Badlands Media - Spellbreakers Ep. 158: Epstein, His Physicist Pals, and Cold Fusion

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

In Episode 158 of Spellbreakers, Matt Trump examines the strange overlap between Jeffrey Epstein’s elite scientific circle and long running research into cold fusion and alternative energy technolog...ies. Matt explores Epstein’s connections to prominent physicists, the funding networks surrounding advanced physics research, and the unusual scientific gatherings that brought some of the world’s top minds into Epstein’s orbit. The conversation digs into why controversial energy research such as cold fusion has been dismissed for decades despite periodic breakthroughs and renewed scientific interest. Matt also considers the broader question of how powerful patrons, intelligence networks, and elite academic institutions may influence which scientific ideas are supported, suppressed, or quietly pursued behind closed doors. By tracing Epstein’s relationships with leading scientists and examining the history of cold fusion research, Matt raises deeper questions about the intersection of money, power, and the future of energy technology.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:10 out of Badlands. Explain those Badlands. That's a hell of a name. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Spellbreakers here on Badlands Media. It's good to see you all. We need to just watching why we vote over there. It's the show that precedes me. It's a very exciting show over there tonight about Arizona elections, something very near and dear to me as I live here in Maricopa County. the knowledge of what happened in previous elections is still very weighty to all of us here, as it is to everybody in the nation, because I think we all know the consequences of what happened in Arizona and other states in 2020 and in other years, too. So very exciting to see Marissa Caldwell on a show with Cannescon and Aux.
Starting point is 00:01:26 Ash tonight. It was a pleasure. I got to, they're actually still wrapping up there, so I've got to turn it down. So it doesn't come through on the mic. This is Spellbreakers, and I see my wonderful audience coming in in the chat. I love all of you. It's so great to see you here. We have this time together with you to talk about things that are hopefully important to all of us. And tonight, I think we have a nice show. Now, you may have noticed. I had a little bit different intro this week just now. It was an abbreviated intro. I'm redoing the intro to my show and making it taped. So I can just play it instead of up till now. I've sort of had to play a bunch of slides along with the music
Starting point is 00:02:16 and it's different every week. And I'm making a more substantial one that, let's see, make sure that we can cut off Matt's head. Okay. Maybe we'll adjust the camera a little bit then. Okay, let's do that. Let's do that. How's that?
Starting point is 00:02:34 Is that better? That's better. Okay. My camera gets jostled. I try to leave it up during the week so that it's the same place every week. So there's a little bit of consistency. And it gets jostled around a little bit, though, with all the cables and everything. Anyway, I'm making a new intro.
Starting point is 00:02:53 That's the full two-minute version of the Route 66 theme that I've been using so far. But I wanted to make, I made about half of it, and I wanted to make a little teaser version that's only 20 seconds long. Because, you know, in classic television, sometimes you get the short intro and sometimes you get the long intro. And tonight, well, I'd made the short intro so that we could jump right into the show. Tonight's show is titled, pop up the slides here in a moment. I guess I could make myself big for in the moment. I know we're going to show slides here in a moment, but tonight's episode is called Epstein and Cold Fusion.
Starting point is 00:03:35 The title was a little bit longer in the feed, rumble feed, but that's the subject for tonight. So we're going to jump right into that here. But tonight's episode of Spellbreakers is brought to you in part by, well, by my pillow. We love my pillow. You know, Mike, I hope Mike is making a lot of money off these ads because it's really been one of the,
Starting point is 00:03:57 key supporters of Badlands Media for years. So let's hear from MyPillow. It's finally here, our second annual mega sale. This sale only comes around once a year, so take advantage of the best offers ever while you can. For example, save 50% on our Geese Dream bedsheets as low as 2998. And for the first time ever on TV, My Pillow mattresses and My Pillow Mattress Stoppers is low as 9999.98. And you save 50% on our Luxpeer six-piece tall sets. Regular 69.98, now only 39-98. And our best-selling standard, MyPillows, regular 49998, on sale for 1798. Way not it.
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Starting point is 00:05:06 Tonight's episode of Spell Breakers is also brought to you in part by All Good, by our own Jessica Storm. Make self-care great again with All Good by Jessica Storm. Made in small batches by Jessica in Florida with only clean ingredients with purpose, zero junk, and packaged in amber glass jars, so it's all good inside and out. Start with the lightweight, pure, whipped tallow for all over hydration, tighten up with the no-talk smoothing serum, treat your hair with the game-changing tallow hair mask, and finish with the tamed hair serum or tallow beard balm for control and style.
Starting point is 00:05:53 Ready for spring, grab some all-good tallow sunscreen and bug out balm to nourish your skin while protecting it. Get a bundle of your faves at badlandsmedia. combs.combe, all good, and use code badlands to discount your entire purchase and to support the creators at Badlands Media. That's badlandsmedia.tv slash all good promo code badlands. Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Yes.
Starting point is 00:06:23 Let's see, Bay Theater. Dave, you had something I wanted to call out right now. All of you at this love. I love everybody coming by. I see you during the week who UC was here. The team at Sapphire purposely avoided using the term
Starting point is 00:06:39 fusion because they're wary of getting dog piled the way Ponds and Fleishman were interesting. I actually don't know what we're talking about but we're going to get into that. I think this is, by the way, I think this is going to be a two-part episode because I think we're just going to get into
Starting point is 00:06:55 some things. I'm going to try to cover a bunch tonight. And, but But I don't know how much I'm actually going to talk about the possibility of cold fusion per se. In this episode, I want to talk about more the sociology of how it came about and how it ties in with Jeffrey Epstein and a bunch of other people that we're going to talk about and how, well, we'll see. We'll see as we get into the episode. But I do want to say that as far as Epstein, I know that there's a lot of things that come to mind. when we talk about Jeffrey Epstein, when the name comes up. And I'll just going to say, we're not going to go anywhere near anything involving allegations of more lurid type that have, well, not just allegations, but obviously proven facts in court of law.
Starting point is 00:07:51 So, and I don't want to diminish the importance of those kind of things, but this isn't about that tonight. So I actually want to not even really talk about it except for right now so that we don't cloud the issues that we are going to talk about tonight, sort of make a focus in on them, because I think they're just as important in a way about how the world works to talk about other things. And besides, as we know, lately, the Democrats and liberals have really taken up the case about the Epstein files and Jeffrey Epstein in a way that's very familiar to us on our side. for several years now that what we've been talking about, going back a number of years, about the other things, the more lurid things. And the Democrats are now very much on board about talking about it for the reason, for the specific reason
Starting point is 00:08:43 that they think it's a gotcha that could bring down Donald Trump. Because that's the most important thing to the left and to the Democrats, is bringing down Donald Trump. So everything that you see about Epstein right now, of course, in the media, always has a picture of him with Donald Trump now. And of course, we know that that's all been debunked a long time ago. There's no there there.
Starting point is 00:09:05 But you wouldn't know that, of course, from them. And in a way, that's, you know, people on our side have pointed out this maybe, you know, it was meant to be with Trump. He wants the Democrats themselves to bring attention to the Epstein files in that way, which for whatever reason, because we know the Epstein files contain much more than the lurid accusations. they contain some things that are very revealing, which is what we're going to talk about tonight. So let's get into it. Let's see.
Starting point is 00:09:36 I wish I could go through and say hello to everybody in the chat. I love you all. So Sammy the Squirrel is here. I saw your you sent me the link to your blog, your substack, excuse me, about the keeping the ongoing tally of things in the Iran situation, which of course, I've heard the term narrative. narrative discombobulation, or does that, did I just make that up, about the concept I didn't make up. It's out there in the wild, including many people here in Badlands, the idea that we are purposely experiencing both from Trump and from his administration, conflicting messages about what's going on that are meant to do that, that are meant to destabilize the entire news cycle and news narrative
Starting point is 00:10:23 from latching on to anything in particular, and that we don't even know what's real or not. So we've got that situation going on this week. And I think a lot of us, probably, I can only speak for myself, but I think a lot of you out there may agree with this, that this is, among other things, this takes a psychological toll
Starting point is 00:10:43 just to try to figure out what's real, what isn't. Is there, you know, is there what about the war that we're seeing is actually real? So we'll talk about, that's going to filter into our discussion here tonight. So without further ado, let's get into this. Let's get into this. So I'm going to share the screen and share screen, Chrome tab.
