Cold Fusion and Other Crazy Ideas:

Cold Fusion and Other Crazy Ideas:

My dad, as I have said was a nuclear physicist who was an undergraduate at Cal Tech and got his Ph.D. in physics from Berkeley. He did particle, high energy, and cosmic ray physics as well has nuclear engineering. He taught at U.C. Berkeley for many years. Those credentials did not prevent him from having unique ideas.  I grew up in the People’s Republic of Bezerkley during the 1960’s. My school bus was tear gassed during the anti-war and civil rights riots. I learned Swahili in school and read books in Ebonics. We had posters of Angela Davis and the Chicago Seven on the walls of my 6^th grade class room. Despite this liberal bastion, my father did not fit the normal “Berkeley” liberal mold. Oh, he believed in free speech, and freedom of expression, and women’s liberation, contraception, mini skirts, and all that,  but he was not a Berkeley Liberal. One of the first realizations that things were not normal in my household was when, after 3 years of complaining to my father about having to study Swahili in elementary school, my dad went to an open house. The teacher gave the standard lecture on how to organize and start a riot and my dad turned to me and said. “Pack up your things, you won’t be back.” It was only six weeks until the end of sixth grade and I was suddenly in private school.

It didn’t stop there, this was in the middle of the Viet Nam war. There were anti-war protests all over Berkeley. There were riots on Telegraph Avenue where they broke every store front window to retaliate against “the man”. People’s park was set up.  My dad thought we just weren’t fighting a real war in Viet Nam. If we wanted to win, we could. I think he was the only parent I knew in Berkeley that wouldn’t allow you to wear a peace sign and felt that we should escalate the war. He had been in WW2, he had seen a real war. He had driven along Patton’s lines. He knew what a serious war was. From our house in the Berkeley hills one could hear continuous bongo drums for many years. It was like a Tarzan movie with restless natives, only there were eucalyptus trees.

When some Berkeley problem would be in the newspapers, like drugs, or riots. He would say something like. “Put me in charge for one day and that won’t be a problem.” It made you wonder what he thought should be done but it always sounded like something Patton would say. “Drugs, not a problem. Put me in charge for one day and it won’t be a problem.” “Dad, what would you do?” “Well, you line em up against a wall, and shoot them. Drugs, not a problem.” His views on drugs, or civil disobedience, were very clear. They usually involved something that would have qualified him as a Stalinist, but he wasn’t .He just wanted to be clear what his view was.  

When environmentalism became popular and the Sierra Club objected to building stuff, my father would say, josh, “I didn’t know the Sierra Nevada Mountains ran through that part of Berkeley”, or that part of wherever it was. The way to protect the Sierra Nevada mountains, is to build a better freeway so people can drive through them without stopping to bother the animals. It makes a lot of sense, if you want a pristine environment, make it so people can avoid being in it, by driving through quickly. Reinforced concrete superhighways, that is the way to protect the environment.  My dad was a big proponent of reinforced concrete and nuclear power, which did not make his views popular in Berkeley. His office was in Etcheverry Hall at UCB in the department of nuclear engineering. Under the grass next to his office was a research nuclear reactor. Berkeley, which became a “nuclear free zone”, had a nuclear reactor under a volley ball court. My father was chair of radiation safety and thought that was reasonable. The problem is Berkeley apparently, didn’t. The Berkeley city council wanted the city to be a “nuclear free zone” and having a nuclear reactor in the middle of the UCB Campus, precluded that concept. So, the university was supposed to move the reactor out of Berkeley. The only problem is that to move the reactor, you have to actually physically move it, and the Berkeley city council didn’t want to issue a permit to transport a nuclear reactor through the streets of Berkeley. It was exactly the kind of thing my father enjoyed. “You don’t want a nuclear reactor in the middle of Berkeley?  OK, we will move it. You have to give us the permit to move it. If you don’t give us the permit to move it, we won’t, and it will still be there, in Berkeley, in the nuclear free zone, which isn’t nuclear free. Sorry.” He spent a lot of time speaking to people who didn’t feel warm and fuzzy about nuclear stuff.

