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WATCH: cold fusion, pathological science or suppressed miracle?

In this 1998 interview, MIT science writer Eugene Mallove discusses what he alleges was an intentional bid by vested interests to bury the genuine and revolutionary discovery of cold fusion. Far from being “pathological science”, as most mainstream physicists allege, Mallove claims cold fusion is a provable and reproducible reality that could potentially provide almost limitless and virtually free clean energy for the world.

Mallove was murdered during a house break-in in 2004.

Mallove’s 1999 book, Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor is available though Amazon and Amazon UK


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Thomas Prentice
Thomas Prentice
Jun 18, 2018 9:22 PM

I don’t know anything about the physics of anything.
But buying technology to repress it and maintain dominant corporate and banking profitability is a standard trope of industrial capitalism.
Perfectly good street cars in cities across the nations were bought up by the concrete and auto industries to facilitate highway construction and long-term concrete profits as well as to jumpstart the auto industry into long-term profitability as well. The “mass transit” that exists in the US outside of, say, nyc, dc, sf/oakland are just tinker toys — which nevertheless push profits to the high tech industrial tinker toy, banking and energy industries.
Same thing happened with wire services like the AP owned by newspapers. Strict rules prevented use of wire copy on radio except for five minutes every two hours or something. Then the newspapers started getting radio livenses and then TV licenses to control the technology and profitability to Big Shots. Couldn’t do it with the internet and that accelerated the demise of journalism and newspapers … and is doing the same thing vor the big networks.
Same thing happened with fax machine technology, invented in the 1920s, not introduced until the 1960s or so.
And on and on.
SO THE QUESTION IS, what divine intervention has / would have occurred to prevent industrial now financialized neoliberal capitalism from NOT doing “rinse and repeat?”
I thought it strange the rush of breathless cold fusion media hyperventilating in the 80s or so and then … sudden silence.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 3:42 PM

From my friend, Prof. emeritus Colman Altman, Physics Dept, Technion, Israel:
“We sent a paper on Cold Fusion to Physics when the issue [of cold fusion] was very warm. It was accepted pending our answer to some specific question from one of the referees.. We answered, but meanwhile the issue of cold fusion had fallen into such disrepute, that the editors didn’t even acknowledge receipt of our comments. Let me describe briefly what we wrote.
We considered muon fusion. A muon is a heavy electron (mass 200 times that of the normal electron, but lifetime of about a microsecond) produced in cosmic radiation, and it sometimes comes to rest in the experimental bubble chamber, which is filled with deuterium (heavy hydrogen}, Now the 2 atoms of deuterium are normally bound by an electron. If a muon comes to rest in this gas then the 2 atoms of deuterium will be bound by the muon, and the distance between the nuclei is then 200 times smaller and fusion occurs immediately, The muon is then emitted and catalyses another fusion. Up to about 50 fusions are recorded; and the the muon then decays and the process ends. Our analysis was based on the supposition that heavy “virtual electrons” (virtual muons), about 5 times the mass of the electron are formed in the crystal lattice (observed and documented) and catalyse the deuterium cold fusion, which now starts.
The trouble is that.the cold fusion destroys the ordering of the lattice structure and there are no longer virtual electrons which can continue the process. So my conclusion is that continuous cold fusion is not possible.
But even if cold fusion were possible, there is no doubt that the fossil-fuel energy lobby would immediately put an end to all such efforts, just as they put an end to the efforts to [safely] exploit ordinary nuclear energy.
In any case we are now in a phase of “no return”, and I don’t think any magic formula could save us.”

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 18, 2018 4:23 PM
Reply to  vexarb

I can’t disagree with most of that regarding muon-catalyzed fusion. There’s only small signs that muons can be produced reliably enough and continuously enough to make it a viable process. But the fact we have proved fusion at low temp is amazingly significant.
Cold fusion as demonstrated at BYU in the 1980s is a different method, and again there is the anomalous heat discovered by Pons and Fleischmann at the same time at the University of Utah. Both of these, especially the Utah discovery, hold the prospect of abundant, CLEAN and essentially renewable energy, though of course Dr Altman is correct about the dangers from established interests. The same ones who destroyed Tesla’s work, and indeed his life.
I don’t know what Dr Altman means precisely by a phase of “no return” but it seems to me unless or until we destroy ourselves in an accidental (or intentional!) nuclear apocalypse we have to keep doing all we can to rescue our species.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 7:13 PM
Reply to  PSJ

@PSJ. I imagine Dr.Altman, having preached against Carbon fuel misuse for decades without avail, has grown pessimistic and now leans toward the opinion of the late Dr.Hawking — we ought to start building Noah’s Spacecraft because Human Life on Planet Earth is doomed. Personally I agree with you — we must be optimistic: hope that, while the present generation will reform somewhat, the next generation will breed competent Ecology Engineers.

Mathias Alexander
Mathias Alexander
Jun 18, 2018 9:17 AM

Unlimited energy could only end up as unlimited heat in the atmosphere (conservation of energy) so it sounds like very bad news.

Robert
Robert
Jun 19, 2018 8:59 AM
Reply to  Editor

Admin, I’d be interested to read why you think that. I’d say Mathias is right to fear some kind of environmental side-effect – all forms of energy extraction turn low entropy source into high entropy pollution, and when we say wind or solar is “clean” we just mean the form of pollution is not currently serious. But you’re right to think it’s a problem for the future – let’s find out whhether CF works or not first.

