Joe Champion
Joe E. Champion | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Claims of low-energy nuclear transmutation of base materials into gold and other precious metals by chemical means; the "Philadelphia Project"; Twentieth Century Alchemy |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemistry, Cold Fusion, Low-energy nuclear transmutation |
Joe E. Champion is an American independent researcher and author best known for his claim that ordinary chemical reactions, carried out under the right thermal and electromagnetic conditions, can drive low-energy nuclear transmutation — the conversion of one element into another, and in particular the conversion of base materials such as mercury, copper and silver into gold and other precious metals. He worked outside the university system for most of his career, and his work belongs to the chemical- and biological-transmutation strand of the wider cold fusion / LENR and free-energy research community. He presented his results at the independent-inventor conferences run by Tesla Tech and its predecessor, the International Tesla Society.
Biography
Champion came to public attention shortly after the March 1989 cold fusion announcement by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, when he began building his own low-energy nuclear apparatus and circulating claims of anomalous nuclear effects. In September 1989 he contacted the electrochemist John O'M. Bockris, a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University who was at that time among the most prominent academic investigators of cold fusion, and the two began a correspondence about Champion's process.
In April 1992 that contact became a formal collaboration. A research team known as the Philadelphia Project, headed by Bockris and Champion, was set up at Texas A&M with a $200,000 donation to the university's development foundation from the California businessman William Telander. Over the following months the group ran the two procedures Champion advocated: bombardment of mineral samples with electromagnetic resonance, and a thermal "gunpowder fusion" method in which mercury, lead, silver, iron, silicon oxide, calcium and other materials were mixed with a combustible charge in a metal can and ignited, the residue then being assayed. In June 1992 the team reported the appearance of gold in the residues, and in October 1992 Champion and Bockris presented the work at a press conference in Mexico City, describing it as the selective transmutation of the isotopic composition of base minerals through electromagnetic resonance.
Attempts to reproduce the results at Texas A&M in late 1992 and early 1993 failed. Bockris withdrew his endorsement of the work in February 1993, and the episode became a public controversy at Texas A&M, where colleagues in the chemistry department and a majority of the university's distinguished professors petitioned against Bockris's continued standing. Chemists working on the project, notably Ramesh Bhardwaj, concluded that the reported gold was the result of contamination, of concentration effects, or of gold-bearing ore that Champion had added to the reaction mixtures, and reported that the academic credentials Champion had claimed — a master's degree in geology and a doctorate in physics — could not be verified. The episode was reported at length by Newsweek, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Houston Press.
Champion has continued to publish, lecture and sell instructional material on transmutation since that time, describing himself in later years as an independent researcher in what he calls dimensional science, and operating the websites transmutation.com and ProducePreciousMetals.com. He later developed the "phonon resonance" version of his ideas and filed patent applications on a claimed microbial route to precious metals.
Legal history
Champion's commercial and research ventures have been accompanied by a documented criminal record, reported in detail by the Houston Press in its 1994 investigations of the Philadelphia Project.
According to that reporting, Champion pleaded guilty in the late 1980s in Texas to felony theft arising from a bad cheque, in a case in which earlier charges of aggravated kidnapping and indecency with a child were dropped, and served part of a four-year sentence. He was later arrested on an Arizona warrant relating to a scheme in which two Arizona men were defrauded of $150,000 over a purported South American gold venture, and received a five-year sentence in that case. He was arrested in Mexico City in December 1992, in an operation involving the FBI, Interpol and Mexican police that followed allegations — made by his Philadelphia Project backer William Telander — that he was selling nuclear technology abroad; those allegations did not result in charges, and Champion was extradited to Arizona on the earlier fraud warrant. Champion has maintained that the Mexico City arrest was engineered against him and that research files were lost as a result.
Telander himself was convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to ten years in federal prison; the federal investigation into the origin of his donation was a principal cause of the Philadelphia Project's closure.
This history is recorded here because it is part of the documented public record of the affair. It is separate from, and does not by itself settle, the scientific question of whether the effects Champion reported are real.
