“Cold fusion” never disproved, lives on under other names

“Cold fusion” began in 1989 as a claim that fusion of deuterium could be accomplished at room temperatures in electrochemical cells using palladium electrodes. The claim was quickly dismissed after quick and dirty attempts at replication, but hundreds of researchers have continued to look into that and similar systems, including activation by sound energy or lasers. Further claims of nuclear transformations followed, and the field is now being pursued under other names: ‘condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS)’;  ‘low energy nuclear reactions (LENR)’; ‘chemically assisted nuclear reactions (CANR)’; ‘lattice assisted nuclear reactions (LANR)’.

There is a dedicated professional society, the International Society for Condensed
Matter Nuclear Science (www.iscmns.org) and journal, the Electronic Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (http://iscmns.org/CMNS/publications.htm).

For an up-to-date review of the field, see Current Science 108 #4, pp. 491-659, freely available at http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/toc.php?vol=108&issue=04.

 

Loch Ness Monsters

A book about “the Loch Ness Monster” by a man (Tim Dinsdale) who had filmed the back of a large creature swimming in Loch Ness had aroused my interest in 1961: Could the Loch Ness Monster be a real animal after all?

I was disappointed that I could find no authoritative discussion of the possibility in the popular or scientific literature. Encyclopedias had no more than a paragraph or two. On the other hand, Dinsdale’s book cited several earlier works, by Rupert Gould and by Constance Whyte, both of whom had quite impressive credentials. Why would science have nothing to say about a topic of such wide public interest?

That curiosity led me eventually to change my academic field from chemistry to science studies, with interest especially in scientific unorthodoxies. But I’ve kept my interest in Loch Ness, which remains an unexplained mystery. I’ve detailed elsewhere what my “belief” about Nessies actually is (Henry Bauer and the Loch Ness monsters).

Some of the most objective and compelling evidence for the existence of these creatures comes from sonar (“The Case for the Loch Ness Monster: The Scientific Evidence”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 16(2): 225–246 [2002]) and a few underwater photos taken simultaneously with sonar echoes, but such technical stuff is less subjectively convincing than “seeing with one’s own eyes”. For the latter, there is no substitute for the film taken by Tim Dinsdale in 1960. Recently Tim’s son Angus published a book, The Man Who Filmed Ness: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness, whose website  contains a link  that enables anyone to see the film itself on-line. Grainy as the film is, small as the Nessie’s back may seem at the range of a mile, you need to know only one thing to judge its significance:

The most determined debunkers, of whom there have been quite a few, have been able to suggest only one alternative explanation to this being a film of a large unidentified creature, of a species far larger than anything know to be in Loch Ness: That what seems to be a black hump, curved in cross-section and length, which submerges but continues to throw up a massive wake, is actually a boat with an outboard motor. Several magnified and computer-enhanced frames of the massive wake on my website show quite clearly that nothing material is visible above the wake after the hump has submerged.

If the most dedicated “skeptics” can offer no better explanation than this, then I feel justified in believing that Dinsdale filmed a genuine Nessie.
It reminds me of the Christian apologist, I think probably G. K. Chesterton or Malcolm Muggeridge, who remarked that the best argument for the truth of Christianity is the attempts by disbelievers to discredit it.
If there is one thing that the hump filmed by Dinsdale is certainly NOT, it’s a boat with an outboard motor.