Big B
Big B
Jun 19, 2018 9:39 AM
Reply to  Editor

Admin: that is exactly how it works; there is always a loss of heat in conversion. In modern fuels the conversion rate is quite poor (around 40% for diesel; 60% for petrol – off the top of my head). The excess heat ends up as the ‘urban heat island effect’, for instance. The more usage, the greater the effect. The hypothetical ‘free’ fuel will generate waste heat loss: how much depends on the efficiency of conversion.
This hypothetical ‘free’ fuel will also need development and scalability: which come with a hidden resource and energy cost. I’m no physiscist, but ‘freedom energy’ sounds like an exothermic reaction, which will need containment and conversion (to steam, for instance) – none of which is ‘free’. It could be used to create a hydrogen economy, but that would require a whole new infrastructure for 7.5bn people – none of which is free. I’m not au fait with the reactants, but Deuterium is not free to make, especially not when upscaled to cater for 7.5bn? Then there are all the high-end techno goods and driverless cars – will they be free?
It doesn’t take much to posit that this ‘free’ energy is actually starting to look quite expensive? Not least because TPTB will slap a tech patent on part, or all, of the process. All of a sudden: it’s not free anymore?
No one will venture to explain how the prevailing power structure (predicated on materialism) will be overturned; or the laws of supply and demand rewritten. Nor tackle the problem of current overconsumption (around 1.6X sustainable planetary limits). Do we tackle the problem of overconsumption with greater overconsumption? We are already using too much energy: do we tackle that by using more?
Nothing is ‘free’: the prevailing power structure IS materialistic at its root. More materialism ensures the prevailing power structure remains; or is replaced by something very much like it. A majority of humanity was ‘Free’ before we violently imposed the Western materialistic mindset on them. Their poverty was our myth to justify the murderous cruelty of imposition. When the project is completed with “freedom energy”, I wonder, what will we have gained and what will we have lost?
I do not like the definition of the word ‘free’ that emerges: it seems like an inversion and subversion to me. Turning concepts on their head, to suit the prevailing power structure: isn’t that how we got into this mess and enslaved ourselves in the process? I think it is.

Robert
Robert
Jun 19, 2018 9:23 PM
Reply to  Big B

I agree. The very word “free” is overdetermined: free as in “not a slave or in prison”, free as in in “not costing anything”, and free as in – the free market, or no freedom for real people at all. Freedom is sold to us on the promise of the first two meanings, but what we get is the third.

theroyalsecretinfo
theroyalsecretinfo
Jun 18, 2018 11:21 AM

Rather like the light bulb that never goes out it will never see the light of day.

wardropper
wardropper
Jun 20, 2018 4:49 PM

Perhaps the answer there is to let everybody know how to make it, forget patenting laws and copyright, and just let people make their own…? You know, an actual service to humanity, instead of a narcissistic craving for professional recognition…?

Big B
Big B
Jun 17, 2018 6:49 PM

Fundamentally, we do not have an energy crisis; we do not have a resource crisis; we do not have a debt or economy crisis …what we have is a psycho-cognitive perceptual crisis. The pan-historic story of Civilisation is one of increasing surplus energy requirements. With surplus energy requirements met: civilisations rose and prospered (by trade and conquest). When civilisations exceeded their agrarian/biofuel/resource requirements: they collapsed (or were out-competed or conquered). [Hall; Tainter; Diamond; et al]
Each of the three Industrial Revolutions (so far) have allowed humanity to exponentially increase our primary energy input: to the detriment of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants …and the planet itself.The worst of all was the most recent source: cheap oil. If we raise our attention above the hedonistic ‘pastime paradise’ we have created for but a few of us in the last 150 years: it should be apparent that an infinite energy resource equates to an infinite destructive capability? More energy would equate to more wars, more death, more famine, more slavery, more ecological destruction …and for the lucky bourgeois few: more debt peonage.
Yes, it could be different: but 6,000 years, or so, of ‘Civilisation’s’ history would tend to favour the realistic appraisal that it would not be. If we have infinite energy: we would not have infinite sustainable resources; nor would we have an infinite waste sink to dump our toxic residue into; nor infinite territory for markets to expand into (as a spatio-temporal fix). The fact that we might have a clean energy resource would not necessarily alter our instrumental rationality that everything else is a deployable and disposable resource. This includes human and other animal’s* lives. [* shorthand for all taxa: flora or fauna.] And, of course, the planetary resources themselves.
The mass pychotic diagnosis is that humanity suffers from a cannibalistic cognitive-narcissism materialism; a regressive and repressive biological behaviourism that has continually used surplus energy as a tool of dominance for the Few: the most narcisssistically and psychopathically materialistically determined. If we were back in a hostile environment (on the Savannah, for instance) we would not survive as we are now – individualistically determined – with a one-for-one ultra-competitive and acquired-dominance social-Darwinism. We evolved cooperatively: together …but that trait is now repressed violently.
I would propose that the worst possible outcome for humanity would be another cheap and abundant energy source. I would rest my case on the evidence of what we have collectively achieved so far, with our evolving abundant and cheap energy sources. Cheap energy has caused the rise and fall of civilisations: an increase in violent and aggressive traits: all the concomitant wars of conquest and acquisition; freedom for the victorious Few; slavery and debt peonage for the majority; and all that has ultimately cost us the Earth.
That might be a cliche, but it is still the best way to put it. We need expensive energy, expensive resources, an expensive (priceless?) evaluation of the worth of human and animal life; and an expensive (priceless?) evaluation of the worth of the biome (the overlapping and inclusive Commons). Then we might evolve an emergent and equitable ecology: and a sustainable economic justice of energy and resource distribution: within and below the finite boundaries of Nature.One that works for the Many (100%); not just the Few (>1%).
More free energy would not mean more freedom: but less. Over time; we have become more and more bound …particularly by debt. Would infinite energy, and infinite debt equal infinite freedom – or infinite peonage?
Probably the latter: so long as we are perceptually bound by a deterministic individualised behaviourism: shackled in a mechanistic and materialistic psycho-cognitive worldview: where we are dominated and indebted to those with the worst and maximally-extremised personality disorders, that is. In our ‘kakistocratic materialistic debt peonage’: those ‘freedoms’ are already at the cost of the externalised majority (85%?) of humanity. Do we want a human monoculture that turns its excess energy requirements into profit for less than one percent of its population: to subsidise our own bondage at the cost of the Earth? Because, with no change to our narcissistic identity formation (which will not be achieved as a top-down evolutionary devolvement) …that is what it will be. And I have history on my side to make my case. QED.

