Cold Fusion.

This is coolbert.

"It's not enough to say it's 'out of the box,' it's got to be plausibly out of the box." - - physicist Steven Koonin.

[this with regard to "far out physics".]

This is not entirely correct.

Consider cold fusion. Widely discredited in most scientific circles.

As an alternative to "hot fusion", cold fusion, when first announced, was met with an amazing amount of skepticism by the scientific community. Skepticism that has been proven to be accurate to a degree.

Most of us are familiar with the originally announced "successes" of cold fusion. Two chemists with a car battery, a beaker of "special" water, and two electrodes of mysterious metallic composition, were able to do on the proverbial shoestring what the foremost physicists of the planet were unable to do for six decades.

It is now accepted that "fusion" as the word is normally understood by the physics community was NOT achieved by the two chemists.

[having spent untold billions of dollars on hot fusion experimentation for six decades, and achieved almost zero in results, conventional physicists were loathe to admit they may have been on the wrong track all along.]

[I talked to a hot fusion physicist about this entire subject on one occasion. He said that he himself, even earning his bread and butter from fusion research, had to seriously consider if the results being gained were worth the effort, money, and time spent. The goal is just so difficult to achieve.]

Something was happening with the cold fusion experiments, however, that could not be explained. MORE energy was being generated than was being put into the experiment. Unknown processes, unanticipated, were at work.

Continued experimentation on cold fusion has continued unabated. And success has been claimed from a variety of sources.

One such experiment into cold fusion that has recently been touted has A MILITARY DIMENSION TO IT!! This is what is called sonofusion.

The entire field of sonofusion is built upon the accidental discovery of sonoluminescence:

"Sonoluminescence arises from acoustic cavitation -- the formation, growth and implosion of small gas bubbles in a liquid blasted with sound waves above 18,000 cycles per second. The collapse of these bubbles generates intense local heating."

A discovery that was an outgrowth of research into military sonar:

"The effect was first discovered at the University of Cologne in 1934 as a result of work on sonar. H. Frenzel and H. Schultes put an ultrasound transducer in a tank of photographic developer fluid. They hoped to speed up the development process. Instead, they noticed tiny dots on the film after developing, and realized that the bubbles in the fluid were emitting light with the ultrasound turned on."

There was no plausible explanation for this phenomenon. NO physicist of the time could have predicted what occurred.

[there is a sound basis for thinking that the ultrasound would speed up the agitation process and development of photos. Agitation WILL speed up the development process even if done by hand. This is a technique taught in photographic classes at community colleges.]

The sonar transducer immersed in the photo development solution was causing the collapsing bubbles that gave off energy in the form light and HEAT!!

There you have it. The entire concept of sonofusion is the result of an accidental discovery derived from MILITARY RESEARCH into sonar. NOT plausible by conventional standards of the time.

GOD works in mysterious ways!! And so does science! NOT some of the time, ALL of the time!

Steven Koonin is NOT ENTIRELY CORRECT in his appreciation of "far out physics"!!

coolbert.