Dr. Benjamin Barrowes: The Thrill of Discovery

For Ben Barrowes, cold fusion was a family affair. He remembers his father, a scientist, coming home and standing in front of the television, enthralled by the news of the cold fusion discovery, so much so that he ignored his family members. His father was convinced it was nuclear, and his excitement showed—and as Barrowes put it, his father wasn’t easily impressed. The enthusiasm was infectious. With AP Physics and AP Calculus under his belt, Barrowes attended the first ICCF as a teenager.

At ICCF1 in 1990, Barrowes was dazzled by the sharp, passionate scientists he met. Though a jovial atmosphere prevailed, some insisted that the discovery’s potential significance demanded a more serious approach. Barrowes recalled that, in response to a joke, Giuliano Preparata stood out of the audience, walked to the microphone, turned it around to face the audience, and said, “Everybody, the world is looking at us to solve this question for them. And we have to be serious and do that.” Barrowes describes this moment as a turning point. “I've always wanted to get back into LENR/cold fusion since that time.”

Many years later, as of 2020, Barrowes is back in the game, following in his father’s footsteps and picking up the pieces of some experiments his father had worked on related to the Pons and Fleischmann findings. The general spirit in the field has buoyed Barrowes, who was excited to see more interest and serious attention paid to a beleaguered area of study. A few years ago, Barrowes noticed that the Army and Navy were starting to think about it again as a potential long-term research project or “game changer.” But the most significant “boon,” he suggests, is the ARPA-E funding. Barrowes plays a role on two teams that have received ARPA-E awards. This ARPA-E funding will, he hopes, pave the way for more research funding at the federal level.

Despite this increased interest, the field remains friendly to newcomers and fosters a congenial atmosphere. As Barrowes told me, “We're kind of co-conspirators almost in this [somewhat fringe] area ... .So we're chummy. There's not too much animosity or competition, which can happen in other fields when you're competing for money.” Barrowes encourages study in the field, telling me that we need “new blood” to enter the collaborative community.

Barrowes recalled that Giuliano Preparata [at ICCF 1990] said, “Everybody, the world is looking at us to solve this question for them. And we have to be serious and do that.” Barrowes describes this moment as a turning point. “I've always wanted to get back into LENR/cold fusion since that time.”

Barrowes himself was always interested in studying science. Recalling his childhood, he told me, “I've always wanted to know how the world works. I've always been curious about taking things apart, fixing things, whatever I can do from an early age.” Spurred by a pre-college questionnaire and a love of mathematics, Barrowes trained to become an electrical engineer, focusing on electromagnetics during graduate school. This prepared him for a long career at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, part of the Army Corps of Engineers, where Barrowes and his team create instruments that “push the boundaries of what we can know.”

The boundary of what we know and don’t know is a thrilling place for Barrowes, who enjoys pushing those boundaries into new knowledge domains. He told me the LENR field has been fertile terrain for these kinds of investigations. “With most engineering, you know what the answer is going to be. Yeah, you can research and call it research, but it's basically how to do what you're pretty sure can be done rather than something that you're not sure can be done. Cold fusion and LENR are are concerned with basic science where you're not quite sure what to expect. You're not sure whether anything's happened or what can be done.”

The excitement of potentially being on the precipice of a discovery has propelled Barrowes forward. “I think a lot of the researchers in this field feel this way–that feeling of ‘it could be today’. There could be some breakthrough today, and the world would be better….just today we had something, and I don't know what happened, actually, but it could be the thing. I feel that, and that's very enjoyable.”

The boundary of what we know and don’t know is a thrilling place for Barrowes: "Cold fusion and LENR are are concerned with basic science where you're not quite sure what to expect. You're not sure whether anything's happened or what can be done.”

He describes a similar optimism in the LENR community. “Looking back to the first ICCF, that's what everyone's attitude was there. They were kind of like, well, we're not sure; this is all very hopeful, but who knows what's going on. Let's figure it out.”

The goal now–partially spurred by ARPA-E–is is to produce a repeatable effect reliably.Barrowes describes it as a pivotal time, as multiple teams try to produce a “repeatable effect with a demonstrable nuclear product.” Once that happens, we’re off to the races. “Then,” he tells me, “the rest of the community can get involved, and then we'll take off.”

