A first-timer’s review of the ICCF16 at Chennai, 06-11 February 2011.
I, a first-time participant in an international physics conference, came to know of this so-named “cold fusion” (first call-out in March 1989) only in the late 1990’s. My first reaction was: maybe it has something to do with “entangled quantum states” (since I had written my home-paper in physics on Bell’s inequality!). The scientists working in the cold fusion field had to face huge flak and even biting ridicule. Opponents, both in the field of physics and journalism, had nothing positive to say about this research and the scientists working therein. It was even called pathological science and many wrote long articles and even larger books of condemnation, which brought them much fame. Their attitude appeared to me rather as one of pathological skepsis. It looked like their way to glory in the annals of science. This I judged even without having really looked into whether this cold fusion idea was real or not. The way the opponents of the idea agitated, that by itself was rather pathological. Being a person with the nature of siding with the downtrodden or slandered, I naturally developed a sympathetic attitude towards the brave lot of the cold fusionists. When I myself wrote something in this same direction I too faced ridicule. But now that is all bygone. The experimenters in the cold fusion field, now called CMNS (Condensed Matter Nuclear Science), delivered many proofs that the phenomena exist, and since they were often so weak, the experiments had to be very refined. Therefore the results were reproducible but not easily the conditions which led to these results. A plethora of most entangled complex factors seemed to (and even today do) affect the results.
Preparations for ICCF16 (the 16th International Conference on Cold Fusion), to be held in India in February 2011, caught my attention. I myself had been toying with and developing various ideas about how to make these phenomena useful for energy generation. In the ICCF16 I saw a chance to get to know the people doing this research as well as eventually presenting my ideas to them. I began a correspondence with the convener Dr. Mahadeva Srinivasan. An abstract of my idea was approved by the ICCF16 committee as presentable and I was given the chance to participate in the conference.
(On 14th January 2011 two scientists in Italy surprised the world with the demonstration of a Ni-H based energy-generator involving Ni+H nuclear reaction(s) triggered at low energies, which they precautiously called “energy catalyzer”. This surely was going to be the big and invisible “elephant in the room” of the ICCF16. Their demonstration has however not been fully free from ambiguities and snags.)
The conference opened on the 6th of February at the GRT center in Chennai (formerly Madras) in the typical Indian way of lighting lamps and speeches by important persons and by the absence of some of these who could not come. Then it got off to a very enthusiastic start by the 60+ scientists from 10 nations. The high level of sincere, hard, perseverant and intelligent work in theory and experiment could not have remained hidden or unconvincing to the most skeptical of the opponents. The evidence for the occurrence of nuclear reactions initiated (or may be even caused) by low energy extra-nuclear events was overwhelming. The theories were, as is to be expected for such a novel, unexpected and experimentally underfunded phenomenon, the Achilles’ heel. Indeed it would not be wrong to say that the field is devoid of a convincing theory and one must doubt whether a theory will soon appear - a situation not unlike the one in the field of high-temperature super-conductivity. Just as Goedel’s theorem says that not all truths are axiomatically provable, so seems it to me that not all experimental results can be backed by a clean, pretty, all-explaining theory. The conference also reported that, since the experiments and their outcomes were now incontrovertible, many a former skeptic was now publicly doubting his own early conclusions or had softened his opposition considerably.
(The details of the proceedings of the conference are a topic by themselves. A look into the themes, the abstracts and their titles, the actual presentations and the debates that followed these presentations will reveal these details copiously and convincingly.)