More MIT LENR News

[JimBowie1958]

http://e-catsite.com/2012/05/07/mit-physicist-nixes-cold-fusion-funding/

Of all the interesting tidbits to come out of The Atom Unexplored conference in Turin, Italy in May 4, perhaps the account by Dr. Peter Hagelstein of MIT on how a prominent physicist actively worked to cut cold fusion funding was the most eye-opening. In the question and answer session held after the morning LENR portion of the proceedings, a member of the audience asked a rather poignant question regarding why scientists often fail to develop clear “road maps” from the laboratory to the “real world.” In responding to this question, Dr. Hagelstein gave a quite detailed and thoughtful answer regarding this problem as it relates to cold fusion/LENR. As the final part of his answer, he stated the following regarding his own recent personal experience regarding this issue:

“The other issue is how to get support for such work. In the United States at the moment, outside of a program under Dennis Bushnell at NASA, there is no currently, as far as I’m aware, there is no other government support for any work in this area for such experiments. I recently had the experience of working with a large company in the U.S. who was interested in pursuing experiments in this area and helping out.

So we put in, we discussed with the technical people at this company of the possibility that they might put in some money for the support of the replication of the Piantelli experiment. So they got the agreement, they got the money, they got it to MIT, and we thought “good, now we can make some progress.”

However, a very famous physicist at MIT, who is involved in the energy program, found out what we were trying to do, and he cancelled the program. And he called up the vice president of the company and said some things that weren’t very polite about the research. And not only did the funding not come and the experiments didn’t happen, but my colleagues at the company were very worried about where they’re going to work next.

As you know, there are unemployment issues currently in our bad economy, so there’s a fundamental difficulty with respect to getting support for the experiments, and what that means is that the science can be expected to go very slowly for these reasons, until a solution is found to this problem.”
....
However, in a report published by the late Dr. Eugene Mallove in 1999, he extensively detailed the efforts of some high-ranking individuals at MIT to falsify positive replication results in order to ensure that MIT continued to receive tens of millions of dollars in US government funding for its plasma fusion (“hot fusion”) program. You can read the detailed accounting here. This article is a first-hand account of what took place at MIT, since Dr. Mallove was the head of MIT’s Science Information Office at the time of these events. He subsequently resigned in protest over the alleged fraud of his colleagues.

Yet, over the many years since the alleged fraud perpetuated by the staff and administration at MIT, that institution has come a long way in distancing itself from this stain on its otherwise stellar reputation. MIT now holds regular cold fusion colloquium’s and just this year held a class detailing cold fusion history and current research. The class included a demonstration of the NANOR cold fusion device built by MIT graduate Dr. Mitchell Swartz. As Dr. Hagelstein pointed out in his lecture (see link below) at The Atom Unexplored, this device has run since January and demonstrated energy gains up to 14 times that of the input power. Most of Dr. Hagelstein’s presentation on May 4 covered the NANOR and included detailed technical data about the device. He even offered an open invitation to the public to visit MIT to witness the device function.

 

[JimBowie1958]

An Australian blogger who was visiting Greece got to tour Defkalion and talk to some of their scientists.

He relates that the scientists at one point tried to make a LENR device that had a glass plate on one side so they could watch what heppend. The 'glass' had a melting point of 1500 C.

The started it up and the nickel started to glow, got as bright as the sun and then the glass melted. He says that these guys really do not know what is going on inside the LENR device in theory. All they know is what they are learning via trial and error like any good inventor, lol.