The Earth is round but the world is flat.
Universalist approach to low energy nuclear reactions
Jean-Christophe Fadot – Ph.D.
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Summary
Since 1989, research on low energy nuclear reactions – LENR – has taken place in a geopolitical context marked by the resurgence of nationalism to the detriment of universalism and the interests of humanity, which suffers from a lack of conceptual, strategic and political representation.
This situation impacts research on LENR, hampers the communication of scientific advances obtained in this field, and limits the funding that can be obtained. A realistic and ambitious universalist model could help change this situation.
This paper is an extension of a presentation at the 2022 Congress of the French Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science.
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Preliminary note.
The word universalism describes here the whole of the data relating to a field, whatever it is, as opposed to a separatism focused on the differences between the components of any social, physical, psychological, industrial object, etc.
We propose to use these two concepts to better understand the difficulties experienced by the ecosystem studying LENRs since the announcements of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989 and to identify perspectives for escaping the “reputation trap” in which it has been situated ever since.
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Table of contents
I. Introduction. The conversation between the one and the many. 3
1. The Standard Model is an open model. 4
2. LENRs are not incongruous. 6
3. The reputation trap is wide open for LENRs. 7
4. The ghost property of the standard model. 9
5. The standard model of Tycho Brahe. 9
6. Universalism and society. 11
7. The universalities are the human society. 11
8. Funding for a laboratory depends on its fit with the consensus. 12
II. Science and universality. 13
1. Science, a model in difficulty. 13
2. The rise of separatism – The earth is flat! 13
4. LENRs at Sigma 5 times 10 power 3. 15
III. LENR and technological foundations of the global society. 18
1. Universalism and biological transmutations. 18
2. What are the words “biological transmutation” synonymous with?. 18
4. Alchemical entanglement. 19
5. Esotericism is structuralism. 20
7. Civilizational technological ratchet. 22
9. Alchemy, artificial intelligence and astrophysics. 24
IV. LENR and universalism: for a global approach. 26
1. Wheat grows, so the earth is flat. 26
2. LENRs depend on universalism. 27
3. Our individual responsibility is committed to human society. 28
4. Repaint the door of the LENR laboratory. 28
5. Social universalism is in trouble. 29
6. Political Universalism and RBNE research. 30
7. Are the destinies of the LENRs and of a united humanity linked?. 31
8. LENR and human universality. 32
9. LENR funding: increase from 100 million to 100 billion Euros. 32
10. Elements for a global research on LENR. 34
V. Conclusion. Will LENRs save the world?. 35
I. Introduction. The conversation between the one and the many.
In a broad sense as well as from a practical point of view, universalism and separatism are complementary and therefore necessary, but, as is often the case in human activities, we maintain a complex and sometimes ambiguous conversation between them, celebrating here the universalism of such and such a doctrine in order to better establish our right to impose it against any other, or celebrating there such and such particularism in the name of the universality of difference!
We find this conversation and this same difficulty in physics, the science in charge of describing and understanding the universalism of the laws governing matter and energy as well as the “separatism”, in other words the detail, of the countless microphenomena, processes, objects and dynamics of the real world.
In this conversation, which began in antiquity, a consensus has been established since the fifties of the last century around a standard model, which we will call MS, and which has become in practice the reference standard around which all approaches are judged. Is a proposal, theory, observation, experimentation, etc. compatible with the SM? It can be considered. Is it not? It does not exist, at least not on the planet of standard physics, where one can study, get credits, make a career and converse in university corridors or on scientific social networks, without risking the wearing of an unpleasant hat, that of an astrologer.
Since low-energy nuclear reactions have a relatively justified reputation for being annoying to MS, studies concerning LNRs have been since 1990 mostly in a discredited territory, not very comfortable though largely unjustified as we will see. This situation drastically limits the publication of studies concerning these phenomena in peer-reviewed journals, and, when they manage to be published, quite often by obscuring what they really talk about – LENR – their audience is diminished accordingly. The reactions they talk about are deemed to be impossible and therefore do not exist.
The scientific and technological community working in this field may present all sorts of arguments, theories, experimental results, and even research programs or calls for national or international projects, but the gap between reputation and reality remains significant.
However, from a practical, societal point of view, what are the LENRs about? The prospect of energy production at particularly attractive economic, environmental and social costs, placing the central theme of LENR at the heart of contemporary societal issues. So we might as well look a little deeper into the reasons for a potentially very costly and equally regrettable disdain.
For what standard are we talking about when we speak of the standard model? Is it a standard at all? In reality, contrary to what its name suggests, the standard model is the juxtaposition of several approaches, more or less compatible, including quantum electrodynamics, QED, quantum chromodynamics, QCD, and Albert Einstein’s restricted and general relativities. Moreover, this assembly of circles and squares not only includes, but relies on, many areas of uncertainty, quite gigantic in reality, for example on the existence of dozens of “free parameters” and “fundamental constants” that are fully unexplained.
The physics of the Standard Model is essentially the juxtaposition of countless experiments confirming this or that point of its purpose, associated with a solid if moving, and above all largely tautological, theoretical body. The remarkable aura of the MS is largely due to the belief that this model has never been faulted, which is essentially incorrect. What is the origin of the mass of the electron? To ask this simple question, which has no known answer to date, is to fault MS, which does not, however, detract from its greatness. MS is big, industrially practical, but not that big, and other industrial developments are theoretically possible if we make it grow a bit.
So this reputation of invincibility of MS, a little hasty but anchored in the collective conscience, seems to forbid the postulate of cold fusion appearing in the open in March 1989. On that Thursday, the twenty-third of the month, two renowned scientists indicated to the scientific community what seemed to be a revolution: nuclear nuclei would fuse at low energy, without emitting dangerous radiation, and with a net energy gain. [1]
The announcement was quickly defeated, and before the end of 1989, most, but not all, of the research programs launched in the world were stopped in view of the theoretical impossibility of the announced process on the one hand, and of the lack of satisfactory reproducibility of the experiments presented. In summary, and in spite of the persistence and the evidence of many positive results, theoretically impossible with respect to the MS, in particular with respect to the impossibility of crossing at low energy a “Coulomb barrier” carried by materials with high atomic numbers, why be interested in LENR, contradicting the theory and very little documented?
However, almost 35 years later, if they seem to contradict the theory, even though a scientific theory must be able to submit to Popperian refutation, the existence of these improbable reactions is supported by the facts. Numerous experiments – thousands of them – have indicated the reality of this gain and of these mergers since 1989. [2]
But to little effect: the scientific community considers in its great majority that the observations of Pons and Fleischmann, and all those which were carried out in the following months, years and decades, can be or have been only errors of measurement, interpretation or installation of the experiments. [3]
The reason? It’s simple, the standard model forbids the possibility of nuclear fusion at low energy, and attempts to replicate positive observations have most often turned out to be negative. This is the consensus,[4] a consensus that is doubly unfounded.
1. The Standard Model is an open model.
This article will return to the confusion between unexpected events in the MS and the low initial replicability of the experiments concerned in the field of LENR. For if near-perfect replicability is essential to the industrial model, it is by no means so in the observation of events indicating an unexpected property of nature.
However, let’s be immediately interested in the supposed universality of the SM as an explanatory model of reality in its primary aspects. For is this the case?
In fact, every physicist knows clearly that the equations of the SM are far from being complete, let alone universal, and sometimes even just enlightening on many subjects. The MS does not know to this day how to explain what a proton, an electron or a neutron is made of[5] ; explains, at best, only 4% of the energy-matter couple present in the universe ; does not know how to understand gravitation at the human or nano scale ; hesitates to know if the very concepts of particle or elementary force are relevant; cannot define electric or magnetic fields other than by describing them literally or by measuring their effects; uses, without explaining them, about twenty fundamental constants and even more so-called free parameters to create its basis; requires in many areas the use of a polymorphic tunneling effect to try, but without success, to explain the observed reality.
As for saying that the MS explains 4% of the matter energy couple, it is still a lot to say. The mass of the quarks composing protons and neutrons represents 1% of the mass of the nucleus, the remaining 99% being attributable to the energy of the gluons, endowed with a hypothetical spin and mass, on the nature of which conjectures and hypotheses abound, and no certainty. Let us add to this that protons and neutrons diffract as much as electrons, in other words that they are also, all quarks, flavors and gluons together, waves.[6] But waves of what? Waves of probabilities? Perhaps, and perhaps not at all. Almost two centuries after the conceptualization of electric and magnetic fields by Michael Faraday, more than a century after Louis de Broglie, the question remains and the debate continues.
On another level, among the many properties of the universe described as to be accepted as such, summarized in these “free variables” of the standard model, is C, the speed of light in vacuum. Its velocity has been measured, perhaps for longer than we think[7] , in a very precise way around 300 megameters per second, but what is its origin? Why not 330 or 270 megameters/second for example? In fact, nobody knows. This speed is certainly the product of the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability in vacuum, but these values being determined by C, this description is essentially a tautological function, which does not explain either why vacuum has properties equivalent to those of a material.
On another equally elementary point, why do protons, neutrons, or diffracted electrons recompose themselves into particles once they have bypassed the obstacle? This recoherence on which the physical world is based is only understood by its observation. The fact that particle and wave function are indissociable although of antagonistic natures, as well as the relation between electric and magnetic fields, are admitted as being starting data on which, moreover, there is hardly any reason to question.
Because in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which remains dominant, there is no causality in reality, the laws of organization of the universe are of a probabilistic order. Why is this so? Well, in short, because! Quantum physics is counterintuitive, and we have to live with it. In short, to summarize, or even paraphrase, Richard Feynman: “This is the way we do physics”. “This is the way we do physics” he told Mendel Sachs, a young physics professor at the University of Michigan[8] . Of course, but it is also “giving up thinking”, concluded Louis de Broglie.
Because of this confusion between the topological, local and functional validities of the SM and causal universality, which the SM in fact renounces from the outset, only a few pioneers or independent researchers are working on the subject of low-energy nuclear reactions throughout the world. However, to think about these reactions is first to ask the following question: does the standard model really forbid this hypothesis? But how could it forbid it when it cannot define dark matter or energy, when it does not say whether the neutrino has mass or not[9] , or when it only describes summarily and with many questions the quarks and gluons of the protons forming the Coulombic resistance which seems, theoretically at least, to forbid the LENR ?
As Edmund Storms reminds us in the opening pages of his 2007 seminal book on LENRs[10] , theory should follow observations, not prohibit them. If observations contradict the theory, then the theory must evolve.
2. LENRs are not incongruous.
The first level of the difficulty of the LENR ecosystem is thus linked to the supposed incongruity of the LENR hypothesis in the face of the universality of the known physical laws of quantum chromodynamics or special relativity. But in reality, the results, even random, of LENR experiments are not incongruous with respect to the MS. Most of the critics of LENRs rely on the experimental efficiency of the MS, theorizing for example the behavior of semiconductor materials, and thus to manufacture them, to dismiss without further ado any proposal located outside the domain covered by these laws or this model.
But this syllogism is inaccurate and unfounded. For does the MS explain the tunnel effect, for example, without which there would be no transistor and therefore no microelectronics industry? Not very well. That the “tunneling” property – which transforms a material that is supposed to forbid the passage of independent electrons into a semiconductor of electric current – is described and mapped in a synthetic and robust mathematical language is certain; that this property is understood is much less so, and it is at least a broad topic of conversation.
This situation has important implications for the real life of the LENR ecosystem, and causes great difficulties for the development of research and communication in this field. Because of this confusion between a robust description of the tunneling effect and a virtually non-existent causal understanding of this property of nature, for example, a discussion between a PhD candidate proposing a thesis topic on LENR and a laboratory director, or, even more so, any idea of public funding for a research program or conference on this topic, was until very recently complicated at best and generally non-existent, with a few happy and recent exceptions. In short, why start a conversation or an R&D project on the subject of low-energy fusion of hydrogen atoms or isotopes since such a phenomenon is deemed to be incompatible with the standard model? In other words, why look for something impossible?
