“I do not know what I may appear to the
world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the
seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a
prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.” Isaac Newton, (From BREWSTER, Memoirs
of Newton [1855], vol. II, Ch. 27)
Modern
physics, the foundation of the 20th century science, had its basic
discoveries just at the turning years from the 19th to the 20th
century, perhaps by accident. (Cf. Appendix D, Topics 2, Radioactivity, Alpha,
Beta and Gamma Rays and Topics 4, Quantum Born as a Result of Trial and Error
Process.) Two outstanding discoveries are the quantum hypothesis by Max Planck
in 1901 and the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905. By
these theories, physics and classical science was born in the 16th
century innovated basically. It became clear that principles of science have
their own realms of applicability.
Microscopic and
macroscopic objects obey different fundamental laws describing their states.
Low speed and high speed (compared with the speed of light, which is a constant
measured from any reference system) objects obey different laws of motion.
Principles
of quantum mechanics accomplished by the end of the 1930s applied to
solid-state physics. Electronic theory of solids was established to explain
various features of solids including electric, magnetic, optical and thermal
properties and formed the basis of modern microelectronics, which induced the
information revolution in late 20th century society. Who could
foresee this tremendous reform of society in the 1930s?
At
the epoch from the 20th to the 21st century, it seems
nothing special occurred in science. The confusion in computer systems related
to the transition of the clock from 1999 to 2000 in each computer arose in the
summer of 1999 as only an episode related with the transition of a calendar.
Instead of such epoch making events that occurred a hundred years ago, there
occurred, however, a gradual paradigm change from simple systems to complex
systems in our frame of reference. Modern physics including classical physics
established in these 400 years has flourished simplifying objects extracted
from the complex real world as far as possible confining region of
investigation thus making possible to treat them mathematically and rigorously.
There was necessarily abandoned vast realm of reality behind the world finely
arranged in modern physics.
With
the development of the computer, people had a shift
in interest from material science to bioscience. An internal origin in
physics itself accelerated this shift. Frontiers of physics at the end of the
20th century receded from phenomena occurring in or near daily life
to those in area under extreme conditions far from our real experience like
extremely low temperature, extremely high pressure, extremely high energy,
extremely old primordial universe, and so on, which have to be investigated by
use of huge experimental facilities and full mathematics. This situation
necessarily induced a structure change in physicists just described by Akasofu
as
"One of the signs expressing the last stage of a
paradigm in the field of physics, astrophysics and geophysics is prosperity of
mathematical physics and arrogance of mathematical physicists. This is a result
induced by oblivion of physical insight into facts by majority of scientists,
as pointed out by many physicists."
When microscopic techniques were applied to biological
objects, a new world under our eyes attracted a strong interest of youth and
competent students went into bioscience. This field, surely, has an interesting
and promising future prosperity and we cannot predict exactly what kind of developments
may be accomplished in bioscience in this century.
The
development of the computer, however, has revealed another fascinating and
wonderful world not touched by modern physics without computer. Typical realm
of the world thus revealed is science of complexity including chaos and fractal
[Waldrop 1992]. It is natural to conclude that the use of concepts developed in
the science of complexity should be necessary in CFP, which is clearly
occurring in complex systems. We will try to develop science of CFP using
traditional concepts in physics and also new concepts found in this new science
of complexity in this book.
As
explained in Section 1.1, the cold fusion phenomenon (CFP) was announced with
its discovery in 1989. In the early years of its research, the central point of
discussion was Fleischmann’s hypothesis about d-d fusion
reactions in solids around which research of and critique against CFP had been
mainly performed. A huge pile of experimental data sets accumulated in these 16
years, however, clearly showed that the controversy fought between proponents
and critiques were fruitless because the point of argument had been irrelevant
to essential factors of CFP and was fruitless.
Our
point of view assumes common causes for all events in CFP such as production of
nuclear products from tritium, helium-4 to other products by nuclear
transmutations with proton numbers larger than 3 as reviewed in this Chapter
and huge excess heat occurring in room temperature solids. These events are
entirely out of the scope of 20th century nuclear physics.
There
are several models for such limited kinds of events as helium-4 and excess heat
productions or production of praseodymium Pr in a system with cesium Cs. These
trials to explain limited events with a model are definitely different from
ours in which we assume existence of a radically new state of matter generating
vast events composing CFP as a whole.
The
name used to express this research field “cold fusion” is recognized now
clearly not appropriate to express the whole events contained in this field. In
this stage of investigation of CFP, we do not know exactly what kind of
mechanism is working behind the phenomenon and it seems appropriate to use a
name “cold fusion phenomenon (CFP)” to express the field called “cold fusion”
at first or nuclear reactions and accompanying events occurring in solids with
high densities of hydrogen isotopes (H and/or D) in ambient radiation as used
hitherto in this book. The ambient radiation means any radiation that exists
naturally on the earth, the most important of them being background neutron as
already explained in Chapter 1. (Cf. Appendix D, Topics 8, Background Neutron)
In
this Chapter, we give an overall feature of experimental data sets of CFP as a
whole from our point of view and depict an entire image of this phenomenon to
investigate it quantum mechanically in the next Chapter [Kozima 2005 a].