The Fleischmann-Pons press conference was 30 years ago this month! I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time—I was, after all, in preschool—and then I heard hardly a word about cold fusion in college, or in physics grad school, or as a professional physicist. Finally, a few years ago, I was surprised to read that people were still researching cold fusion, now also known as LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions). So I started reading about it. I immediately found sources making a strong-sounding argument based in theoretical physics that it cannot possibly exist, and other sources making a strong-sounding argument based in experiments that it does in fact exist. …Well, one of these two arguments is wrong!

This blog has been all about the theoretical physics case against cold fusion. The case is simple (…well, it’s simple if you have a strong background in theoretical physics!), but is it correct? Does it have any loopholes? Is the underlying theory uncertain? Nope! After countless hours of reading papers and doing calculations and writing blog posts, I find the theoretical case against cold fusion more convincing than ever. That leaves the other possibility: maybe the experiments purporting to see cold fusion are all wrong?! This is of course the mainstream scientific consensus on cold fusion, but the detailed story of exactly how and why the experiments are alleged to be wrong is a bit hard to find—mostly buried in obscure technical papers and websites. Here I’ll do my best to summarize and evaluate these arguments.

In ordinary “hot” deuterium-deuterium fusion, you get:

• D+D → neutron + helium-3 (~50% of the time),
• D+D → hydrogen + tritium (~50% of the time),
• D+D → helium-4 + a gamma-ray (0.0001% of the time)

In palladium-deuteride cold fusion, you allegedly get more-or-less only helium-4, plus energy that winds up as heat. Very strange!

A reasonable guess is that the reaction is different because there is a third particle, besides the D+D, involved in the fusion reaction as a “spectator”:

• D + D + spectator → helium-4 + spectator

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There are a variety of phenomena under the heading of “cold fusion”, but for now I’m primarily thinking about the oldest, most famous, and most-widely-tested aspect: Heat produced in palladium-deuteride systems, which is (allegedly) due to the D + D → He⁴ nuclear reaction.

If D + D → He⁴ is really what’s going on, it has a number of properties which are awfully hard to explain. The cold-fusion skeptic John Huizenga described these as the “miracles” of cold fusion, in the sense that they have no possible explanation. Anyway, everyone agrees that a plausible theory of cold fusion would at minimum need to answer the following two questions:

• Why doesn’t the Coulomb barrier prevent fusion from occurring in the first place? Since the two nuclei are positively charged, they repel very strongly until they get so close that they can fuse. It can happen at extremely high temperatures or pressures, as in a thermonuclear bomb, or a star, or a tokamak, or using a laser the size of a football stadium. It can also happen if you accelerate a beam of deuterons to a high speed, and shoot it into other deuterons, as in a Farnsworth Fusor (try it at home!). It can also happen in muon-catalyzed fusion, for well-understood reasons. But it is difficult to see how the Coulomb barrier could be overcome in a cold-fusion experiment.
• If D+D fusion is occurring, why does it only create helium-4, and why doesn’t it create comparable quantities of helium-3, tritium, neutrons, and gamma-rays? That’s what normally happens in conventional “hot” D-D fusion. In fact, if cold fusion produced neutrons at the same “branching ratio” as you expect from “hot” D-D fusion, it would be easily detected in the experiments … by the radiation-poisoning death of everyone in the room! Actually, neutrons and tritium are sometimes seen in tiny tiny amounts (if I understand correctly), but it’s such a low level that it could only be a “side-channel” at best, as opposed to the main event producing all that heat. So, obviously the reaction is proceeding in a different way than hot fusion. What is it, and why? (The constraints will be discussed more in the next post.)

Cold-fusion skeptics think that there is no theory that answers these questions. Proponents have offered a variety of theories that they claim DO answer these questions. Should we believe them? We shall find out! Stay tuned!

[UPDATE 5 YEARS LATER: After spending a lot more time studying this question, I wound up having stronger and more informed opinions on it; see the post The case against cold fusion experiments.]

I’ll kick off my new blog with an important question, a question that impacts whether this blog should exist in the first place: Is there experimental evidence of cold fusion? Here is my understanding, but this is all a bit new to me.

Cold fusion started with an experiment by Fleischmann and Pons. They did an electrochemistry experiment involving palladium and deuterium, and announced in 1989 that their apparatus produced excess heat (much more heat than could be accounted for by chemistry), and also signatures of nuclear reactions. Many labs immediately tried to reproduce these findings, and most failed, and it later emerged that those alleged signatures of nuclear reactions were misinterpreted. (Fleischmann and Pons are not nuclear physicists.)