To argue that a tunneling effect that diminishes or bypasses coulombic repulsion at low energy cannot be imagined forgets, for example, that this same effect is indispensable for fusion by magnetic confinement. Without this property, this type of fusion could only occur at a temperature of several billion degrees Celsius, a temperature that has not been reached for some time, in fact since the Big Bang. Via the tunneling effect, the required temperature is much colder, of the order of 200 million degrees. This is obviously still hot, but it is a temperature that Tokamac-type reactors manage, with great industry, to create.
The tunnel effect is thus very practical and undeniable as a physical principle or vector, but why admit this property here and refuse it there? That it cannot yet be created at will in the LENR is one thing; that it is forbidden to exist by refusing to imagine it is quite another, especially when thousands of experiments, measurements and observations have shown it. A large part of the research on low-energy nuclear reactions in condensed matter assumes the existence of a tunneling effect reducing the Coulombic resistance via a crystallo-metallic confinement. Is this so daring to conceive? And why would this confinement be more unthinkable than another tunneling effect, the one at the origin of alpha particles – in other words, of quasi-helium nuclei – other transmutation vectors?
Because this one is easily reproduced, and this one would not even have been observed, given the absence of additional radiation or production of neutrons, helium, tritium, as the theory predicts? However, such radiation has been observed on many occasions, including in reproducible experiments that are relatively simple to set up.[11] These radiations are certainly less abundant than with magnetic or inertial fusion, not to mention fission reactions, which is even a large part of the interest of cold fusion, but they have been recorded for decades now.[12]
3. The reputation trap is wide open for LENRs.
In reality, the primary difficulty with cold fusion is not material, factual, scientific or even technological. It is primarily psychological, and on two levels. Firstly, contrary to what the saying goes, we do not believe what we see. One believes what one understands, which is quite different, so that what one does not understand, one cannot admit, even if one makes or would make direct observation of it, or if reputed scientists, such as Julian Schwinger[13] , would echo it.
Second, the conversation about LENRs is served by what British epistemologist Huw Price calls the reputation trap,[14] that career black hole that should be carefully avoided for obvious material, financial, economic, and even social reasons, and to which we will return later in this article.
Therefore, in practice, in the field of LENRs, it is not a question of noting or not not noting reactions differing from the results expected by the Standard Model, it is a question of avoiding any research in front of one’s peers to note a phenomenon of this order, as well as any public manifestation of interest for this field, dangerous for one’s career or professional reputation.
The conclusions of countless experiments in this field over the last 30 years, often in the framework of programs of the highest scientific and technological level, accompanied by publications in the best peer-reviewed scientific journals[15] , are, in order to survive professionally, to be ignored, even if these publications would bypass any use of the terms “cold fusion” or their substitutes “low energy nuclear reaction”.
But is it science, or at least scientific research, to ignore observations? It is easy enough to answer this question when one is not confronted with it, but in real life, to speak of cold fusion or of anything that might resemble it, is in countless environments to stick an astrologer’s cap on one’s head and to risk an almost definitive ostracisation from the common scientific city.
Under these conditions, whatever the facts, results and publications, any work on LENRs is generally unthinkable and therefore unthought of. The researcher, whether he is qualified to direct research at the highest level, director of a laboratory, with diplomas, experience, renowned publications, even a Nobel Prize, as in the case of Julius Schwinger, will produce any document, proof, result, established according to the most rigorous procedures, sometimes at the end of processes that are doubled, tripled, tenfold, repeated for several years in parallel in independent university laboratories, financed by industrialists and first-level public organizations, but his or her publications struggle – very much so – to be published, and are even less read.[16] [17]
To produce heat by transmutation of elements at low thermal altitude is not possible, because, and therefore. Because it is incompatible with what we know about quantum chromodynamics. Because by definition, low energy nuclear reactions in condensed matter or liquid matter can only be artefacts, statistical errors or calorimetric measurements. Because, in short, this is what everybody knows. And so everyone keeps quiet, or almost!
Almost, because many scientists know and demonstrate that nuclear reactions take place at low energy in condensed matter, in plasmas, in liquids and even in biological, natural and geological environments and present these manifestations in scientific publications.
4. The ghost property of the standard model.
Let’s go back for a moment to the standard model, or more precisely to what we make it say.
The supposed universality of the MS is in reality topological, circumscribed to precise perimeters. Moreover, many elements that were considered essential and mastered in the MS only a few years ago are today leading to oceans of imprecision or unknowns.[18] In current research, the distinction between particles and energies is becoming extremely tenuous.
So much so that from the “Grid” as Frank Wilzeck calls it, from this “Network”, from this “quantum vacuum”, in other words from this energetic ether held to be certain until Albert Einstein in 1905, until he himself reconsidered the possibility of its existence from the 1930s onwards, real particles arise, quarks for example, by association of pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, or similarly in short, particles reputed to be massless, such as photons.
However, if we approach a new field of understanding of matter and energy, with Frank Wilzeck’s Grid,[19] or this concept of polarization of the quantum vacuum, how and why should low energy nuclear reactions be forbidden? It should be seen as audacious, and even inaccurate, to assert that LNRs are impossible on the grounds that the standard model is universalist. For the standard model is above all, or even essentially, a vast interrogation on the constants and parameters on which it is based, as well as on the content of the quantum vacuum on which it opens and approaches.
The MS is not universalist, it is even its strength in reality, because it is another way of saying that it is part of science, but the persistence of this phantom property in the collective imagination, fruit of our need for universalities obviously legitimate, since they are the foundation of human society, indicates that universalism in physics is an essential point of the equation that the LENR community has to solve.
5. The standard model of Tycho Brahe.
The standard model has allowed huge technological advances and synthesizes great theoretical advances. Its social benefit is obviously gigantic, but to dismiss in one sentence the LENR hypothesis on the grounds that the SM would forbid it, is inaccurate, abusive and surprising. The MS is far from prohibiting excess heat release, neutron emission, or nuclear transmutation, such as with the production of tritium from deuterium in low energy reactions. The MS does not foresee them, but it does not prohibit them. How could it? It would be out of science.
Mathematically, it would be quite easy to map with additional families of wave vectors the hypotheses that may underlie the observations made, and these are numerous. That these events are still relatively random is an industrial and technological problem, and should not be a scientific problem. Theory should adapt itself to the measurement of physical events, and not forbid, let alone deny, a manifestation that it does not yet understand, any more than it understands the primary parameters of objects as elementary as electrons, protons, neutrons or photons.
Tycho Brahe’s astronomy was also very efficient, and had the upper hand over Copernicus’ for more than a century. Being several centuries ahead in terms of arithmetic refinements, it was more efficient in the first decades than Copernicus’ astronomy, which was just beginning. But as efficient as it was, it was perfectible. It was even fundamentally inaccurate and survives today only in museums, where it is possible that two hundred years from now, the MS of today will join it, with all the honors that are obviously due to it.
The MS is a practical description, because it is flexible, open and collaborative, of many topological properties of reality, but still poses innumerable unresolved questions about the properties that order it. The fluidity of its dazzling mathematical language allows to create ontological properties, causal properties, state vectors, to use complex numbers and objects to propose hypotheses and descriptions, for the benefit of incremental interpretative advances. But it is a language, and to confuse it with what it is talking about is very confusing. The standard model formalizes what we know of reality, in full and in hollow, but does not describe in any way the foundations of what is observed. In fact, we know nothing about the foundations.
The MS is a beautiful and effective map, but it is also a porous barrier. Crossing it is called science, in other words, it is a social duty. In fact, LENR research is the very idea of science; to ban it, forget it, or deny it is a scientific regression. Certainly, the LENR community seems to contradict some of the foundations of what it calls “mainstream science”, the standard science, but this contradiction is that of a saving and genetic doubt, in the sense of formative, necessary, even indispensable. It is a research, a conversation between observation and hypothesis, it is not an earthquake calling into question the foundation of physics.
His doubt is in fact the deepest foundation of science, the one that the epistemologist Karl Popper had circumscribed in his principle of refutability of scientific hypotheses. We can certainly increase the Popperian criterion of definition of science – we should even, because it is clearly incomplete, not defining the essence of science – Frank Wilzek proposes on this subject the concept of “truthification”, which we can translate by “veracity”, but this one defines in any case one of the essential modalities in sum of the scientific progress. The refutability of any scientific statement, even if it is called the standard model, is an essential basis. Let us address it.
All science is a delicate balance between protecting acquired knowledge, as established in norms and models of reasoning, and transgressing them in new advances. This polarization between conservatism and innovation is essential and the advancement of science depends on its maintenance. To freeze any possibility of transgressing the norm is to refuse progress. To forget any acquired reference point is to enter the void of uselessness. The research on LENR is a vector of this fertile polarization.
6. Universalism and society.
The standard model is therefore obviously imperfect, but where does it get this reputation of universality to which it does not claim? One of the reasons is probably due to the hyperspecialization of science. Even in physics, very few people master what is being discussed globally, simply because such mastery is impossible today, and most scientists therefore stick to the general scientific opinion. Keeping up to date with the theoretical assumptions and experiments on the nature of the proton, for example, is probably beyond the reach of almost all physicists, even those specialized in particle physics. Science today is synonymous with specialization.
But beyond this first difficulty related to hyperfocus, it is conceivable that a more fundamental aspect is at work. In fact, we probably assume a universal status for the standard model because we need such a system to exist, at least for a given moment. Its existence is vital for humanity, whatever its content. Humanity is constantly searching for universal explanatory models because, as a living social whole, it is itself made up of attempts at universal, or “relatively universal” explanations and models, transcending the particularism, the natural separatism of each of its components, we humans and the whole environment, pebbles on the way to the cosmos.
Human society defines itself, thinks, sees and organizes itself according to moral, scientific and societal vectors that it establishes as universal, while making them evolve in the course of time, in a more or less bumpy or harmonious way. For example, the “human rights” of the 18ème European century have a tendency to widen today towards the rights of the living, a concept itself widened to the dimension of non-biological realities, such as a river or a mountain. This doesn’t take anything away from human rights, but it broadens the conversation.[20] The Standard Model is a universal; its status is temporary, which is normal; to think that it is eternal is obviously a serious mistake.
7. The universalities are the human society.
Let us explore this point for a moment, for we shall see that it is much more than an improbable disgression and goes to the heart of the problematic of LENR studies. Indeed, universalism is an essential underlying concept of everyday life. The electricity in our homes, workshops or offices, the fact that schools, universities, cinemas, media libraries, roads and airports exist, the assumption that peace is generally preferable to war – all these are based on repositories of values, knowledge and goals common to almost all human beings.
These shared universes, in other words the validation of what we all accept as self-evident, is called society. What we no longer accept collectively leaves the common social field, and if this exit takes 10, 20 or 50 years, it has never been taken for granted in human history. And the reverse is true: what society initially accepts informally sooner or later becomes the moral or legal law of society and becomes part of its operating norms.
But science is one of the essential reference points that make up human society. We generally trust science, and do not generally try to verify whether or not the electric charge of the electron is higher or lower than what the school books say. We know that a phone charger plugged into a standard outlet will charge our phone, and this confident knowledge, shared worldwide, is enough for us most of the time.
It is this sharing that gives science its social power. And it allows the financing of scientific research, in all fields, which ultimately depends on the relationship of the citizen to this universalism that is science. This relation is complex, moving, and takes place in a context where the citizen is represented by the public decision-makers and its vectors, among which we can count the academies and national and international scientific institutes. In the end, the cloud of this relationship is condensed in a certain number of norms, among which, in physics, the standard model.