Starting point is 00:11:12 All right. Okay. I can actually just share the window, I think, tonight because I don't have videos I'm going to play. So, okay. Here we go. All right. So tonight we have Jeffrey Epstein and Cold Fusion part one. So part one.
Starting point is 00:11:29 I'm already declaring there's going to be part two, because I don't want to rush too quickly through the material I had assembled about this. And I think the other part we're going to do where we talked about more fringe science and interesting science things in general. Well, I'll save that to part two. You know, this show did start out. It was meant to, you know, I started up doing with Patrick Gunnells and we focused on scientific things that was the intention.
Starting point is 00:11:56 And I tried to do, pay homage to that at first and how I, setting up the show because Patrick sort of let me set it up. But I sort of got away from that a little bit because it was hard to talk about some of the scientific things. The first issue was that I didn't realize Patrick was a flat earther and that he had set up the show primarily to go in that direction. And that was just not acceptable to me. And it still is not acceptable to me. If you saw the, well, let's not get into that. but it's not the kind of way I approach science. I was once a scientist.
Starting point is 00:12:36 I still try to call myself that. I still call myself a physicist. And to me, calling myself that places a burden of an obligation on me that I don't hold other people to, but that I hold myself to, which is that I want to represent the body of expertise that would go along with anybody calling them. and the training I received from that and that it doesn't mean I'm right about everything. It certainly doesn't mean I'm right about everything and know everything about physics.
Starting point is 00:13:10 And that that's very true. But it means that I strive to hold myself to a standard about what I say. I don't necessarily have to be right all the time, but I hate providing information that is incorrect, that it comes out of ignorance. And so I'll always, I'm very conservative. I'm a very conservative physicist in the sense of, not politically, but in the sense of where I'm willing to go with things. So tonight we're going to touch up on something like that a little bit with cold fusion.
Starting point is 00:13:44 There's a topic, but we're going to be, I'm going to be not get into that as much, the physics of that is much, but we will do a little bit of physics. So let's do that. So, the Bell Breakers, Jeffrey Epstein, Cold Fusion Part 1. If you like in the show, please do consider giving a thumbs up. We really appreciate the thumbs up. I tend to forget to ask for thumbs up. But hey, I gave myself a note to do that. So let's do that. So let's hope this works.
Starting point is 00:14:15 I'm going to do slides here. Okay. So we did we did our sponsors, two of our sponsors, at least, my pillow and all good. All right. So this all started because I saw a I didn't I didn't seen this I hadn't been following the Epstein files release I was let let other people dig into it that are really into it and if anything pops up that's of interest and I'm going to pursue it well something did pop up of interest in X post that I saw and this is definitely caught my eye and so this is from Dataset 11 one of the PDFs and I found it it's if you can can find it on the justice.gov website on their dedicated Epstein search, which is okay.
Starting point is 00:15:06 It's not the greatest search feature. I would have wanted a little. I could have made a little better search feature because you can't really search very well for multiple terms once. So anyway, but I'm glad they, I'm not complaining. I got to find what I wanted. So it was this, it was this email that was sent from Jeffrey Epstein. to a gentleman named Al Sekel, and we'll get into who he is here in a minute. And it was set on the October 1st, 2009. I remember what I was doing that day, by the way, beside the point. But it's funny how sometimes you go, oh, yeah, I know what I was doing that day.
Starting point is 00:15:44 And at 744 in the morning, and it was part of a thread. It's actually a response to something, response to, hey, in the subject line, I tried to find the beginning of this thread in the Epstein files, but I couldn't. That was, so I don't know if it's in the files or not. There are follow-up messages to this, which we're not going to get into at the moment. We may save those for part two. But this message began, regarding cold fusion, so this is Epstein talking. Regarding cold fusion, I killed pawns years ago.
Starting point is 00:16:18 So, okay, first of all, that sounds bad. I killed pawns. So you can see that I put up. pictures there. There's Epstein. Born in 1953, supposedly died in 2019. I think there's grounds, more than enough grounds to believe he isn't dead. And Al Seckle, there's a picture of him below who was born in 1958, and he supposedly died in 2015, although that's not actually confirmed. Very interesting that both of them are, you know, sort of, we'd only actually know if both are dead.
Starting point is 00:16:55 And then the Pons, Pons refers to Stanley Pons, because we know that because it's about Cold Fusion. There's another Pond. If you search for Pons, Pons name in the Epstein files, there's another Pons there that'll pop up, who I think is Cuban and it has nothing to do with this, as far as I know. So regarding Cold Fusion, I killed Pons years ago.
Starting point is 00:17:17 So Stanley Pons born 1943, a physicist. So the message is, is definitely not literal, which is sort of good. I'm glad that he's still alive because otherwise you might think that, wow, did Epstein have him killed? He didn't have him killed because Pons is still alive. So it can't mean that. It means something else.
Starting point is 00:17:41 It means his career and his ideas, as we'll see. So Stanley Pons, born in 1943. And he's a professor at the University of Utah, or he was. I don't think he's there anymore, but he was at the time of all the interesting things happening that we're going to talk about. All right. So, let's talk about this guy, Al Sekel. Who is he? So he was born in 1948.
Starting point is 00:18:10 Al Sekel, I'm not going to read all of this. These are my notes, sort of, but let's see here. He was an American collector of, this is from Wikipedia, actually, was an American collector and popularizer of visual and other types of sensory illusions. who wrote books about them. So he wrote books about optical illusions. He's active in the free thought movement as a skeptic in the 1980s. Basically that means he's an atheist. The free thought movement means free of religion movement, free of belief in God. He was the co-founder and executive director of the Southern California skeptics. So he's a self-identified skeptic with a capital news coverage arising from his connection to Jeffrey Epstein has stressed
Starting point is 00:18:56 Seckles misrepresentation of his education and credentials. So at one point he was, yeah, claiming to have degrees he didn't. I don't really care about that. That doesn't mean anything in terms of physics being valid or not, whether you have a degree or not. Anybody can call themselves a physicist if they want. Anybody can write journal articles and send them to, and send up preprints.
Starting point is 00:19:18 The science is valid no matter who you are. having a degree, as I was saying before, it's something that allows you to say, well, I am versed enough to know what you might suppose to know about physics in general and about some specific subfield within it to claim some kind of expertise. But anybody can be a physicist. Born in New York City, father was German-born painter and graphic artist. Mother was a refugee from the Nazi, so he is, like Epstein, they're both Jews. So was Jewish raised in a Jewish household, attended Cornell University from 76 to 78, but left without receiving a degree, was active in the free thought movement. Okay, as we said, generated a number of articles and pamphlets.
Starting point is 00:20:12 Ah, here we go. He co-created the Darwin Fish Design. Did you know that? which was first sold as a bumper sticker and a t-shirts. But then somebody else came along and sort of did the same thing, but with magnets on the back of cards, and they got it to a big legal battle over it. He started the, and they lost.
Starting point is 00:20:30 He and his partner, they lost because they hadn't protected their copyright. Started the Southern California skeptics and became a spokesperson for science and their relationship to the paranormal. I love that. That's so Wikipedia. He became a spokesperson for science. It's like, what does that mean? I don't know what that means. I have no idea what they think it means. I will speak out for science. You know, it's like, was that Professor Dave guy? I'm speaking out on behalf of science and what it be. Oh, God. You know somebody is just insufferable if they say something like that. Okay. Created an interactive website on illusions, including several picture books for children. Collected scientific papers of a number early, of early molecular biologists.
Starting point is 00:21:18 So he became a collector of scientific papers at one point, which is interesting as well, it's gonna tie into a lot of the stuff we're talking about tonight. He's accused of absconding with over half a million dollars. So he got into trouble for supposedly, sort of embezzling money and getting, and, ditching out on some financial obligations.
