Dr. Wilhelm, congratulations on a fascinating and very readable article. We especially appreciate the posture you have taken toward cold fusion/LENR: neither declaring it established nor dismissing decades of anomalous results because the subject became scientifically unfashionable. Revisiting the experimental record, including loading conditions and other boundary conditions that may not have been reproduced consistently in the earliest replication efforts, seems entirely warranted.
One development that makes the timing of your series particularly interesting is the July 2026 Nature Communications work demonstrating strongly enhanced low-energy D–D fusion behavior in palladium and titanium hydrides. It certainly does not validate Fleischmann–Pons or LENR generally, but it does provide mainstream experimental evidence that a condensed-matter environment can significantly influence nuclear reaction behavior at low energies. That strengthens the case for asking whether highly organized metal–deuterium systems may contain physics that deserves a closer look.
Our only constructive suggestion would be a little caution in how strongly some of the anomalous systems are connected to the deleted subspace. Force-free Taylor states, for example, already have a conventional Maxwell–MHD description, while the Shoulders observations remain open to several possible interpretations. We nevertheless agree that the recurring pattern is intriguing, and these systems strike us as particularly interesting test cases for your expanded electrodynamics—especially if the additional mode can ultimately predict something measurable that the conventional treatment does not. That would turn an intriguing “signpost,” to use your term, into a genuine experimental discriminator. We very much look forward to the next article.
That one's new to me. Nice find. They see a plateau below 2 keV in Pd and Ti, eighteen orders above bare nuclei, and they pin it on screening in the damaged surface layer. There's nothing exotic in it anywhere. 1989 was supposed to have killed exactly that. Mechanism's still a fight though: Czerski reads the same plateau as thermal fusion, screening unchanged. His titanium disagrees with theirs. The palladium agrees.
Yeah, fair. Had it wrong in print, fixed it this week. Taylor states are ordinary MHD, they need nothing anybody deleted. Force-free means the force on the plasma is zero BY CONSTRUCTION, so the six-component theory's one channel sits at exactly zero. The textbook explains that state completely, then has nothing left to measure in it. Shoulders I hold even looser. Feynman's letter hands you a confinement mechanism straight out of standard electrodynamics, given a field and a quadrupole. The clusters are supposed to form with neither.
Forget deuterium. Put a monopolar receiver in a sealed Faraday enclosure. Does it hear what a dipole can't, and does the falloff go 1/r or 1/r squared. It costs a weekend and needs no palladium. A null kills the propagating half of my argument outright.
PS: show me a screening measurement in that damaged-layer regime that separates the two mechanisms. Or is it just the titanium?
Excellent work and thank you for being one of the voices willing to give something like Cold Fusion an honest look despite the background noise of popular misinformation.
Let's remember that a certain international criminal and all around extremely bad person -- a real spherical bastard, if you will -- convinced the equally-morally-corrupt Mormon leadership to have Pons and Fleischman's funding pulled.
Love this stuff, the science content, the thinking/digging a level deeper, and above all the open, exploring measured exposition. No one selling anything but "let's look deeper".
That sounds like science to me.
As a 'guy off the street' and armed with the additional information that Dr. Wilhelm presents here (the under saturation of the material, i.e.) and the scale of the physics -- desktop physics, not multi-decadal accelerator projects -- couldn't this simply be re-tried and 'done right'?
I mean....isn't that what they did w/Toyota in France at IMRA? And yet it did not pan out. And Fleischmann persisted until his death, and Pons bailed out to become a French farmer or something....
I'd be more interested in a story on what Toyota/IMRA did & tried than anything else at this point.
Last I read, "they" found a very low energy anomaly where some form of D-D fusion might have been happening but in the sub keV realm. While higher by *dozens* of orders of magnitude than it should have been, it was still far too low in any absolute sense to be of practical use.
Still.
How hard can it be to get sub keV deuterium smashing around, play with electrodes, beams, etc on a 'desktop'? Seems like a super fun area to look into...
Finally a purely kneejerk physics-for-poets vibe, from...from nowhere, really: What if it's about 'shape' and not energy or chemistry? What if it's about the shape of the D interacting with D? The shape provided by the material and fields the D is embedded within...?
