Report from Cold Fusion 101 at MIT (Barry Simon)

Thanks very much to Barry Simon for this report from the recently held 2015 Cold Fusion 101 short course held at MIT .

CF 101 was again inspiring. Peter Hagelstein is a CF theorist and Mitchell Swartz brings in his experimental data with the NANOR and the PHUSOR. Since 2012 when I first saw a NANOR at MIT, they have been improving on an increasing curve. The latest series are called M-NANORs. The M is for magnetism, which somehow increases the efficiency and the longevity of the NANOR with consistent gains of 80 to 100 COP (in some tests much higher by far).

I asked Dr. Swartz if he would share these super-gains, but he said he wants to run the tests 100 times first. The gains are at low wattage. Some NANORS are becoming physically larger and less expensive to make. When the wattage is increased the gains come down. At 2 watts they give out a COP of 6. Above 2 watts the gains become less and less efficient. His goal is more with low watt electronics than home heating. He also has an ambition of setting up a NANOR lab at MIT to study the phenomenon.

Dr. Swartz and Dr. Hagelstein both use the term “Cold Fusion” quite freely. Perhaps what we call the phenomenon should be up to those who have been wrestling with it for the last 25 years.

Peter Hagelstein was told, “If CF is real you have to prove the negative testing wrong and come up with a new model of physics.” There were 217 negative tests of CF, most of them dating back to 1990. With four modern CF criteria he rendered the tests down to zero. When someone in the class suggested he should present these findings somewhere, he said, “I just did.” He also presented a model that joins CF to classic physics. He’s been working on it for 10 years and said it will be a long time, maybe generations, before it can be proved or disproved (just don’t ask me to explain it).

At MIT, anything Cold Fusion happens only through him and Mitchell Swartz, though only PH works at the college. MIT has yet to awaken from their false negatives from the early days of Pons and Fleishmann. Reproducible data is far beyond 1989. Perhaps it’s time for colleges to enter the 21st century and redo the classic CF/LENR experiment.

Attendance was down, but the class is available to the world at large thanks to Jeremy Rys’ good work of live streaming the class and making videos available through Ruby Carat’s Cold Fusion Now http://coldfusionnow.org/mit-goes-live-with-cold-fusion-101/ Through them last year’s class went out to 8,000 people via the web. As a result PH also corresponded with scientists from other countries, Russia included (Parkhomov???)

On the last day Mitchell Swartz passed around a celebratory copy of Current Science with an article about the class put together by Gayle Verner (from Infinite Energy magazine who’s always working behind the scenes).
Since I’ve become aware that “Cold Fusion is Hot Again” in 2012, though the progress has been excruciatingly slow at times, it has been the scientific thrill of a lifetime to watch CF/LENR gain momentum on a steady upward curve. It’s our generation’s Theory of Relativity. Soon the world will change beneath our feet!

Barry Simon