Starting point is 00:21:43 And then he supposedly died. So we have somebody who, you know, died under mysterious circumstances that allowed the termination of some situation, personal situations, sort of like Epstein, and like somebody else we're going to see here in a minute, too. So, well, let me check the cat, I'll make sure I'm not. All right. All right. All right. So this slide here. So he also married somebody named Isabella Maxwell, Isabel Maxwell, who was born in 1950.
Starting point is 00:22:21 And that name should be interested in Isabel Maxwell. Yes, Isabel Maxwell is the sister, the older sister to Gilein Maxwell, the known associate of Jeffrey Epstein. So they're connected not just by, you know, there's your connection right there. And then both Glein and Isabel are daughters of, or just Robert Maxwell, who that's not his original name. He was born in Eastern Europe, in the former Czechoslovakia, actually, in the now in the Ukraine. So we'll talk about him because he's actually sort of important in this whole story, even though he died in 1991, again, under weird and mysterious circumstances, allowing him to escape a lot of financial obligations.
Starting point is 00:23:12 So anyway, in 2009, Seckle was involved in organizing a science conference. This is one of the things. This is going to tie in. This is where we get into. You've heard, maybe heard that Epstein was, you know, he had pals who were science in AI and physics. And so this is one example. I don't, this is not the only one.
Starting point is 00:23:32 But in 2009 Sechle, this guy Al Sechle, was involved in organizing a science conference with Finan and Sear and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Mind Shift Conference took place in early 2011 on Epstein's private island, Little St. James, in attendance were scientists Murray Gail Mwan, the late Murray Gailwan,
Starting point is 00:23:54 Leonard Mladenov, who's Caltech, Gerald Sussman, Francis Arnold, in addition to actor and cryptocurrency component, Brock Pierce, and also Marvin Minsky
Starting point is 00:24:08 should be mentioned in there too. Now, these names, all of these names, the first four names, all were familiar to me already. So, Gilman, a very famous physicist. Very famous. He came up with the theory of arcs and the theory of the strong nuclear interaction that holds nuclei together, which we're going to talk about tonight, actually. Not his version of it. We'll talk about nuclei tonight, absolutely, because you can't talk about cold fusion without talking about nuclear physics. Miladinov, also a nuclear physicist at Caltech. He's still alive. Sussman wrote a famous book on computer science, and his lectures online from MIT are available
Starting point is 00:24:52 where he goes through this book using a computer programming language called List, if you've ever heard of that, which is a super geeky language. I watched not half of his course at one point. And Marvin Minsky, who was a great pioneer in AI, also at MIT, it really came up with the idea of modeling AI networks on the human neuron and the similarity between that, making basically electronic versions of neurons and building neural nets. Minsky was very, very influential on that in the old days. We're talking early 1960s at MIT.
Starting point is 00:25:30 And his lecture, he has a lecture series online too for MIT when he was pretty much Professor Emeritus by then. It's more of a philosophical course on AI. And I watched about half of that at one point two, all these years ago. So those names were familiar to me. Francis Arnold, she's an American woman who did pioneering work in bioengineering that allowed her to win the Nobel Prize. And then Brock Pierce, who was a child actor for Disney, these were all at this mind shift
Starting point is 00:25:59 conference in the little St. James Island, who went on to, he founded Tether, the cryptocurrency and he basically set Jeffrey and Epstein up in becoming the co-founder with Coinbase. So we have cryptocurrency, we have AI, and we have physics. Epstein had supposedly this fascination with those kind of things. I think there were some things at Zorro Ranch too in New Mexico, but I didn't go deep into that part of that. I wanted to, I sort of, I wound up going deep into something else, which is this message about
Starting point is 00:26:33 cold fusion. So let's get into that. Let's talk about. So Stanley Ponds, let's talk about him. Stanley Pons, born August 23rd, 1943 in North Carolina. So he is not Jewish. So everybody in the previous slide is Jewish, if you're keeping score, if this matters to you. I know Jewish people keep score. So they know who's Jewish and who isn't generally. So it's not anti-Semitic just to keep track with that. Francis Arnold is not Jewish and neither is Brock Pierce, but everybody else on the slide besides them is Jewish.
Starting point is 00:27:09 And this is going to come up to because we're going to find some connections with Israel. There's some very strong ones, actually. See how everything is just coming together in the news, all of this. Stanley Ponds, born in 1948, not Jewish, born in North Carolina, attended Wake Forest University, began his PhD studies in chemistry at the University of Michigan, but left before completing his PhD. In those days, you didn't need a PhD to become a college professor. Finished his PhD.
Starting point is 00:27:37 Oh, but he did. He did. He finished a PhD in England at the University of Southampton. Or in 1975, he met Martin Fleischman, chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah. Okay, so let me make sure we're... I have to keep checking. If you've been with my show a while, sometimes my mic goes out, and I don't notice it for a while.
Starting point is 00:28:04 So I just got to make sure I don't teach. Matt, can't hear you. Okay. A thousand peeps here. Hit the sums up for Matt. Yes, please do. Would love that. Are there really a thousand people?
Starting point is 00:28:13 Good. Good. It took me a while to build back up to levels I had on Wednesday night when I moved over to Friday. We're hitting a stride. BC was here. L.O.E.C. Love your morning show. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:28:28 anti-Semitism is non-reciprocal, merely noticing is anti-Semitic. I know what you're saying. And it's okay for Jewish people to notice Jews, but it's not okay for non-Jewish people to notice who's noticing, I guess it's called. But I don't really care. I just don't care. I don't care. I have a lot of Israeli friends, physics friends.
Starting point is 00:28:49 I have a dear friend who lives in Israel, a couple of them that go to the conference I'm planning to go to. and I think about them when anything is going on there, and I wish them the best, and that's all I'm going to say. So send me the squirrel. It's amazing what you can find when you connect this fact-based docs. Yeah, so we're going to be connecting dots tonight.
Starting point is 00:29:16 I should say, doing this, I was like, okay, okay, this is interesting. This is interesting. And then something came out of the blue that I definitely wanted to. get to tonight that really just made me connect a lot of dots and I'm going to hope hopefully I can lead you to that kind of place too so all right let's um I'll point it out when we get there Martin Fleischman who is Jewish born 1927 so you know senior to pawns pawns was his graduate student at University of Southampton and he he's passed away in 2012 He was born in Czechoslovakia.
Starting point is 00:29:57 Family moved to the Netherlands, to basically to escape Nazi persecution, served in the Czech Air Force during the war, moved to London to study for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in chemistry at Imperial College London. His thesis, I thought this was interesting, thesis on the diffusion of electro-generated hydrogen through palladium foils. Oh man, does this come up?
Starting point is 00:30:32 It's like, oh, well, that sounds pretty weird. I don't know what that means. You'll get to see what that means. Fusion of hydrogen through palladium foil. Foil like a metal foil. He became professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton. At one point, Fleischman confided to pawns that he might have found what he believed to be a way,
Starting point is 00:30:58 to create nuclear fusion at room temperatures. Ah, here we go. Here we go. So let's just pause. And just for the record, why is this important? Why is this important? Because it might be a tremendous source of energy to humanity. It could be one of the greatest thing ever for mankind to discover something like this.
Starting point is 00:31:26 So he thought, he told Pons, after Pons was at South Hampton, he said, I think I found a way to do this at room temperatures using techniques I know about in metal ergy. So, okay, from 1983 to 1989, he and Pond spent $100,000 in self-funded experiments at the University of Utah. Fleischman wanted to publish it first. So they thought they had found it, this technique to do this, which, which, would be absolutely revolutionary.
Starting point is 00:32:01 They wanted to publish it in an obscure journal and had already spoken with the team that was doing similar work at a different university for joint publication. All right. So this is where you get into just the politics of science, being the first to publish so that you become the first to get credit. And, well, that's probably something people would recognize as something that we would have. Right. So getting into print, it's not getting published first. It's just getting, you want to submit the journal article first.