8. The funding of a laboratory depends on its suitability for the consensus.
This relationship between society and science obviously concerns the difficult and contemporary epic of the LENR. Scientists, in all fields, seek funding, the obtaining of which depends on the adequacy of their project to the general consensus to which the political decision-maker will refer. If the consensus is that the MS prohibits LENRs as a matter of principle, any funding of LENRs will be complicated, marginal, exceptional, or private. If, on the contrary, the consensus is that LENR is a little understood, uncontrolled process, but common in the universe, even in geology or in biological processes, if this consensus notes that experimentation is now observing numerous effects at moderate temperatures, if it becomes accepted that it is urgent to integrate LENR into the field of energy or environmental solutions to be explored, this field will be strongly financed or encouraged in view of its potential for society. This is what is at stake.
II. Science and universality.
Therefore, it is necessary to take a little more interest in universalism as a social object, and to consider it on a broad level. We must even start at the beginning: to what extent is science part, or not, of the citizen’s universalist frame of reference?
Why ask this question, and especially about the LENR? In fact, it is essential, because any science is by definition an occult science, in the sense of complicated, complex, hermetic, not immediately accessible. The expression “occult science” has a pejorative meaning today, but in reality any scientific approach aims at revealing the “occult”, the hidden, in other words at revealing – behind the appearances and the obvious – the foundations of matter, of energy, of the modalities of functioning of the living, of the social, cultural, artistic phenomena even, and in general at defining the concepts allowing to understand the real, beyond its appearance
In the case of the search for LENRs, observations of events deviating from the standard model are, or were until very recently, episodic, essentially misunderstood and relatively weak. Why then be interested in this elusive subject? Perhaps because it is also the case, to varying degrees, for almost all scientific realities! No one has ever been able to see an electron with his eyes, even via a screen, to touch gravitation, or to take a mathematical object in his hands. We can eat 2 apples and 3 pears, their addition remains a concept out of the field of physics, which we cannot crunch but in which we must have faith to understand reality. This shared faith, based on reasoning, experimentation and modelling, is the basis of the relationship between citizen and science.
1. Science, a model in trouble.
Therefore, if science is recognized as a valid object by the citizen community, we can move forward on the LENR hypothesis, as obviously on any other scientific research field. But if this is not the case, the path will be much more difficult for everyone, all fields, LENR, social sciences, or critical superfluidity, taken together. It turns out that society’s answer to this question about science is not as clear-cut today as it was a few decades ago. Why is this so?
There are certainly many reasons, but one of them seems to be related to the fact that for the citizen, for all human beings, universalism in the broad sense is essentially alien to current events, individual or collective, local or global, while separatism is a rising value, if not a generalized approach, almost synonymous with current life, and this impacts the social status of science. For various reasons, trust in the transmitters of universal scientific faith and knowledge has diminished, while separatism is on the rise as a social benchmark.
2. The rise of separatism – The earth is flat!
Are there any universal references in human society? There are, of course: raising one’s children, laughing, singing, eating, helping each other, the list is fortunately long, are planetary values, shared on the whole by the human nation. But there are also many what could be called separatists, unspoken referentials, taken for granted, validating the idea of separateness, of a generic particularism of the conditions of human life, of existence, of thought, of value, of the conditions of economic consumption, of care, of studies, of access to culture, etc., in the first rank of which are probably the idea and the reality of nation. The concept of nation is a very shared frame of reference validating the idea of genetic separation between human beings, a separation that is not total of course, but in the name of which human cohorts are regularly sent to die and kill. It does not seem exactly certain that the cost-benefit ratio of this “separatist” that is the nation has been well perceived. As inescapable as it obviously is, it is the scope of its field that could, and should, pose a little more of a question, it seems to us.
Globally, culture and science are concerned by these separatists. For example, we often think in Europe that human rights are universal, or that everyone knows that the earth is spherical. But the reality is quite different, and on the last point, in France for example, a study of the IFOP indicated that in 201,7 9 % of the French are convinced of the flatness of the earth. How is this possible? The answer is simple, although confusing: it is easy to show that the earth is flat, complicated to demonstrate that it is not.
And indeed, billions of individual observations and the slightest glance around us show, are the visual proof, indicate that the earth is obviously flat, or at least seems to be. A field, a meadow, a lake, in short the immediate visual experience, indicate that we are surrounded by flat referential spaces. So the earth is flat, let’s see! Let us observe here that platism is not even an example of separatism, but on the contrary imagines a vocation of universalism. For the platist view, the earth is not flat for one person, it is flat for everybody.
3. The flat weather.
Is this a special case? In fact, not really! The universalist approach is so absent from our daily reality and the frames of reference that structure it that our individual understanding is largely topological, local, circumstantial, shaped by and essentially limited to our local history, culture and geography. In short, we live, but without knowing it, in a separatist world: ours, on an individual and collective scale. In such a way that there are many fields where everyone, who laughs at platism here, nevertheless professes it in the next moment on quite similar subjects, including science, without even realizing it. Why is this? The reason is the same: globally, the information we get from the world, even with the disruption of online resources and social networks, remains localized, partial, topological, flat.
Let’s take a micro-example: the weather. In fact, the weather reports that we read, watch or listen to, generally describe the conditions of the cities, regions or countries in which we live, rarely of the continent where we are located, almost never of the weather on the oceans, and even less of the globe in its entirety, which is however an essential actor and vector of the weather here or there.
In practice, we live in a quasi-flat world: our understanding of the weather and the system that explains it are circumscribed in the perception of an almost flat territory – that of our continent, our country, our region, our city – separated from their genetic set, that of our planet, certainly spherical, but which we almost never look at or consider as such. In our reading of reality, on our smartphone, tablet, newspaper or screen, clouds, anticyclones, depressions and temperatures fade away at our borders, coming from a nebulous no-man’s land quickly evacuated from our view of the immediate, factually flat environment.
And this is the case in many fields: our studies, training, research, professions, even leisure activities, or reasoning are generally specific, specialized or even hyperspecialized, in other words hyper-localized. For example, in the economic field, we generally prefer to consume or use objects made in our country. In principle, this seems self-evident, especially in times of crisis, out of national solidarity, but we ignore the fact that our jobs depend to a large extent on international economic exchanges. The more we buy home-made, the less the house will be rich.
What is self-evident is that the economy is flat; what is more complex to grasp, because it is hidden from immediate experience, is that it is planetary, spherical, integrated. If everyone wants to consume truly local, we won’t even have a pickaxe to dig the ground and plant corn, wheat or anything else. The making and distribution of a pickaxe is an extraordinarily complex international process, and so is almost everything today in the areas of health, tranquility, recreation, nature, environment, etc.
In short, we live among, celebrate or hate, fight for or avoid a multitude of trees, of all kinds of species, without understanding that we live in the same, unique and vast forest of which we, humans, are only a small component, quantitatively. Universalism is a concept essentially foreign to our concerns, a distant word, vaguely utopian, idealistic even. It would be only in science, we think nevertheless generally, that this concept would express itself in all legitimacy. But as we have just seen, it is now far from being certain, in many respects.
Another factor is that, in practice, universalism is a word that is quite foreign to the toolkit of the scientist, and particularly to experimental physicists. In general, the so-called universal laws only interest them to detect possible defects, those insignificant deviations from which Nobel prizes flourish! This is typically seen in the somewhat disproportionate importance of the Popperian criterion of refutability where science is defined in its capacity to be refuted. It is a criterion that has its value, no doubt, but it would seem at least as effective, and perhaps more so, to define science in its capacity to define symmetrical models, i.e. reproducible, applicable to the greatest possible number of referents, in physics, natural sciences, social sciences, human sciences, mathematics, chemistry, art, economics, etc. This is what F. Wilzek proposes, for example, with his criterion of veracity.[21]
The fact remains that more universalism, as a view, an approach and a method of work, of organization or of social, cultural, scientific reasoning, etc., could bring a lot to daily life, to social organization, as well as to the scientist’s effort, and especially around the field of LENRs, where we have long since gone beyond the stage of a mere hypothesis. A hypothesis is indeed a supposition: do we suppose that there is a possibility of exothermic production by LENR outside the prediction of the MS, or has this production already been observed, even if only once, in robust conditions of observation and measurement?
4. The LENRs at Sigma 5 times 10 power 3.
A single finding of this order, or at least a dozen of them, should, or could reasonably have led the scientific community and public decision-makers to launch multiple investigations into this event. In particle physics, a signal of interest is generally activated according to the so-called “Sigma 5” criterion, i.e. from the occurrence of 5 positive cases out of 1 million negative cases. In the case of LENRs, Sigma 5 thus represents a rate of failure of the theory with respect to the expected thermal results according to the MS, higher than 5 per million. Has this threshold been reached?
It is common to read or hear in analyses of LENRs that no successful experiment has ever taken place[22] . But the reality is quite different: since 1989, there have been thousands of “cold fusion” experiments, transmutation of simple or complex elements, with so-called “exothermic” results, i.e. having produced more energy than the total energy consumed, as well as having produced neutrons or radiation not predicted by the MS.[23] It can be noted that among the phenomena recorded is the acceleration by a significant factor of the decomposition of Caesium 137, thus opening immense perspectives for the remediation of ultimate nuclear waste, the burial of which obviously poses insoluble ethical and ecological problems. [24]
As early as 1989, despite the controversy, reproductions of the Pons-Fleischmann effect were carried out with positive and documented results.[25] In 2007, 18 years after the announcement of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, Edmund Storms lists on more than ten pages[26] the hundreds of experiments having demonstrated the appearance of helium, neutrons, radiations, transmutations, excess heat, in experiments led by recognized physicists. Over the last 33 years, hundreds, even thousands of articles detailing reactions of this kind have been published,[27] including in leading scientific journals[28] , using experimental or theoretical approaches, such as those of Peter Hagelstein. [29]
Moreover, the so-called “abnormal” thermal reactions are now the subject of hundreds of patents filed by industrial consortia of significant size. International congresses are organized in Europe, Italy, Poland, France, USA, China, Russia, South Korea and India. Public-private programs associating industrial groups and university laboratories are developed all over the world, especially in Europe, Japan, USA, certainly in China and Russia. A peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, has been launched and gathers thousands of pages, which, when read in a few minutes, shows the remarkable gap between a general perception of this branch of physics as unadvanced and the remarkable expertise of the scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who are advancing it around documented, replicable and promising experiments.[30]
In the end, we are not at Sigma 5, but at about Sigma 5 x 104 . Out of 100,000 experiments, the order of magnitude of exothermic results obtained can be estimated at 5,000. This certainly indicates 95,000 disappointing experiments, but also 5,000 experiments that were positive, intriguing, successful. 5,000, not 0.5. We are still in a fog, but it is a sign of good humidity.
So where does this gap between positive results and lack of recognition come from?
One word sums up, but cannot explain this situation, let alone justify it: the lack of sufficient repeatability of the processes, and partly the lack of a convincing theoretical model. Only partly, because do we have a convincing theoretical model explaining the basis of technologies used on an industrial scale in microelectronics, for example? The tunneling effect, to come back to, in short, this manifestation of the wave function of matter, remains essentially misunderstood as to its nature, but this does not impact the funding of research in this field or the setting up of production lines for microprocessors at 5, 3 or 2 nanometers in investments of between 10 and 20 billion dollars per industrial unit.
Why?
Because, even if it is not understood, the tunneling effect is so well documented in its behavior in semiconductor materials used for transistors or for the manufacture of magnetic memories, for example, that it is reasonable to make investments of this kind in these fields: the tunneling effect will be present in the product purchased on the shelf or online. The unknown is commercial, not technological.
Thus, the low repeatability of positive LENR results could justify the low level of industrial or prototypical investment in this field, but in no way to consider as inadmissible the question raised by hundreds of documented experiments deviating from the expectations of the standard model in its current definition. That the exothermic gains in the LENRs are still essentially random, at least as far as we know, because in the secrecy of the industrial alcove all sorts of secrets can be kept, is one thing; that they have taken place, even randomly, is quite another, of considerable significance.