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 17, 2018 7:00 PM
Reply to  Big B

Free, limitless and clean energy would do more than any other single thing to liberate human beings and end the prevailing power structure. Why else do you think it has been so ruthlessly suppressed, to the point of murdering its proponents?

BigB
BigB
Jun 17, 2018 8:28 PM
Reply to  PSJ

Ergo: 150 years of “cheap” oil would have liberated us? It didn’t: the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires and more and more of humanity was excluded from wealth acquisition and valorisation. This is the empirical observable conclusion of historic trends toward monopoly capitalism. The bottom half of humanity are not increasing their net value at all: it was all lies about the “rising tide that raises all boats” …as is every other economic fallacy we have been told. There is not a perpetual motion machine driving the global economy: there are bio-energetic limits and planetary boundaries to consider. For the most part: we are operating on or near the redzone …more energy won’t put us in the greenzone: nor will it be equitably distributed. That is a factual historicity, I’m afraid. If we want to change that, we will have to overturn the historical precedent and inherited acculturation of heirarchical dominance. Will more energy encourage a radical re-envisioning of the future: or more acquiessence and complacency toward the status quo? The status quo leads to moral and ecological collapse: or do you envision an alternative historicism outcome? If so, you’ll have to outline it?

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 17, 2018 8:59 PM
Reply to  BigB

Please note I said free energy, not cheap oil. Very, very different things.
But to answer your question “Will [free] energy encourage a radical re-envisioning of the future” – potentially, yes! LENR and, even more so the various over unity “freedom energy” studies currently being conducted (without funding) show that Tesla’s dream of wireless energy could be a reality. Such a resource would be very difficult to contain or control, which is why JP Morgan buried it (successfully). It’s mere existence would constitute a massive challenge to the current system of monopoly and control.
Try to understand this wouldn’t be just an additional energy source to power the turbines and send electricity down those copper wires it would be a profound revolution in supply and availability which has the potential to change the economic structure of the world.

BigB
BigB
Jun 18, 2018 12:22 AM
Reply to  PSJ

OK, humour me …we are close to running out of everything: not just resources, but fresh air, clean water, fertile topsoil, biodiversity (particularly large fauna), fish, even sand, etc etc …having freedom energy changes none of this without a fundamental shift in consciousness away from the materialistic: toward the regenerative. With freedom energy, we are still restrained bio-energtically (on non-sustainable non-energy resources); and by planetary boundaries (land management usage, species extinction, collapsing water tables, ocean acidification and depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, climate change, etc). There might still be demand: but how are you going to supply it without creating a resources deficit?
My whole point is that with our pan-historic materialistic mindset, every chance we have had to increase our energy usage, we have not used it wisely, we have used it destructively. We have become a virtual monopoly monoculture that is destroying its own life support system. Your answer is freedom energy makes it all good …will it replete all the dwindled resources and regenerate the biosphere?
I think you miss my point: the situation is very much not to my liking. What I said was look at history …we need a very much more fundamental psycho-spiritual shift away from materialism: or we’ll just use the excess energy as we have done before. It’s not about the energy at our disposal: it’s about the mind that disposes it? Now if the mind was free, not the energetic resource …we would never have got into this plundered mess in the first place. Does freedom energy then free the mind?