Starting point is 00:32:34 Because whenever you have a journal article in signing, it always, they always lists the date it was received, manuscript received on this date. And that's sort of like the precedence indicator. All right. So they got published. They published the article, it came out. they submitted it and it was received by a journal on the 22nd of March 1989 and then the very next day they did something that was sort of
Starting point is 00:33:07 not the standard way of doing science in that they held a press conference and they got a lot of knock for this the now to be fair they had submitted a journal article already the so when you hear about a term like science by press conference. Yes, this is an example of that, but it's not as bad as some other examples. I'm thinking of David Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, Johns Hopkins gave a press conference saying that they had found the source of AIDS, the AIDS epidemic. Oh, we found the virus. We found the virus. And they did it by press conference, as far as I knew, completely by press
Starting point is 00:33:53 conference. And then that became the canonical story after that. So I know this from the book, inventing the AIDS virus, written by Peter Dewsberg, a very famous book. One of the first things that Redfielded me back in the mid-1990s was reading that book and thinking, wow, maybe everything's very different than I thought. But that's a different field of science. But this was somewhat the same. And then it was on the front page of the newspaper the next day. You, so that would be university. So this is Salt Lake Tribune. So they're obviously talking about University of Utah. U-Fusion finding energizes scientists. So you can see Fleischman and Pons at their press conference.
Starting point is 00:34:30 Nuke Fusion offers particle of hope for a better world. That's saying the least. They thought they had found it. And I do believe there's all indications as they believe. And Pons still believes that Fleischman maintained that they had found it. And at first people gave them a lot of credibility, but that sort of faded away. This all happened, by the way, in the spring of 1989, I had finished with my undergraduate physics degree at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. At the end of 1988, I'd already been accepted to graduate school at the University of Texas, but it wasn't going to start until the fall.
Starting point is 00:35:10 And so I was back at home in Colorado and working some odd jobs, just sort of preparing for go to graduate school. And this hit during that time. and it came and went basically before I even got there. But by the time I got to graduate school, it was definitely something that had sort of everybody had known about. And they were, they weren't, you know,
Starting point is 00:35:33 people weren't really to talk about it so much by then because of what had, how it had played out. But it was definitely the big thing that had just happened. So I have, I have some vivid memories about that. That was a, you know, it was an interesting time.
Starting point is 00:35:47 You know, Berlin Wall was about the fall. The World Wide Web was being invented, you know, it's a really, really interesting time in civilization to be alive. And to be starting a career in graduate school. Fleischman wanted to publish it first in an obscure journal. Okay, so we read that. So, oh, I mean, here's the important part. So why did they wind up doing this? Why did they sort of break this protocol and do a press conference? They claim it was the university pushed them to do this. The University of Utah wanted to establish priority over the
Starting point is 00:36:22 discovery and its patents by making a public announcement before publication. So they'd submitted the article that it hadn't come out in print yet. The journal article. In an interview with 60 Minutes on April 19th, 2009, so 20 years later, Fleischman said that the public announcement was the university's idea and that he regretted doing it. This decision perceived as short-circuiting the way science is usually communicated to other scientists later caused heavy criticism against Fleischman and Ponds. So it gives you a little bit of reason for some of the pushback and hard feelings over this issue.
Starting point is 00:36:56 But in the end, it's neither here nor there. The science stands or falls on its own. Whether they did it this way or not, in the end, doesn't matter. But it matters in how it might be received by the public and by the scientific community. But the science remains the science. And they did publish a journal article, which is the right thing. The journal article, here's the journal article. Let's see.
Starting point is 00:37:20 I hate it one of my curse. seems to disappear. All right. This is the journal article. I could only get the first page. I would have had to pay a bunch of money to a company called Elsevere, which we're going to so many dots connected it. We're going to Elsevere here at a moment.
Starting point is 00:37:43 And the journal article was published in the journal of electroanalytical chemistry, obscure journal, came out in the April, 19, issue, electrochemically, so electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium. So I've got to pull apart this title. We're not going to pull it apart completely right now. The key, the revolutionary part is the words electrochemically induced. So that's the part about doing it at room temperature, like in a beaker, basically. achieving nuclear fusion, which as you may know, is a possible source of energy.
Starting point is 00:38:27 It's a process that we believe is a natural process. And it's the physics behind the bomb. And I say, we believe, because I'm actually putting it at my own personal little asterisk there about some of the things involving fusion, which I'll mention a little bit later when we get to it. But the revolutionary part was electrochemically induced. That would have made people, whoa, okay. But like I said, they'd already given their press conference. So here's where they would, here's to a physicist, this is the physics right here.
Starting point is 00:39:03 When you're doing physics is you're publishing a journal article or at least a preprint. Now you don't even have to publish. The physics happens now before publication. You talk about peer review journals and all that kind of stuff. That's slow. That's old hat. We're beyond peer-reviewed journal articles and physics now. What we do are pre-prints. We upload our papers to a pre-print server that marks when it was received and when it might be revised, but it's online and people can access it then. And that is effectively the new publication mechanism in physics, our pre-print server. Preprint means pre pre pre being printed in a journal before that.
Starting point is 00:39:47 And because it's just online, it's all digital means there's no, there's no scarcity of paper pages to have to worry about. Anybody can upload three prints. At least they used to. Now preprint servers, the most famous one came out of Cornell University actually, are acting more and more like journal articles themselves. And you can get rejected. You'll preprint and get rejected now. from preprint servers. That used to not be the case. They used to be sort of wide open. But they're sort of, uh, it, the idea of the people realize that it's sort of becoming the new
Starting point is 00:40:22 publication mechanism, or preprints. And, and so there's, there's now a little bit of review happening now. Um, and so, by the way, the web, the worldwide web was invented to share physics data. So, uh, you know, um, who was the guy that invented it? I can't remember the British guy at CERN. It was invented to share physics data with physicists around the world. So here it is, and it's got a bunch of symbols there. So Deuterium. What's Deuterium?
Starting point is 00:40:54 We'll get to that in the moment. That's a form of hydrogen. So there we go. There's your physics right there, that page. But I only had the first one. So let's talk about nuclear reactions that provide power. So we're going to jump into the physics. Now, we're going to jump into the physics.
Starting point is 00:41:13 But since it's 646, let me just mention that tonight's episode of Spell Breakers is brought to you in part. All right, well, you guys have been seeing this ad all week, have you not? I think we're going to, it's, we've got another ad, I think, it's our St. Patrick's ad. You guys are seeing this one. So here we go. Legend says on St. Patrick's Day, a beard without oil is just a chin with ambition. But a beard with soft disclosure beard oil? That's true treasure.
Starting point is 00:41:48 Spiced vanilla. Naked, smooth as a lepricons getaway plan. Soft enough to impress your barber, bold enough to confuse a baby goat. And this bore bristlebrush tames your beard like it owes the crown coin. Every bottle is American made, which means when you buy soft disclosure, you're supporting six American small businesses. That's not luck. That's capitalism with cheek. bones. And while you're at it, try our mint green deodorant, because even legends need fresh
Starting point is 00:42:17 pits. Soft Disclosure, go for gold. Visit softdisclosure.com and use promo code tiny bright for 15% off. He seems to not be evaluated by the FDA. Promocor does not apply to bubble distance. All right. Okay. So, there's some really interesting comments going by. Yeah, Al Gore, inventing the internet. Yeah. He didn't invent, he never claimed to invent the World Wide Web. So we say the World Wide Web, we mean it means like HTML, web pages, anything that you'd use a web browser to get. That was definitely invented in 1989. What was the guy's name? Oh, I can't remember. A British guy working it, sir. All right. All right. Love the bear chasing, tiny bright, Sammy the squirrel says. Yes, we like that.
Starting point is 00:43:12 Let's see. Electrochemical is chemistry, therefore electrons, not nucleus. Well, yes, but in this case, it did affect the nucleus. So it's electrochemically induced. It's by means of electrochemical reactions. And an example of an electrochemical reaction, by the way, if you ever took a chemistry class in high school, you probably did electrolysis, which is, you know, you put a, you separate hydrogen and I. oxygen through electricity probes in water. And that's an example of electrochemical reaction.