For, as we have seen, these results have been observed on many occasions, well beyond statistical margins or measurement imprecision, in countless laboratories, companies, institutes, established in several dozen countries and over more than 3 decades. It is essential to take them into consideration with regard to the civilization issues addressed by meetings such as the COP 27. Thousands of laboratory experiments have produced excess heat releases, neutron emissions, transmutation of elements[31] , in proportions or conditions incompatible with the current standard model. These experiments and the publications that have documented them are therefore a revolution, scientific, technological, and of societal significance, but a revolution that has been killed and unknown. This situation must and can change.
III. LENR and technological foundations of the global society.
1. Universalism and biological transmutations.
Another point of the relationship between universalism and LENR is the field of biological transmutations. Their social, technological and energetic potential on the environmental, ecological, economic and industrial levels, follows from the previous point and draws, if it is possible, an even larger potential than that of low energy nuclear reactions in condensed matter with regard to energy issues.
Let us recall that transmutation itself is not a vaguely alchemical extravagance, but a common phenomenon, studied in the field of radioactivity of which it is one of the consequences. Far from being reserved for the nuclear or medical industry,[32] radioactivity is a widespread natural phenomenon. The human body for example produces 7% of the radioactivity present on earth. We all transform Potassium 40 into Calcium 40 and Argon 40, at an average rate of 8,000 atomic transmutations per second.
That nuclear transmutation can concern the biological domain should not be surprising. From the physical point of view, a slice of bread, a hair, a silicon wafer, a bacterium or a granite paving stone are composed of the same protons, neutrons, electrons, particles, quarks, gluons and interaction vectors. If there is nuclear transmutation in the human body or in solid materials, the hypothesis of low-energy nuclear interactions in a biological environment is equally conceivable, and this is precisely what is studied by the little-known branch, including sometimes in the LENR community, of biological transmutation[33] .
2. What are the words “biological transmutation” synonymous with?
In reality, the interest of the hypothesis of biological transmutations is even wider, if it is possible, than that of the LENR in solid materials. It allows, for example, to consider the remediation in the natural environment of soils or liquids saturated with heavy metals or radioactivity[34] in a current situation where the transfer into the ocean of effluents containing radionuclides collected during disasters involving nuclear reactors is scheduled for the coming semesters. Moreover, the revival of the nuclear fission boiler industry is effective in several countries, in a context where its public and political support is growing significantly. Therefore, the documented hypothesis[35] of biological transmutation of nuclear waste is obviously of considerable interest. If one can envisage the neutralization of the ultimate waste of the nuclear industry, its footprint decreases considerably, and its social utility increases proportionally.
3. The reputation trap.
Yet, if the hypothesis of biological transmutation is of considerable interest, it remains little taken into account, it is even a weak word, starting within the LENR community, which often hesitates even to talk about it. Why this paradox? The answer is simple: the community of scientists, laboratories, industrialists and public-private consortia active in the field of LENR is located within the perimeter of what the British epistemologist Huw Price calls the reputation trap. [36]
What is this trap?
A dangerous trap. It is in practice essential for a scientist’s career, he notes, not to fall into the black hole of reputation that cold fusion represents. To be interested in, mention, etc., to write about this subject, exposes one to an almost definitive ostracism. In ancient Athens, ostracism allowed the Aeropagus, i.e. the decision-makers, to remove political opponents from the city for 10 years. But today, this period is much longer for the few personalities whose courage or personal conditions have brought or allowed their investment in the field of LENR! To communicate, even in a semi-private way, in the corridors of a university, one’s interest in this field, is to condemn oneself to remain a lecturer for life, even if one is a laboratory director. In real life, the career of any researcher represents, in the best of cases, a delicate balance, which should be consolidated, and not weakened by adding to one’s reputation that of an interest for biological transmutations.
The study of the hypothesis of this field thus represents an additional trap door, opened at the very bottom of the reputation trap that LENRs represent. This trap has been largely bypassed by many, but not all, LENR researchers. Researchers such as Jean-Paul Bibérian,[37] Hideo Kozima,[38] and mainly Vladimir Vysotskii in Ukraine and Anna Kornilova in Russia,[39] regularly publish papers documenting the reduction of the half-life of radionuclides at low thermal, energetic or economic cost.
It is impossible to say how significant the interest of these works and advances is for the human civilization with regard to its long-term responsibility towards the nature that hosts its species.
4. Alchemical entanglement.
One of the reasons for the low attractiveness of studies related to biological transmutation within the LENR community may have to do with the use of the word transmutation itself. Transmutation strongly connotes alchemy, a field that has been foreign to scientific research for more than two centuries and strongly associated with the corpus of esoteric disciplines. We can stop for a few moments, and for several reasons that will be discussed here, on this term of esotericism that seems at first sight foreign to the scientific approach. Is esotericism in itself ascientific? Yes, we generally think so, but this thought is not always based on rational reasoning. To pronounce the word astrology, for example, will engage any scientific discussion on the ground of irony or will end it with a few words!
For in appearance, horoscopes are ridiculous, and this judgment seems definitive. Certainly, however, life shows us that the weakest causes, at least from the physical, material, weight point of view, have the heaviest practical consequences. Feelings and ideas, thoughts and emotions do not weigh anything, refuse to be observed physically, yet they do rule the world. “Indeed, the world is ruled by little else”, wrote John Maynard Keynes, speaking of the ideas of economists, in his General Theory of 1936. And what does the earth’s magnetic radiation weigh? Nothing, by definition, yet without it, there would be no life on earth, due to the ionizing power of the very high energy protons of which the cosmos is generous.
In the same way, the radiation of the stars of the solar system or that of the constellations whose apparent field they cross, are quantitatively infinitesimal from a relativistic or Newtonian point of view. But are they so ineffective, so transparent on the nervous and neuronal systems of the newborn or the adult, from a global point of view? In reality, we don’t know anything about it, because of the conjunction of two ignorances: science doesn’t study this field, and astrology doesn’t study physics and, generally speaking, esotericism, which together could possibly explain what it thinks it observes but does not explain.
5. Esotericism is a structuralism.
In reality, one can see in esotericism, a set of apparently disparate and disconsidered disciplines, a structuralist and coordinated approach, an attempt to order the understanding of the invisible domain of reality, a plural and systemic look, all attempts that are part of the historical claim of humanity to understand its environment. From this point of view, esotericism and physics are close. Both aim at elaborating a theory of the whole, a physical and energetic whole for physics, a human and universal whole for esotericism. Is this ridiculous? Yes, it seems to some. But then it is ridiculous to think.
The attempt to rationally understand reality, manifested in objects, matter, energy, feelings, emotions, opinions, thought, intelligence, music, art, cosmos, particles and quantum waves, the perception of beauty, of the true, of the just, of the good, is synonymous with the human fact, probably since the invention of the human being, if the human domain is in this fundamentally different from the rest of the living. This attempt is also a synonym of esotericism, this attempt to map the watermarks of daily life and of reality, to rationalize the invisible, to think the physics of the soul.
Is it unfounded or without hope of progress? The question does not arise for many censors. Esotericism: pseudo-science, next topic! But what do we really know about it? Many mythical legends relating to treasures buried in the rubble of castles vanquished by time have revealed real precious deposits offered to the sagacity, and to the heritage, of tenacious researchers. We can infer that esotericism, a field of myths we believe to be able to say, conceals treasures that a sagacious future and more tenacious than our sufficient present will be able to discover.
Certainly, there is considerable noise around the esoteric signal, but by filtering it, one can certainly find propositions of considerable interest, which the author of this article has studied in his field, economics, in the analysis of markets, innovation processes, marketing, management, tourism or monetary theory. [40] It is also worth noting that esotericism is now addressed by academic research. [41][42]
In the case of physics in general and LENRs in particular, the potential point of convergence with esotericism is called … alchemy, and we can approach this field for a moment as well.
6. Physical alchemy.
What is alchemy? It is often summarized by one of its claims, certainly remarkable: it would have the capacity, or at least the ambition, to elaborate a powder, the famous “philosopher’s stone” that could transform lead or mercury, or even other metals, such as silver, into gold. This seems like a fantasy from another age, but is it really so certain?
Alchemical research, historically inseparable from chemistry until the 18ème century, was able to associate lead, gold and mercury throughout the world.[43] èmeHowever, these three elements, whose proximity was discovered in the 20th century on Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, do not have much in common from the point of view of immediate sensitive experience, especially between mercury and gold. Gold, which is solid at room temperature and has a characteristic yellow-gold color, is almost half as heavy as mercury, which is bright red and is liquid in its natural state when extracted from its ore. Why then did we choose them in this alchemical process, and not copper or zinc, more similar to gold by weight or visual appearance, or other metals more similar by density or appearance, and this in very distant regions of the world?
For there was alchemy in ancient Egypt, the oldest known texts come from it; a tradition of this order in Chaldea, present-day Iraq; in India as well; there was an eminent Arab alchemy, both experimental and theoretical, which dominated the whole of the Western Middle Ages; alchemy in Korea, probably originating from the study and practice of alchemy in China[44] , where the very word alchemy refers directly to mercury, the ideogram used being that of cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, even today.
Why, however, should we be interested in alchemy when questioning LENRs? Is it not to open an even larger hole, a third trapdoor at the bottom of the second trapdoor of reputation, that of biological transmutation, under that of cold fusion? In fact, this proposal comes from the consideration developed above on the relation between universality and societal issues. Indeed, if esotericism, alchemy, biological transmutations, LENR, electric vehicles, floating windmills, promotion of cycling or walking, dry farming methods, geo-engineering, can bring some element to the march of humanity in front of global warming, why deprive ourselves of it by principle?
Because, as far as LENR, alchemy or biological transmutation are concerned, the trap of reputation is wide? Very wide is also the boulevard of the problems of the humanity, narrow the door which leads to the Nobel prizes, in any case to the scientific progress, theoretical and experimental, incremental. It is true that the narrowness is a bit of a drag, it is not always comfortable to live with on a daily basis, it is not pleasant to see other colleagues, less inventive but more standard, progressing in the academic career, but the narrowness of the conditions also allows a conversation on the fundamentals, free of the concern of conformity.
7. Civilizational technological ratchet.
Would industrial alchemy make technological sense, at least for gold production? It should be noted that, after the immediate windfall effect, the exogenous production of gold, for example from mercury, would be of rather limited economic interest. The world’s stock of gold, in other words the total quantity of gold produced over the last 10,000 years, corresponds to less than 10 years of current silver production. If gold is expensive, it is because it is certainly pleasant to look at and wear, technologically useful, but above all not very abundant. To remove this last characteristic would transform it, from an economic point of view, into tin.
In passing, one can ask the question of the origin of gold, and generally of most heavy metals, in the earth’s crust, as this question could have a link with the LENRs. Logically, they should be essentially absent, gravitationally attracted into the central core, or formed in it, but this is obviously not the case, as there is much more gold and heavy metals in the first layer of the globe than the theory allows us to understand: the reason for this presence remains essentially unexplained. [45]
One hypothesis is the generation of gold by the collision of neutron stars, but in addition to the fact that this event is uncommon, even on the scale of the universe, many questions remain as to a possible “late bombardment” of our planet by meteorites from such a collision. So that one may wonder if the earth itself has not served during its long history as a low energy nuclear reactor in its surface layers. Indeed, if bacteria can provoke nuclear reactions in a biological environment, if protons and neutrons can transmute at low thermal pressure, one of the implications of this potential concerns the hypothesis of LENR in a geological environment.
