreement to explain observed phenomena without appeal to the supernatural — and is explicit that this agreement "does not deny that there can be spiritual events," only that they fall outside the current body of scientific knowledge.

He then names three claimed fundamental discoveries in the new-energy field: Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons's excess heat from electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium; Randell Mills's claimed thousandfold energy gain attributed to collapse of the hydrogen atom below its ground state (commercialised as BlackLight Power); and Kenneth Shoulders's high-density charge clusters (HDCC), patented as U.S. 5,018,180, with the patent itself suggesting the excess energy might be tapped from the vacuum. Fox's point is sociological: none of the three was publicly funded, none is academically accepted, and each is denied by a specific current model — that hydrogen cannot exist below its ground state, and that nuclear reactions cannot be produced by low-energy means.

The practical advice that follows is the most useful part of the editorial and is directed against the community's own failings: don't discard data contrary to your model; learn the limits of your instruments (a 100 MHz oscilloscope will not show nanosecond phenomena); and beware the "delusion" of measuring pulsed inputs with equipment calibrated only for sinusoidal AC — a warning aimed squarely at overunity motor claims.

Bench notes: charge clusters and arcs

Under "Experiments at EEMF" and "How do you explain that?" Fox reports replicating a Shoulders arrangement — a point cathode facing an aluminium anode coated with a ~0.006 in layer of silicon carbide in epoxy. Where dry air normally requires about 10,000 V to arc across one centimetre, the coated arrangement arced at 2,000–3,000 V. Three observations are recorded: ejection of material from the back of the foil, holes about 0.001 in in diameter punched clean through both the silicon carbide and the aluminium, and — most striking — an arc that bent over to strike through the silicon carbide rather than take the shorter path to bare aluminium. Fox's proposed explanation is that the classic account (ion trail completes, spark follows) is wrong here: the high resistance layer puts most of the voltage drop across a very thin dielectric, producing a steep gradient that favours charge-cluster formation, and per Shoulders "every arc is preceded by a charge cluster." Full construction details are given so readers can repeat it.

Abstracts around the world

The bulk of the issue — roughly a third of its pages — is a bibliographic digest, and it is where the newsletter is doing its most durable work. Under low energy nuclear reactions it collects George Miley's thin-film electrolysis results (~1 W/cc excess power, with new elements clustering in mass bands at A = 22–23, 50–80, 108–120 and 200–209); Focardi, Piantelli and colleagues on Ni–H systems, including two cells run about 300 days producing 600 and 900 MJ excess, and neutron emission at around 700 K; Yoshiaki Arata and Yue-Chang Zhang's series of double-cell comparisons showing large excess energy and helium from D₂O with a double-structure cathode and none from H₂O, together with direct detection of gaseous ⁴He inside the cathode; Ohmori and Mizuno on claimed transmutation products (mercury, osmium, iron, silicon and others) with isotopic distributions departing from natural abundance; Hideo Kozima's trapped-neutron (TNCF) model analyses; and Dragic, Marić and Jean-Pierre Vigier on tightly bound hydrogen states as a possible origin of excess heat. Negative and sceptical results are included rather than filtered out — Botta et al. reporting essentially no neutron emission from Ti/D, and Garlaschelli's brief review concluding cold fusion "is yet unproven."

Under torsion field research and gravity the digest turns almost entirely to mainstream theoretical literature: Boyadjiev, Fiziev and Yazadjiev on neutron stars with propagating torsion (noting the inconsistency of Saa's model with the Roll–Krotkov–Dicke and Braginsky–Panov experiments); Belyaev and Shapiro deriving the unique renormalisable torsion action and setting experimental bounds from LEP, HERA, SLAC, SLD, CCFR and TEVATRON data; Babourova et al. on plane torsion waves; B. L. Hu on stochastic gravity; and work on gravitating monopoles in Brans–Dicke theory. The juxtaposition is deliberate and is the digest's implicit argument: torsion, which the fringe literature treats as an exotic energy source, is a live and respectable topic in Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Antigravity, reviews and letters

A short item relays James Meek's Guardian report that BAe Systems' military wing was still pursuing the Podkletnov gravity-shielding claim under the name Project Greenglow, working with Lancaster University, with project leader Ron Evans keeping a low profile "for fear of ridicule as 'crank' science." Book reviews cover Nick Begich and James Roderick's Earth Rising (HAARP, beam weapons, mind control — praised for its 660 references, criticised by Fox for not telling readers what they can actually do) and Bobbie Sandoz's Listening to Wild Dolphins, which Fox reviews as containing a testable scientific claim, that cetaceans communicate telepathically, and explicitly proposes be studied under that hypothesis.