Starting point is 00:43:51 And in fact, that's pretty much exactly very close to what they did. What they did, when you see the diagram, basically they set up something almost as simple as that, but using specific materials and a special form of water, heavy water, it's called, and claim that this could actually produce nuclear fusion. in the nuclei inside the metal probe in the water was what they claimed they could do. And they claimed they could measure this by an increase in temperature that could not be accounted for by any other means. That was their evidence. And also of what are byproducts of fusion reactions, when you have a fusion reaction, there are bi-products.
Starting point is 00:44:36 And they said, we have those we see present too. That was their evidence that they claim. But using the most sort of simple way of doing it, it almost defies belief. And some would say, well, of course it defies beliefs because it's not real, would be one way of saying that. But is at the end of the story? Is that the end of the story?
Starting point is 00:45:01 So ZBM, $1, lurking while doing the dishes. Love this episode. I've always been interested in this subject. Thanks again, Matt. Down the hatch. Down the hatch to you. All right. Clarecats is working and lurking. Great show. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. All right. There was a comment by one of you. Let's see. Let's see here. Let's see. What was the one I was looking for? Just taking a breather here. Please give a thumbs up if you like in the episode. Really appreciate it. My old co-host, Patrick, would say, and give a thumbs up even if you don't like the episode.
Starting point is 00:45:42 So, good old Patrick, good old Patrick. I wouldn't have the show without him. I wouldn't have it. And so I'm eternally grateful for that. So, where was it? It was something, it was something Bay Theater Dave said. I thought it caught my eyes. I got to remember that.
Starting point is 00:46:09 EC was here, peer review was gatekeeping and very anti-science. Yeah, we didn't, you know, peer review. was a very recent thing. For most of the history of science, you didn't have peer review. You sent your article to a journal and they published it or not. They were the review. And anybody could start a journal and this is the way it happened. Or sometimes scientists just sent letters to each other.
Starting point is 00:46:32 That was their publication. So it was, this whole idea of it's peer reviewed or not is, I guess I laugh when I hear that because it's, you know, I didn't know maybe in other fields it's more important. but in physics it's not really important. You go mostly by the, you stand or fall on your own reputation as an author at some point. So, all right, my darling Cherie, hey Matt, good to see you. Again, thank you for your own feed, my darling, Cherie, because you, sometimes I cannot find things in the drumble app and the padlet.
Starting point is 00:47:14 The entire badlands disappeared for me out of my feed at one point. And I had to use your feed to find, it was, this was yesterday. I was looking for, like, John's show. And I couldn't find the badlands. It's like, where is it? No, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it's because of your feed, I was able to find it. It's like, they're going to have to build a better app.
Starting point is 00:47:41 All right. You're welcome. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. What did I say? I apologize in advance.
Starting point is 00:47:46 You had an insightful comment, and I'm like, where was it? What was it? Hello, Raw Shark lives. If you ever discover anything truly ground baking, do not patent it and do not put it in a journal. It will simply steal it and make you disappear. Okay, there's a case for that. And I can get that article for you, Eleanor 2000s.
Starting point is 00:48:05 That's okay. I don't think I would probably, we're going a mile a minute on all my subjects right now. Maybe I would be, I'm not going to turn you down on that, though. Um, it might be, I wouldn't mind reading it if it's not too long of an article. Um, because it's useful to know. I'm going to give myself a migraine trying to read that paper. Sammy the script. All right.
Starting point is 00:48:30 Uh, yeah, still not a virus. Okay. All right. Just taking a breather here. Taking a breather. Try not to, I try not to talk too fast. I've noticed some of the, some of the better hosts. here on Badlands, they'll talk slowly and deliberately.
Starting point is 00:48:49 Like, you know, Chris Paul does that and definitely Burning Bright does that. It's like, well, these guys know what they're doing. I should talk more deliberately. And there's John sort of mumbles. It's like I do sometimes too. So we've all got our style, but I'm always looking for my, I'm always looking to improve. You know, I definitely can improve. Well, do give a thumbs up if you're liking this.
Starting point is 00:49:12 Now let's dive into the physics. Let's just try the physics a little bit. And we're going to talk about nuclear reactions, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Now, and the reason I'm going to talk about both is a couple reasons. One, one is that I saw one of our Badlands hosts, somebody you would know. I'm not going to mention who. And there was something about fusion they were talking about. I can't remember what on their show.
Starting point is 00:49:38 And they brought up something article about fusion. and they and no it was it actually said fission but they read fusion so they actually saw the word fission was printed
Starting point is 00:49:52 and they read it out loud as fusion so I thought oh oh no this is terrible because there are two different things fission and fusion and the words themselves give you a clue what they mean fission is a breaking apart
Starting point is 00:50:05 not just of a nucleus but of anything and fusion is the fusing together of something not just a nucleus but of anything. So nuclear fission, a nuclear fusion, cousin process. And we'll give to talk about, I'm not just doing this to distinguish that and make that clear. It's actually a really important reason I want to do.
Starting point is 00:50:29 So here we go. So nuclear fission is the breaking apart of a nucleus. So some, here's the bottom line without getting too, I want to skip right to the bottom line. is that you know that the elements on the periodic table, there are some elements in the periodic table that are able to undergo this thing called fission where the nucleus can actually break apart into,
Starting point is 00:50:55 mostly into two big chunks. Like if you think of a big rock and think of it breaking apart into two, two, not halves, but a big chunk and a smaller chunk, that's what a nucleus can do. And it happens, there's very few elements that can do this. One of them is uranium. Plutonium is another. There's a few others besides that.
Starting point is 00:51:17 And there have to be, there's have to be special forms of the, of the nuclei that can do that too. Like not all uranium can undergo fission. Most uranium doesn't undergo fission. Small percentage of natural uranium can do. And it has to do with the number, the number of particles that are in the nucleus. Now, the number of particles in a nucleus that are protons, which has to do, have the charge, the electric charge is in protons, that determines what element you are. So every uranium, every uranium nucleus, no matter what form of it is, always has 92 protons.
Starting point is 00:51:56 But it can have a number of, different number of neutrons. The number of neutrons, by the way, is always typically bigger than the number of protons. And that helps that, we think that the number, that causes the, the, the electric charge of the protons to be sort of smeared. out. It's like adding, adding more in to sort of weaken the effect, because otherwise, packing 92 protons together, they'd want to fly apart. You know, no way nature could get those together. If you add some neutrons in enough, you can weaken that, that thing that would make them fly apart, and you can have a nucleus that holds together. And our current theory of how that happens was, well, that's what Murray Galman helped produce in the 1960s. Theory of the
Starting point is 00:52:40 strong nuclear force. It's strong because it has to hold the particles together that would otherwise fly apart due to their electric charge. That's it. That's what that's that's, that's as far as we need to note for this subject. So, so you different uranium, there's different it's called isotopes. As we heard that word. So all uranium nuclei have 92 protons. Most uranium has 146 neutrons in it. So if you add 92 to 146 very simple arithmetic, you get 238, and we call that uranium 238, indicate that's the type of uranium we're talking about, and most 97% of naturally uranium, which we abbreviate as U-NAT, natural uranium, is of that form. And U-238 does not undergo fission.
Starting point is 00:53:31 You have to have a special form of uranium. So what, and so the way fission would work, it doesn't work for U-2308. But the way it would work is you have a strain neutron. Now, where might that come from? Well, it can come through anything. We can be wandering around through some other process. Strikes a uranium nucleus and that if it hits at the right temperature, at the right temperature is actually correct,
Starting point is 00:53:59 but at the right speed, if it hits the right speed, not too fast and not too slow, it has to be right in the sweet spot. But it can cause the nucleus to sort of oscillate and get sort of, until it starts to oscillations get out of control and get sort of peanut shaped. This is our model of how it works, at least. And then it separates into two big chunks. That's fission.
