Fleischmann, Martin cold fusion

On March 23, 1989, the University of Utah held a press conference that shook the energy world. Electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced reproducible cold fusion 10% more energy released than supplied. They passed an electric current through palladium and platinum wires in a container of heavy water and lithium sulfate. Cold fusion is nuclear fusion at ambient temperature. When the two hydrogen atoms in a water molecule are replaced with deuterium (called heavy hydrogen because it has one proton and one neutron), it is called heavy water. 

In 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann startled the scientific community with their claims that they could achieve fusion under ordinary experimental conditions (so-called cold fusion). One of the nuclear reactions they claimed to have achieved is as follows. Calculate Q (or the amount of energy) that is produced by this reaction. 

Another abiding memory of Martin Fleischmann is the ending of a BBC documentary on Cold Fusion. He appears purchasing cream cakes from a patisserie in the South of France with the accompaniment of Edith Piaf singing Je ne regrette rien ... 

Some readers of this book will consider that this chapter on cold fusion represents Martin Fleischmann s greatest scientific failure however, the authors believe that this may instead be one of the greatest contributions that Martin Fleischmann, along with Stanley Pons, made to science [1,2]. Unfortunately, early attacks on this field were vigorous, even resorting to personal and unscientific criticisms [3-5], and progress in this field has been slow because of the consequential lack of funding and the difficult problem... 

It was scientists who exposed the false findings behind the cold fusion case in 1989, when a pair of researchers (Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons) publicly claimed (mistakenly) that they had produced fusion and heat production during the electrolysis of heavy water it was careful and persistent application of scientific methodology that identified the errors in the claim from CERN that neutrinos were superluminal and could travel faster than light. 

In March 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons reported their discovery of cold nuclear fusion. They announced that during electrolysis of a solution of hthium hydroxide in heavy water (DjO) with a cathode made of massive palladium, nuclear transformations of deuterium at room temperature can be recorded. This announcement, which promised humankind a new and readily available energy source, was seized upon immediately by the mass media in many countries. Over the following years, research was undertaken worldwide on an unprecedented scale in an effort to verify this finding. 

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