We can note here the work of Mikio Fukuhara who proposes the theory of an endogenous creation of terrestrial elements, by nuclear fusion of carbon and oxygen contained in the aragonite within the earth’s crust, due to the interaction of endo- and exogenous particles under thermal pressure at 2600 kilometers from the surface of the globe.[46]
It may be noted in passing that the relationship between alchemy and economics is a long but rather curious story. Among the great fortunes recorded by history, the great treasurer of Charles VII, Jacques Coeur; Nicolas Flamel; Cosme de Medici the Elder; Jacob Fugger; all had in common that they had achieved rapid and immense wealth from almost nothing, that they had owned mines, a relatively convenient cover for selling alchemical gold if any, and a supposed or proven interest in alchemy.[47] On the other side of the conversation, the economist John Maynard Keynes acquired Isaac Newton’s manuscripts on alchemy, which he studied for six years, publishing a monograph on the subject. [48]
8. Industrial alchemy.
It should be noted that a possible “alchemical” technology would have a very great social interest, well beyond the use or value of gold. Because what we are talking about with LENRs is the ability to transform an element into another element, at low sanitary, ecological and economic cost. It turns out that in the case of LENR in dense material, this transformation is accompanied by a thermal gain greater than the energy cost of its production, we speak of exothermic reaction, a gain obviously valuable in terms of climate emergency and the economic energy model in human society. However, the LENR hypothesis also relates to a part of the alchemical promise, namely to the prospect of transforming a radionuclide into a stable element, or even more broadly, to the hypothesis of transmuting any element into an element close to it on the Mendeleïev table.
In other words, if the transmutation of complex elements such as heavy metals or radionuclides, or the production of rare earths, were to become technologically and economically feasible, we would be moving into a new era. We can even consider that this is the number one interest of LENRs: if they are possible, they can finance and produce a significant societal change, because it is civilizational and planetary.
In sum, the LENRs represent the prospect of a transition from a society of raw resource gathering, which our era still is for the most part, to a society of raw resource production through transformation. This process would allow us to solve the immediate issues of radioactive waste, which is common in the nuclear industry or resulting from accidents, but would also allow the emergence of a global economic model for the production of elements, such as metals/rare earths for the electronics industry, no longer by extraction, refining and composite production or storage, but by transmutation.
Is this scenario science fiction? In fact, it is no more so than the transmutation of nitrogen into oxygen carried out by Ernst Rutherford and Frederick Soddy in 1919 by the use of alpha particles, or that of aluminium into silicon by the same process some time later. Let us note here that the legend, credible, wants that on this occasion Rutherford would have said to the co-author of this experiment Frederick Soddy: “For the love of heaven, Soddy, do not pronounce this word. People will want our heads when they call us alchemists! Rutherford and Soddy had known each other for twenty years, and Rutherford was well aware of Soddy’s documented interest in alchemy, an interest that preceded his discoveries in this field[49] .
A brilliant former student of Oxford, Soddy took a modest job in a laboratory at McGill University in Montreal, where he continued his research on alchemy, which he had begun at Oxford, and was convinced that he would one day be able to rediscover the methods of this ancient art. He was not the only one, and the first twenty years of the twentieth century saw the reappearance of a lively interest in alchemy.[50] However, part of the story, to this day at least, is known: Rutherford’s argument carried, the word transmutation was discarded, and the term disintegration was preferred. However, it is the same thing, and one could even argue that the word transmutation is more precise and accurate than disintegration. Disintegration has a common meaning close to disappearance, destruction, complete dilution, but radioactivity defines the mutation of unstable nuclei by the emission of particles and/or radiation, not their disappearance or disintegration.
However, is alchemical transmutation, in the common sense of the term, possible from a scientific point of view? In fact, it is as conceivable as a low-energy nuclear reaction, since these two expressions say the same thing. The emotional charge of the expression alchemical transmutation is stronger than that of LENR, so it is almost never used, but what was once imagined under this name by Frederick Soddy is now used daily in a number of health or industrial sectors under the word radioactivity.
9. Alchemy, artificial intelligence and astrophysics.
Thus, from an economic perspective, it is possible to view the global literature on alchemy as a body of data that can be used to advance research on LENRs.[51] For what does this literature describe? Across centuries and continents, the same process of purification of physical or conceptual elements, mercury, cinnabar, carbon, salt, sulfur, accompanied by a heating process. The Philosopher’s Stone once obtained, in reality a red powder, after two preliminary stages, the white work and the black work, was supposed to be able to provoke a reaction, transmuting dense metals, such as lead, mercury or silver, into gold, in a heating process lasting a few dozen minutes. Is this so strange?
In practice, most of the LENR experiments of saturation of dense metals by hydrogen isotopes last from a few tens to hundreds of hours, and are carried out in thermal levels of a few hundred degrees, consistent with the levels documented by the world alchemical literature, and mastered by mankind for thousands of years. We can use the ancient words of works in white, black and red to represent these contemporary researches, we can also requalify the historical alchemical attempts with a more actual vocabulary and scientific knowledge.
More broadly, we will address here another dimension of universalism, that of the universality of knowledge. It is sometimes said that the scholars of the sixteenth century Europe were the last to master all the scientific knowledge of their time, those of Europe in any case. This is actually quite abusive, because it ignores the considerable scientific corpus of other regions of the world at the same time, in the Middle East, Africa, China, India, Japan, Korea. However, this universality of principle has in a way become accessible again over the last 15 years with so-called artificial intelligence. Thanks to this informational technology, it is now possible to have knowledge of all available scientific data through data mining tools and methods.
The use of the epithet artificial may be inaccurate, there is some debate, but intelligence is in any case appropriate, at least in English, because intelligence, in this language, means information. Artificial intelligence, in this approach, is the capacity to associate computer and electronic resources with search and classification algorithms developed by human beings. It can be estimated that data mining programs could profitably study the correlations not only of the traditional alchemical works but also of a great number of scientific and technological fields related to or even immediately distant from physics, such as health, thermal industry, biology and microbiology, with the contemporary scientific literature, in order to identify possible elements of convergence or common questioning, and to inspire innovative lines of thought around the unknowns and perspectives of the LENR.
One of the most promising aspects of this possible convergence is probably to be found in astrophysics. The universe represents a giant experiment of the configurations and processes that the science of the infinitely small addresses. If material physics can record LENRs, astrophysics should be able to observe them, so there is most likely a vast field of study.
However, as in the solid sciences, the reputation trap acts in the world of astrophysics. To be able to find something, one must be able to look for it, which starts by defining what one conceives to be able to look for. The database of astrophysical measurements is considerable, in this field too, the mitigation of the reputation trap could lead to significant scientific advances.
An example of an approach is provided in 2019 at the 21ème ICCF Congress by V.I. Vysotskii, M.V. Vysotskyy, from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, Ukraine and Sergio Bartalucci INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Italy around the anomalous concentration of two lithium isotopes, Li 6 and 7, in the universe, a problem known as the Lithium paradox.[52]
IV. LENR and universalism: for a global approach
As we have seen, the question posed by research on LENRs is therefore serious, documented, and broad. However, as important as this research is for human society, it remains little considered and therefore little financed. This situation has been going on for more than thirty years, how can we get out of it?
We propose to observe that the weak relationship of LENRs with universalism and at the same time the loss of speed of this concept in the global society, paradoxically represent a perspective to solve this double problem.
Positioning LENR research in a perspective of universalism, i.e., favoring human society’s view of the holistic social contribution it can make, could improve its social perception and thus its access to funding and to the “mainstream” ecosystem. This positioning would in turn contribute to a renewed interest in universalism in general and in science in particular.
Sometimes, and very often, if not usually, it is enough to name things accurately for them to appear for what they are. The choice of words is obviously essential in communication, which consists in using tools – verbal, mental, conceptual, semantic, emotional, graphic, musical, etc. – to bring human beings closer together. – to bring people together. Good communication uses words that are understood by all.
To eat, to heat, to feed one’s family, to raise one’s children, to reasonably foresee what the future will be made of, are words understood by all human beings. These are the words that the LENR phrase says in essence, so we might as well give these implied but unspoken words a concrete existence. To be heard, we must speak. To eat, to heat, to feed one’s family, to raise one’s children, to be able to project oneself to more than one, five or ten years, are the words of a simple, necessary, admirable and possible sentence.
1. Wheat grows, so the earth is flat.
In fact, one could compare what the LENR community is experiencing with the flat earth syndrome experienced by physicists. Even though they are convinced that the earth is spherical, it is difficult for them, as we have seen, to prove this sphericity to people who are focused on the immediate evidence. It is therefore an irritating syndrome, in the middle of the 21ème century, but they themselves use it quite often, having difficulty in getting out of the evidence of the standard model when the subject of the LENR emerges.
Because the obvious is that the earth of the standard model is flat, and that we cannot imagine the rotundity proposed by the LENR community, because it is obvious.
And what does this one hear on its side?
This: “the LENR, do not exist, it is obvious!” In short, we say to him the equivalent of what is retorted to the “sphericalists”: “Listen, it is ten thousand years that the humanity plants seeds in the ground, 10.000 years that a seed of flax correctly watered is going to produce the fibers of which we make weavings and clothes, we agree well? We are indeed; but all the fields, without exception, do you hear me? on which flax has been grown since the dawn of time are flat; this property has never, absolutely never, been taken in default, all mankind feeds itself in this way, all the food industry, from the manufacture of tractors to the packaging of frozen peas, functions in this way; therefore the earth is flat “.
Of course, we don’t say exactly that, but it amounts to the same thing. Improbable farmers of low energy nuclear reactions harvest on the other side of the scientific planet results unexpected by the standard model, so it is impossible, since antihemisphere of itself in the standard model.
Let us continue the analogy: locally, yes, the earth is flat, that is undeniable, in a plain near a river for example; but in a global, holistic vision, it is not flat at all. What is obvious is that the earth is flat; what is hidden from immediate experience, and therefore doubtful, but much more true, is that our planet is spherical. This is the scheme that applies to the subject of LENRs. What is obvious is that transistors are produced in huge factories. What is relatively hidden and little known, but equally interesting, is that NBDRs are an experimental scientific reality, based on a property similar to the one that makes transistors grow on silicon wafers with a little industry: there is a tunneling effect characterizing NBDRs.
In short, the usefulness and evidence of a local description – the lower resistivity of a semiconductor material, the cultivation of beans, flax or wheat – is confused with the cause of the expected effects, beans or transistors, in order to reject the LENR. It is true that wheat should not grow upside down, it is true that a non-conducting material should be non-conducting of the electric field, it is true that we should not be able to carry out low energy nuclear reactions according to our knowledge, i.e. according to the standard model, but in reality, seen as a whole, we can and, above all, we do.
Seen as a whole, in Europe in winter one can buy grapes harvested a few days earlier in Australia or New Zealand, even if this is not – for the moment at least – precisely ecological. Seen together, wheat, flax and beans grow upside down, on the other hemisphere than the one where each one is located. Seen together, transistors exist. Seen together, dense metal nanopowders saturated with hydrogen isotopes can produce excess heat in an electrolytic bath of deuterium oxide. There is nothing scandalous about this, it is nature that produces this effect, the physicist as well as the farmer are only the workers.
Seen as a whole, we are walking on the sides of a Möbius strip at the same time, and this is not necessarily easy to admit. Let’s create a Möbius strip with a sheet of paper a few centimeters wide, one side colored in blue, the other in red, let’s connect one end to the other with a half-turn, what do we see? The red side leads to the blue side. Even if you carry out this experiment yourself, it is difficult to understand what you are seeing: the back and the front of the same object are on the same plane. Even visual evidence is hard to admit, but it is true. In the same way, LENRs are certainly only a particular aspect of a more general characteristic, for the moment unknown or misunderstood. It is as obvious as the blue and red sides of a Möbius strip: although the evidence is there, we have difficulty imagining it, seeing it, believing it, yet there is a reason for everything.
2. LENRs depend on universalism.
In LENR, as in any other scientific field, topics, programs and research and development budgets depend on a correct relationship with the set of values that society must share if it is to exist. If this relationship is weak for LENRs, and it is so far, the conversation between society and LENR researchers is difficult. But if it progresses, anything goes.
But can this relationship be improved? It is desirable, but it is also possible, because in other fields we can easily observe that this relationship is satisfactory for subjects that are much less advanced in terms of concrete results. String theory, quantum computing and superconductivity at room temperature have significant funding, but their technological maturity is much lower than in the field of LENR.
