New Energy News (May 2001): Difference between revisions
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==Abstract== | ==Abstract== | ||
''The archive record for this item carries no abstract. It is a complete issue of a newsletter rather than a single paper; its contents are described below.'' | |||
==Overview== | |||
This is the May 2001 issue of ''New Energy News'' (Volume 8, Number 5, ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy (INE), edited by [[Patrick G Bailey]] and produced out of [[Hal Fox]]'s office in Salt Lake City. It is not a research paper but a movement document: a snapshot of what the [[New Energy]] community was reading, arguing about and organising around at the turn of the millennium. The issue runs to seven departments — Editorial, Abstracts, Book Review, Articles, Letters, Meetings and Humor — and opens with the announcement that the newsletter will henceforth be distributed by email in two formats, plain ASCII and PDF, with a mailed Acrobat CD-ROM available for two dollars to members without internet access. | |||
For a reader of this wiki the interest of the issue lies in what it reveals about how a dissident research community sustained itself. There was no peer-review filter, no institutional host, and no journal willing to carry the work; instead there was a membership list of just over three hundred, a monthly deadline of the last Friday, a device database maintained by hand in an Excel matrix, and one annual conference. Bailey's editorial states the editorial policy in a single word and makes the reasoning explicit. | |||
==Contents of the issue== | |||
===The President's Corner: an anti-editorial policy=== | |||
Bailey, then INE President as well as NEN editor, devotes his editorial to how articles are submitted and what happens to them. Asked what the criteria are "for writing, for review, and for the acceptance of an NEN article," his answer is "NONE!" Authors will be "held accountable for what you write by all the other readers"; contributors blasting someone else's theory or reported device data are asked only to "re-read your text the next day and make any updates then." Once submitted, articles "will not be edited or changed — unless absolutely necessary." His stated reason is that open, unedited interaction will "prohibit the kind of scientific and political extortion and overt suppression that we see everywhere else in this world today." | |||
The same section reports on the INE website (unchanged since September 2000, Bailey having had major eye surgery), on plans to password-protect the device-comparison database for members, and on the 2001 INE conference to be held again in Salt Lake City. Bailey calls it "THE ONLY conference that I know of — anywhere — where any of these ideas and devices can be openly discussed," and notes that presenters may use pseudonyms and withhold data if they wish. He closes with a challenge to inventors: contribute the technology and be paid later, or "continue to sell out for short-term cash and see their new technology be suppressed and destroyed by greed, dishonesty, lawyers, banks, and existing lobby groups." | |||
===Abstracts=== | |||
Three items are carried. The first, submitted by [[Hal Fox]], summarises an MIT Global Change Joint Program report, "Uncertainty Analysis of Global Climate Change Projections," which puts the most likely unmitigated warming at 2.5 °C by 2100 against the IPCC Third Assessment range of 1.4–5.8 °C, with a 95 per cent probability interval of 0.9–4.8 °C and less than a 1 per cent chance of reaching the top of the IPCC range. | |||
The second is [[Thomas F Valone]]'s abstract for an invited talk at the April 2001 American Physical Society meeting in Washington, titled "One Cold Fusion Speaker is One Too Many for a Future Energy Conference." Valone recounts how the 1999 Conference on Future Energy (COFE), scheduled for the State Department Open Forum with fourteen plenary lectures, was labelled a "cold fusion conference" by APS spokesman Robert Park — on the strength of a single scheduled talk by [[Edmund Storms]], formerly of Los Alamos — and how what followed included APS "pseudoscience" presentations mocking COFE scientists and, in Valone's account, the loss of his livelihood. He describes Park's activity, quoting a ''Washington Post'' review, as "a one-man search-and-destroy mission." | |||
The third is a reprint of a ''Wall Street Journal'' piece on BP's "Beyond Petroleum" repositioning and the shareholder resolutions it attracted. | |||
===Book review, articles and letters=== | |||
The book reviewed is Maurice Strong's ''Where on Earth are We Going?''. The Articles section carries a press release from Tathacus Resources on independent Alberta Research Council testing of Xogen Power's oxygen–hydrogen gas generation system — the ARC data being said to "confirm that the Xogen process works to produce an oxygen-hydrogen gas mixture," with the caveat that plate and connector material optimisation has not yet been undertaken — and a set of electric-vehicle news notes, prefaced by Hal Fox's remark that battery EVs combined with "on-board battery chargers that tap the energy of space" would be "a much-needed combination." | |||
The Letters section contains two items of note. [[Robert W Bass]] writes to point readers at his US Patent 4,448,743 (1984), "Generation, Insulated Confinement, and Heating of Ultra-High Temperature Plasmas," and explains — this being 2001 — how to install a TIFF browser plug-in so that US patents can be downloaded free from the USPTO site rather than bought from a commercial service. [[Dezso Sarkadi]] writes from Paks, Hungary announcing "a sensational gravitational experiment" using a physical pendulum, and asks anyone able to repeat it to contact him. | |||
