Hey!
Could it be...
Yes!
IT'S HERE!!!
It's...
The Original, Official, and Long Awaited
--- Five Yars in the Making ---
COLD FUSION FQA
(Ferociously Questioned Answers)
List
Q. Why did it take you so long?

A. I was waiting for the Stanley Pons Water Heater.
Now, can we get down to business? This is a serious matter.

Q. Allright.  What is Cold Fusion?

A. That is an easy one. Cold Fusion (also called Cold Nuclear Fusion
by those without an ounce of marketing sense) is the generation of
thermal energy, in excess of what is allowd by conventional physics,
by the electrolysis of heavy water solution of lithium hydroxide with
a palladium electrode, or of a light water solution of sodium
carbonate with nickel electrode, or of a complex salt solution in
light water with titanium electrode; or by the collapse of
ultrasound-generated bubbles in light water, or by the cryogenic
cooling of titanium chips in a deuterium atmoshere, or by the
resistive heating of a nickel rod in a deuterium atmosphere, or by
passing dirty water in the gap between two rapidly spinning cylinders,
or by spinning a copper disc in a static magnetic field.

Q. Who discovered Cold Fusion, and when?

A. Cold Fusion was independently discovered by two teams: Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleishmann at the University of Utah, and Stephen Jones and
his collaborators at the Brigham Young University.

The discovery was announced to the world on October XX, 1989, in a
historical press conference by Pons and Fleischmann; and XX day later
bys the BYU team. The excitement and confusion that were to surround
the field in the following months were fueled in no small measure by a
bitter dispute precedence and ethics between the two teams, who had
become aware of each other's work a few months earlier. The two sides
had formally agreed that they would not go public before submitting
their papers together to Nature, and that they would simultaneusly
cheat on each other by violating this agreement. The two teams had
independently hit upon the idea a couple of years before the
announcement, while pursuing entirely different lines of research and
reviewing entirely different DoE grant proposals submitted by the
other team. (There were rumors at the time that actually neither of
the two teams had come up with the idea, but, rather, that both teams
had simultaneously stolen the idea from each other. But these rumors
were eventually proved to be rumors.)

Upon learning of the Pons and Fleischmann discovery and of its
potential implications, literally thousands of researchers around the
world independently were the first to discover the phenomenon, and
many had been working on it for years right away. As it so often
happens in this unfair world, few of those valiant pioneers are
remembered nowadays. The sensational discoveries of Higgins at
Stanford, Bockris at ???, ??? at Georgia Tech, Scaramuzzi at ???, have
somewhow fallen out of people's minds. Even some members of the two
Utah teams, who coauthored the original papers, are now largely
forgotten---such as What-Was-His-Name Hawkins and
Who-Was-That-Other-Guy ???. (In fact, Hawkins's name was already
forgotten by the time his paper was submitted to the journal,
especially by his coauthors,) Strangely enough, none of those heroic
pioneers has tried to rescue his name from obvlivion. Stephen Jones
himself, while not denying his seminal role in the early invstigations
of Cold Fusion, has generously conceded that Pons and Fleischmann
alone deserve all the credit for the theoretical and experimental
paradigms that underlie all the work that has been done since then in
this field. Moreover, science historians now agree that Jones deserves
little if any credit for the prestige and respect that Cold Fusion now
enjoys among scientists, public officials, and the general public.
Thus, five years after the field was born, only two names stand
shining and uneffaced in the Cold Fusion Hall of Fame: those of
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.

Q. Wow, that was moving.  But how were Pons and Fleischmann led to the discovery?

A. As it happens, the discovery of Cold Fusion is one of those amazing
and unlikely coincidences that are so common in the history of
science. While studying the electrolytic hydrogenation of palladium,
which was then viewed as a promising hydrogen storage method, Pons and
Fleischmann becae aware of three crucial facts. First, they observed
that extended electrolysis achieved hydrogen concentrations in the
palladium that would otherwise require astronomical pressures ---
pressures comparable to those in the center of the sun, and hence
(they supposed) perhaps large enough to cause the fusion of deuterium.
Second, they observed that funding for research in alternative energy
technologies, including the hydrogen-palladium system, was generally
drying up. Third, that funding for research in conventional ("hot")
fusion was still quite generous, even though the technology is
obviously not going to be economically viable in our lifetime.

From the last fact, they correctly concluded that, in order for a
research project to be funded, it is not necessary that its goals have
some chance to be achieved. Therefore---and here is the really genial
part of their discovery----it ought not be necessary that its
theoretical premises be correct, its experiments be sound, or even
that the phenomena to be studied be real. Once these three key facts
were put together, the discovery of Cold Fusion followed by logical
necessity.

Q. What are the theoretical principles behind Cold Fusion?

Q. How does one build a Cold Fusion device?

A. ...Don't bother trying if you are a researcher at a university,
government lab, or other public place, or merely a dedicated amateur:
if there is one clear consensus among all experimenters, cold fusion
only works for anonymous employees of big corporations, who are into
it for the money, and are prohibited from even mentioning that they
are working on CNF. You you just think that the faintest idea of
publish your discoveries has a remote possibility of passing near your
head, bingo---your CF device will sense it, and go dead as a nail.