Starting point is 00:54:25 That's what we mean by fission. And that was, here's where we get into. We've got to make sure we can stay on track. Seven o'clock. All right, we're going to move along. Now, there is a form. form of uranium. And it does do that. And it's, if you only have 235, not 238, but 235, so three less neutrons, because you always got the same number of protons. And less than one percent of
Starting point is 00:54:50 natural uranium is of this form. And if you do that, that's what it will do this, this fissioning thing. And it will split apart. And this is, this is something amazing because it, it actually not just splits apart, but out, it releases energy. Now, what do I mean by that? because you hear that term, release this energy. In this case, what energy means is basically it's speed, speed, in that the particles come out and it doesn't just break apart the nucleus. They fly apart. So even if the original nucleus is standing still,
Starting point is 00:55:26 the pieces will fly apart like a little mini explosion. That's the energy we're talking about. And that shows up, when you have a lot of particles doing that, that shows up as an increase in temperature. Temperature is basically speed of the underlying molecules or atoms. And the higher the average speed, the higher the temperature. Simple as that. All right.
Starting point is 00:55:49 So, and then the increase in temperature, you can do things like turn a steam turbine or something like that. A little bit of natural uranium does this. And so this isn't fusion. The reason I'm talking about this is because here's where we're going to get into some stuff. This is a slide I did for, this is the third episode of spellbreakers back. in January of 2023. It was about Oppenheimer. There were going to be a movie about Oppenheimer.
Starting point is 00:56:15 It hadn't come out yet. And so, and I was trying not to do Flat Earth. And I was like, Patrick, let's do something. I didn't realize he, you know, he basically thinks everything. So he had to sit there with his tongue sort of like this, like, oh, I'm going to let Matt talk about everything that's fake and gay. So, you know, I did a show on Spell Breakers about looking at whether nuclear bomb is real or not. and that's a whole different subject.
Starting point is 00:56:39 You're not going to find a more open-minded, conservative physicist than me. I'm very open-minded, but like G.K. Chester didn't say, what did he say? To the purpose of having an open mind is the same as having an open mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. So that's what I try to do. So I'm very open-minded about a lot of things and a lot of different perspectives, especially in this area we're talking about here, which is alternative energy and energy sources, the power sources, I should say, that are that are a little bit speculative, right?
Starting point is 00:57:21 Like this cold fusion idea, revolution. So fission was discovered when? It was discovered in late 1938 by a group of people working in, Germany, a group led by Otto Hahn, a German physicist. So 1938, just stop and think for a moment. Okay, so the war hasn't started yet. Germany has invaded Czechoslovakia by this point. So everybody knows there's going to be a war. The Nazis are in power. So Otto Hahn led a group with Felix Strassman and Lisa Meitner. She's going to be important. Remember that name Lisa Meitner. So, and they disliked.
Starting point is 00:58:04 discovered and observed fission. And this was at the time, and they measured it, they had uranium 235, and they bombarded it with neutrons. And I think so. I think this is how it happened. And they measured the increase in temperature and the presence of fission byproducts and discovered it. This was the cold fusion of its day, this discovery. But here's the interesting part.
Starting point is 00:58:33 I brought this up when I first discussed this. This is the same slide I used from three years ago. And they published this. Think about that. This is something that people thought about at the time as a power source and possibly a weapon. It was developed in Germany. And it was not kept as a secret. It was openly published.
Starting point is 00:58:57 And this has sort of always been very puzzling is how did this come about? We're going to answer this tonight. How did this come? I'm about. And this is going to tie right back into the very subject of the very email that we saw about Epstein talking to Al Saker about Stanley Ponds. Believe it or not, this is this is the important thing here. It was published in a journal article D. Naturvesen Schafton, which is basically nature science. In January of 1939, it was published. And that journal was that journal was owned then, by a German publishing company called Springer Verlag.
Starting point is 00:59:39 Verlog just means press. It's like Springer Press. This is important. This is the, we're going to remember this. We got to get through this part at least here. I have maybe 10 books by Springer Verlog. Every physicist or mathematician probably has a lot, small library of Springer Verlog books.
Starting point is 01:00:00 Really, probably the most reputable book publisher. in science, one of the most reputable book. If you want a prestige imprint for your research monograph, Springer Verlag is right up there at the top of the list. So remember this. So this was the journal article. So it was published by this team. And they said, we found fission. And they published it. And right away, it was picked up on by some people in the note, including Enrico Fermi, who was Italian, but he was living in the United States at the time. And multiple teams in the US, France, and the UK went and tried to duplicate it and they were successful. Now, this is, this is going to happen with cold fusion later on.
Starting point is 01:00:43 People try to go find it. They tried to duplicate it. And at first they thought they had. The first things after cold fusion is people said, oh, we found it too. And then people started backing off saying, you know what? I think we made a mistake. Now, this didn't happen with fission. And in fact, so Fermi is able to duplicate it.
Starting point is 01:01:04 Columbia University. And it's going to be Fermi who's going to, and with Einstein, are going to go to Franklin Roosevelt and tell them about this and saying, there's this thing. And the Germans found it and we found it and we think it could be used for a weapon. And this is what's going to cause Roosevelt in October of 1939 to start the Manhattan Project, which really doesn't get fully underway until 1942, but it was authorized in October of 1939. And by that point, the war has started in Europe. So think about this. We went from not knowing about fusion to it being discovered in Germany, published by Springer Verlag,
Starting point is 01:01:45 and then published to the world. And then it being picked up around other countries, including the U.S., and it kicks off the Manhattan Project. All right. Think about that. Okay, keep that in mind. So nuclear fission chain reaction. So the other thing about nuclear fission is that you can have a, it doesn't just be a one-off thing.
Starting point is 01:02:08 It can be a chain reaction, a chain reaction where one fission leads to another, to another, to another, to another. And this is, the reason it can happen this is because when you have a fission event, it's not just the two big pieces that come on. Think of a rock breaking apart. A big boulder breaks apart. You might just have the two pieces, but little rocks crumble off too. right? You might have something like that. That's sort of like with a nucleus too, in that you have neutrons sort of come out of the thing too,
Starting point is 01:02:40 free neutrons. And these neutrons, if they're the right temperature, not too fast and not too slow, are going to be able to then hit other uranium nuclei. And if they're the right kind of uranium nuclei, U-235, then those can fissioned. And you have multiple neutrons coming out at every step,
Starting point is 01:02:59 three or so. And so you have one, becomes three, becomes, you know, three times three is nine. And that's, that is the chain reaction. Now, you, you can have controlled chain reactions. That was first done in 1942 by Fermi at the University of Chicago. So the German team, they found Fission. They didn't, they didn't have a chain reaction yet. Fermi is the first one at the University of Chicago, below the football stadium. It was as part of the Manhattan project that was able to do a chain reaction in Fission. And then you been of uncontrolled fission when that's the bomb and that was first done in
Starting point is 01:03:35 1945 in the desert in New Mexico. Okay. Now to have to have a to have a to have a to have a chain reaction though you need uranium. You can't just use natural uranium. It's because there's not enough fissionable uranium in it. Less than one percent of natural uranium is fissionable. You have to enrich it. You have to take the uranium and beef up the amount of U-235 fissionable uranium that's inside of it. Now, how do you do that? This was a big problem. This was the, this was the big, question of how to do this. And it turns out that there's different processes of doing that. And one of the, the current way we do that to beef up the amount is we use centrifuges, which are
Starting point is 01:04:17 basically tubes that spin. And when they spin, the U-238, which is not fissionable, is slightly heavier than the U-235, which is fissionable. And so you basically, it's like separating out the cream, you know. And so the U-238, which you want to get rid of, is on the, goes to the outside, and the U-235, which is what you want, stays in the inside of the rotating tube. Now, you don't just do this once. And by the way, you have to use it, you have to put the uranium in a gas called uranium hexafluoride. All there's a bunch of stuff. It's not important at the moment. You have to do this in, in cascading centrifuges. And this is the way we do it now. It's one centerfuge and what you get out of one centrifuge you put in the next one and the next one and the next one
Starting point is 01:05:02 one and at each step you get a little bit higher a little bit higher a little bit higher a little bit higher amount of u-235 until you get enough that makes it worthy of being like fuel in a nuclear reactor and you have to go from about less than one percent of u-235 to about five percent typically five percent you have to beef it up through your centrifuges that way to make it worthy of being nuclear fuel But it's still way short of what you would need for a bomb, for an uncontrolled reaction. For a bomb, you needed to be about 90% fissionable uranium. So you have to put it to a lot of centrifuges and very sophisticated and very delicate operations. So by the way, so I looked it up.
