FOREWORD
Background
It
has been a great honor for me to organize ICCF11 in
There are many things that we do
not know about our research, but we are sure of one thing; it is not only about
fusion. We have observed fission and transmutation beyond doubts but, there are
probably more reactions than we currently know. The name of the conference is
now International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. For the sake
of simplicity and continuity, we have decided to keep the old acronym ICCF.
In order to meet our goal of
creating awareness about this, we had the great honor to have Brian Josephson
come to the conference. He is the Nobel Prize winner in 1973 in physics for the
discovery of the effect that bears his name. I would like to use this
opportunity to thank him for his support, as he took the risk by associating
his name to a controversial topic. He came to the conference and lectured on
"Good and Bad ways of doing Science." It was a great pleasure for me
to meet him. He added a lot of weight to the conference. The city of
One full day of the conference was held
at the Faculte des Sciences de Luzniny,
the University where I teach and do research, so that my peers at the
university could attend. This has been an opportunity for students and faculty
members to come and listen to other scientists than myself on the subject. A
demonstration unit was even displayed in the hall of the cafeteria, where many
students could see for themselves the reality of the phenomenon.
As we now known, the international
thermonuclear experimental fusion reactor (ITER) will be built in Cadarache, which is less than 1 h by car from the conference
location. Support for ITER, was very popular in
The conference was held at the
hotel Mercure. This was a posteriori a good choice
because it means mercury in French, and is one of the key ingredients used by
the alchemists in the past to make gold!
The Conference
Several
important new results were presented during the conference. The joint
US/Israeli team, headed by AID Irving Dardik,
confirmed that the superwaves they use in their electrolytic
experiments help in producing more heat. Also Iwamura et al. showed new
transmutation effects in their experiments of diffusion of deuterium gas
through a complex structure of palladium and calcium oxide. In addition to the
traditional Cold Fusion community, a team of Russian scientists claimed that
their experiments show the existence of light monopoles. The theory was
developed by Lochak from
On the theory front, I must
confess that there appears to be far too many. The initial idea of the
necessity of high deuterium loading in metals to obtain the effect seems to be
relevant only for cathodically loaded Pd wires. The
fact that hydrogen is also active and that in some cases the loading is
obviously low indicates that something else is happening. Storms mentions
"active sites," but what are they? Can we use classical quantum
mechanics or quantum electro dynamics? Do we need poly-neutrons, neutron band
structures, or magnetic monopoles? Nobody knows for sure, but every theory
developer is convinced that he/she is on the right path to obtain the solution.
The Proceedings
When
accepting papers for the conference, we decided to be open and to avoid
filtering. This is in reaction to the attitude of the scientific community, in
its large majority, regarding CMNS. If we publish everything, all kinds of
foolish and false ideas can be put forward, but if we are too narrow in our
choices, great ideas can be lost. By opening up, we took the position that
everyone is capable of deciding for oneself what is good and bad science. We
did not want to have a committee to decide and thereby take the risk of missing
a great opportunity. These proceedings follow the same philosophy, and
therefore the reader must use his/her own understanding to judge the quality of
the works presented here. As the editor of this book, I take full
responsibility for this choice, and I hope that the future will prove me more right
than wrong. Peter Hagelstein from MIT, who organized ICCF10, was a great
support in helping me with the quality of the proceedings. He found a company
that reformatted all the papers that I had received in numerous formats. This
was a precious help and I believe the readers will appreciate it.
The Future
The ICCF12, as has been decided, will be
held in
My feeling is that we have
now entered a new era, and that the various effects of CMNS will revolutionize
science and technology in the near future.
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank Jed
Rothwell who has put in tremendous work by improving the quality of the papers.
English has become the international language for science. However, more than
two-thirds of the contributions were made by people coming from
non-English-speaking countries. Jed read them all and did his best to
understand their contents. Especially, difficult papers were theoretical
papers.
All my thanks to Vittorio Violante as well from ENEA Frascatti,
who co-chaired the conference. I am also grateful to the scientific
committee who trusted me and helped me in making decisions. This is also a good
place to recognize the role of the sponsors: Infinite Energy, the City of
Finally, I am very proud of the help of
my two elder children, Melanie and Gabriel without whom this conference would
have been a disaster. They worked day and night to the satisfaction of all the
attendees.
Dr. Jean-Paul
Biberian,
Chairman, ICCF11,