Child playing with sand, if it was radioactive sand, it would still be ok, probably healthier really.

But he truly enjoyed it. He would shock people. The first approach was to take something truly terrifying to most people and use it as an example to show that what people were afraid of either wasn’t that dangerous, or was not really a big deal. When discussing radioactive waste his favorite examples started out something like this. “So, if we take a kilogram of plutonium dust and we spread it around a grade school play ground. What would be the effect?” The audience was so taken aback that they didn’t notice that he had then defused their fear with fact. Frequently the example involved children, or eating the material, or spreading it on a play ground. “No, having tritium on the eucalyptus leaves behind the lab is not a problem. No one eats eucalyptus leaves. There are no Koala bears in Berkeley. It is not a problem.”  “No, nuclear weapons are not going to be used to destroy the world, it is way, way too expensive.” “Or, don’t worry about the North Koreans. If they actually made a bomb, it would have to be in a large container, which they would put on a ship, and there would be 20 North Korean Scientists with the bomb, when they brought the ship into San Francisco bay to set it off. You would notice the 20 North Koreans shopping in Macy’s in their white lab coats, wouldn’t be a problem. Nuclear weapons, not that dangerous, really.” Other kids were worried about bomb shelters, or the Russians and nuclear weapons, my dad, not worried at all, “our house was built just beyond the blast line. Not a problem.” When Osama Bin Laden started gaining notoriety and people worried about weapons of mass destruction, my dad was very sanguine. “Not a problem. If we gave him the design, and we gave him the plutonium, he couldn’t make it work. Earnest Lawrence, and his staff could make it work, but Osama Bin Laden in a cave? Not going to happen, just doing the lathe work would light it on fire and kill them all. Don’t worry.   Nuclear weapons, not a problem.

Tropical Paradise of Enewetak

At one point after he built a home computer with a soldering iron, he brought home a program that displayed the temperature and dose from a nuclear blast at different distances from the blast site. “See, it is not a problem. Once you are a couple of miles away, it’s just heat.” The temperatures looked a bit high to a high school student but he was my dad and he said, not a problem. Besides its “too expensive to destroy the world with nuclear weapons.” We had a very, very large clam shell in the back yard, it was about two feet across that my dad brought from the Enewetak Atoll where he had gone to see a test shot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enewetak_Atoll#Operation_Sandstone). I don’t think it was any larger than a normal clam shell from the Marshalls, but to a kid it looked like the Godzilla of mollusks. “Radiation, not a problem, makes you heathier, you know Hormesis.” He had been to India to study the people living on the radioactive sand, he had done the studies, but it certainly worried the non-techically sophisticated. 

At one point my dad brought home a wonderful report called project plow share. It was an analysis of the use of nuclear “devices”, they weren’t weapons, they were devices, to do civil engineering. They wanted to build a sea level canal across Nicaragua as a new Panama Canal. The Panama Canal took decades to build and requires locks. People moved in to the jungle to dig the canal, thousands died of tropical diseases, started towns, and now you have a country where there was only jungle; terrible environmental damage from all the construction work. So, in project plow share you avoid all that environmental damage. You send in a helicopter with a drill rig. Drill a well every half mile or so. Place a nuclear device, not a bomb, a device, in each well. You set off them simultaneously blowing a half mile wide, sea level, canal. A week or so later you send in a bull dozer to smooth out any missed dirt. Then blow the two ends filling the canal with water. Presto, a half mile wide, sea level canal, built in a millisecond, with surprisingly little environmental damage, None really. The fact that you just set off 100 nuclear weapons near surface didn’t bother him one bit. Not a problem.  The other project plowshare study was of building a new harbor in Australia. Drill some wells, plant some devices, blamo, new harbor, and minimal radiation dose, because the water in the harbor shields the people who then “live” there.