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 18, 2018 12:40 AM
Reply to  BigB

I’m not sure what you think “materialism” means in reference to this. We are living things that need “material” in order to survive. Short of an ascetic disapproval is there anything wrong with that? If we can provide “material” things with no cost to the planet, then why not? And Tesla-type free energy has that potential.
I didn’t say, by the way, that it would cure all the other ills of the world. Of course we need to curb pollutants and sustain the biosphere, but the threats to these things aren’t “materialism”, they’re exploitation by the vested interests. It is possible to sustain a high grade “materialist” civilisation without exploitation, and free energy might at least give us a way of achieving that.
My major point is – don’t regard science as an enemy, or energy as an enemy, on the contrary they are both essentials to our survival. The fact they have been misapplied shouldn’t persuade you to give up on them and their considerable potential for good.
Free, clean and virtually limitless energy could potentially eradicate poverty and pollution, to name only two current problems. That is probably at least as achievable as the poorly defined rejection of “materialism” you aspire to

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 18, 2018 8:51 AM
Reply to  PSJ

The problem with greed, as Aristotle noted, and I rather bet he wasn’t the first to see it, is that it is insatiable. Any ‘growth’ in the planetary human economy will be grabbed by the insatiably avaricious parasites. Removing them from power, and sending them off to some sanatorium for treatment is one unavoidable first priority.

BigB
BigB
Jun 18, 2018 12:11 PM
Reply to  PSJ

Let’s define “materialism” then: as anything above the sustainable …the false wants, needs, and desires, created by the system to sustain the system. So I understand the demand side: what about the supply side? So is your hypothesis is that we can have iPads, iPhones, and Tesla cars for 7.5bn people …and this can all be achieved sustainably (and freely, presumably?)…and grow exponentially to accomodate the increased demands …because “materialism” does not have a word for “sufficient”?
Materialism requires vast inputs of raw material resources: sustainable and unsustainable ones …OTHER than the freedom energy you are fixated on. Catering for the entire population materialistically will ensure environmental catastrophe: not least because the materialistic mindset carries with it the seeds of its own demise …as we can see pan-historically.
Science and energy aren’t the problem: our mindset is. Freedom energy coupled with the pan-historic materialistic mindset equals destruction …to which you say it will be different this time? Sorry, history tells a different story.

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 18, 2018 4:29 PM
Reply to  BigB

We can certainly have ipads, iphones etc for as many as need them, provided we focus on sustainable production. If we made phones to last fifty years (and we could if we wanted to), with easy and Green upgradability then we could provide technology to most of the world and be less destructive than we are now!
Being sustainable doesn’t mean turning our backs on technology per se, that’s simply Ludditism

candideschmyles
candideschmyles
Jun 18, 2018 6:03 PM
Reply to  BigB

BigB, usually I find myself riding a metaphoric surfboard on the wave of your thoughts. On this occasion though the half pipe collapsed on me and pushed me under. What cynicism!
I cannot see how genuinely “free energy” would accelerate all the dismal consequences we see in the carbon economy. I feel you ignore, or at least underplay the pivotal role of geography in the chaos our reliance on fossil fuels has created. The exploitation of hydrocarbons has always proceded on the basis of developing the easiest to access and largest by volume sites first. It has been this more than any other factor that has led to the motivation behind all US hegemony around the middle east and beyond.
Free energy would not solve the mindset of the psychopathic leaders of the erm, free world but it would go a long way to reversing the headlong destruction of the environment and dramatically reduce inequality. I for one hope that cold fusion technology will be developed though I am not holding my breath. In the meantime we can become 100% served by extant renewable technologies. My home, Scotland, already produces 114% of its electricity needs from wind energy alone. All the problems you cite are nothing to do with how we produce energy. They are caused by ignorance and apathy within the populations of mostly western nations.

Big B
Big B
Jun 18, 2018 8:17 PM

Candi: I’m not sure why everyone is getting their knickers in a twist about hypothetical ‘free’ energy? Or rounding on those, like me, who say it is not that simple?
Energy, is a single parameter. How it would impact human ecology and economy would have to take in many other factors. In the absence of any input other than “freedom energy saves the world”; I assume that means pretty much carrying on with the global economy as it is? Currently, we are consuming renewable and non-renewable resources at exponential rates: thus even ‘renewable’ resources are being depleted, by being harvested faster than they can renew. Fisheries and forestry are two good examples. At exponential rates, resources pretty soon get decimated: accelerating demand leads to collapse, which is not an unreasonable assumption to make?
Resources – other than the hypothetical ‘free’ (negentropic) energy resource – are subject to entropy, depletion, and declining quality. If growth is not limited by energy: then there will be a new factor. The biological (Leibigs) Law of the Minimum states that growth is limited by the scarcest factor. That could be a rare earth mineral, for instance. Total resources are not the only focus. If we get round one limiting factor, there will be a new one. Growth, in a finite bound system, is always limited. ‘Freedom’ energy, all things being equal, pushes us further beyond our finite limits. We are already operating at something like 1.6X our maximal sustainable planetary limit. Got a spare planet we can consume?
With no major system change, I cite the Jevons Paradox: which states that technology does not decrease, but increases energy consumption. As we only have a hypothetical free energy supply (which will need multi-decadal development from lab to power station, once it ceases to be hypothetical?). In the meantime, to maintain the levels of materialistic consumption: it is safe to assume that we will continue to burn hydrocarbons …which definitely will come at a cost?
I’ve already made the point that every time we have harnessed a new energy resource: we have done it detrimentally and destructively. With 5,500 years of unsustainable development to rest my case on; I don’t think it is unreasonable to question our materialistic ethos. If we have destroyed numerous habitats, precipitated the 6th Mass Extinction, and are close to rendering the biosphere uninhabitable even for our selves …would it not be wise to question our materialistic mindset? Especially before we inflict “freedom energy” on what is left of the planet?
As for the imperialism, exploitation and debt: would we not be reduced to fighting over the last rock of columbite-tantalite (coltan)?
What I proposed was not cynical: only we make do with less and distribute what we have equally. Nothing is free, everything has a cost and a consequence. With unfettered materialism thus far, that cost has been the future. We do not have X decades to wait for hypothetical “freedom energy”. We need to start changing the way we perceive and think right now, not tomorrow. Hypothetical “freedom energy”, which may or may not materialise, is not actual freedom. As it is hypothetical: we don’t actually have it, and may never have, it becomes a conceptual barrier to freedom? If all we can do is dream of applying it to material ends (as defined above), so will it ever be?