Conference listings cover the International Congress-2000 in St Petersburg (sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences and St Petersburg State University, with sessions on "dynamics of ether"), the 2000 International Symposium on New Energy in Salt Lake City chaired by Bailey, a Fort Collins forum on converting to a hydrogen economy, an Adolf and Inge Schneider-organised congress in Zürich, and the ANS/ENS winter meeting in Washington.

The closing letter, from George Galeczki, is the issue's sharpest piece of writing. He dates his own scepticism to witnessing "the phenomenon of personality cult in science" at a 1979 Einstein centenary party, reports some forty critical articles and a book with Peter Marquardt, and then makes a point rarely made from inside the dissident camp: that the critics are far less unified than the orthodoxy, ranging from total rejection of the scientific approach to mere apologetics, and naming both extremes (Millennium Twain and Georges Bourbaki at one end; Umberto Bartocci, Mogens Wegener and the neo-Lorentzians at the other). His warning is that wrong theories surviving a long time must not be allowed to induce "a process of decay of the scientific method ... and a return to dogmatic beliefs, anti-science, numerology, astrology, belief in miracles and superstitions." Fox's published reply agrees on the diagnosis but declines the strategy: rather than fight academicians, "develop new devices and systems that 'they' say will not work." The issue ends with a short science-fiction piece, "Miniature Suns" by Chuck Bennett.

Assessment

Judged as what it is — a community newsletter — this issue is well made, and two features deserve credit. First, the abstracts digest is scrupulously sourced: journal, volume, page, year and author affiliation are given throughout, and the selection includes results that cut against the community's hopes (Botta et al.'s null neutron result, Garlaschelli's dismissal). A partisan editor could easily have omitted them. Second, Fox's editorial contains genuinely good methodological advice, and the specific warning about measuring pulsed inputs with sinusoid-calibrated instruments identifies the single most common source of spurious overunity claims. A newsletter that tells its own readers how their favourite results most often go wrong is doing something honest.

The difficulties are also visible. The editorial's central move — that discovery precedes modelling, and that the answer to academic resistance is a device on sale — is stated as though it settled a question it does not settle. A product that works is not evidence for the explanation offered for it, and the history of the three exemplars is instructive: two decades on, none of Fleischmann–Pons, Mills or Shoulders has produced a commercially deployed energy device, so the strategy has been tested and has not delivered what Fox expected of it. The charge-cluster bench note is a fair report of an interesting observation, but the interpretation runs ahead of the measurement: a reduced breakdown voltage across a resistive dielectric layer, and an arc that tracks along a surface rather than jumping to nearby bare metal, are both well-known effects of surface conduction and field concentration in insulating coatings, and nothing in the reported observations distinguishes a charge cluster from ordinary surface flashover. No current, energy or timing measurements are given.

The digest's greatest weakness is its lack of editorial discrimination between kinds of claim. Miley's isotope mass bands, Arata's helium detection and Kozima's TNCF fits are presented in the same register and without comment, though they differ enormously in how directly they bear on the question — and the excess-heat claims in particular have never been reconciled with the absence of commensurate nuclear products at the rates required by the energies reported, which remains the standing objection to the whole field. Placing torsion-gravity papers from Classical and Quantum Gravity next to new-energy claims implies a kinship that the cited papers do not assert; Belyaev and Shapiro's work in fact sets upper bounds on torsion couplings from collider data, which is close to the opposite of what an energy-from-torsion programme would want. And a reader will notice that the same issue that publishes Galeczki's warning against "numerology, astrology, belief in miracles" also carries an editorial proposal to study dolphin telepathy — a juxtaposition Fox does not remark on, and which illustrates precisely the difficulty of drawing the line that Galeczki says must be drawn.

For all that, this is a useful document. Read as a primary source on the state and self-understanding of the new-energy community in 2000 — its evidence, its heroes, its internal disagreements and its relationship with the journals — it is more informative than most single papers of the period, and the bibliography alone gives a researcher a working entry point into the low-energy nuclear reaction literature of the late 1990s.

See also

• Patrick G Bailey — INE president and named author of the archive entry
• Hal Fox — editor of New Energy News and the Journal of New Energy
• New Energy — the field this newsletter served
• Cold Fusion — the subject of the issue's largest abstract section
• Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons — cited as the founding discovery
• Hideo Kozima — the TNCF model, several abstracts in this issue
• Jean-Pierre Vigier — tightly bound hydrogen states as an excess-heat mechanism
• Zero Point Energy — proposed as the source of charge-cluster excess energy
• Peter Marquardt, Umberto Bartocci and Millennium Twain — named in Galeczki's letter
• Nick Begich — reviewed in this issue
• Adolf Schneider — organiser of one of the conferences announced
• Nikola Tesla — the International Tesla Institute is a listed congress organiser