Starting point is 01:05:41 International monitors report that Iran has enriched uranium up to about 60%. So that's way short of 90%. So and the centrifuges are are basically what you want to if you're trying to take out Iran's nuclear program. That's what you'd want to go after with the bunker buster. So we're tying right into the current events right here is you want to destroy Iran's, you know, other things too, but primarily it's centrifuges because that's those are tough to build. Plaratus. Well, you get to build a whole new set of them. And but still supposedly they were only at 60%.
Starting point is 01:06:20 which is way short of what it needs to be a bomb. You could definitely use it as fuel in a nuclear power plant. You're still way short of that. So cascading centrifuges, why the U.S. bombed a bunch of metal tubes. A nuclear engineer explains the importance of centrifuges to Iranian efforts to build nuclear weapons. So there's sites right there. So if you're liking this, please do give a thumbs up, by the way. Please do give a thumbs up.
Starting point is 01:06:44 All right. Spell breakers. Okay, we did soft disclosure. Okay. please give a thumbs up. I'm remembering to ask for thumbs up this week. Now let's get to fusion. Nuclear fusion. Where are we at 7-11?
Starting point is 01:06:57 We've got to get through a little bit here. So nuclear fusion is taking not uranium but hydrogen, the simplest possible element, and basically slamming it together at high enough speed so that normally hydrogen nuclei
Starting point is 01:07:12 would want to push each other apart because they're both positive. So you have to overcome that. You have to really run them together really fast. It's called the Kulam barrier, technically. You have to get over that, and it relies on quantum mechanical tunneling and a bunch of other things.
Starting point is 01:07:28 And if you get them close enough, though, they'll stick. They'll stick together. And immediately, one of the two will turn into a neutron, saying, oh, we can't have to. That's too unstable to have two positively charged protons, which is what hydrogen nuclei are,
Starting point is 01:07:44 basic. One of them turns into a, into a neutron. and so you have hydrogen with an extra neutron. That's called deuterium. So it's heavy hydrogen, basically. And then other things come off. You get a neutrino and you get a positron and a gamma part.
Starting point is 01:08:02 A bunch of things have to happen right away that happen right, including high gamma radiation, which is very deadly if you get enough of that. So that's it in a nutshell. That's fusion. Pretty simple process, but very hard to achieve. You need a lot of, you need the, you need very high temperature so that the hydrogen nuclei are going very fast so they can run into each other head on very fast. And you, or high pressure, you need that. And those are, that's very hard to achieve.
Starting point is 01:08:33 And this is why, but what if you could do it at room temperature? This was the thing that ponds and Fleischman supposedly found. So Deuterium, by the way, this form of hydrogen, it's twice as heavy as normal hydrogen. You can make water with it, and that's called heavy water. And ice cubes made with heavy water will sink in normal water. So there's a whole story about heavy water being useful in nuclear reactors for reasons that have nothing to do with fusion. So that's one of the reasons people may. heavy water to begin with. Okay, so keeping an eye on the time here. So that's fusion. You're just
Starting point is 01:09:17 ordinary hydrogen and you're slamming it together. Okay. Now, but of course there's more to the story than that. There is the idea that where do you find fusion? Supposedly it's what powers the sun. And it supposedly powers all stars is the process of fusion. And you get fusion and then the The products of fusion like Deuterium, those undergo fusion and you wind up with helium. And this is the theory, one theory of how the elements are made. And I say one theory, some physicists hearing this would go, what are you talking about? This is what we know this is what does it. We don't know that this is what does it.
Starting point is 01:09:55 This is our current model. There's other ways that people think that why the sun burns, but we're not going to get into that tonight. Actually did a show about that too, and we'll circle back around to that at some point. And I happen to believe that there's some validity in alternate points of view, that it may not be fusion that powers the sun. Some people would think I'm a crank for saying that. But I'm open-minded about an alternate theory that we'll get into maybe some other time. It's also fusion is you can make a bomb out of that too.
Starting point is 01:10:24 Those are thermonuclear weapons, we call them. Thermonuclear means fusion power. And those have much higher destructive power and yield. Now, some people don't think that these weapons exist. I get it. I didn't know about that too. So, well, I want to give you, if there's people out there, that's freaking gay. Fine, fine. You're entitled to your opinion.
Starting point is 01:10:42 But tonight we're just going to stick you right to the standard interpretation here. Much higher yield than A-bombs. Adam bombs, uranium weapons, the kind that were dropped on Nagasaki in Hiroshima.
Starting point is 01:11:00 Vision weapons have never been used in war, except maybe the sci-up propaganda war. Then there's another way you can have fusion, which is in a reactor. You can, we make reactors that the first one was made in the 1960s in the USSR and then there were ones made in the US. Now we can have reactor. We can make fusion with very high temperature, high pressure containment devices. They're ring-shaped. And there was one at the University of Texas in the building where I worked. There was a total. a Wocomac fusion reactor.
Starting point is 01:11:38 The problem is, as of now, it takes more energy put in than you get back out. That's the holy grail of the fusion reactors, is we want more energy out through the fusion process than we have to put in to create these high temperature and pressures. So it's an energy loss. It's like spending money to make money, spending $100 to make $90. You're going to go broke, right? that has been the state of the art infusion reactors for half a century now. It's like, oh, we would just need a little bit more temperature and pressure and more research.
Starting point is 01:12:17 Now, there have been recent breakthroughs. We're not going to talk about them tonight. And then there's one other possible way to do fusion, which is the way Stanley Ponds and Martin Fleischman claimed they discovered, which is through in the laboratory at room temperature through electrochemical processes. Just an amazing idea. Now, we know that there is actually something like this. This is sort of an old idea.
Starting point is 01:12:49 This idea was not new to them. And what it is is that you need a special metal, palladium. It's the kind of metal that's in catalytic converters in cars. It's actually a similar kind of thing. And it has a palladium, like all metals, it's in a lattice structure, the crystal metals are essentially crystals.
Starting point is 01:13:07 If you didn't know that, they have a crystal structure. And the type of crystal structure that it has, palladium has a special property that if you push electron, if you push hydrogen atoms into it, they will sort of embed themselves, they'll absorb themselves into the structure of the palladium crystal. And it actually will blow the crystal up a little bit. And so this is what Fleischman had studied early on in his career.
Starting point is 01:13:47 And he thought he'd been able to find it and told Pons about it and said, I think we can get, make fusion happen this way. And they claimed they could actually get a net energy output. You know, the problem that reactors have. No, we get a net energy output. We measure it through an increase in temperature. and it happens at room temperature and basically we have to stuff
Starting point is 01:14:07 hydrogen into palladium through a very normal process this way but not just ordinary hydrogen it's actually this thing I call deuterium which is a heavy hydrogen so that's why you see look at a paper you see electrochemically induced nuclear fusion
Starting point is 01:14:24 with deuterium that explains that whole title there so that's what they did they said well I think we've got it we've got it that was their claims they made in March 1989. That's why it was revolutionary. All right. So we'll talk about what happens after that with cold fusion and the follow-up. We're going to do that next week.
Starting point is 01:14:46 But I want to get to the punch here with punch line. So this guy, Robert Maxwell, father, we're going to talk about him now for a little bit. Maxwell is the father of Gilaen and Isabel Maxwell. And there we go. There's the connections there. So we have to skip through some of this stuff because we've got only 720. So he's got a long story career. You know, born in Czechoslovakia Jewish, fought for the Czechoslovakian army, went to Britain afterwards, became a British subject.
