New Energy News (July 2001)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (July 2001) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 7 |
| No. of pages | 17 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
This item is an issue of a newsletter rather than a research paper; the archived file carries no abstract. A summary of its contents follows below.
Overview
This is Volume 8, Number 7 of New Energy News (ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly bulletin of the Institute for New Energy, edited by Patrick G Bailey and distributed from Salt Lake City. The issue opens with a note that from this point the newsletter will be circulated by e-mail in two forms, plain ASCII and PDF, with readers lacking Adobe Acrobat invited to mail $2 for a CD-ROM — a small detail that dates the publication precisely to the moment when the cold fusion and free-energy community was migrating from paper and floppy disk to the web.
The issue is organised in five departments: Abstracts, Articles, Letters, Meetings and Advertisement. Its editorial character is that of a clearing house rather than a journal. Refereed abstracts from Fusion Technology sit alongside newspaper clippings, an unrefereed theoretical essay, a reader's letter describing a home-built antigravity experiment, and conference announcements from three continents. Nothing in the issue is peer reviewed by the newsletter itself, and Bailey's editorial interventions are limited to bracketed asides such as "[This is not energy related now, but it may be soon!]". The value of the document is therefore documentary: it is a snapshot of what the New Energy research community was reading, arguing about and organising in mid-2001.
Contents
Abstracts
Two papers from Fusion Technology are abstracted, both from 2001 and both concerning deuterium in palladium.
Hiroshi Yamada and co-workers at Iwate University report on "Producing a Radioactive Source in a Deuterated Palladium Electrode under Direct-Current Glow Discharge" (Fusion Technol. 39, no. 7, March 2001, 253-258). Anomalous gamma emission was rarely observed during DC glow discharge in about 3 torr of deuterium gas using a deuterated palladium foil cathode. Autoradiography after the run showed isotopes with both low- and high-energy radiation components produced before or during the discharge, and secondary ion mass spectroscopy of the foil after the anomalous gamma emission revealed a considerable increase in iron and copper content at the surface.
Fulvio Frisone of the University of Catania contributes "Deuteron Interaction within a Microcrack in a Lattice at Room Temperature" (Fusion Technol. 39, no. 2, March 2001, 260-265). Frisone calculates the probability of deuteron fusion catalysed by plasmons in a cubic lattice as a function of temperature, in pure and impure palladium, on the hypothesis of a chain reaction within the crystal lattice. His conclusion is that coupling of plasmons and deuterons in the presence of impurities can "not only reduce the thickness but also lower the height of the Coulomb barrier" — the central theoretical obstacle for any low-energy nuclear reaction — with microcracks formed by lattice deformation favouring the process.
The abstracts section is completed by two news items: the opening of the first United States retail biodiesel outlet in San Francisco, selling soy-derived fuel at $3.15 a gallon, and the German government's June 2001 pact with four utilities to phase out the country's nineteen nuclear power plants over a nominal 32-year plant lifetime, with the first closure at Stade in 2003 and the newest plant scheduled for 2021.
Articles
The longest article is Joel Achenbach's Washington Post report on the Disclosure Project press conference at the National Press Club, at which Steven Greer presented twenty witnesses, mostly retired military personnel, testifying to unexplained aerial phenomena. Achenbach's piece is written as satire and closes by offering the reader two scenarios: either intelligent creatures have crossed trillions of miles and been concealed by a flawless half-century cover-up, or "some people believe in things that aren't true." Bailey reprints it in full and adds a one-line note that he personally met the witnesses at the meetings following the press conference. Its relevance to the newsletter is the rumour Achenbach records in passing — that "Big Oil wants to suppress knowledge of a secret, stunning energy source that can be harvested from the quantum soup all around us", a claim adjacent to the Zero Point Energy literature the newsletter otherwise covers.
The substantive theoretical contribution is Bert Schreiber's "Essay on Force", in three parts. Part 1 is a semantic argument: "force" is a human concept with no fixed dimensions, and physicists have erred by equating forces of unlike dimension — voltage against centripetal force, or atmospheric pressure against either. Schreiber insists that dimensions must be stated explicitly for each usage and that force and effect are distinct things, a force always being the result of a field effect.
Part 2 turns to fields. Prompted by Georg Duve on the case of a rotating light beam — where the intercept point sweeps along a distant arc faster than c without anything material exceeding c, and where the rays do not bend merely because the source rotates — Schreiber asks whether a rotating charged sphere drags its field around with it or whether the field remains fixed to absolute space. His answer is that the question dissolves once one stops thinking in lines of force: the field goes out in spherical wave fronts, the effect is transmitted along a single perpendicular line from source centre to target centre, and the familiar lines of force "have no real existence, as they are nothing more than the measured/detected connecting linkage between two bodies." He applies the same reasoning to a bar magnet and to induction in a coil, concluding that "a fixed Field will not cause any affect. The Field itself must move to cause an affect."
