Robert E Godes
Robert E. Godes | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1962 (age 63–64) |
| Residence | Emeryville, California, United States |
| Known for | New Energy, Cold Fusion, LENR |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Engineer, Entrepreneur |
Robert E. Godes is an American electrical engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, president, and chief technology officer of Brillouin Energy Corporation, a company based in the San Francisco Bay Area that is developing a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology commonly described in the popular press as cold fusion. Godes is the originator of what he terms the "Controlled Electron Capture Reaction" (CECR) and of an accompanying "Quantum Fusion Hypothesis" intended to explain the phenomenon.
Biography
Godes earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Ohio Northern University. He began his professional career in the mid-1980s, designing equipment for manufacturing companies in the Cleveland, Ohio area, and went on to accumulate more than thirty years of experience as a technical designer, electrical engineer, and inventor. Much of his work focused on power distribution and the electric utility industry, and his self-described areas of study span applied science, several engineering disciplines, control systems, programming, electrochemistry, and areas of physics ranging from condensed matter to astrophysics.
According to accounts of his career, Godes became interested in the cold fusion controversy in 1992, after a colleague told him about the 1989 experiments of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. He subsequently began developing his own model of the underlying process and, in the 2000s, founded a company (initially operating as Profusion Energy) to pursue the research, later reorganized as Brillouin Energy Corporation.
Scientific contributions
Godes is the primary inventor of Brillouin Energy's "Hydrogen Hot Tube" (HHT) reactor and its "Q-Pulse" electrical control technology. He proposes that a specific electrical pulse applied to a metal (such as nickel) lattice loaded with hydrogen can stimulate what he calls a Controlled Electron Capture Reaction, in which a proton and an electron combine to form a neutron. In his model, the newly formed neutron is captured by nearby nuclei, and the resulting isotopic changes release energy as heat, with only small amounts of helium reported as a by-product. He describes the associated theoretical framework as the "Quantum Fusion Hypothesis," and presented it publicly in a 2008 abstract.
Godes argues that this mechanism can, in principle, use ordinary hydrogen (protium) rather than the deuterium emphasized in much earlier cold fusion work, and that the reaction can be controlled electronically. Brillouin Energy has reported measurements of excess heat from its reactors and has described independent testing arrangements, including work associated with SRI International.
The claims made by Godes and Brillouin Energy fall outside the scientific mainstream. Conventional physics holds that nuclear reactions of this kind cannot occur at the low temperatures and pressures involved, and cold fusion and LENR research generally remain unaccepted by most of the physics community, in part because of difficulties in independently reproducing reported results. Godes and his collaborators continue to present their findings at LENR conferences and to characterize the work as ongoing engineering and commercialization efforts.
Abstracts
- 2008 - "The Quantum Fusion Hypothesis"