The New Indian Express gets science reporting wrong

Two days ago, a weird article appeared in the New Indian Express' opinions section, written by V Sudarshan, its executive editor (linked here). The article spoke about how low-energy nuclear reactions were "here to stay" without a single credible reference to a journal article or another report, and went on to assert that it was feasible in the tone of someone suggesting a long-awaited solution to the energy crisis.

The contents of the piece were, as such, credible: the scientists who came up with the technique had patented it and even expressed that it was good only in principle and that they hadn't taken the trouble to verify it practically. The published paper is available here and the patent report here.

Now, it's not as if just the tone of the article was amiss - if it was only that, I wouldn't be concerned. The piece read like Sudarshan had assumed a lot of numbers and techniques to make his point. If he had done his due and had gone about reporting the development as any honest science reporter would have, it would be a fantastic article capable of inspiring research in India.

# The piece opens by saying a Dr Rossi was inspired by the Fleischmann-Pons experiment of '89 to start working with cold fusion. The FP experiment was debunked and trashed few months after it came out, and anyone who was inspired by that to continue in that very line of work is not going to be taken seriously easily. Given that the latter half of the article says how Rossi's work isn't in the cold fusion category but the low-energy nuclear reactions one, the reference to the FP experiment is just counter-productive.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Dr Andrea Rossi"][/caption]

The piece portrays the US Department of Energy as sceptics for running down cold fusion. The DoE had reasons. They weren't the only ones who ran down cold fusion: it was defenestrated by the entire scientific community!

Tip: when it comes to science reporting, please don't distort reality by leaving out the context. It's just... stupid. Who are you benefitting when you write like that? Not the academic community, not the people involved in the research, not the people. It's just an opinion. Write it like it should be written.

# Next: Rossi's device is mentioned as something that "produces lots of energy." How? When did it produce lots of energy?

The piece says Dr Rossi challenged Dr Focardi, a physicist from the University of Bologna, to find faults with the device. After Sudarshan writes that Focardi failed in his attempts, he leaves the plot hanging there to hint that the device, having been vetted by ONE physicist, actually works.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="294" caption="Rossi with Dr Sergio Focardi"][/caption]

What's missing are these: Have Rossi and Focardi published the evidence of that much energy? If they haven't published it, where did you get your opinion from? If they have published it, why are you afraid to print it?

#

"Four years later, Rossi unveiled the device that amplifies energy."

How is that possible without a second source of energy to perform the amplification? If there is no second source, then the sacrosanct first law of thermodynamics stands violated! Worse yet, these are Sudarshan's words, not Rossi's, and will pass muster only when spoken by other physicists who are willing to endorse Rossi's claims with sufficient evidence.

Sudarshan should have chosen his words more carefully. For someone reading the paper whose physics education was stopped and forgotten with high school, saying energy can be amplified without a second input can bypass the importance of the first law. To illustrate another instance of Sudarshan's foot-in-mouth disease, the piece says,

"Once you have steam, it is a matter of time before it is converted into electricity."

Sounds like there are going to be 17th century alchemists on stand-by as the reaction progresses.

#

"This is how it works: a minute amount of hydrogen is heated in a lead-covered chamber ... containing nickel powder. The hydrogen converts the nickel to copper and in the process, heat is given off, as well as low energy gamma rays."

Since when does hot hydrogen convert nickel to copper? Since when does hot hydrogen convert nickel to copper and release heat?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="560" caption="In the Periodic Table of elements, nickel (Ni) and copper (Cu) are numbered 28 and 29, which are their respective atomic numbers (the number of protons in their nuclei)."][/caption]

The nuclear transmutation of nickel to copper is an energy-consuming reaction: the copper nucleus is heavier, meaning the nickel nucleus is more stable naturally. Because Rossi is going the other way, he must be using an isotope of nickel (a variant of the metal that contains an extra few neutrons in its nucleus while keeping the number of protons intact). Which isotope of nickel?

This is where it gets even better: Ni-48 is one of the most stable isotopes on the planet, Ni-56 is produced by supernovae and not available easily on Earth, Ni-58 - the most abundant - forms by the decay of copper-58, Ni-59 and Ni-60 are available in extremely small quantities, Ni-62 is the product of nuclear fusion reactions, Ni-64 is formed by the electron-capture of copper-64, and the solar system doesn't have enough Ni-78 to have let Dr Rossi experiment with it.