Scientific contributions
Champion's central claim is that nuclear change does not require the enormous energies assumed by conventional nuclear physics, and that it can instead be triggered chemically and thermally at or near ordinary laboratory conditions. He has described the effect variously as low-energy nuclear transmutation (LENT) and low-energy nuclear change (LENC), and dates his own introduction to it to the late 1980s. In his account the central obstacle to acceptance has not been the absence of the effect but its poor repeatability — the same difficulty that dogged the wider cold fusion field after 1989 — and much of his later work is presented as an attempt to identify the conditions that make the reaction reproducible.
Chemically induced transmutation
In his earliest published work, including the material collected in Twentieth Century Alchemy, Champion argues that mixtures of selected elements and salts, subjected to a rapid high-temperature combustion, undergo nuclear rearrangement rather than merely chemical rearrangement, so that mercury, lead and other base materials are converted into gold, silver, platinum and the platinum-group metals. He presented assay data from such runs as evidence of the effect. This is the process that was tested, and not reproduced, in the Philadelphia Project.
Phonon resonance
Champion's later theoretical work centres on what he calls phonon resonance. On his account, the diameter of an atom varies continuously with temperature, and when an isotope of one element is held at a temperature at which its effective atomic spacing coincides with that of an isotope of another element, the two become resonant and a low-energy conversion between them can occur. From this he derives specific transition temperatures for particular isotope pairs, arguing that silver-107 and gold lie unusually close together and that silver held near 43.2 °C will therefore begin to convert. He has reported visible conversion of silver to gold in as little as six hours under these conditions, with yields of the order of one to two per cent over a day, and has claimed much larger runs — for example that a hundred pounds of copper processed in a single phonon resonance device yielded several hundred troy ounces of gold and platinum.
Biological transmutation
A third strand of Champion's work is microbial. In patent applications filed in the 2000s he described placing metallic silver in an aqueous solution together with a Saccharomyces yeast, from which he said a mutant strain arises that deposits a thin yellow layer containing trace nanoparticulate gold on the silver surface, with conversions on the order of one per cent. This places him within the "biological transmutation" tradition associated with Louis Kervran, in which living systems are held to bring about elemental changes that conventional biochemistry excludes.
Champion has been unusually candid about the difficulty of the work, warning readers of his own instructional material that most who attempt to replicate his processes should expect to fail, and that only a small number of people known to him have approached anything like production quantities.
TeslaTech
Champion took his results to the independent-inventor and Tesla-technology conference circuit organised by Steven R Elswick, first under the International Tesla Society and later under Tesla Tech.
At the ExtraOrdinary Science conference held 20–23 July 1995 at the Sheraton Hotel South in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he gave two presentations:
- "Nuclear Change via Chemical Reaction" (conference presentation, catalogue no. TE9508)
- "Modern Day Nuclear Change" (workshop, catalogue no. TE9523)
Both remain available in the TeslaTech conference archive. The venue was characteristic of Champion's audience after 1993: having lost his academic platform, he addressed the independent-researcher community that Tesla Tech exists to serve.
Works
- Twentieth Century Alchemy: How to Synthetically Produce Precious Metals (ISBN 1884928013)
- 20th Century Alchemy (revised edition, 2000) — full text
- Producing Precious Metals at Home: Alchimia — Quod Erat Demonstrandum
- "Phonon Conversion of Silver to Gold — a Dimensional Formation" (24 July 2001)
- "Nuclear Change via Chemical Reaction", ExtraOrdinary Science conference, Colorado Springs (1995)
- "Modern Day Nuclear Change", workshop, ExtraOrdinary Science conference, Colorado Springs (1995)
Patents
- WO 94/03905, "Method for Transmutation of Select Isotopes"
- US patent application 2008/0081359, "Methods for Producing Mutant Microbes Useful for Precious Metal and Bioenergy Production" (Biometal LLC)
- US patent application 2009/0087892 (continuation of the above)