My dad really enjoyed stirring up people at parties. He would say something that was technically absolutely true, only politically incorrect. Nuclear power is the most environmentally sensitive form of power and safest. It’s the only choice. Let’s take coal, the deaths per mega, mega watt or some such number were 300, oil was 150, nuclear 1, and that was from mining accidents from uranium. Worker injured by bull dozer or truck. Which is safer, invading a middle eastern country to get oil? Coating all the baby harp seals with oil? Or building a clean, safe, environmentally safe nuclear power plant? Global warming from oil and coal, or clean, safe, environmentally safe nuclear power? You can see how we were extremely popular in Berkeley. The facts were correct, just not politically correct. “People have certain ways that are acceptable to die. It is acceptable to die from a motorcycle, or a car accident, or being gored by a bull in Pamplona, but a nuclear accident, not acceptable.” When people were afraid of having fluoride added to the water supply, my dad bought a bottle of fluoride tablets to hand out to us every day. “Vitamins, worthless, here have a fluoride tablet, they protect your teeth.”  He wanted to start a society of people who were afraid of halogens such as fluoride. 

When conservation came in he was all for it. The only problem was he worried about conserving truly rare stuff, not paper, or plastic, or endangered species. He wanted to conserve helium. “Helium, extremely important stuff, very hard and expensive to make.” If you release a helium balloon the helium atoms leave the earth’s atmosphere never to return.  He wouldn’t allow us to have helium filled balloons because they were a waste of helium, which if you didn’t know is useful in heliarc welding (aluminum), as a diving gas, medical gas, and for blimps. Here we were driving cars that got 12 miles to the gallon, worrying about conserving helium because when it is released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space, and is lost. Note to self, helium is really expensive to make, better conserve it.

 Now one of the major problems with physicists is that their science is extremely quantitative. There are physical theories or processes that are good to 8 or 10 decimal places. The standard model  which explains all of particle physics except gravity is good to 12 decimal places.  Physics theories are constructed that are accurate to many decimal places. Physicists do science where they make up a law. One can challenge a law, but do you really want to challenge the LAW of GRAVITY. As the saying goes the Law of Gravity is strictly enforced. Non-physical science and medicine, are less qauantitative, and less certain. For example, Sigmund Freud did not write the LAW of PSYCHOTHERAPY. He developed the theory of psychotherapy. Let’s see, everything that is longer than it is wide is phallic, the only thing that is not longer than it is wide is  sphere, spheres are phallic. This type of theory is not good to 12 decimal places.  There are few things in medicine that work at p=0.05, which means that 95 times out of 100, you are correct. Alternatively, 5% of the time you are wrong.  When a physicists looks at a medical or biologic problem, they think it is like a physics study, were statistics weren’t needed because the problem was correct to 1:10¹². Nothing in medicine is good to 1:10¹².  My father thought that medical, surgical, and especially psychiatry to accurate, like physics.  Dad, it is a theory, it is not a fact. 40% of people with problem X,  fart. Yes, there is an association, it is just not good to 1:10¹².  My dad would believe the psychiatry lectures he heard were true, and not just true, but true at 1:10¹². Oedipus loved his mother, but one must remember, that unlike physics, sometimes it isn’t fundamentally true.   He had a hard time separating the limited accuracy of biology and medical science and took much of it to be True, with a capital T.