What Sudarshan should have done is explained for the layman what really happens with the heating of hydrogen instead of deliberately misleading the paper's readers. When the hydrogen is heated in the presence of nickel as a catalyst, its electrons and protons are separated from each other and deposited in the spaces between nickel atoms in the metal's crystal lattice.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="426" caption="The nickel crystal lattice, with the black dots indicating the positions nickel atoms will occupy"][/caption]

The remaining unpaired protons are, according to the patent, "statistically captured" by the nickel atoms. If you read the word "statistically" anywhere in a journal or patent report, it means that there's only a chance of that event happening. In other words, if the process is repeated over and over again, it will have happened enough times to warrant a practical consideration.

The rest is easy. The nickel isotope that captures a proton becomes heavier and gradually decays into an isotope of copper, releasing low-energy gamma rays. Further, the copper-isotope that results is heavier compared to its natural form, and gradually decays by emitting positrons and gamma rays. When such a positron encounters an electrons, anti-matter will meet matter and they will annihilate, releasing a gamma ray and a neutrino.

The lead encasement within which all this will occur will be capable of trapping the gamma rays and converting them into thermal energy. Another smaller source of energy is that when copper decays by the emission of gamma rays, it recoils, like a gun recoils after firing a bullet. This recoil is absorbed by the surrounding lattice of nickel atoms and gives rise to a vibration in the crystal that is slowly dissipated as heat.

The reason this proposed technique will work only in principle is that, for practical feasibility, the total amount of energy released should be demonstrably greater than the total amount of energy consumed. Otherwise, it's only an energy sink.

# With apologies for the digression, we now circle back to Sudarshan's article.

"Apparently the device heated Rossi's factory continuously for two years."

Do I dare ask where the attribution is? Why do apparent occurrences make it into a report that's supposed to be festering with hope, intent on sinking it with dubiousness? Moreover, instead of saying the device powered the factory for two years, the piece could have mentioned how much power that amounted to. There is another incidence of this "apparent" business when Sudarshan says,

"One gram of nickel apparently can produce 23,000 MW-hours of energy."

Making these many "apparent" claims makes the piece read like the work of a rumour-monger.

# Which it could easily be because the ONE reference that Sudarshan points to right at the bottom of the article is e-cat.com. Yes, the reference is not a neutral-third party or a collection of papers produced Rossi or Focardi but Rossi's website that smacks of desperation to have his solution proven practically.

This article is a discussion of the newspaper report only. If you're looking for physics of it and whether or not Dr Rossi's new device will ever see the light of day, you could go here. As a scientist put it,

"Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion."

The constant culpability of the crackpot

The tenet of media operations - in most places - is 'innocent until proven guilty'. The adversarial stance often assumed by television channels and newspaper reports reflect a tendency to view the news from a neutral perspective, to exonerate the common man as much as possible, and to hold ministers and other decision-makers as suspect till a particular threshold. Unfortunately for science, it's exactly the other way around: guilty until proven innocent.

[caption id="attachment_21676" align="aligncenter" width="220" caption="Roger Bacon ('Doctor Mirabilis') was a Franciscan friar (1214-1294) whose emphasis on the scientific method popularized it and made it the experimental method of choice for hundreds of generations of scientists, and continues to be to this day."][/caption]

This is, for many reasons, important. When the media get excited, they often raise the expectations from a particular news story: they ensure that the story is exciting, that it is sufficiently unprecedented so that it challenges existing notions enough to incite interest. And here's where 'guilty until proven innocent' gets to work its magic. Science stories that are capable of becoming exciting have by definition a low chance of being valid. If there was a high chance of the story being valid, it would border on being expected, predictable; covering such an event would be more a chronicling than a witnessing.

By holding a phenomenon guilty, however, nobody would get sucked up in what could be a wild goose chase.

There are a bunch of "discoveries" that, because of their unprecedentedness, purchased interest from the media and allowed the men and women behind the pseudo-discoveries to cash in. One of the greatest examples is the Fleischmann-Pons experiment in cold fusion. When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah announced that they may have discovered cold fusion on March 23, 1989, there was a flurry of excitement that rippled through military quarters, media offices and the scientific community. According to their paper, there were indications of micro-scale fusion reactions at temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius (as opposed to the millions of degrees they were expected to be at) when deuterium-water was electrolysed in the presence of palladium metal.

