U.S. Navy Releases “Significant” Evidence of Cold Fusion
March 25th, 2009I’ve been reading Blank Spots on the Map, and enjoying it a lot. I’d like to quote from it here:
And then there was Dan Vanderhorst, who “has been the lead pilot on seven classified aircraft to date.” In fact, according to his biography, “Vanderhorst has made his career in the cockpit of so many classified aircraft, there is not much that we can say about him, on the record,” and “his work has been outstanding and will probably never be recognized by the general public.” Although Vanderhorst was honored that evening, he wasn’t able to make it to his own party: He was “working at Edawrds AFB on a classified program.”
The silences, absences, and unsaid implications in these men’s biographies were like blank spots on maps. They were guides to the places where the public record ran out. The carefully constructed blank spots in Vanderhorst’s biography alone had remarkable implications. To build a single aircraft is a tremendous financial, industrial, and intellectual undertaking. Building an airplane means spending millions or billions of dollars with dedicated factories, test facilities, and countless workers from janitors to managers, pilots to machinists. Vanderhorst, one pilot, had flown seven. In the first instance, his biography spoke to the scale of the classified flight test industry. It pointed to a hidden geography of finance, research, development, engineering, manufacturing, and testing projects as complicated and industrialized as modern airplanes. Second, his biography spoke to the black world’s ability to keep a secret, about not only the physical but the social engineering that goes into building classified aircraft.
…
Given the number of personnel and the amount of money invested in developing an aircraft, the fact that there aren’t more credible leaks, more inadvertently declassified histories or photos, or more disgruntled ex-officers willing to spill the secrets out into the open means that the secrecy enveloping Vanderhorst’s biography is a remarkable feat of social engineering. Finally, this pilot’s biography says something about the dynamics of secrecy: If Vanderhorst alone piloted seven classified, manned aircraft, and if the three previously classified aircraft at the Gathering of Eagles represent the sum of the black aircraft that have made their way “into the blue” since the 1970s, then the declassified record represents an exception to the rule rather than the rule itself. HAVE BLUE, TACIT BLUE, and Bird of Prey are not unusual in that they were secret. They’re unusual because they are not secret anymore. Long after their retirement, most black airplanes stay black.
It might behoove us to keep all of that in mind as we read public disclosures about military energy research.
What is still black?
Well, since energy is THE most important overall consideration in modern warfare, my guess is that the massive black world of classified aircraft is a minor dalliance compared to what is really happening with energy research. But there’s no need to go all woowoo on this topic to see how ridiculous the energy situation is.
Forget about the virtually untapped and vast amount of energy (100 million exojoules) that could be produced from geothermal. That’s too boring for a story like this. Read about Tadahiko Mizuno’s work on plasma electrolysis. Try some experiments at home or at school.
As far as the U.S. Navy and cold fusion are concerned, that’s well and good, but what is still black?
Via: AFP:
Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.
The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.
“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.
The study’s results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The city is also the site of an infamous presentation on cold fusion 20 years ago by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons that sent shockwaves across the world.
Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.
Scientists have been working for years to produce cold fusion reactions, a potentially cheap, limitless and environmentally-clean source of energy.
Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
“It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons,” he told the Houston Chronicle.
“The whole point of fusion is, you?re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”
But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was “big” and could open a new scientific field.
The neutrons produced in the experiments “may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process,” added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.
“We’re talking about a new field of science that’s a hybrid between chemistry and physics.”