There were some things is physics he had trouble with. We would talk about cosmology frequently. Ok, I get the idea that the universe is expanding. I get that energy and mass are the same thing with E=mc². I understand why the sky is black and the red shift, and that it all started with a big bang, my simple question is where did all the stuff in the big bang come from? If energy and mass are convertible, where did all the energy come from? If there is conservation of energy, where did it come from in the first place? He would use Einstein’s out. If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question. Ok, I am ok with that, let’s do a thought experiment. There is infinite time and space. Out of the quantum vacuum, every once in a while two particles pop out, one matter, one anti-matter, and then they anilate. I am ok, with that. Lots of time, lots of space, rare event, fine. How did you get more matter here, where is all the anti-matter? If it anilated, where is the light from the anilation? . If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question. Ok, I’ve got a question. If there were a particle that popped out of the quantum vacuum today, could you tell it wasn’t from the particles in the big bang? How different would it look, would it be moving in a weird direction, speed? We would then discuss how cosmic rays, pronounced comic rays, looked like this, very high speed, very high energy, but most likely given energy and weird directions by collisions with stars, not some post big bang process. Supposed, we give you the quantum vacuum particle popping theory, and we ignore the imbalance problem giving us more matter than anti-matter, and we get it to condense into one giant ball, why didn’t it become a black hole? Why did it go boom? Rather than just remain the largest black hole ever? Are there black holes that are so big they explode? What process would make a black hole explode?  Ah there was silence. If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question. Well, if the black hole was large enough, and there is conservation of angular momentum, would the out edge approach the speed of light and be limited by the speed of light setting up some problem that would cause it to explode like a giant spinning glob?  We would go around and around on these questions. Ok, if all these particles condensed into the big bang, was it rotating, if it was rotating, prior to the big bang, could we see the rotation? “No reference frame, can’t see the rotation,  If you can’t do an experiment to test it, it isn’t a meaningful question.” I will miss my lessons in cosmology, I hope to someday understand where all the stuff came from. His theory, which was always depressing, “it was always here. Why did it need a beginning?” We could have a three hour conversation about gravitons, you know, the government wouldn’t fund the study on gravitons. More people die of gravitational radiation poisoning than any other type of radiation injury. They won’t fund it.

When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons gave their press release about Cold Fusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion) my dad was fascinated. His first reaction was nope. Too little energy and they don’t understand neutron detection. He had spent years talking about Fusion, how it was extremely hard to do. How Fusion was always just 30 years off. In 1950, it was 30 years off, in 2010, is it just 30  years off. He also subscribed to the theory that there is limited money in the Universe. If one project sucks all the physics dollars into one corner, they can’t be used somewhere else. There is conservation of energy, mass, and money. The “Hot” fusion people had sucked up all the money for a long time, he liked the idea that they could be shown to be wrong by the “cold” fusion people. He followed the palladium story, and went to meetings discussing cold fusion. His summary was usually something like, there is something weird that happens at the surface of palladium, they don’t get enough neutrons, they don’t know how to detect a neutron, isn’t that fascinating. I think he wanted the hot fusion people to be shown up by the cold fusion people, rather than actually believing Pons and Fleischman, but we did get to hear a lot about the surface chemistry of palladium. “They are chemists they never calibrate anything, and they don’t know how to detect a neutron.” My dad divided people by profession. Chemists would write on note books. They would go into the lab and do an experiment. Physicists would write on envelopes. They go into a lab and calibrate stuff, and then calibrate some more, and after a couple of months of calibration, they would do an experiment. Medical doctors? They just told you what they thought.

Chemists, they don't calibrate, and they can't detect a neutron.

My dad had all kinds of theories. He read a book on left handedness (The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness by Stanley Coren). He applied the logic of a physicists that thinks things are true to 1:10¹², and we got to hear this theory for a year. When he read a book about the alphabet, we got to hear that theory for a while. The biggest change occurred when he moved to Canada. All through my child hood, I heard how dysfunctional our government was. When it took a couple of years to toss out Richard Nixon, we heard how wonderful a prime mister was. They just loose a vote of confidence and they are done. It seemed like America was going to fail because we could toss the criminals out with a no confidence vote. When he moved to Canada, he would watch the parliament, I guess on the Canadian equivalent of C-Span.. He watched the British Prime Minister’s weekly question and answer session in Parliament with great reverence. The U.S., we are going to fail, because we can’t toss them out. “But Dad, what about Italy, they have a Parliament, they toss out their government every few months, they are unstable.” “Very simple, if the entire parliament has to stand for election with a vote of no confidence, then it is stable. If is just the prime minister and cabinet, it is not.” He always had an answer.

He loved the metric system. U.S. not going to succeed cause we are the last country on earth that doesn’t have the metric system. We had one other country on our side, Sri Lanka, but they decided to switch, now we are alone. You know, if we had a parliament, we could have a no confidence vote, and toss them out. I used to tell people that he was so embarrassed by George Bush 2, that he moved to Canada, it probably was partially correct, oh, yeah and the draw of C-SPAN Canada with the parliament.