<shakes head to clear it>
Anyway, great article, Dr. Wilhelm. Thanks for publishing.
Your last paragraph is the one I'd keep. Shape rather than energy is close to what the newest result actually says, and you got there from nowhere, as you put it.
The sub-keV work you're pointing at is UC Davis and Berkeley, published this year on DOE money. Deuterium beam into a palladium or titanium foil that's being electrochemically loaded from the other side. What the loading buys them is a screening potential: palladium goes from 0.8 keV to 1.7, titanium from 0.3 to 0.9. Same increment on both, from a lattice, at room temperature. That's your shape, doing measurable work on a nuclear rate.
You're right that it's useless as power, and the authors say so themselves, many orders below anything that could run a kettle. The 10^18 enhancement figure that gets quoted is at the single lowest energy they probed, 0.25 keV, not across the range. Worth carrying that number with its energy attached or it oversells badly.
The part I like most is that they refuse to explain it. Their constant-screening model breaks below 2.5 keV, so they offer depth-dependent screening or low-energy resonances and pick neither. A group in Szczecin reads the same plateau as ordinary thermal fusion at unchanged screening, and says it confirms something they published two years earlier. Effect corroborated, mechanism wide open.
On re-trying it properly: there's a 2019 Nature paper called Revisiting the Cold Case of Cold Fusion, which is your question asked by people with a budget. Start there.
IMRA I can't tell you about honestly. I know the shape of the story and I haven't done the reading, and it's the one people keep asking me for. It's on the list.
Cheers, Paul! 🥂 I would add David Fryberger, former Professor Emeritus at Stanford, for his group's discovery of cavity lights / mobile luminous objects. For me it is a quintessential case -- The existing framework could not fully elucidate the phenomenon observed, and so Fryberger went in search of an explanation that brought him back around to ball lightning and magnetic charge / magnetic monopoles / Dyality rotation, based on Schwinger's concept of Dyons.
I should also mention the gigantic elephant in the room with regards to Pons and Fleischmann. Their research was curtailed by none other than Jeffrey Epstein, who convinced the Mormon leadership in a closed door meeting to have their funding pulled. The scientific community has an obligation to fully correct this conspiracy to suppress, and the Mormon leadership should be held accountable as well.
Figure of 8. Infinity. Push, Turn, Pull onto Pull, Turn, Push. Repeat. Hurricanes and Tornadoes are Cold Friction. Thats Elevate (Magnetism or Spiral or Horizontal or Circular Rotation aka HURRICANES) with Lift (Electrical or Cylinder or Vortex or Vertical Spin aka TORNADOES). When combined you get GYROSCOPIC ROTATION (Levitation aka GRAVITY). Movement is GROUND UP. Thats Physics.
Cold Fusion is Volcanoes and Earthquakes. That Matter Creation (Fusion) with Reduction (Fission) with Containment (Vibration or Gyroscopic Spin/Rotation). Thats Biology. Create, Reduce, Contain. Repeat. GROWTH or Inside Out.
Chemistry is Existence. Physics is Telekinesis or Cold Friction or Artifical Reality or Flight (Movement or Mind). Biology is Pyrokinesis or Cold Fusion or Augmented Reality or Fuel (For Existence and Movement).
Very interesting article! - Even as a person just starting B.Sc. in electrical engineering this year - but why so lurid phrases like: "the physics that textbooks dont show"? Its catchy i'll admit that...
Thank you! Yes, it is catchy. But it's also true, at least when considering how long it took me personally to peek behind the curtain. It's not that the information is hidden, but you're also not made aware of it easily. I try to bring it to the foreground.
Ate my comment. See eq.(14) in: https://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell-ga.htm . (Geometric /Spacetime Algebra version of Maxwell, ∇² A = ∇ F = J, with J unpacked into 24 components of E and B.) Could you please tell me which term or terms in that correspond to the neglected 7th term you found? Or is that in the Lorentz law or something?
Eq. (58) & ff. for waves may be needed to decipher which components do what.