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 18, 2018 11:26 PM
Reply to  Big B

B-do you know Norman Lindsay’s ‘The Magic Pudding’? One hundred years old this year, it tells the tale, for children, of a magic pudding that grows whole again whenever a segment is devoured. There’s your cornutopian mindset. Just how the growth fetishists still continue obeisance to their neoplastic cult when every day brings new reports of the rapidly accelerating ecological collapse on the planet, really bemuses me. The attitude of the psychopathic Right, what with their innate stupidity, ignorance, avarice and viciousness is no surprise, but all the Meanswells, with their tender concern for every panda, porpoise and potoroo, still voting for the psychopathic political stooges of the ruling, totalitarian, capitalist destructocrats, and otherwise closing their eyes to reality-that really pisses me off. Even today, when you mention our predicament, even to those who claim to be ‘concerned’, once you utter the dreaded word ‘extinction’, they shut up shop, mentally, and get highly irritated.

Big B
Big B
Jun 19, 2018 8:46 AM

MM: me too! The problem with “techno hopium” is that the problems of the world are happening in the here and now: and demand here and now applications and solutions. What use is hypothetical ‘freedom’ energy in twenty, thirty, or fifty years, if we have irrevocably corrupted the biosphere in the meantime? Humanities quest for greater and greater energy resources have been disastrous thus far. It’s axiomatic to me that we need to use less, now. That means being less materialistically inclined: particularly in the developed world. We need less energy: more equally redistributed between the Global North and South. That, in effect, means the developed world can develop no more: what energy we use needs to be redistributed justly.
How about people campaign for less, not hold out for more? Not an easy sell!
The problems with techno hopium and the transference and projection of the materialistic mindset into the ‘future’ is that de-radicalises us in the here and now. Now is when we need to act. It becomes an obfuscational hallucination. The woolly and barely formed ideas that TPTB will evaporate, and the current model of ‘supply and demand’ will be defunct (though no one has explained how), and 7.5bn people will have iPads, iPhones, and driverless Tesla cars has no real world application. In fact, it emasculates real world radicalisation and application. It favours the status quo of heirarchical dominance and ensures that heirarchical dominance (and racism, misogyny, patriarchy, greed, exceptionalism, etc – all facets of the root materialistic mindset) are features of the ‘future’; which is actually a re-imposition of the past.
At no point in human history has more energy overturned the social order. With “freedom energy”: no one has even ventured to explain how that might occur: it is just assumed. I might just as well assume, from the historical precedent, that it will not. The social order will be manintained: because the root materialistic mindset will be maintained.
The idea that poverty is indigenous is part of the White Mans Burden. I read testimonies from indigenous people all the time. The synopsis is the only want their old traditional way of life back: the one that has been displaced in the name of Progress. One such fisherman recently was traumatised. He had every thing he wanted in his ‘poverty’ in the forest. He could catch fish, grow maize, provide for his wife and two daughters. Now he lives in a camp and is provided with food aid. He has no life, and no future. Do you think he will be happy when he gets his iPad, iPhone, and Tesla car? Or will he have died of spiritual poverty in the meantime?
My brother is a cop in Perth. He spends his entire time locking up drunken Aborigines. He hates it, but there is nothing he can do. That is what happens when you displace a spiritual people and violently break their connection to the Dreamworld and the Mother: they sit around in a drunken stupor …when they are not fighting, robbing, and I’m afraid to say, raping. Will their connection be healed when they get their iPads? Perhaps they can connect to the transhuman virtual network to displace their loss of the Dreamworld?
Who are we to violently impose our Western materialistic mindset on the world? Has anyone even considered that the world never wanted our arrogance from the outset? Call me a cynical Luddite: but I’d take the spiritual autonomy, the harmony with Nature, and the self-sufficiency any day. The West can keep it’s fetishised baubles (because they have brought such freedom and happiness to all, without exception) …no one wants them anyway!

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 19, 2018 9:13 AM
Reply to  Big B

I got the dread today when I read the latest in the current rush of horror stories re. the extermination of insects. This, of course, is the death knell for much life on Earth, (the birds already)perhaps even ourselves, arriving so very suddenly, but unexpected only by fools. The answer, apart from utter disinterest by the plebs, was short and pithy from the omnicidists responsible-the chemical industry assassins of Life. Why, without their poisons, poisons that MUST be peddled in ever greater numbers and quantities according to the Death-cult of capitalism because profit maximisation and constant growth are ‘goods’, humanity would starve. Organic or permaculture food production do not exist-only industrial Life carnage can be allowed, and the chemical industry Moloch, like all the other capitalist life-destroyers, has a coterie of politicians bought by ‘contributions’, and lying propagandists and corrupted scientists to peddle their lies, while, ever more rapidly, we career towards Near Term Extinction. And no-one does ANYTHING concrete to prevent it, yet they’ll whine that they ‘love’ their children. Fermi Paradox resolved.

