Patent Law

Bob Park roasts cold fusion, again

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

It's been almost 20 years since the March 23, 1989 announcement that cold fusion had been discovered by two chemists at the University of Utah. By June, cold fusion was an object of ridicule. A small band of embattled defenders retreated to holding annual conferences of like-minded scientists to which skeptics were not welcome. The story now seems to be entering a new chapter. Believers have begun showing a willingness to confront skeptics, submitting papers to open meetings of major scientific societies. They no longer use the term "cold fusion," preferring the less contentious "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) to describe their field; LENR more accurately describes what, if anything, is going on. However, the use of LENR has been undone by referring to "excess heat" as the Fleischmann-Pons effect. This only serves as a reminder of the outrageous conduct of the university administration and the incredibly sloppy research on which the claim was based. This year, there is great excitement over the work of Yoshiaki Arata, a respected professor at Osaka University. In May Arata demonstrated the production of excess heat to an audience of 80, but there have been many such claims over the years and until it is replicated by someone outside the LENR community and a plausible explanation is advanced, it will change few minds.

Steven B. Krivit reported on the Arata experiment on 22 May 2008.

A post at freerepublic made reference to the USPTO: El Baradei and his ilk guard the US Patent Office against even the remote possibility of this moving forward., presumably an allusion to the International Atomic Energy Commission's Mohammad El-Baradei. One doubts that anyone is "guarding" the USPTO.

Full post as published by IPBiz on November 30, 2008 (boomark / email).