Already here, the history becomes very contentious. For example, one of the groups that tried to reproduce the results was at MIT, and they said they couldn’t reproduce the heat signal. But in the cold fusion community, there’s a story that MIT actually did reproduce the heat signal, but reported to the contrary due to incompetence or fraud (allegedly to protect funding for the MIT plasma fusion program!). Conversely, the groups that claimed to successfully reproduce the results are accused by cold fusion skeptics of not actually doing so, again due to errors or fraud.

Anyway, by 1991 or so, mainstream science and society had decided that there’s no such thing as cold fusion, but a small group of proponents continued to believe in it and study it. And they still do to this day. According to proponents, the subsequent decades of work have brought dramatically better experimental evidence of cold fusion, refined procedures, more consistent lines of evidence, and so on. The mainstream view is that this is the cozy consensus of true believers in a pseudoscience, egging each other on.

It’s really hard to evaluate these decades of experiments, because pretty much all the mainstream subject-matter experts have long ago stopped criticizing specific experimental results and methods, and instead they just ignore the field entirely. I am very familiar with this dynamic, because sometimes I edit Wikipedia articles on all sorts of bizarre, obviously dumb fringe physics theories like this one, and it’s always really tricky because the only sources who ever mention these theories are their passionate advocates or inventors. So in some cases, literally everyone who is most qualified on paper to discuss Theory X (having published about it etc.) is a passionate believer in Theory X … but Theory X is still super duper wrong and dumb. So we can get the wrong answer by deferring to the subject matter experts. I’m not saying that cold fusion is necessarily following this dynamic, I’m just saying that this is a possibility to keep in mind.

So anyway, you read this old version of the Wikipedia article written by a proponent, and it sounds like there’s overwhelming experimental evidence for cold fusion. But if you digging, everything is murky. Did “Mitsubishi Heavy Industries [observe],…in a spectacular series of experiments that have proved 100% repeatable, host metal transmutations”? Well, “100% repeatable” may be a stretch when a different group could not reproduce the results despite spending millions of dollars and working closely with MHI. I’m not siding with NRL or MHI here—I haven’t tried to evaluate the back-and-forth—I’m just saying that it’s very hard to figure out what’s going on, it’s not immediately clear who to trust, and nothing can be taken at face value.

Are the theoretical and experimental questions really separate? The theoretical question is “is there a plausible physical mechanism for cold fusion?” The experimental question is “is there experimental evidence for cold fusion?” Many cold fusion proponents argue that these are independent questions. For example, here is an anonymous comment in a 2006 argument on the wikipedia cold-fusion discussion page:

you also say “the most important fact about cold fusion is that it cannot work” – no, the most important fact about [cold fusion] is the experimental observation that it does work; the fact that conventional theory cannot explain why it works is purely incidental.

In other words, cold fusion is an experimental observation, and experiments are the ultimate arbiter of truth in physics, and if theorists cannot explain an experiment, then they should get to work finding a better theory.

This sounds very nice. It sounds like The Scientific Method like we all learned in school and read about in Karl Popper. Who could object to The Scientific Method?

It sounds nice, but it’s wrong! It is rational to give experiments a complete veto over theory only if experimental results are always correct. That’s not the case! Sensors can be calibrated incorrectly. Procedures can be followed incorrectly. Results can be described and interpreted incorrectly. Experiments can be wrong for reasons that are extraordinarily subtle, reasons that are not understood for months, or years, or ever. This is not a nitpicking hypothetical, it is one of the most basic facts of life for everyone in experimental science and engineering.

Therefore it is not only extremely common in practice, but also entirely correct, to use theoretical physics to inform our guesses about which experimental results are trustworthy. In other words, we are doing a Bayesian analysis of what to believe, and both theoretical and experimental knowledge are legitimate inputs into this analysis.

(Example: Here is a link to a meta-analysis in support of parapsychology. Oh, you still don’t believe in parapsychology? Did you meticulously read that article and judge its methodological soundness on its own merits? Or did you rule it out based on prior expectations derived from theoretical physics?)

(Note: If the previous paragraph doesn’t work for you because you really do believe in parapsychology, you’re definitely reading the wrong blog.)

Finally, my answer to the question: Is there experimental evidence of cold fusion? Based on what I know so far (which isn’t very much!) my assessment is: There is enough experimental evidence of cold fusion to make it worthwhile to spend some time searching for a plausible theory of cold fusion … especially since this is the kind of thing I like doing for fun. But there is not SO much experimental evidence that I would believe in the existence of cold fusion without seeing such a theory! I would rather disbelieve even 100 independent cold-fusion experiments than throw out everything we know about quantum field theory and the Standard Model of Particle Physics, if that’s really the choice. (Whatever experimental evidence there might be for cold fusion, it’s absolutely dwarfed by the experimental evidence for our current best understanding of the laws of physics in general.)

So that’s my motivation for starting this blog. Is there a plausible theory of cold fusion? Let’s find out! The journey begins…