John O’Mara Bockris, 90

Jul 102013
 

John O'Mara Bockris

John O’Mara Bockris


July 10, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

John O’Mara Bockris died July 7 of a heart attack after a 20-year battle with cancer. He was 90. Bockris was a giant in low-energy nuclear reaction research and even more so in the general field of electrochemistry.

The tritium discovered by the Bockris group, along with tritium discovered at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in India, was the first nuclear evidence that established LENR as a de facto nuclear process.

His friend and longtime assistant Trish Schulz wrote to New Energy Times on July 7.

"Dr. B. has had an impact on all of our lives, and he will be missed by many," Schulz wrote. "He was loved and cared for greatly by my family, and we shall miss him."

A memorial service is tentatively planned for September. Schulz updated the Wikipedia page for Bockris on July 8, and it is an excellent reference for him and his life’s work. New Energy Times has preserved a PDF copy of that page; it is accessible from our own Bockris Web page.

New Energy Times also has a detailed collection of reference material that chronicles Bockris’ courageous stance and fight for academic freedom at this Web page.

Sergio Focardi, 81

Jul 102013
 

Sergio Focardi

Sergio Focardi


July 10, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Sergio Focardi died June 22. He was 81 and had been in declining health for many years. Focardi was a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Bologna. He was a key associate and friend of Francesco Piantelli, who discovered the nickel-hydrogen-gas LENR method. New Energy Times wrote two feature articles about their work in 2008. Piantelli and Focardi were never able to achieve high rates of repeatability for their work, nor did they ever achieve widespread recognition for their significant contribution to the field.

Kenneth Radford Shoulders, 86

Jul 102013
 

Ken Shoulders

July 10, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Ken Shoulders died June 7 from a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a complication of metastatic prostate cancer. He was 86.

Shoulders is survived by his wife, Claire, daughters Diane Meade and Lee Shoulders, son Steven Shoulders and granddaughters Madeline and Hannah. New Energy Times spoke with his daughter, Diane Meade, on July 9 and confirmed the death. She provided the following statement:

“Ken’s brilliance will be missed in the scientific community as a visionary in the field of new-energy exotic vacuum objects (EVOs). He was a leader in this new frontier but perhaps best-known to the scientific community as the father of vacuum microelectronics.

“Ken was also greatly admired for his earlier work for SRI International, resulting in many patents. Other inventions that were based on Ken’s designs were the first commercially available quadrupole mass spectrometers he built, which were developed by Finnigan Instruments. Ken built the first quadrupole mass spectrometers in 1958 while working at SRI.

“Other areas of devotion to science included vertical flight technology, which remained an unfinished passion at his death. Ken will be greatly missed, but his ground-breaking work in new energy will be built on and come to pass when the rest of the world catches up to his vision. Memorial services will be held privately.”

Continue reading »

Uppsala University Professors Accuse Peers of Wishful Thinking

Jun 282013
 
Andrea Rossi: Fairy Godfather of Cold Fusion

Fairy Godfather of Cold Fusion: Drawing by adw, photo by dubross


June 28, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Two professors at Uppsala University, in Sweden, have published critical comments about their colleagues’ endorsement of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat device.

Göran Ericsson and Stephan Pomp, professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala, uploaded their critique on Wednesday to the arXiv preprint server. Their paper reports serious deficiencies in a May 20 paper written by seven researchers, including three professors at Uppsala.

“Wishful thinking seems to have replaced scientific rigor,” Ericsson and Pomp wrote.

The authors of the May 20 paper say they made an independent test of Rossi’s device. They also say, “By the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.”

The authors of that paper are Giuseppe Levi (University of Bologna), Evelyn Foschi (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics), Torbjörn Hartman (senior research engineer at the Svedberg Laboratory, Uppsala University), Bo Höistad (professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University), Roland Pettersson (senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Uppsala University), Lars Tegnér (professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences at Uppsala University) and Hanno Essén (Royal Institute of Technology).

 

Continue reading »

1998 SRI International Hydrogen LENR Experiment Produces Helium-4

Jun 192013
 

1998 SRI International Hydrogen LENR Experiment Produces Helium-4
June 19, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

New Energy Times has discovered that a 1998 light-hydrogen gas LENR experiment performed at SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., unexpectedly produced a significant amount of helium-4. [DAP errMsgTemplate=”” isLoggedIn=”N”] According to the deuterium-deuterium cold fusion hypothesis, this result is impossible. [/DAP] Otherwise-identical deuterium-gas experiments conducted in parallel also produced helium-4.

The researchers who performed this set of experiments have published and presented this data for 14 years; however, they obscured this particularly anomalous result. This surprising data, which clearly indicated production of helium-4 in a light-hydrogen gas experiment, contradicted the deuterium-deuterium cold fusion theories of their colleague Peter Hagelstein.

The context for the significance of this observation of helium-4 production with light-hydrogen gas goes back to the very beginning of the “cold fusion” story.

At the Dallas, Texas, American Chemical Society national meeting on April 12, 1989, reporters asked “cold fusion” co-discoverer Stanley Pons about the “obvious control experiment of running with all conditions identical but with normal water rather than heavy water.”

Pons knew that an admission of excess heat with light water would directly contradict his and co-discoverer Martin Fleischmann’s working hypothesis of deuterium-deuterium cold nuclear fusion.

Pons reluctantly admitted to reporters that the experimental data he and Fleischmann had accumulated suggested that they had observed excess heat in light-water (H2O) electrolytic cells as well as in heavy-water (D2O) cells.

[DAP errMsgTemplate=”” isLoggedIn=”N”]

Login or Subscribe to remove this notice

Professional Journalism – LENR Facts

Original online content only at New Energy Times

[/DAP]

[DAP errMsgTemplate=”” isLoggedIn=”N”]

_____ Article continues for subscribers. Click here to subscribe. _____

[/DAP]

Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries
© 2024 newenergytimes.net