Big B
Big B
Jun 19, 2018 9:52 AM
Reply to  Big B

When the bees go: we follow. So simple: but too hard to understand! Would love to continue, but it’s time to go and work for the Man! Or is that the Moloch!!

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 9:05 AM
Reply to  PSJ

@PSJ: “I said free energy”.
As the old song goes, “Nothing is for nothing, nothing is for free”.
First Law: Energy does not come free.
Second Law: We don’t even get all the energy that we pay for.
Third Law: The more energy we dissipate, the harder it becomes to extract the remainder.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 17, 2018 11:54 PM
Reply to  BigB

The inevitable consequence of the deliberate process of neo-feudalistation that you describe, is a world where the 1% control all the wealth, more or less, and the 99% of ‘useless eaters’ represent only a threat to the ‘Gods Upon the Earth’. With computerisation, robotisation, automation, AI etc, the serfs are not even required for production, or their consumption any longer. The obvious next step is undoubtedly, in my opinion, being prepared in the archipelago of bio-warfare laboratories that the Pentagon has established world-wide, where they are furiously involved in collecting the DNA, blood and tissue, including neoplasms. of all identifiable human populations. With the progress in genetic engineering, the ‘final solution’ to the ‘useless eaters problem’ cannot be far off.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 17, 2018 8:34 PM
Reply to  Big B

Basically I agree with BigB. Energy slaves are wealth (Alexander Findlay, Chemist). Love of wealth is the root of many evils (The Good Book). Therefore, Limitless energy would bear fruit as Limitless Evil.
“Nothing is Enough for the man to whom Enough is not Enough”. — Epikouros

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 17, 2018 9:05 PM
Reply to  vexarb

Vexarb, I believe you are constrained by the existing model of supply and control. Of course that model could persist, but freedom energy has the potential to move the world into a new model in which energy monopolies, and therefore many other monopolies are broken.

Jim Porter
Jim Porter
Jun 18, 2018 6:44 PM
Reply to  PSJ

And don’t forget that most people who want to dismiss ‘free energy’ assume that we live in a closed system when even our own ‘laws of physics’ (written by people no more knowledgeable than anyone else) allow for an open system where the energy may be tapped from a dimension we don’t inhabit (mathematically at least 11 in total) or from a fundamental law in our own set of dimensions that we have not fully understood yet. Examples of this being resonance, precession, Lenz’s Law, the hydrogen bond, Heisengerg’s uncertainty principle………… and so many more things yet to nail down.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 6:21 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Oops! Lapse of memory, it was not Findlay the chemist but Soddy the physicist. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt
Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt is a 1926 book by the Nobel prize-winning chemist Frederick Soddy on monetary policy and society and the role of energy in economic systems. Soddy criticized the focus on monetary flows in economics, arguing that real wealth was derived from the use of energy to transform materials into physical goods and services. Soddy’s economic writings were largely ignored in his time, but would be applied to the development of ecological economics in the late 20th century.

rilme
rilme
Jun 18, 2018 8:57 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Yo, vexarb: “Nothing is bananas for someone to whom bananas are not bananas”. — Epicurious

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 17, 2018 11:47 PM
Reply to  Big B

I wonder who the five down-voters are? The Free Market capitalist system is not just neoplastic in action, unambiguously and almost parodically so, but also is human psychopathy in action. It guarantees, indeed is predicated on, the rule of the worst in society, that kakistocracy that you mentioned (although I now prefer ‘kakastocracy’-rule by shits).
I’ve watched every sane, humane, even human, individual in Austfailian society, in the power structures of politics, business, the brainwashing systems etc, purged from public life or replaced by opportunists or raving psychopaths (the current Federal regime resembles those that the SA might have rejected in 1930 as too stupid and vicious)over the last forty years. The remnants of the ‘social democratic’ Labor Party are very nearly as vile, redeemed by something or other that escapes my recollection. The country is so totally dominated by the Right, hard or pretending not to be, that it simply defies belief, yet the psychopaths, big and little, egged on by the Murdoch cancer, still screech about ‘Leftwing bias’ in various nooks and crannies, like the ABC (TOTALLY Rightwing, neo-liberal and pro-Imperial)and various outposts of academia, ‘post-modern’ (the Murdochites’ great obsession among many)and ‘Marxist’ to their core.
The familiar TOTAL ideological uniformity reigns throughout the Free Press and politics. Syria is a battle between EVIL Assad and super-EVIL Putin, and lovely, cuddly, ‘freedom fighters’ and the heroes of the White Helmets. Some nasty types appeared from somewhere or other, but that’s all EVIL Assad’s fault. Russia is Evil, Putin a monster, the Chinese sinister, treacherous and bent on conquering the world. The USA is our ‘great and powerful friend’ who none dare criticise, Israel is brave, plucky, clever etc, and beset by Evil Moslems bent on exterminating the Jews by ‘driving them into thesea’, etc, etc.
The country is buried in debt, and being beset by ecological collapse, which is particularly viciously denied, in toto, by the Murdochites and the Federal regime, and basically ignored by the Labor Party, lest they lose the votes of belligerent morons, a huge constituency. The treatment of the poor, weak and defenceless like welfare recipients, refugees and the Indigenous (hatred, raw hatred, of whom is a handy vote-winner)is ruthlessly vicious, disempowering, humiliating and sadistic. And the prospect of real fascism grows greater every day, as our military-intelligence apparatus is mobilised by their US controllers to join the Real Evil Empire’s war-plans against China, and the necessary suppression of Thought Criminals who refuse to join enthusiastically in the racist hate campaign. It’s like living in Chile in 1970, I imagine.