===Meetings=== | |||
Two conferences are announced: a congress on "New Hydrogen Technologies and Space Drives" at Weinfelden, Switzerland in June 2001, organised by the Institute for New Energy Technologies and the German Association for Space Energy; and the 9th Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation (RCCNT-9) at Dagomys near Sochi, 30 September – 7 October 2001, convened under the Russian Academy of Sciences and several Russian scientific societies, with sessions on experimental research in [[Cold Fusion]], transmutation and ball lightning, theoretical models, and applied technologies and devices. The issue closes with a parody of the theme from ''Rawhide'' about the California rolling blackouts. | |||
==Assessment== | |||
As a historical document this issue is genuinely useful, and more informative than most of the technical papers it advertises. It records with unusual candour the trade-off the [[Free Energy]] community made: total openness of publication bought at the cost of any quality filter. Bailey does not disguise this — he argues it explicitly, and his argument that reader accountability can substitute for review deserves to be taken on its own terms rather than sneered at. The Valone item is a first-hand account of a suppression episode that is otherwise hard to document, and the RCCNT-9 announcement is evidence that cold-fusion research retained institutional backing in Russia long after it had lost it in the United States. | |||
Its limitations are equally plain and follow directly from the editorial policy. Nothing in the issue is refereed, and the technical claims are carried at the level of press release. The Xogen item is a company announcement quoting a company president on his own company's due diligence; no gas-production rate, no input power, and no efficiency figure appear, so the claim "the process works" carries no energy-balance content at all. Hal Fox's aside about chargers "that tap the energy of space" is asserted in passing as if it were an existing technology. Sarkadi's gravitational result is announced by a URL, with no data reproduced. A reader cannot evaluate any of these from the newsletter, only note that they were claimed. | |||
The issue is therefore best cited as evidence about the community rather than about nature — for who was working on what in 2001, which conferences existed, and how the movement understood its own relationship to mainstream physics. | |||
==See also== | |||
* [[Patrick G Bailey]] | |||
* [[New Energy News]] | |||
* [[Journal of New Energy]] | |||
* [[Hal Fox]] | |||
* [[Thomas F Valone]] | |||
* [[Edmund Storms]] | |||
* [[Robert W Bass]] | |||
* [[Dezso Sarkadi]] | |||
* [[New Energy]] | |||
* [[Cold Fusion]] | |||
* [[Free Energy]] | |||
[[Category:Scientific Paper|new energy news]] | [[Category:Scientific Paper|new energy news]] | ||
[[Category:New Energy|new energy news]] | [[Category:New Energy|new energy news]] | ||
[[Category:Cold Fusion|new energy news]] | |||
[[Category:Free Energy|new energy news]] | |||
Latest revision as of 11:47, 21 July 2026
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (May 2001) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 5 |
| No. of pages | 22 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The archive record for this item carries no abstract. It is a complete issue of a newsletter rather than a single paper; its contents are described below.
Overview
This is the May 2001 issue of New Energy News (Volume 8, Number 5, ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy (INE), edited by Patrick G Bailey and produced out of Hal Fox's office in Salt Lake City. It is not a research paper but a movement document: a snapshot of what the New Energy community was reading, arguing about and organising around at the turn of the millennium. The issue runs to seven departments — Editorial, Abstracts, Book Review, Articles, Letters, Meetings and Humor — and opens with the announcement that the newsletter will henceforth be distributed by email in two formats, plain ASCII and PDF, with a mailed Acrobat CD-ROM available for two dollars to members without internet access.
For a reader of this wiki the interest of the issue lies in what it reveals about how a dissident research community sustained itself. There was no peer-review filter, no institutional host, and no journal willing to carry the work; instead there was a membership list of just over three hundred, a monthly deadline of the last Friday, a device database maintained by hand in an Excel matrix, and one annual conference. Bailey's editorial states the editorial policy in a single word and makes the reasoning explicit.
Contents of the issue
The President's Corner: an anti-editorial policy
Bailey, then INE President as well as NEN editor, devotes his editorial to how articles are submitted and what happens to them. Asked what the criteria are "for writing, for review, and for the acceptance of an NEN article," his answer is "NONE!" Authors will be "held accountable for what you write by all the other readers"; contributors blasting someone else's theory or reported device data are asked only to "re-read your text the next day and make any updates then." Once submitted, articles "will not be edited or changed — unless absolutely necessary." His stated reason is that open, unedited interaction will "prohibit the kind of scientific and political extortion and overt suppression that we see everywhere else in this world today."