3. Our individual responsibility is committed to human society.
In general, in order to obtain funding, project leaders, public decision-makers and those responsible for a public or private research and development budget must present a coherent social framework for their project. In other words, they must present their project in its relationship with the common vectors of understanding and objectives of society. If this relationship is evident, effective or demonstrable, if this project is in line with the universalist referentials of the society or structure in which they participate, this project will be understood and validated, and funding will be granted. Any loan or financial contribution is based on an immaterial credit, that is to say on a mutual trust between the contributor and the project holder. Any financing of a project takes place when the financiers, the project holders and the analysts of the market concerned share a common field of conviction.
But the main bearer of the market, in the end, is us, the human nation, we, every human being, an intricate part of human society. Which is to say that we, humans, are collectively responsible for the stagnation of the research on LENR. By ignorance, which we maintain without knowing it, and sometimes by conviction, we are satisfied with the “separatists” of human society, of which the lack of recognition of research on LENRs is an effect. But we are also its first victims, paying the price of our submission to the separatist consensus in disdain of the gigantic potential of social universalism in general and of LENRs for example.
4. Repaint the door of the LENR laboratory.
Society as a whole, i.e. ourselves, certainly needs to increase the attention paid to the work on LENR, but on its side, the LENR ecosystem has significant room for improvement in optimizing its relationship with society. For example, by considering that its primary objective is to contribute to refining the description and understanding of the physical and energetic world to improve everyday life. This seems obvious, yes, but is it really the case?
In fact, no, for reasons that are certainly understandable but that detract from the quality of its relationship with society. For in practice, the primary objective of the LENR community is, for its experimental component, to achieve significant and reproducible exothermic reactions, and for its theoretical component to define a satisfactory explanatory model. This also seems self-evident, but these goals, legitimate as they are, do not fit into the current social conversation about science, a conversation in which they could nevertheless easily fit. How could they?
To answer this question, we must first observe that the definition of repetitive exothermic processes, exploitable industrially, as well as the definition of a theoretical framework of the LENR, are acts of rebellion with respect to the consensus on the standard model. This rebellion is certainly necessary, because science is in reality a mille-feuilles of successive rebellions, and this rebellion, like the others, will be celebrated by history if it becomes victorious.
But at the time any rebellion is by definition conflictual, and therefore difficult, difficult to organize, difficult to finance, difficult to go through. And it is probably of little help to consider that many of the major advances in science were born in a cradle of criticism and in a stream of incremental advances that seem to future generations to be non-existent. The first advances in electronic computing date from the late thirties of the last century, and no one imagined then what future importance they would have. It is probably the same with the efforts of the pioneers in LENR; later will come the recognitions.
Another condition would be to consider, and present, the work of the LENR community as a contribution to the improvement of the standard model, at least of nuclear science, in other words as an act of scientific conversation. In the first case, the rebellion, it is a question of being right against everyone, it is complicated; in the second case, the conversation, it is a question of talking with the whole of human society, it is easier in reality.
5. Social universalism is in trouble.
How can this be achieved? To do so, let’s go a little deeper into the notion of universalism. Is it a relevant concept, globally, beyond the field of physics, even if only theoretically? As we have briefly seen, no, answer a quantity of social forces on a world scale. Worse, in this answer, no political, social, administrative, economic universalism would be even to imagine, let alone to hope for, as testifies the discourse, in increasing audience, of the ultra-nationalism, branch of the ethnocentrism.
In this narrative, political truth, in other words, optimal social organization, is only local, relative, limited to a territory, a nation, or even a culture. Even multilateralism, that is to say the idea that international problems are to be solved in a conversational approach between countries, would be a nonsense, a pitfall to be avoided, a fruitless illusion. Globalism? A hated word. States are masters at home, period. At most, they could, if they wish, associate themselves in regional or cultural alliances. In short: let’s fight each other, in a “soft” or strong way, the strongest will win, or more precisely, the strongest in the short term will win. In the long run, however, everyone loses.
Now, the long term, inevitably, comes one day, and that day is now, a day when the geopolitical landscape gathers losers in advance in an epic and cruel struggle where the short-term alliances between regional dominants try at great human cost to stabilize the situation in temporary and precarious balances, because linked to their military, economic or communication power.
Is this an interesting and viable approach? Everyone can answer this question according to the situation or the evolution of the world, but it is in any case the general approach of humanity to date and each of us contributes to it. No one questions the principle of every man for himself. Newspapers, parties, conversations among family and friends or on social networks, among nations, states and academic research have one thing in common: there is hardly any trace of political universalism.
The concept of a regional, let alone planetary, federation of nations is a non-issue, an unknown concept, an absent idea. Even among the few actors of an intermediate federalism, such as the European Union for example, one will hardly find today any voice to recall the universalist ideal at the heart of the preparations in the 1950s of what became the European Union of today or the United Nations in 1945. Who still talks about creating the United States of Europe, the central and formalized objective of the fathers and mothers of Europe in the early 1950s, who remembers the Action Committee for the United States of Europe? [53]
Almost nobody! Without this ideal, without these meetings however, the chain of European wars, incessant since the high Middle Ages, would not have been broken in this sub-continent. But nobody seems to remember this. In fact, it is quite the opposite: all globalization is designated as the enemy of the people, not to mention the medieval speeches that light the fires of irrational terror, the many disastrous consequences of which are known in advance: they have been catalogued by history over the centuries, and the horror of this history makes one shudder.
6. Political Universalism and Research on NSBR.
Can we get out of the regressive dynamics of this almost unending planetary civil war? In his last book, written in haste while he was being sought by the Terror and the Convention, Nicolas de Condorcet had described in his “Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain ; fragment sur l’Atlantide” a planetary learned society, working for the improvement of human life. [54]
We can consider that this dream remains current.
A dream, because 230 years later, in this respect at least, the planetary cooperation imagined by Condorcet is still not a reality, but an unfinished human duty. A duty that remains a potentiality, a potentiality that is indispensable to the success of research on LENR. In some respects, it is possible that this duty is even of a vital nature for humanity.
Thinking about the universality of the human family is not a parlor conversation, a utopian dream for alternative thinkers, it is a question posed by the present to the future. Every human being is, we all are, the future, that fabric made by the intersection of our actions and our goals, of what we hope for and what we do. If universality is not among our objectives, we will never reach it: why and how would we reach a locality that we do not even locate on the map of possibilities?
The first condition for arriving at a point B is to define that point. If we do not know where to go, we will not be able to get there. But if our objectives integrate the idea of a universality in the organization of human life, from the simple fact of this objective now imagined, drawn named, hoped for, everything already changes in reality.
So why not consider it? Because it is impossible? Where is it written? Any company that manages to offer and market its products on a global scale becomes immensely powerful, more so than most states, and humanity would not be able to establish what simple individuals manage to do in the space of ten years, and sometimes even less? [55]
In reality, what humanity lacks above all is the idea of uniting. And if this idea is missing, it is first of all because we don’t talk about it, or almost not. The absence of communication on such a project prevents humanity from conceiving and consequently realizing what it thinks is impossible and which would in reality be extraordinarily simple to concretize, so much the conditions have changed, so much everything lends itself today. Is it necessary to describe the advantages of helping each other? Do we need to remind you that there is no progress without collaborative research and development? No doubt, since we hardly ever talk about it and pour out torrents of like to denounce imaginary enemies of our national comforts, but illusory.
And then, what do we want in the end? To kill, to massacre, to suffer and to make others suffer? Because this is what we tolerate, finance or encourage by our silences, our conversations, our likes or our posts on social networks. Do we want this or would we prefer to live in peace, locally because globally, being prosperous, creative, surrounded by family, friendship, perspective, serenity, sharing, because this is what social peace allows and brings? Everyone prefers the second way, but considering it as illusory, we all resolve however to contribute with all our strength to the first one, because we think, it is necessary to protect what we cherish and see around us, while a somewhat utopian idea of peace, what is it indeed?
However, this flat, local, partial, topological protection of our personal interests is unfruitful, ineffective and cannot ultimately achieve what it hopes. The real is not flat, local, limited, bordered. One cannot protect a flat terrain surrounded by potential attackers. Barbed wire is always porous, no wall has ever stopped the rain from falling. The only real, long-term protection is to envisage a human, social, spherical, universal reality, without barbed wire, because it always ends up being cut or bypassed. Collective wealth and individual protection ultimately require envisioning a round planet, because that’s what it is, and getting out of our separatist conception of human culture.
7. Are the destinies of the LENR and of a united humanity linked?
In any case, they have a lot in common and can bring each other a lot. What they have in common is this strange but universal configuration, consisting in forbidding the union of humanity on the grounds that it is impossible even though we all wish it to the highest degree. A paradox that presents and sums up exactly the absurdity of the fate reserved for research on LENR. We cannot imagine it and work on it because it is impossible, which it is not.
This field could, in a few years, significantly solve the energy and environmental problems of humanity, but the institutions and structures in charge of these problems fight with the last energy of the media, the editorials, the academics, etc., these heretical pioneers defying the temple of the standard model where one celebrates an infinity of frozen unknowns as many intangible deities. But, exactly, why? In the name of science? Science consists in modeling reality. When reality says that it is hot in an electrolytic bath in which nickel is immersed, we must listen to what the electrons say, it is wiser.
Why, the future humanity will ask of us, have you been so slow to consider that it is at least necessary to think about human unity if it is to be achieved? Why have you stifled a promising field of scientific and technological research and development in one of the most acute areas of environmental concern for our common future? Why have you refused or delayed to fund and organize on a global scale research on NEGR and the areas associated with or implicitly derived from it, to provide energy to the human planet in a more satisfactory, sustainable and environmentally harmonious way?
The LENR ecosystem can, and must, enter into the overall scientific and social conversation and contribute to meeting the current energy challenges of society. The energy resource defines the stratification of human history; first stratum: the use of solar radiation in a more or less cavernous initial daily life, in reality probably more frequently in wooden huts or animal skins, living from hunting and gathering a few tens of thousands of years ago, then, in the successive strata, evolving through the ages via all sorts of solutions. Wood, wind and water mills, coal, nuclear fission, photoelectricity, wind power again, hydrogen, nuclear fusion perhaps one day, have been central stages of collective life and are at the heart of the immediate future of humanity.
Faced with the certainty of 9 billion people in 2040, 10 billion in 2050, in the context of a global warming of 2 to 5 degrees Celsius since 1900, humanity must think, finance and implement its next energy stratum. This certainty determines the main pull of NEHR research, and where its communication effort should be focused: on its ability to advance science and technology, and thus society, in the myriad areas – economic, societal, cultural, scientific, geopolitical – related to energy.
8. LENR and human universality.
The relation between LENR and universality of the human race is thus essential. In order to be heard, the community that studies and prepares technological developments should, we believe, address human universality. What is it?
Genetically, emotionally, behaviorally, we, human beings, are universally similar, in the broad outlines as well as most probably in the details. Yet, the consideration of this universality is weak. In real life, we are taken into account in a fractal, stereotyped, cut-up, partial, separate, and rarely global or individualized way. Humans, individuals, as well as nature, environment, animals, countries, nations, cultures, are understood, considered, addressed, in a disjointed way, according to specific, categorical, commercial, political, gendered, “topological” objectives, etc. In other words, we represent in social reality, in the real world, a flat earth.
The focus on differences is also a reality, of course, but one that is not very socially productive, corresponding to the flat earth syndrome. By widening the audience of the LENR to a wider range of publics, by addressing a wider range of dimensions, identities, particularities, components of society and of the human fact, by aiming in fact at the universal, “spherical”, multi-faceted, plural dimension of the human being, the only meeting point in reality between individual identity and collective existence function, the LENR community will allow for a reception of its reflections, actions, communications, decisions, etc., infinitely more developed than up to now, by resonance effect.
