April 30, 2010

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) AKA "Cold Fusion"

In 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced to the media that they had discovered "cold fusion." Immediately, other scientists around the world tried to replicate their results. Most failed. Establishment science eventually dismissed it as an illusion, if not an outright hoax. "Cold fusion" became the epithet of choice for unorthodox scientific claims. Yet a few researchers soldiered on, accumulating an impressive body of work. To get an overview, I turned to Dr. Jan Marwan, an independent researcher in Berlin, who recently organized a symposium on "cold fusion" for the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, and who, with the ACS, is editing a series of three volumes of papers on the subject for Oxford University Press. It's still controversial — and why not, it's practically a new branch of science — but "cold fusion" appears to be gaining legitimacy. You should listen and decide for yourself. Total runtime forty six minutes. Enjoy!