Jim Porter
Jim Porter
Jun 17, 2018 4:34 PM

I remember reading a chemistry book published in the 1950s in which a chapter was set aside describing a kind of cold fusion, but nothing was expanded on the subject as if it had been known for decades. I’m 61 now and read it about 30 years ago and have never been able to find that book again. PS I’m a conspiracy theorist.

George Blot
George Blot
Jun 17, 2018 10:18 PM
Reply to  Jim Porter

Not so much of a conspiracy theorist, I hope, that you believe in the Mandela Effect…
But this is interesting… can you remember anything at all? Was thee book in English? American or British? Elementary or advanced? Academic or popular? Old books are the way in to “things we’ve forgotten to remember.”

Jim Porter
Jim Porter
Jun 18, 2018 6:13 PM
Reply to  George Blot

The book was required reading for a degree course in Environmental Science in Kent. I knew someone on the course and they pointed me to it. I was a physicist at the time and obviously looked down on chemistry but every now and then we found common ground. The book was by British scientists and the research seemed to have been done pre WW2. Science research these days would not get funding for this as the profit margins are not large enough.

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 18, 2018 10:04 AM
Reply to  Jim Porter

@Jim – that would be muon-catalyzed fusion, discovered by accident by Luis Alvarez in the 1950s. Muon-catalyzed fusion is now a proven reality, and it does produce some excess heat, but not currently enough for it to be viable, though there are some interesting new developments.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 3:55 PM
Reply to  PSJ

@PSJ. Thank you for that info; it ties in with Prof.Altman’s conclusion which I posted above.

Jim Porter
Jim Porter
Jun 18, 2018 6:19 PM
Reply to  PSJ

Often ideas come before technology or material science can cope. With Nano technology, a lot of the material science can be designed to work but at huge cost at the moment. Eventually things will catch up with the original idea and make it profitable.

candideschmyles
candideschmyles
Jun 17, 2018 2:02 PM

I remember this controversy well and remember being exited by the initial announcement that room temparature cold fusion had been achieved. The logic of the claims made by free energy enthusiasts is tempered in me by the reality that such cheap options would by now have been seized upon by natural resource poor nations like China that could easilly afford to develop such technologies. I am not a nuclear physicist so I must rely on such base logic and thus I remain sceptical.

Dave Lawton
Dave Lawton
Jun 17, 2018 3:27 PM

Your logic is flawed.The Chinese have been researching and have been developing Lenr.

Nat
Nat
Jun 17, 2018 3:29 PM
Reply to  Dave Lawton

Evidence?

Dave Lawton
Dave Lawton
Jun 17, 2018 3:41 PM
Reply to  Nat
candideschmyles
candideschmyles
Jun 17, 2018 4:18 PM
Reply to  Dave Lawton

No need to be rude. My logic can only be informed by that which I am aware. This obscure bit of research you link to has, unless we live in different dimensions, led to no revolution in power generation?
I read several science digests daily and there is regularly a paper published which hints that cold fusion may have been achieved. Nothing I have seen has panned out to a usable technology. While I agree with Mallove in his assertion that there are flaws in the status orthodoxy has over the novel I would assert there is sufficient competition for status and budgets within each orthodoxy, across the many institutions and nations investing in this area to insure that if a method to achieve it at low cost we would know about it.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 17, 2018 8:53 PM

Candide is using a practical, down-to-earth argument from ‘The Sceptical Chemist’ by Robert Boyle, against get-rich-quick schemes in science. “Those who published about using the Law of Mass Action to turn water into wine should by now be recognizable by limitless wealth, because…”

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Jun 17, 2018 10:26 PM
Reply to  vexarb

That is rather a sceptical (and cynical) POV. Whatever happened to research and the joy of discovery instead of ‘someone’s always trying to make buck’ ?