Dr. Wilhelm, congratulations on a fascinating and very readable article. We especially appreciate the posture you have taken toward cold fusion/LENR: neither declaring it established nor dismissing decades of anomalous results because the subject became scientifically unfashionable. Revisiting the experimental record, including loading conditions and other boundary conditions that may not have been reproduced consistently in the earliest replication efforts, seems entirely warranted.
One development that makes the timing of your series particularly interesting is the July 2026 Nature Communications work demonstrating strongly enhanced low-energy D–D fusion behavior in palladium and titanium hydrides. It certainly does not validate Fleischmann–Pons or LENR generally, but it does provide mainstream experimental evidence that a condensed-matter environment can significantly influence nuclear reaction behavior at low energies. That strengthens the case for asking whether highly organized metal–deuterium systems may contain physics that deserves a closer look.
Our only constructive suggestion would be a little caution in how strongly some of the anomalous systems are connected to the deleted subspace. Force-free Taylor states, for example, already have a conventional Maxwell–MHD description, while the Shoulders observations remain open to several possible interpretations. We nevertheless agree that the recurring pattern is intriguing, and these systems strike us as particularly interesting test cases for your expanded electrodynamics—especially if the additional mode can ultimately predict something measurable that the conventional treatment does not. That would turn an intriguing “signpost,” to use your term, into a genuine experimental discriminator. We very much look forward to the next article.
That one's new to me. Nice find. They see a plateau below 2 keV in Pd and Ti, eighteen orders above bare nuclei, and they pin it on screening in the damaged surface layer. There's nothing exotic in it anywhere. 1989 was supposed to have killed exactly that. Mechanism's still a fight though: Czerski reads the same plateau as thermal fusion, screening unchanged. His titanium disagrees with theirs. The palladium agrees.
Yeah, fair. Had it wrong in print, fixed it this week. Taylor states are ordinary MHD, they need nothing anybody deleted. Force-free means the force on the plasma is zero BY CONSTRUCTION, so the six-component theory's one channel sits at exactly zero. The textbook explains that state completely, then has nothing left to measure in it. Shoulders I hold even looser. Feynman's letter hands you a confinement mechanism straight out of standard electrodynamics, given a field and a quadrupole. The clusters are supposed to form with neither.
Forget deuterium. Put a monopolar receiver in a sealed Faraday enclosure. Does it hear what a dipole can't, and does the falloff go 1/r or 1/r squared. It costs a weekend and needs no palladium. A null kills the propagating half of my argument outright.
PS: show me a screening measurement in that damaged-layer regime that separates the two mechanisms. Or is it just the titanium?
Excellent work and thank you for being one of the voices willing to give something like Cold Fusion an honest look despite the background noise of popular misinformation.
This is an excellent piece of writing, Paul!
Let's remember that a certain international criminal and all around extremely bad person -- a real spherical bastard, if you will -- convinced the equally-morally-corrupt Mormon leadership to have Pons and Fleischman's funding pulled.
Love this stuff, the science content, the thinking/digging a level deeper, and above all the open, exploring measured exposition. No one selling anything but "let's look deeper".
That sounds like science to me.
As a 'guy off the street' and armed with the additional information that Dr. Wilhelm presents here (the under saturation of the material, i.e.) and the scale of the physics -- desktop physics, not multi-decadal accelerator projects -- couldn't this simply be re-tried and 'done right'?
I mean....isn't that what they did w/Toyota in France at IMRA? And yet it did not pan out. And Fleischmann persisted until his death, and Pons bailed out to become a French farmer or something....
I'd be more interested in a story on what Toyota/IMRA did & tried than anything else at this point.
Last I read, "they" found a very low energy anomaly where some form of D-D fusion might have been happening but in the sub keV realm. While higher by *dozens* of orders of magnitude than it should have been, it was still far too low in any absolute sense to be of practical use.
Still.
How hard can it be to get sub keV deuterium smashing around, play with electrodes, beams, etc on a 'desktop'? Seems like a super fun area to look into...
Finally a purely kneejerk physics-for-poets vibe, from...from nowhere, really: What if it's about 'shape' and not energy or chemistry? What if it's about the shape of the D interacting with D? The shape provided by the material and fields the D is embedded within...?
<shakes head to clear it>
Anyway, great article, Dr. Wilhelm. Thanks for publishing.