To give an image, it is a question of addressing the rotundity of the human dimension in order to trigger a fertile social resonance, by human resonance effect. The research on LENR is much more than a simple hypothesis on the relevance or the difficulties of the standard model or on the success of the electrolysis of such and such a deuterium charge on a substrate of palladium and calcium oxide nanopowders. His questioning addresses contemporary environmental, energy, societal and geopolitical challenges in an equation of vital character. The sentence said by the work on the LENR is up to the current questioning of humanity, confronted with temperatures that are dangerously increasing every year.
9. LENR funding: increase from 100 million to 100 billion Euros.
Certainly, if he is already an actor in research on LENR, the reader will think that he is well convinced of the centrality of his research to societal challenges. But is this how LENRs are perceived? Most of the time they are not perceived at all, not coming out of the theoretical invisibility radius in which a defensive understanding of science, albeit essentially ascientific in its method, keeps it. By broadening its efforts to engage in a comprehensive conversation with society, the LENR ecosystem will emerge from its radar-cold glare.
The universal character of the current environmental and climatic crisis, the insoluble equation between the energy needs of humanity and the current methods of energy production and consumption, can and should lead the audiences addressed by the work on LENRs: governments, university and public research programs, industrialists, the media, universities, social actors and the general public, in short, all of us humans, to consider that it is costly not to pose the LENR hypothesis, costly to think that the MS forbids their existence, easy to see that it is not so and to draw the consequences.
This situation can be modeled mathematically and economically, and could be called the LENR paradox or the cost of silence. The cost of the silence imposed on him since 1989 is remarkably high compared to the benefits – social, economic, cultural, human and financial – that his study could bring to society.
A simple reasoning should lead to remove this paradox and it is up to the LENR community to facilitate this reasoning. More precisely, the simple hypothesis of a positive thermal production via LENRs diverging from the MS, even slightly, should have long ago, and in any case must now, lead to the commitment of budgets of the order of 10 to the power of 3 to 7 of the amounts currently observed on a global scale. The Clean HME and Hermes programs financed by the European Union represent about 10 million Euros, which is an appreciable advance compared to the 3 previous decades. However, if we add up all the actual and foreseeable public and private research programs for the years 2015 to 2024, we will probably not exceed, all countries combined, the 100 million Euro mark. Admittedly, this is significantly more than a few years ago, but what does this amount represent in a global perspective?
International organizations estimate the world GDP in 2021 at about 100,000 billion Euros/Dollars and the share of this GDP devoted to R&D at about 2.6%, i.e. 2,600 billion Euros/Dollars for the same year, of which about 2/5 are publicly financed, 3/5 privately financed. 100 million Euros represent about one thousandth of one two hundred and sixtieth of this amount, that is to say 0.00385%, or a large third of one thousandth of one percent. Well, that’s not much.
100 million Euros from 2015 to 2024 is still something, but is it up to the potential of the LENR? And to begin with, in real life, what does 100 million Euros represent? This sum, one tenth of a billion Euros, is 250 times less than the estimated cost of developing the A380 jumbo jet, or 360 times less than the cost of the E39 coastal road that Norway is about to inaugurate, in 2026, or 1,000 times less than the rout, in one week of November 2022, of the FTX crypto-currency platform. Blockchain technology certainly remains interesting, the A 380 represented a milestone in aeronautics development, while the E 39 will allow travel to Norway in 11 instead of 21 hours. These two development programs in particular are very useful, but are they 250 times or 360 times more useful than research on LENR? In the short term, perhaps; but in the medium term? That is doubtful.
In the medium term, the real and proven prospects of LENR are probably worth much more than 100 billion Euros and in any case would justify an investment in research and development of this amount. What is 100 billion Euros? A lot of money, of course, especially compared to current R&D budgets in LENR, but also very little. Very little compared to the Pharaonic cost of adaptation to climate change that we already have to foresee and whose main reason is our collective incapacity to understand that together it is cheaper than divided into 196 nations using 162 currencies. 100 billion Euros is very little compared to the fate of humanity. 100 billion Euros would also represent a good basis of reasoning to undertake a program of valorization of universalism!
In reality, 1,000 billion Euros is probably the unit of account to consider for a holistic, global, common sense approach to the logistical and economic problems of the human nation. In the category of energy, production and remediation of ultimate waste, the LENR can make a significant contribution. But such a unit of account can only be envisaged in a planetary unity perspective. Otherwise, i.e. in the current situation where many 1,000 billion Euros are burned every month to defend ourselves, to foresee an enemy attack or to attack here and there, such a sum is unthinkable on a so-called “civil” program, and would be, moreover, a sword in the water, an ineffective dispersion because projected into the ether of uselessness.
10. Elements for a global research around the LENR.
It therefore seems urgent to consider the organization of an international scientific and technological cooperation around this new field of research, essential for the future of the human nation. This cooperation is all the more feasible as it is already in place in a certain number of scientific research fields, and animates in an informal form, even larger, countless forums, colloquia, learned societies and online networks, setting up data libraries, facilitating conversation, and organizing virtual or face-to-face meetings.
Such cooperation remains above all a human duty, because science is based on a universalism of reality, and this duty, which might seem idealistic, theoretical, even utopian, actually defines the practical modalities of this organization. In order to establish its universal character, a scientific truth must rely on a community of researchers and knowledge capable of establishing its social validity. The larger this community of people, concepts and knowledge, the greater its capacity to progress. In the field of LENR, if we consider that the standard model proposes important margins of progress, we open all the more possibilities to optimize this scientific field to solve the problems of the human nation.
The beginning of coordinated international research around the NBDRs is to communicate about it. How can we do this? In fact, many quality information sites, including lenr-canr, infinite-energy, lenr-fusion, disseminate most of the published research, including in peer-reviewed journals. The Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, edited by Jean-Paul Bibérian, gathers and distributes hundreds of studies of great interest.
What could multiply this action is the support of a UN agency organizing coordinated research on a planetary scale in which each nation would have all the more its place since in the field of LENR, research of great interest is possible with relatively inexpensive equipment. We cannot overemphasize the idea that such an agency would gain by also promoting the idea of a holistic organization of the human nation.
V. Conclusion. Will LENRs save the world?
To conclude this article, we will make a link between social universality and scientific advances. Each technological revolution has generated confident outpourings of hope for the future of the human family, often by their own authors and actors, followed by seemingly as many disillusions. The printing press, radio, television, nuclear energy were going to allow a new golden age for humanity. However, this is still to come, but this does not necessarily mean that these technologies do not contribute to the integration of humanity, even if it is slower than desired.
Frederick Soddy, a few years before receiving a Nobel Prize for his work on ions, had also painted an optimistic picture of the global social changes that nuclear energy would allow. He noted, however, a certain number of possible deviations, in particular through the creation of nuclear weapons, and it is worth noting that his own writings in this field were to inspire the writer HG Wells in his science-fiction novel “The world set free”, which was to inspire, according to them, the actors of the Manhattan Project in the development of the atomic bomb…
The prospect of lower-than-hoped-for or desirable humanistic achievements also applies to NEHRs. There is no reason to believe that the development of innovative energy or materials production technologies will necessarily lead to a wiser or more united humanity. Aesop’s fable – the ox-tongue, to be considered the best and worst met – is found here as well. NBDRs are a new and possibly promising tool on humanity’s table, but what will it do with it? The question is not so much what or how, but for what purpose, and in what spirit, and this at several levels.
It can be noted that wherever the alchemical quest was manifested, in the Middle East, in India, in China, in Chaldea, in Europe, this quest was accompanied by a philosophical component, to which the very name of its Grail, the “Philosopher’s Stone” bears witness. A kind of spiritual asceticism, an inner transformation, was to accompany the realization of the “Great Work”.[56] We can question this perspective, which in a way is similar to the questioning of the link between the observer and quantum observation, by noting that it is basically very wise. Alchemy could have generated sudden fortunes; this is a possibility that history could consider around the destinies and biographies of characters such as Cosmo de Medici the Elder, Jakob Fugger or even Nicolas Flamel, but a fortune for what?
The same question arises for the LENR: their exploitation seems conceivable, but what will we do with them? This question is universal, and also works in the opposite direction: the ideal, the goal, the expected objective, if they carry and are carried by the universalist appetite of any human being, can contribute to transform the hypothesis into success, for obvious reasons related to the sharing of the information, to the protection of the intellectual property, indissociable from its distribution, to the mutualization of the expenses, to the distribution and to the ethics of the technological and economic spin-offs and uses.
The more the conditions of exploitation of LENR technologies that can be expected from such a development will appear beneficial to the human species, by not focusing only on international industrial consortiums or startups with meteoric growth, but by creating the conditions of a planetary self-sustaining ecosystem, the more the doors of laboratories and technological resource platforms will open, the more impact investment funds, the more career opportunities for talents wishing to give meaning to their professional lives, the more governments and university boards will move towards this ecosystem of research and development and industrial and technological distribution with a positive real social sum.
Therefore, we can outline some considerations that allow us to envisage a scenario of social reinforcement and not a new collective disillusionment. By social reinforcement, we mean the strengthening of the dynamics and structures that contribute to the internal conversation of the planetary family: the United Nations, the European Union, cultural life, and, despite everything, the Internet and social networks.
Indeed, humanity, this story without reason told by a fool, as William Shakespeare summed it up, is a long-term adventure essentially marked by two territorial battles: the race for food and energy resources, and the religious question. Let’s start with the latter. The dynamics of the LENRs obviously do not address this domain, but by validating the alchemical proposition at the margin, they bring a significant public light to the mother house of alchemy, esotericism. This collateral effect is important because esotericism, as a rationalization of the spiritual, is likely to bring the cultural components of the human family into conversation on a less antagonistic basis than is the case today.
This is obviously an eminently weak lead, but it is a lead, and there are not many of them in the broad meadow of global conflicts, present and potential. This aspect of the equation proposed by the LENR is probably secondary, but we propose to consider that it is not exactly uninteresting.
As for the age-old struggle for bread, rice, wood, coal, gas and energy, LENRs hold out a rather interesting promise: the possibility of decentralized and sustainable energy production. Cold fusion is indeed generally synonymous with processes using a temperature ranging from ambient to a few hundred degrees, without any particular radiation, and which can be implemented in a delocalized way.
This point is also of immense geopolitical interest. The LENRs are not a promise of world peace, but a potential for imagining coherent economic development in the face of the challenges of a humanity where access to energy resources is very unevenly distributed among the 196 nations of the world. Is it viable to continue on the basis of this scattering and injustice? It is unlikely, and this is not what current events demonstrate in any case.
This potential is probably worth more than the 100 million Euros invested in 10 years in the field of LENR. It is time to get Jean-Paul Bibérian, Vladimir Vysotskii, Anna Kornilova, Peter Hagelstein, Akito Takahashi and so many other pioneers out of the reputation trap that has closed on science itself. In short, it is time to offer a planetary future to humanity.
“Offering a planetary future to humanity” should not appear as an illusory or disillusioned romantic posture. This sentence should not even appear in an article talking about the potential economic and social impact of a set of experiments that have demonstrated their interest in solving a number of environmental, geopolitical and technological challenges. It should not appear, because it should be self-evident, and has been for a long time. But it is written here because it now has a meaning, the meaning of a humanity in difficulty, a meaning that calls for a planetary leap.
This leap forward is possible, it passes by a weaving of universalism, millenary innovation, and separatism, this sure value. Separatism can be assimilated to the capacity to distinguish the respective advantages and interests of any component of a whole: individual, theory, nation, region of the world, industry, company, social category, etc. In this sense, it is fully compatible with universalism, which should not be understood as a mush that erases all individual identity.
This conjugation is possible on the condition that separatism extracts itself from the war to which, untamed, it always leads, and on the condition that universalism understands that the universe is only made of particles whose radiation is what unites them.
Innovation, patents, intellectual property, remuneration of investments, industrial, national or regional strategies related to the LENR will have to be recognized and respected in the sharing and global harmonization of the social value added, of which one of the components is the economic remuneration, another one the harmonious distribution of available technologies.