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 6:54 AM
Reply to  vexarb

From the link which Dave Lawton supplied to sceptical Candide, it seems that Robert Boyle’s “Skeptical Chymist” argument is ripe for testing:
“Chinese government researcher Songsheng Jiang reports achieving a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) in a hydrogen-loaded nickel wire. In an email to Frank Acland Jiang reported that the reaction lasted for around 80 minutes and generated around 240 watts of heat.
The Institute is China’s top atomic research organization the People’s Republic’s equivalent of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. The Institute has close connections with the top levels of the Communist Party and the Chinese military.”
I have long since lost touch with my friends in fusion research at Harwell, but I venture to guess that 240 watts of heat for 80 minutes was beyond their wildest dreams in the 60s. Jiang’s email is dated 2015. Generally it takes about 50 years for fundamental science to become social reality; so expect Limitless Energy wealth in China around 2065.
And this makes me even more of a Skeptical Chymist: “The Institute has close connections with the top levels of the Communist Party and the Chinese military.”
Lysenko, anyone?
Honestly, I am not so much Skeptical as Incredulous; and have been a downright Unbeliever ever since I first read that paper in Nature (I forget how long ago).
A propos of the new look “Nature” science magazine, which reformist editor John Maddox transformed into something much larger, slicker and more popular, I hear it still publishes good research. But can anyone tell me if it still carries on its mast-head the old quotation from Wordsworth:
"To the sure ground of Nature trusts the mind that builds for all time".

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 18, 2018 9:09 AM
Reply to  vexarb

The usage’…has connections with the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military’, is standard Sinophobic fear-mongering. The Chinese possess a military, like EVERY country, more or less, and they havn’t attacked anyone since the stupid war with Vietnam, forty years ago. They possess ONE overseas base in contrast with the USA which has one thousand or so, and the US military has attacked many countries, some quite illegally, and killed millions, since WW2.
Similarly the Chinese Communist Party ruins China, along with a huge bureaucracy, and do not bother with sham ‘democracy’ behind which facade the rich make all the decisions. As for Lysenkism in China-are you kidding. Most Chinese leaders are highly educated, many in science and engineering, and few, if any, are reality TV stars. There is an awful lot of Sinophobic propaganda doing the rounds in the West, that the Chinese are, somehow, incapable of innovative thought, unlike the ‘Gods Upon the Earth’ of the West.

vexarb
vexarb
Jun 18, 2018 4:24 PM

Mulga, I am not knocking the Chinese. Far from it; nobody has expressed more reverence than I have, for the constructive achievements of Mao and Stalin during WW2, the fruits of which we see today: Russia and China are literally all that protects the remains of the free world from the depredations of Anglo Zionazi Capitalism. Nevertheless, Lysenkoism is a fact — it destroyed Russian progress in genetics for a generation; and the stupidity of Political Parties voting on questions of science is a fact. It is dangerous to brush these facts aside: they serve as warning examples. If the experiments described are reproducible they will be reproduced anywhere in the real world; not only in a lab with “conneksia” at the top of a Party hierarchy.

candideschmyles
candideschmyles
Jun 18, 2018 5:30 PM
Reply to  vexarb

Additionally it has to be noted that in 2016 Chinese scientists published 426,000 papers to the US’s 409,000 making it the worlds most prolific research nation. Indeed a scan of papers published everywhere in any given week would reveal that a large proportion of all papers published anywhere will involve some collabaration with Chinese scientists and there are many 1000s of them in respected universities the world over. Prudently they manage this on less than half the budget allocation of the US, though that gap is closing.
I would also note that there is no nation on Earth I respect as much as I respect China. I am not saying it has no faults by any means but it is an ancient culture thriving in the 21st century without an expansionist ideology.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Jun 18, 2018 11:43 PM

If you have read Needham’s ‘Science and Civilization in China’, you must be old and rich, because it consists of, Googling frantically, seven ‘volumes’, many sub-divided into numerous sub-sections, and thousands of pages. The return of China to global scientific and technological dominance is sending the ‘Gods Upon the Earth’, in Thanatopolis DC, and their crawling, boot-licking, minions in failed states like Austfailure, into paroxysms of rage at the insubordination of it all. A bunch of ‘mere Asiatics’, the ‘Yellow Peril’ as once was the favourite usage in Austfailure, and is rapidly returning to favour, daring to create more science and technology than God’s Chosen Exceptional darlings-it is insufferable. They MUST be stealing it all from the superior minds of the West.
Among the ludicrous demands that the Thanatopians have made of the Chinese in ‘trade negotiations’, are a couple that more or less insist that China abjure its drive to high technology, because that would threaten Thanatopia’s God-given right to scientific, and, hence, military dominance over the planet. You have to give them full marks for chutzpah, but that comes with their mothers’ milk.

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 18, 2018 10:12 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Harwell was principally involved in researching “hot fusion”, as were all the major centers such as MIT and Los Alamos. Hot fusion is a very different entity from “cold fusion.” Don’t confuse them.
Hot fusion received billions of dollars from the DOE in the US, because of its potential in the weapons industry, but never produced any viable source of energy.
Cold fusion is a lonely orphan that received almost no funding, and after the Pons and Fleischmann debacle even that tiny trickle all but dried up. No weapons potential, you see, and considerable potential threat to energy monopolies if it were to become a viable source

PSJ
PSJ
Jun 18, 2018 11:30 AM
Reply to  vexarb

PS The LENR result from a hydrogen-loaded nickel wire is potentially cold fusion or possible the same anomalous heat demonstrated by Pons and Fleischmann back in 89, which may be closer to Tesla’s unknown energy source.

rilme
rilme
Jun 18, 2018 3:06 AM
Reply to  Dave Lawton

There is nothing wrong with the logic. Obviously.

Helmut Taylor
Helmut Taylor
Jun 17, 2018 12:50 PM

Ho Ho Ho……which way tae jump?