Tabletop fusion breakthroughs are too hot for ideologically entrenched scientists

Monday, March 13, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: cold fusion, tabletop fusion, free energy

In the world of physics, one of the fastest ways to commit academic suicide is to conduct research into tabletop fusion. Mere mention of the term "tabletop fusion" or "cold fusion" causes previously logical, unemotional physics department colleagues to transform into raging cultist lunatics who believe that discrediting low-energy nuclear reactions is a religious calling. Witness the treatment of Fleishman and Pons, two chemists who demonstrated tabletop fusion in the late 1980's and were immediately attacked, discredited and ostracized by advocates of hot fusion. Yet cold fusion experiments are alive and well today, with verified results being replicated in literally hundreds of labs around the world.

Now a new round of attacks is being unleashed against Purdue researcher Rusi Taleyarkhan, who has gone public with his construction of a tabletop nuclear fusion device that's about the size of a coffee maker. Taleyarkhan's device produces excess heat energy via low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) initiated through a phenomenon called sonoluminescence. In sonoluminescence, high-frequency sound waves are blasted into special liquids (like heavy water or heavy acetone), momentarily creating micro-bubbles that collapse in a burst of light and heat energy, leaving behind obvious traces of low-energy nuclear reactions such as excess helium.

Similar to this process, any mention of the word "sonoluminescence" in an academic setting causes sound vibrations to reach the ears of competing physics colleagues whose intellectual bubbles burst in a dazzling display of heated jealousy. This result, too, has been reproduced in research universities around the world.

At Purdue, Taleyarkhan is now being accused of actually conducting interesting science. How was he to know that certain areas of interesting results would be considered sacrilegious to the Church of Hot Fusion?

LENR research is welcomed almost everywhere in the world -- Japan, Germany, Canada, Russia -- but not in the U.S. In the United States, the censorship of science has now become routine in areas like global warming and cold fusion, where the only researchers allowed to continue working are those who subscribe to the politics that says pollution does not affect the environment and there's no such thing as low-energy nuclear reactions. Even while we are facing a certain energy crisis in the years ahead, some of the most promising clean energy research being conducted today is routinely censored, criticized and shut down. All in the name of science, of course.

As I've always said, a true scientist is one who asks questions of nature and observes the answers, regardless of whether those answers comply with political protocol or institutional biases. In this way, scientists like Taleyarkhan are true scientists. Their critics, on the other hand, are just altar boys working for the Church of Preordained Science, where the overriding belief is that all science has already been discovered, and no new breakthroughs will ever be found unless they involve billions of dollars in government grants, enormous budgets, and over-inflated egos to match.

This is why I believe the United States is being left behind in clean energy research. My prediction is that either Japan or Canada will soon commercialize LENR devices, leaving the U.S. holding tightly to its outdated oil economy and massive, multi-billion dollar hot fusion projects that have yet to feed a single Watt of electricity into the national power grid.