Part 3 proposes a testable claim. Light leaving a rotating mass shows a Doppler Effect following a cosine law, zero perpendicular and maximal at a tangent. But for a sphere that both rotates and oscillates radially, Schreiber predicts by thought experiment that the emitted spherical sound wave front will show no Doppler effect at any rotational speed, each point of emission behaving "as if it is at a point of Absolute Rest to space." He names this the Nash Effect after Donald J. Nash of Boulder, Colorado, in recognition of Nash's work in getting dissident papers heard at the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Region meetings of the AAAS, and suggests it may bear on how charged particles radiate and on what an Electron might be.
Two shorter items close the section: French work by Pascale Aussillous and David Quéré at the Collège de France on "liquid marbles", water droplets coated in a hydrophobic powder that roll without wetting and can float on water; and a Field Institute poll finding 59% of Californians in favour of building more nuclear plants, a reversal from 61% opposed in 1984.
Letters, meetings and advertisements
The single letter is from Andreas Fehlau of Neustadt, Germany, describing five years of experiments with a massive disc spun at about 60,000 rpm in a vacuum chamber, with a lead weight suspended by cord through the disc's central bore to a beam balance. Fehlau reports that the faster the disc rotates the more the weight rises, that an electromagnetic field builds around the disc, and that the force acts on any material in proportion to its mass; he asks whether the experiment is already known.
The meetings section documents the international spread of the field at that date: the INE Symposium 2001 in Salt Lake City (7-8 September); ICCF-9, the Ninth International Conference on Cold Fusion, announced by Xing-Zhong Li for Tsinghua University, Beijing, 19-24 May 2002; the Ninth Russian Conference on Cold Nuclear Transmutation (RCCNT-9) at Dagomys near Sochi, chaired by Yuri Bazhutov, covering experimental cold fusion, transmutation and ball lightning, theoretical models and applied devices, with a full table of correspondent banks appended for foreign registrants; and the 2002 St Petersburg congress "Fundamental Problems of Natural Sciences and Engineering", whose seven sections include etherdynamics, electrodynamics and gravity, and "time and space in genuine universe", under the motto "From investigation to knowledge cognition". Advertisements for the Alternative Energy Institute newsletter and for Arcana Books of Salt Lake City close the issue.
Assessment
As a historical record the issue is genuinely useful, and more informative than any single article in it. It shows a research community that in 2001 was still tightly organised around palladium-deuterium systems and still publishing in a refereed venue — Fusion Technology — while simultaneously carrying material that no refereed venue would take. It documents the institutional infrastructure of that community: three international conferences on three continents within twelve months, a Russian series backed by named academies and universities, and a Chinese host institution of the first rank. The banking annex for RCCNT-9 is an unintentionally vivid record of what international scientific exchange cost in post-Soviet Russia.
The editorial policy, however, is the issue's central weakness, and it is a weakness the document itself makes visible. Placing Yamada's autoradiography and SIMS results, which are quantitative and were refereed, in the same publication and at the same apparent level of credence as an uncalibrated home antigravity experiment and a satirical newspaper column about flying saucers does real damage to the former. Bailey's note that he personally met the Disclosure Project witnesses invites the reader to take the piece as testimony when its author wrote it as ridicule. Nothing in the issue distinguishes the evidentiary status of its items, and a reader unfamiliar with the field has no way to tell which claims carry weight.
Schreiber's essay is the substantial theoretical item and deserves to be judged on its merits. Its opening point about dimensional consistency is elementary and correct, and would be uncontroversial to any physicist; presenting it as a correction to "scientists being confused" overstates the case considerably, since dimensional analysis is standard practice. The treatment of fields is more interesting: the observation that lines of force are a representational device rather than physical objects is sound, and the rotating-beam example is correctly analysed. But the argument proceeds entirely by assertion. No equations are written, the claim that a field must move to have an effect is inconsistent with electrostatics as ordinarily practised, and the account of induction — that nothing happens when the coil is moved because "the wires of the coil are moving across the fixed fields" — contradicts the well-established equivalence of moving the magnet and moving the coil, which is the observation that opens Einstein's 1905 paper and is confirmed in every laboratory that runs a generator. The proposed Nash Effect is the one falsifiable claim in the essay, and it is left as a thought experiment: no apparatus, no predicted magnitude, no data, and no follow-up in later issues of the newsletter. Fehlau's rotating disc likewise lacks the controls — vibration coupling, air currents, magnetic interaction with the balance, thermal drift of the beam — that would be needed before a weight change could be attributed to rotation at all.
The issue is best cited as evidence about the state and organisation of the new-energy community in 2001, not as a source for any of the physical claims it reprints.