Starting point is 01:15:23 Eventually he was in parliament. Look at this, though. So he co-founded, he basically went into publishing. Now, he's now and today now as being a tabloid publisher. But that was later on. At first, he went into some sort of scientific publishing. In fact, he co-founded, by the way, he was a distributor after the war. Who?
Starting point is 01:15:49 Springer Verlag. Okay, but that's not the end. Remember that? They were the one that published the original fission things. In 1951, he co-founded Pargammon Press with Paul Rosebow bowed. Paul Ross Faud, who is German-Austrian, not Jewish, is it? We'll talk about him in a second. He's where things get really interesting to tie back to Epstein in a way.
Starting point is 01:16:14 So in the mid-1960s, Pergammon Press begins acquiring a significant ownership stake in Springer Verlag. And Maxwell at this time, he's really into publishing, he develops new scientific journals. He wants to be reputable. Think of that with Epstein and his like things. with scientists, Maxwell was very much like that too, in his own way. But on a bigger scale, on a much bigger scale. But this guy, Paul Rossbound, but we're going to talk about him here in a minute, because this is where we get the punchline.
Starting point is 01:16:51 So eventually then Maxwell goes into acquiring tabloid, becomes a rival to Rupert and Murdoch, and that's how most people came to know him later on. So he, uh, oh, he quires other things. He requires British computers for a while. Okay. Oh, and by the way, he was a spy for Israel. Pretty much, we know that. He helped the, he helped the Czech Air Force supply Israel during the 1948 war of independence. So he's considered a hero. He sold a corrupted software that allows Israel to spy on other nations for a while. Okay. Um, he was very,
Starting point is 01:17:33 eventually forced to liquidate Targammon and other properties to cover his debts and he died deeply in debt. He wound up dying under mysterious circumstances on his yacht in 1991. We have to sort of skip over for now. But again, you get this strange idea of somebody dying under mysterious circumstances under cloud of allegations, legal and financial problems, mostly. Spy allegations, so it ties to multiple intelligence agencies, MI6. to Mossad, very much out in the open and known about that. So in his death there.
Starting point is 01:18:11 Okay, now let's talk about this. We finally get to, we're going to have this about far as we'll get tonight and then we'll have to pick up. Paul Rosfeld, co-founder, Maxwell co-founder of Pergammon Press. So he's ethnically German, and this is important because this will allow him to stay in Germany during the, during, during, the Nazi era. Now, he eventually leaves because he married his wife was Jewish. But then he went back to Germany. It stayed there during the war. And this is, so I had this chat GPT, make sure that I was leading this all right. So he served in Austria and Army in World War I, had steady physics. So
Starting point is 01:18:52 he did his thesis. He published a title, On Strain Hardening of Crystals by Allowing and Cold Stretching, very similar to the idea in Colt Fusion, by the way, although that doesn't really matter for here. He passed away years ago. So he became a talent scout for physics talent. And in 1932, he began work for publishing house Springer Verlag. So even before they had acquired it, he was working for that. And he was, please do give a thumbs up if you like this show.
Starting point is 01:19:28 Here's the punchline. Here's what we do. Through his work at Springer Verloc. Roseville knew much of the scientific community in Germany, and as a presumed Nazi, he had sources of vital intelligence relating to weaponry. In 1935, he began to work with the journal Notcher Vision Schaft. Okay, we've seen that. Where did we see that before? In the article, original article by Otto Hahn and Felix Strassman that publicized fission that allowed the Americans in the rest of the world to find out about fission that allowed the Manhattan Project to be authorized.
Starting point is 01:20:00 In 1938, he and his Jewish wife Hilda and their only daughter, Angela, went to the UK to avoid Nazi harassment. Rosbaugh was invited to stay in the UK, but he decided to keep working in Germany to undermine the Nazi regime. Okay? Well, that's the story, at least. In addition to his own family, Rossbaum helped the number of other Jewish families flee the Nazis, including that of well-known physicist Lisa Meitner, part of the Otto Fauntz Strassman's team. He was assisted his work saving Jews by an MI6 agent. Okay, and then finally, before the outbreak of the war,
Starting point is 01:20:35 Ross Bout hurried to print. And this is official, this is on the record. Rothbao hurried into print Otto Hahn's work on nuclear fusion in the German science Natrubyssinchaft in 1939. Rothbao realized the vast destructive potential of what Hahn, Strassman, and Meitner had discovered and he was acutely aware of the fundamental research
Starting point is 01:20:55 that had been done in Germany. He wanted the rest of the world to be aware of the significance of the work as soon as the Nazi planners did. By rushing Hans' manuscript into print, he was able to alert the physics community worldwide. So that solves the mystery that I didn't know this sort of, which is why the Germans published this possible weapons out in the open. So this was Paul Rosfeld. So there we go. Now we've got Maxwell and Roswell and the team that developed the fission process, became the bomb in World War II.
Starting point is 01:21:30 We've got the Maxwell daughters and Al Sekel and Jeffrey Epstein, who is connected to all these other physicists. And we've got Epstein claiming that he killed Stanley Pawns' idea of Cold Fusion, that he killed it in this email. So we're back to their email now. And this is where we're going to stop for the evening, because we've got to wrap up. I'm going to get over to Onlylands here in a minute.
Starting point is 01:21:55 But do think about going to, if you're not yet going to the Badlands, Gart 11 meetup. Think about going or birching is a virtual ticket, which I think is still on sale until March 15th. I will be there, as many other people will be there. And I talk more about it. We're at 727. Try to finish right at exactly 7.30. So, again, this is our punchline here. is that you see the common themes that we're developing here, the dots that are being connected,
Starting point is 01:22:34 people who are very wealthy and influential, involved in with scientists, cutting-edge technologies for building energy, for energy and bomb-making, either encouraging it or stopping it, connected throughout all this in a giant network, which is really, if you think about Epstein, he was a connector of people, just like Robert Maxwell was. and you have these dots, these dots being connected. So keep that in mind. This solves the big problem that I had, about, why did the Germans publish that? Well, it was because of Paul Raspod, who was co-founder with Robert Maxwell,
Starting point is 01:23:13 father of the Maxwell daughters who were connected right in with Epstein. So we're seeing some common things. Oh, and also, of course, the whole idea of being connected to Israeli intelligence and Mossad, in MI6, strongly connected and throughout all that. So let's, here's where we're going to call it tonight. Please do give a thumbs up if you like tonight's show. I'm going to check for if any late arriving. Now, if you're listening, I'm peeled.
Starting point is 01:23:44 Love the show tonight, send me this world. Thank you. Grace H-A-HP. Amazing. This is super interesting. If we can get a guard at Estes Park, Medved. with the mules it's less than an hour from the front gate of my range yeah you live in masonville yeah i know masonville very well thanks i grew up in four columns you see i'd probably say that will raid us but faster to give him the link yeah so if if you have the link for only lands we'll do that here right now um
Starting point is 01:24:18 so it's somebody could plop the link in there i don't want to go away from There we go. Thank you, Spetzel. Thank you. Thank you all for coming to tonight's show. I'm going to try and look at some of your comments afterwards. I really appreciate it. I love all of my audience. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed putting this together. This is the kind of show I really like doing where I can really dig into things and we can really get into the weeds. And I get a chance to be a physicist to talk about physics for the first time in a while. Thank you very much for an awesome episode, Claire Katzis. Thank you. Great show, man. Thank you. Thank you all.
Starting point is 01:24:54 All right, let's, I'm going to raid you guys over. Confirm rate. So I'm going to send you over. Carol Burnett will come back for those of you wondering too. I'm going to bring her back to, but, but tonight we just didn't. I'm so glad we had this time together. I'll do Carol tonight. All right. So we're going to raid over. I'll see you over at only land. You can jump over there.
Starting point is 01:25:15 Four, three, two, one. Okay. All right. So I want to end the stream now, too. in the stream. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Anybody still listening. See you next week.

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