Kobres: The Case of Carbonaceous Catastrophes

Wow, Bob, I find it hard to believe you've gotten zero comments on this post. It did come during a kind of flurry of posts, if I recall, so it kind of got lost in all that, in my own memory of that time. My comment (maybe the first of several) is this: I have a tale to tell of the cold fusion furor of 1989. You are going to get this story third hand, basically. I was then working as a designer and technician in the R&D lab for American Can Company. I was the guy who made experiments real for a group of six PhDs. We had a metallurgical department which consisted of several metallurgists approaching retirement - in other words, very experienced lab men. The week the Pons and Fleischman news broke, I was having lunch with my boss. The cold fusion topic came up, and he said he had been talking to the metallurgists. He laughed and said they told him the following, as I recall it: 1. The physicists wouldn't find anything, but that the result was probably real. 2. Metallurgists know a lot that physicists don't spend their time on and will make mistakes because in metallurgy they don't know what they are doing. 3. The physicists will in all likelihood use the wrong crystalline form of Palladium. 4. Certain forms of Palladium are known by metallurgists to have particular properties that others do not have. 5. All of the Palladium forms is well-studied in the field of Hydrogen in Metals. Some of them are known to develop VERY high internal pressures in their crystalline lattice, due to Hydrogen. 6. "Hydrogen in Metals" is the study of how Hydrogen embrittles metals when it gets into the crystalline lattice, in sometimes VAST quantities. This embrittlement causes metals to fail, even when they are stressed at much below their yield strengths or ultimate strengths. These failures are why this is studied so much. 7. With the right form of Hydrogen, the internal lattice pressures are well into the hundreds of thousands of psi, and exceed one million psi. They thought that 10 million psi was very conceivable - AT ROOM TEMPERATURE. 8. They were VERY certain that the physicists would get a false negative, because they simply did not even know what they were dealing with. The R&D facility had a very extensive technical library. In the days after this lunch, I checked out some books on Hydrogen in Metals. In one of the books was a seemingly innocuous paper presented at some conference, in which pressures were noted. The pressures were noted in kilopascals, which I at the time did not know about. I did plenty of metric-to-English conversions, but kilopascals were not in my experience, so I may have messed up the conversion. I know how to keep all my units straight and get all the constants and numbers right in the calculations, but I cannot swear that I did it right. When I did the conversion, the pressure I got was 10,000,000 psi. That was - and is as far as I know - exactly the pressure needed to cause fusion. If my conversion was correct, the presenting metallurgist was describing fusion-level pressures. If I was right, he seemed to not realize what he was presenting. I came away VERY impressed and certain that cold fusion WAS possible from the Pons and Fleischmann research - even if they didn't know why. Even if I was off by a magnitude, the result should have alerted someone to pursue research in that direction. BTW, it was that high internal pressure that was cracking metals in the first place. In the weeks and months afterward, quite a few researchers DID replicate the work of P&F, but many were not able to. I suspected that the metallurgists were correct, that the post-P&F researchers were randomly taking Palladium and popping it into P&F devices. Some got good result, and others got nothing, all because they didn't know which form of Palladium they needed to use. Some got lucky and used the right form of Pd, and some didn't. All the points that you list from Fleck were at work in 1989. Science listened to the physicists - who were invested in hot fusion - who pontificated on the silliness and impossibility of P&F's research. Enough foreigners thought enough of P&F's work to invite them to work in Europe (and I think Japan, too). But in America, Pons & Fleischmann are considered to be idiots. Time will tell.

Facinating, Steve. I always though there was a small chance they got a raw deal, but a chance nonetheless.