The same section reports on the INE website (unchanged since September 2000, Bailey having had major eye surgery), on plans to password-protect the device-comparison database for members, and on the 2001 INE conference to be held again in Salt Lake City. Bailey calls it "THE ONLY conference that I know of — anywhere — where any of these ideas and devices can be openly discussed," and notes that presenters may use pseudonyms and withhold data if they wish. He closes with a challenge to inventors: contribute the technology and be paid later, or "continue to sell out for short-term cash and see their new technology be suppressed and destroyed by greed, dishonesty, lawyers, banks, and existing lobby groups."
Abstracts
Three items are carried. The first, submitted by Hal Fox, summarises an MIT Global Change Joint Program report, "Uncertainty Analysis of Global Climate Change Projections," which puts the most likely unmitigated warming at 2.5 °C by 2100 against the IPCC Third Assessment range of 1.4–5.8 °C, with a 95 per cent probability interval of 0.9–4.8 °C and less than a 1 per cent chance of reaching the top of the IPCC range.
The second is Thomas F Valone's abstract for an invited talk at the April 2001 American Physical Society meeting in Washington, titled "One Cold Fusion Speaker is One Too Many for a Future Energy Conference." Valone recounts how the 1999 Conference on Future Energy (COFE), scheduled for the State Department Open Forum with fourteen plenary lectures, was labelled a "cold fusion conference" by APS spokesman Robert Park — on the strength of a single scheduled talk by Edmund Storms, formerly of Los Alamos — and how what followed included APS "pseudoscience" presentations mocking COFE scientists and, in Valone's account, the loss of his livelihood. He describes Park's activity, quoting a Washington Post review, as "a one-man search-and-destroy mission."
The third is a reprint of a Wall Street Journal piece on BP's "Beyond Petroleum" repositioning and the shareholder resolutions it attracted.
Book review, articles and letters
The book reviewed is Maurice Strong's Where on Earth are We Going?. The Articles section carries a press release from Tathacus Resources on independent Alberta Research Council testing of Xogen Power's oxygen–hydrogen gas generation system — the ARC data being said to "confirm that the Xogen process works to produce an oxygen-hydrogen gas mixture," with the caveat that plate and connector material optimisation has not yet been undertaken — and a set of electric-vehicle news notes, prefaced by Hal Fox's remark that battery EVs combined with "on-board battery chargers that tap the energy of space" would be "a much-needed combination."
The Letters section contains two items of note. Robert W Bass writes to point readers at his US Patent 4,448,743 (1984), "Generation, Insulated Confinement, and Heating of Ultra-High Temperature Plasmas," and explains — this being 2001 — how to install a TIFF browser plug-in so that US patents can be downloaded free from the USPTO site rather than bought from a commercial service. Dezso Sarkadi writes from Paks, Hungary announcing "a sensational gravitational experiment" using a physical pendulum, and asks anyone able to repeat it to contact him.
Meetings
Two conferences are announced: a congress on "New Hydrogen Technologies and Space Drives" at Weinfelden, Switzerland in June 2001, organised by the Institute for New Energy Technologies and the German Association for Space Energy; and the 9th Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation (RCCNT-9) at Dagomys near Sochi, 30 September – 7 October 2001, convened under the Russian Academy of Sciences and several Russian scientific societies, with sessions on experimental research in Cold Fusion, transmutation and ball lightning, theoretical models, and applied technologies and devices. The issue closes with a parody of the theme from Rawhide about the California rolling blackouts.
Assessment
As a historical document this issue is genuinely useful, and more informative than most of the technical papers it advertises. It records with unusual candour the trade-off the Free Energy community made: total openness of publication bought at the cost of any quality filter. Bailey does not disguise this — he argues it explicitly, and his argument that reader accountability can substitute for review deserves to be taken on its own terms rather than sneered at. The Valone item is a first-hand account of a suppression episode that is otherwise hard to document, and the RCCNT-9 announcement is evidence that cold-fusion research retained institutional backing in Russia long after it had lost it in the United States.
Its limitations are equally plain and follow directly from the editorial policy. Nothing in the issue is refereed, and the technical claims are carried at the level of press release. The Xogen item is a company announcement quoting a company president on his own company's due diligence; no gas-production rate, no input power, and no efficiency figure appear, so the claim "the process works" carries no energy-balance content at all. Hal Fox's aside about chargers "that tap the energy of space" is asserted in passing as if it were an existing technology. Sarkadi's gravitational result is announced by a URL, with no data reproduced. A reader cannot evaluate any of these from the newsletter, only note that they were claimed.
The issue is therefore best cited as evidence about the community rather than about nature — for who was working on what in 2001, which conferences existed, and how the movement understood its own relationship to mainstream physics.