Getting a repeatable effect is easier said than done, as materials and experimental conditions can be temperamental. One can think they’ve glimpsed something nuclear, only for them to realize it was a contaminated sample or simply a quirk of an instrument. Hopes rise and fall multiple times over the course of an experiment. “It's tricky. As a human that wants to understand science, we're so full of hopes and dreams and biases, positive and negative. Sometimes it's hard to know. It's hard to disentangle that from the experiment in front of you.” he tells me.

While frustrating, this can also be “tantalizing.” But for the best work to happen, experiment and theory must inform one another. But at heart, Barrowes is an experimentalist. As we spoke, Barrowes had a portrait of famous experimentalist Faraday in his office. “Many times in scientific discovery, the experiment will lead the theory…Faraday was an experimentalist. He didn't like or understand all the mathematics…he did experiments, and then other people explained it…sometimes one happens before the other…in this field, I do think it'll have to be an experiment.”

“We'll know more from this ARPA-E round and hopefully other rounds, whether there is anything there or not ... .if someone gets a repeatable experiment, the whole field will explode.”

Barrowes predicts that the discovery will come first because we don’t know the controlling factors. His approach is to prioritize “detection” over “explanation.” “I'm not trying to say ‘because of this reason, I'm going to make this tweak to the experiment, so forth.’ I am just trying some things like more heat or less heat or a higher power laser or less and ‘let's put some current through it.’ I'm trying, just jumping in different places around this parameter space…no one knows where to be in this parameter space, though there are some clues.”

Within that parameter space, all kinds of unexpected happenings change the course of the experiment. Barrowes describes it as “hunting,” a “suggestive but not conclusive process.” Barrowes hopes that more funding will allow the research to progress toward conclusiveness. “Part of the struggle is, on this budget, trying to move past suggestive into conclusive. I’m hoping we can.”

Despite pushback from those outside the field, Barrowes remains open-minded and cautiously optimistic. “We'll know more from this ARPA-E round and hopefully other rounds, whether there is anything there or not ... .if someone gets a repeatable experiment, the whole field will explode.” He anticipates that if a repeatable experiment is accomplished, many laboratories will shift emphasis over to LENR. This would result in an influx of graduate students and postdocs to the field, which it badly needs, he tells me.

Getting new funding is critical because these “game changers” need longer timelines. Barrows suggests that we need to move back to more long-term research, telling me that “studying something that will take thirty or forty years to pay back…that's where the big payoffs come from.” Barrowes’ own thirty-year goal: powering his own home independently from an energy source based on cold fusion.

“Many times in scientific discovery, the experiment will lead the theory…Faraday was an experimentalist. He didn't like or understand all the mathematics…he did experiments, and then other people explained it…sometimes one happens before the other…in this field, I do think it'll have to be an experiment.”

Citing Feynman’s famous talk, Barrowes tells me, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom…the smaller and smaller you go the less and less we understand and the less we have exploited it. There's plenty of room at the small scale for exploitation.” Since that famous lecture, Barrowes notes, we’ve discovered much more at that scale, like quantum energy or how quantum processes work in organisms. “Nature was using it all around us,” but we didn’t understand these effects until recently. That ties into the LENR research, he suggests. “Some people see that this is where this fits, that it’s…a nuclear effect, but on a small scale, not globally hot like the sun, but locally on the scale of nanometers…that is similar to how photosynthesis uses a nuclear effect or animals metabolizing something in your liver exploiting a nuclear effect. So hopefully it'll tie in to the broader quantum energy quantum information field.”

This growing corpus of knowledge has energized Barrowes and made him hopeful not just about the science but its applications. “That will be a step if we get something repeatable and we understand it, but the real step we all want is to scale it to energy generation, to larger scales.”

In describing the ups and downs of experiments, Barrowes described the feeling as, “There could be some sort of breakthrough today, and the world would be better.” He argues that the field could produce a “good, clean, compact energy source” as a tool to fight climate change. It would also make the United States energy independent and simplify geopolitics overall. “There would be huge ramifications if we had a new, clean, compact, energy source, and so that motivates.”