Report of Josh Hall Lecture on Cold Fusion

I am very grateful for this report submitted by ECW reader Clifford Kaufmann.

The meeting at Eastern Shore Community College Lecture Hall on Friday, May 2, 2014 in Melfa, Virginia was well attended, with roughly fifty people present. Josh Storrs Hall, PhD, was the speaker, and he accompanied his lecture with an excellent slideshow which was well researched, well designed and well implemented. He was introduced by a moderator, whose name I didn’t catch, but who made the comment that it takes cold fusion to get so many people to a lecture on such a fine day (beautiful spring day in the mid sixties).

Dr. Hall’s areas of interest seems to be Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology and he’s written several books including “Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine” and “Nanofuture” which can be seen at his website http://autogeny.org/. His interest in molecular nanotechnology seems particularly well suited to dealing with the intricacies of LENR, as Brian Ahern recently stated in a YouTube video that the “active” regime of 3 to 20 NM is where “magical” things seem to always happen.

Dr. Hall went into the history of cold fusion at a level of detail I wasn’t personally familiar with, for example: he recounted how when Fleischmann and Pons were experimenting with their device they had been using .75 amps for over a month to load the Palladium with Deuterium, and when nothing appeared to be happening they doubled the amperage to 1.5 and left it overnight. When they came in the next morning the device had not only melted through the tabletop, leaving a hole about a foot in diameter, but also melted about four inches into the concrete floor beneath the table. He went on the recount some of the sordid details about the ensuing politics which forced F&P to rush into a press conference before they were actually ready to report anything.

He mentioned Steven E. Jones work with muon-catalyzed fusion at about the same time as being a factor in that haste. The quote he used to sum up that whole scene was particularly apt: “If you’re not taking flak — you’re not over the target”. He then went into the subsequent history of the field, mentioning researchers like Huizenga & Ramsey, SRI, SPAWAR, Mizuno, Energetics Inc in Israel (fractal waveform solution), and many others. He continued with a “State of the Art” section which included a kind of wish-list of characteristics like: reproducibility on demand, a COP of over 100, and controllability of codeposition, temperature, pressure, magnetic fields, etc. The two leading theorists in his opinion are Peter Hagelstein and Widom-Larsen. He then mentioned the half dozen or more companies on the verge of commercialization, like: Clean Planet (Mizuno), Jet Energy, Brillouin, Industrial Heat (Rossi), Mitsubishi, Toyota, Defkalion, etc.

The audience’s questions and participation afterwards was lively and particularly interesting, bringing up points like, as a biochemist mentioned, that since nickel, platinum and palladium are catalysts there could be other catalysts like hemoglobin and chlorophyll that maybe should be looked at as a source of catalysis. All in all a very fruitful hour — well worth the hour and a half drive it took to get there.

Clifford Kaufmann