[caption id="attachment_21672" align="alignleft" width="199" caption="Martin Fleischmann"][/caption]

The timing couldn't have been better. The 1973 Oil Crisis was fresh in the minds of many people and, seemingly in response to that, cold fusion presented an alternate source of energy that was accessible and more efficient by orders of magnitude. Moreover, just three years earlier in 1986, high-temperature superconductivity had been discovered. When earlier certain materials were thought to be superconducting only at temperatures as low as 4-10 kelvin, a new breed of materials were shown conducting with zero resistance at temperatures as high as 90 and 120 kelvin. Its impact on the discovery of cold fusion was the exculpation of the crackpot: it told the world that having crackpot written all over an experiment didn't mean it couldn't be true.

Fleischmann and Pons were superstars. Soon, a $25-million federal grant was coming the way of U of Utah. However, disturbing developments were being reported from western Europe, other parts of the USA and Japan. The paper Fleishmann and Pons had published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry did not include the experimental protocol, but that didn't stop scientists worldwide from trying to replicate the research. And they had all been in vain: none of those experiments had detected fusion of any kind at any temperature. In fact, Nathan Lewis, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, set about trying to corroborate cold fusion systematically, trying out all kinds of variations on the process. None of them succeeded.

While the Utah chemists basked in the glory of their finding and the (carefully selected) findings of other groups in America, that also claimed to have observed cold fusion, the death knell was sounded so far afield as CERN: Douglas R. O. Morrison, a physicist, announced that all attempts in western Europe at replicating cold fusion had failed. In order to quell these doubts, Fleischmann and Pons published a "note" in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry in April 1989 that showed a gamma-ray energy peak from their experiment.

Now, it was known at the time that gamma rays released by a fusion reaction could transfer only a certain amount of energy to the detector, which is reflected as a sharp cutoff in the peak after which the energy seems to plummet. The cutoff is called a Compton edge and wasn't observed in the chart in the Journal. When alerted to it, the chemists refused to take any blame, continuously asserting that their experiment was error-proof.

After this incident, interest in the matter rocketed - and negatively. The New York Times published a scathing article on April 30, 1989, titled The Utah Fusion Circus. Its last lines effectively drew the curtains on cold fusion and sent Fleischmann, Pons and the U of Utah back decades in terms of their credibility and accountability.

For Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann, the best bet is to disappear into their laboratory and devise a clearly defined, well-understood experiment that others can reproduce. Until they have that, they have nothing. As for the University of Utah, it may now claim credit for the artificial-heart horror show and the cold-fusion circus, two milestones at least in the history of entertainment, if not of science.

What ultimately made the difference was replicability: when scientists found that the experiment couldn't be replicated, the game was lost. Fleischmann and Pons were held guilty to the end. Their exculpation was all the time hinged on their ability to assert that the experiment would occur anywhere irrespective of geographic location as long as the experimental setup was the same. Because of the nature of their experiment, there was a sizeable measure of urgency to establish priority: as far as anything immensely profitable is concerned, primacy makes all the difference. Woe betide if anyone else claim it first - all would be lost! And in that moment, facts are not checked as rigorously as they should be.

More recently, the same went for the misbehaving neutrinos. When other experiments around the world tried to replicate the phenomenon, nothing happened. In fact, a sister-experiment of OPERA (which first announced the anomaly) called ICARUS drew the curtains more than halfway down within three weeks of the exciting announcement.

[caption id="attachment_21674" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The ICARUS experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory, Italy"][/caption]

Replication is many things. At the least, it is consensus. At the most, it is a form of characterization that removes a phenomenon out of its germane environment and blesses it with universality, as a result making it explicable within a logical framework and scientific. If the Higgs boson were to be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, that will be the first step in a series of experiments on which hundreds of scientists and thousands of engineers will be involved for tens of months. They will check, and then they will check again. If someone somewhere finds that such a boson couldn't be spotted, he won't be snubbed but encouraged to speak up: the closer to the truth you get, the more careful you need to be.

Unfortunately for quacks everywhere, everything about science is the truth.

--

In a curious turn of events, the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India, recommended the Indian government to resuscitate research in cold fusion in 2008. Projects were commenced at IIT Madras, the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, and BARC. However, because of persistent scepticism among physicists at chemists, research was halted as of 2011. Find the ToI article here.