This is the necessary contribution of separatism, the expert function of human society. But this same human society must be able to envisage its federation on a human scale, that is, on a planetary scale. That would be its beauty, a beauty enlightened, nourished and warmed by the LENR.
Cold fusion is a kind of oxymoron, it is also a beautiful project of society.
Jean-Christophe Fadot.
*
[1] Fleischmann, M., Pons, S. and Hawkins, M., Electrochemically induced fusion of deuterium. J. Electroanal. Chem. 1989, 261, 301-309.
[2] Cf Mizuno, T., Nuclear transmutation: the reality of cold fusion. Infinite Energy Press, Concord, N.H., USA, 1998.
[3] : Note the documented analysis by Eugene F. Mallove on the initial reception of the Pons-Fleischmann hypothesis. MIT and cold fusion: a special report. Infinite energy, 24, 1999.
[4] Huizenga, J. R., Cold fusion: The scientific fiasco of the century, first ed. University of Robchester Press, Rochester, NY, 1992.
[5] Star Collaboration, Tomography of ultrarelativistic nuclei with polarized photon-gluon collisions, Science Advances, 4 Jan. 2023, Vol 9, Issue 1.
[6] On the concrete nature of the wave function of the electron, this approach: A. Danghyan, “The Wave Function of the Electron”, in Quantum Field Theory [Working Title]. London, United Kingdom: IntechOpen, 2022 [Online]. Available: https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/84908 doi: 10.5772/intechopen.108756
[7] ; It is difficult not to evoke here the value of the Egyptian foot, 29,92 cm, rather close to the distance covered by the light in one billionth of second, 29,98 cm.
[8] The influence of the physics and philosophy of Einstein‘s relativity on my attitudes in science: an autobiography. Mendel Sachsop. cit. pp. 201 – 233.
[9] The neutrino’s flavors oscillate: not that he cannot conclude from his calculations that he does not have any, but to concede that the flavors of the neutrino oscillate would be to admit that the neutrino, by far the most widespread physical object in the universe, moving at the speed of light, would manifest, in addition to this velocity energy, an additional mobility energy, reputed to be impossible in the standard model, thus destabilizing one of its bases.
[10] Edmund Storm, The Science Of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation Of Evidence And Explanations About Cold Fusion. World Scientific ed. 2007
[11] : Pamela Ann Boss, Lawrence Forsley, Energetic Particle emission in Pd/D co-deposition: An undergraduate research project to replicate a new scientific phenomenon, Journal of Laboratory Chemical Education, June 2018.
[12] As early as 2007, Edmund Storms gives hundreds of documented examples in his remarkable “Cold fusion now”, op. cit.
[13] Schwinger, Julian: Cold fusion: a brief history of mine. Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion, ICCF4, Maui, Hawaii, December 1994, https://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue1/colfusthe.html
[14] Price, Huw (forthcoming). Risk and Scientific Reputation: Lessons from Cold Fusion. In Managing Extreme Technological Risk. Singapore: World Scientific.
[15] : Edmund Storms, Introduction to the main experimental findings in the field of low energy nuclear reactions. Current Science, Vol. 108, No. 4, 25 Feb. 2015.
[16] : Akito Takahashi, Akira Kitamura, Yasuhiro Iwamura, Jirohta Kasagi, et al, Leading the Japanese Gvt NEDO project on anomalous heat effect of nano-metal and hydrogen gas interaction. Published on Research Gate.
[17] Sergio Martellucci, Angela Rosati, Francesco Scaramuzzi, Vittorio Violante. Cold Fusion – The History of Research in Italy. Focus Technologies. ENEA, 2009.
[18] : Michael K. L. Man, et al, Experimental measurement of the intrinsic excitonic wave function, Sciences Advances, 21 Apr 2021, Vol 7, Issue 17.
[19] Frank Wilzeck, The lightness of being. Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Basic Books, 2008.
[20] Sophie Gosselin, The Earth Condition. Habiter la Terre en communs, Seuil, 2022.
[21] Frank Wilzek, The Lightness of Being, op. cit. p. 182.
[22] See Sabine Hossenfelder’s video blog of October 8, 2022: “Cold fusion is back; there’s just one problem”. https://backreaction.blogspot.com
[23] See for example the 1433 bibliographical references collected by Edmund Storm in The Science Of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation Of Evidence And Explanations About Cold Fusion. Ed. World Scientific. 2007
[24] : L.A. Bernstein, Destruction of radioactivity by stimulation of nuclear transmutation reactions. Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, 11, 2013.
[25] On the behavior of Pd deposited in the presence of evolving deuterium. S. Szpak and P.A. Mosier-Boss, J.J. Smith, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, 302-1991, pp. 255ff.
[26] Edmund Storms, The Science of low energy nuclear reaction. A comprehensive compilation of evidence and explanations about cold fusion, World Scientific Publishing Co, 2007.
[27] : Some references are given in the bibliography of: “Terahertz difference frequency response of pdd in two-laser experiments,” Peter L. Hagelstein, D. Letts, D. Cravens, Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, 3, 2010, 59-76.
[28] : Cf. for example, Tatsumi Hioki, et al, “Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry Study on the Increase in the Amount of Pr Atoms for Cs-Ion-Implanted Pd/CaO Multilayer Complex with Deuterium Permeation.” Japanese Journal of Applied Physics 41, 4642-48, 2002.
[29] For example : Peter L. Hagelstein, Quantum composites: a review and new results for models for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 20, 2016, pp. 139-225. Hagelstein, P. L., D. Letts, and D. Cravens. “Terahertz difference frequency response of pdd in two-laser experiments.” J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 3 (2010) 59-76.
[30] For example, K.P. Budko, A.I. Korshunov, Calorimetric investigation of anomalous Heat production in Ni-H systems. J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Saw, 23, 2017, 85-90.
[31] Trends in transmutation products and hydride formation in Brass, Bronze, Solder and Silver Brazing alloy cathodes during light water electrolysis” – Monu Kumawat, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, International Conference on Cold Fusion, July 2022, Mountain View, California, USA.
[32] See https://www.cea.fr/multimedia/Documents/publications/rapports/rapport-gestion-durable-matieres-nucleaires/Tome%202.pdf, page 10 in particular, accessed November 2022.
[33] Biberian, Jean-Paul (2012). Biological transmutations: historical perspective. J. Condens. Matter Nucl. Sci.. 7. 11-25.
[34] Cf. the work of the Franco-Japanese company Phoenix R&D, whose results in the biological remediation of soils contaminated with heavy metals “cannot be explained other than by appealing to the hypothesis of low-energy nuclear reactions. Conversation with Erik Sarkissian, 2021.
[35] : Jean-Paul Bibérian, Biological transmutation, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 108, NO. 4, 25 FEBRUARY 2015
[36] Price, Huw. Risk and Scientific Reputation: Lessons from Cold Fusion. Forthcoming in Rhodes, C., ed, Managing Extreme Technological Risk (World Scientific).
[37] : Jean-Paul Bibérian, La fusion dans tous ses états : fusion froide, ITER, alchimie, transmutation biologiques…, G. Trédaniel, 2012 .
[38] Hideo Kozima, The Nuclear Transmutations (NTs) in Carbon-Hydrogen Systems (Hydrogen Graphite, XLPE and Microbial Cultures), Cold fusion Research Laboratory News, No. 94, http://www.kozima-cfrl.com/Papers/paperf/paperf08.pdf.
[39] : Microbial transmutation of Cs-137 and LENR in growing biological systems V. I. Vysotskii1,* and A. A. Kornilova, CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 108, 2015, or “Nuclear Transmutation of Stable and Radioactive Isotopes in Biological Systems”, Vladimir I. Vysotskii, Alla A. Kornilova, Motilal UK Books of India, 2010.
[40] Cf: Cf our study in the economic field: https://www.academia.edu/11916746/Nature_Esotericism_and_Economics_Re_enchanting_the_World_Financing_It_Building_the_United_States_of_the_World_A_practical_approach_using_Omraam_Mikhae_l_Ai_vanhov_s_esoteric_teachings
[41] Notably: Association for the Study of Esotericism, USA; European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism, Association francophone pour l’étude universitaire de l’esotérisme, FRESO.
[42] Hanegraaff, W. (2012). Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781139048064
[43] Bernard Joly, Histoire de l’Alchimie, Ed. Vuibert / ADAPT, 2013.
[44] Metallurgy and alchemy in ancient China”, Eurasia, n° 12 (2003), La Forge et le forgeron, II. Le merveilleux métallurgique, Société des Etudes Euro-Asiatiques, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2003, pp. 155-189.
[45] Kimura, K., Lewis, R. S. & Anders, E. Distribution of gold and rhenium between nickel-iron and silicate melts-implications for abundance of siderophile elements on Earth and Moon. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 38, 683-701 (1974).
[46] : Mikio Fukuhara, Alexander YoshinoNobuhisa Fujima, “Earth factories: Creation of the elements from nuclear transmutation in Earth’s lower mantle”, AIP Advances 11, 105113 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0061584 , including: “Fukuhara proposed a model for the formation of nitrogen, oxygen, and water using circumstantial evidence based on the history of the Earth’s atmosphere. This hypothesis suggests that heavier elements result from an endothermic nuclear transformation of carbon and oxygen nuclei confined in the aragonite CaCO3 lattice of the Earth’s mantle or crust, which is enhanced by the attraction caused by high temperatures ≥2510 K and pressures ≥58 GPa in the Earth’s interior,6
212C+216O+4e∗+4𝑣̄ 𝑒→214N2↑+O216↑+H21O16↑+2n−10.58MeV.212C+216O+4e*+4v̄e→214N2↑+O216↑+H21O16↑+2n−10.58MeV.
The above-described reaction is favored by the physical catalysis exerted by excited electrons (e*) that were generated through stick-sliding during the evolution of supercontinents and mantle conversion triggered by collisions of major asteroids and anti-electron neutrinos 𝑣̄ 𝑒v̄e coming from the universe, especially from the young sun from the Archean era to the present time,7 or by the radioactive decay of elements such as U and Th and nuclear fusion in the Earth’s core that is described later.
[47] Alfrédo Périfano, “L’Alchimie à la Cour de Côme 1er de Médicis : savoirs, culture et politique “. Ed. Garnier, 1997-2022, Collection Etudes et essais sur la Renaissance, n° 16.
[48] : John Maynard Keynes, ‘Newton, the Man,’ in Essays in Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, 2013), 363, originally in Newton Tercentenary Celebrations, 15-19 July 1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 27-34; William R. Newman, Newton the Alchemist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3-7
[49] : Sclove, Richard E. “From Alchemy to Atomic War: Frederick Soddy’s ‘Technology Assessment’ of Atomic Energy, 1900-1915.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 14, no. 2, 1989, pp. 163-94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/690079. Accessed 8 Nov. 2022.
[50] Morrisson, Mark S., Chemistry in the Borderland: Ramsay, Soddy, and the Transmutation Gold Rush, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory, New York, 2007; online edn, Oxford Academic , 1 May 2007, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195306965.003.0004, accessed 16 Nov. 2022.
[51] Cf. in this regard the work of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry. https://ambix.org
[52] : V.I. Vysotskii, M.V. Vysotskyy, Sergio Bartalucci, LENR Solution of the Cosmological Lithium Problem, J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 36 (2022) 115-129.
[53] : Grazia Melchionni. The Action Committee for the United States of Europe: a network at the service of the European Union In: Jean Monnet: Europe and the Paths to Peace [online]. Paris : Éditions de la Sorbonne, 1999.
[54] Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat. Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain ; fragment sur l’Atlantide. Editions Garnier-Flammarion, 1988 [1804].
[55] See Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster ed. 2011.
[56] Cf : Françoise Bonardel, Philosophie de l’alchimie : Grand œuvre et modernité. Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.