Cold fusion – the ability to generate nuclear power at room temperatures – has been considered a ‘pseudoscience’ by ‘skeptics’ ever since the infamous media circus surrounding the original experiments described by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann . However, things appear to be changing:
…a recently published academic paper from the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego throws cold water on skeptics of cold fusion. Appearing in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, which counts Albert Einstein among its distinguished authors, the article claims that SPAWAR scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community.
Cold fusion has gotten the cold shoulder from serious nuclear physicists since 1989, when were unable to substantiate their sensational claims that deuterium nuclei could be forced to fuse and release excess energy at room temperature. Spawar researchers apparently kept the faith, however, and continued to refine the procedure by experimenting with new fusionable materials.
Readers interested in the controversy over cold fusion might also be interested in a lecture titled “Fifteen Years of Progress in Cold Fusion Research (available as an mp3/podcast) by Charles G. Beaudette, which charts the political versus scientific machinations behind the history of this controversial topic.
