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67) Experiments in Texas
Ludwik Kowalski (May 28, 2003)
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ, 07043
What follows is another testimony about cold fusion experiments performed in Texas A&M University by Professor Bockris and his associates. Like Fleischmann, Bockris, (who retired in 1997) was a recognized expert in electrochemistry. He is the author of a 1993 textbook entitled “Surface Electrochemistry: A Molecular Level Approach.” Was he lying about what has been observed? In my opinion, funds should have been made available to continue investigations of unexplained data. The quote below is an extract from his 2000 paper (Accountability in Research, 2000, vol. 8: p. 103). The entire paper, with references, can be downloaded from the library of the www.lent-canr.org web site.
“A quick start was made by my own group (in the Chemistry Department) partly due to my personal knowledge of Martin Fleischmann, who readily told me on the telephone some aspects of the technique he and his collaborators had used. The intense period of work at Texas A&M lasted about one year [ending in 1990]. Work in my own group continued until 1994. The following results from it have been published in refereed journals.
1. Multiple observations of the formation of tritium from deuterium; the tritium production turns on for several hours, then ceases. It can be started up again by means of an increase of the cathodic electrode potential. K. Wolf in the Cyclotron Institute also reported tritium in high concentrations in his own independent experiments. Later, he claimed that this must have been due to tritium present as an impurity in the palladium.
2. We observed significant amounts of excess heat in a few runs. The excess heat was observed in experiments of Appleby and Srinivasan in the TEES laboratories at Texas A&M.
3. In one run we observed heat and tritium together (we had not sought this relation in our other runs). The amount of tritium produced was about 0.1% of that necessary to explain the heat.
4. We found 4He in the Pd lattice after prolonged electrolysis, the difficult analysis being done at North American Aircraft. The helium was about 100 times above background. (Melvin Miles subsequently found 4He in the gas phase equal to around 1/4 that necessary to explain the heat.
5. We carried out about 20 experiments on the detonation of a mixture of solids. We found between 10 and 300 ppm of noble metals, in particular gold, in several experiments. However, the results were not reproducible.
6. In work on damage inside Pd electrodes we found that the impurities deposited on the electrode surface matched those in solution but that new nuclei (of species not present in the solution) developed inside the electrode after it had been saturated with deuterium or hydrogen. We also found Fe produced from spectroscopically pure carbon rods, arced under water of O2 were present.
All these results have been subsequently verified in many independent labs (the detonation experiments by only two other labs).“