Your last paragraph is the one I'd keep. Shape rather than energy is close to what the newest result actually says, and you got there from nowhere, as you put it.
The sub-keV work you're pointing at is UC Davis and Berkeley, published this year on DOE money. Deuterium beam into a palladium or titanium foil that's being electrochemically loaded from the other side. What the loading buys them is a screening potential: palladium goes from 0.8 keV to 1.7, titanium from 0.3 to 0.9. Same increment on both, from a lattice, at room temperature. That's your shape, doing measurable work on a nuclear rate.
You're right that it's useless as power, and the authors say so themselves, many orders below anything that could run a kettle. The 10^18 enhancement figure that gets quoted is at the single lowest energy they probed, 0.25 keV, not across the range. Worth carrying that number with its energy attached or it oversells badly.
The part I like most is that they refuse to explain it. Their constant-screening model breaks below 2.5 keV, so they offer depth-dependent screening or low-energy resonances and pick neither. A group in Szczecin reads the same plateau as ordinary thermal fusion at unchanged screening, and says it confirms something they published two years earlier. Effect corroborated, mechanism wide open.
On re-trying it properly: there's a 2019 Nature paper called Revisiting the Cold Case of Cold Fusion, which is your question asked by people with a budget. Start there.
IMRA I can't tell you about honestly. I know the shape of the story and I haven't done the reading, and it's the one people keep asking me for. It's on the list.
Gold answer. Thank you.
Cheers, Paul! 🥂 I would add David Fryberger, former Professor Emeritus at Stanford, for his group's discovery of cavity lights / mobile luminous objects. For me it is a quintessential case -- The existing framework could not fully elucidate the phenomenon observed, and so Fryberger went in search of an explanation that brought him back around to ball lightning and magnetic charge / magnetic monopoles / Dyality rotation, based on Schwinger's concept of Dyons.
I should also mention the gigantic elephant in the room with regards to Pons and Fleischmann. Their research was curtailed by none other than Jeffrey Epstein, who convinced the Mormon leadership in a closed door meeting to have their funding pulled. The scientific community has an obligation to fully correct this conspiracy to suppress, and the Mormon leadership should be held accountable as well.
Arcane, THANK YOU for bringing up Dyons and Fryberger. This is gold. Investigating this now.
✨
Figure of 8. Infinity. Push, Turn, Pull onto Pull, Turn, Push. Repeat. Hurricanes and Tornadoes are Cold Friction. Thats Elevate (Magnetism or Spiral or Horizontal or Circular Rotation aka HURRICANES) with Lift (Electrical or Cylinder or Vortex or Vertical Spin aka TORNADOES). When combined you get GYROSCOPIC ROTATION (Levitation aka GRAVITY). Movement is GROUND UP. Thats Physics.
Cold Fusion is Volcanoes and Earthquakes. That Matter Creation (Fusion) with Reduction (Fission) with Containment (Vibration or Gyroscopic Spin/Rotation). Thats Biology. Create, Reduce, Contain. Repeat. GROWTH or Inside Out.
Chemistry is Existence. Physics is Telekinesis or Cold Friction or Artifical Reality or Flight (Movement or Mind). Biology is Pyrokinesis or Cold Fusion or Augmented Reality or Fuel (For Existence and Movement).
Simple. See my Substack.
Very interesting article! - Even as a person just starting B.Sc. in electrical engineering this year - but why so lurid phrases like: "the physics that textbooks dont show"? Its catchy i'll admit that...
Thank you! Yes, it is catchy. But it's also true, at least when considering how long it took me personally to peek behind the curtain. It's not that the information is hidden, but you're also not made aware of it easily. I try to bring it to the foreground.
excellent
Thank you so much for covering this!
Here is a documentry about this:
https://youtu.be/tZae1KCLdOY?si=yN74MyCSvWFhS90b
Ate my comment. See eq.(14) in: https://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell-ga.htm . (Geometric /Spacetime Algebra version of Maxwell, ∇² A = ∇ F = J, with J unpacked into 24 components of E and B.) Could you please tell me which term or terms in that correspond to the neglected 7th term you found? Or is that in the Lorentz law or something?
Eq. (58) & ff. for waves may be needed to decipher which components do what.