INE Symposium '99 in Salt Lake City
(Originally Published November-December, 1999 In Infinite Energy Magazine Issue #28)
Reported by Jeffery D. Kooistra
I attended the Institute for New Energy's INE-99 Symposium for New Energy (August 27-28, 1999) pretty much incognito. You see, Dr. Ruggero Santilli had a prominent spot on the roster at this event, and since his ludicrous lawsuit against us (see IE No. 27, p. 75) was rather freshly in the air then, I didn't think it would be fair to come to the meeting with too high a profile. After all, I was going only as a reporter, and I didn't want to become a part of the story. So I didn't "press the flesh" very much or mingle as I would have liked to, even though there were some personal "giants" there with whom I would have liked to talk to in depth.

I was able to attend the entire day of the 27th, but my flight schedule meant I could spend only a few hours at the Saturday morning session on the 28th. So this report will not be as complete as was my earlier Conference on Future Energy (COFE) article (IE, No. 25, pp. 10-15). This will just give you a flavor of the Symposium. Those interested in pursuing subject matter discussed at the conference in more detail can avail themselves of the INE website at www.padrak.com/ine/.

The Symposium was held in beautiful Salt Lake City, at a convention center called the Salt Palace. Although the Salt Palace was huge, the Symposium was not. I counted heads that first day and found just over fifty or so people in attendance. Since at least a third of them were either presenters or reporters, this left precious few as mere attendees. This was a disappointment for me, coming so soon after the well-attended COFE.

Patrick Bailey opened the Symposium with a few remarks about the INE and its history, in which he and Hal Fox have played a large role. He then introduced Friday's first speaker, Tom Valone. Valone's talk was on "Breakthroughs in ZPE and Remaining New Energy Problems." Much of what he discussed can be found in Valone's article that we published in IE No. 26, but there were a couple of other things he brought up that I want to note here. Tom mentioned that he'd been reading Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am so familiar with this book myself that I sometimes forget that others may not have read it. Suffice to say that you don't know what a "paradigm" is until you've read Kuhn, so this is a definite must-read book. There was also a discussion of what the "black world engineers" are up to. I call this the "Greer Influence." Dr. Steven Greer made quite a splash at COFE with his talk about UFO matters vis-à-vis the New Energy field. This was a welcome opening. All of us in the New Energy field should be prepared to come to grips with the idea that maybe what we're pursuing has already been done in the shadows of the black budget world.

Following Valone's Q&A it was time for Dr. Santilli to speak. Much of Dr. Santilli's theoretical discussion has already been printed in the pages of Infinite Energy. I must admit, I enjoyed the passion and energy of his talk. He was an exciting speaker and I wish I could have been listening to him under less acrimonious conditions. After Dr. Santilli's first talk, he and Leon Toups of Toups Technology Licensing made their big announcement about MagneGas.^TM Toups gave Dr. Santilli full credit for the discovery, and this gas was touted as the first validated demonstration of an over-unity fuel (of a sort) since the discovery of nuclear fission. Since Gene Mallove knows more about the history of this fuel, I'll defer to his account, which follows this article. After Santilli and Toups, Professor Domina Spencer of Boston University and the University of Connecticut spoke on the subject of "Criteria for Electrodynamics in the Next Millennium." This was highly enjoyable for me, because I've read many of the papers she has co-ed with the late MIT Professor Parry Moon. She is a critic par excellence of conventional electrodynamics. She discussed four criteria that any formulation for electrodynamics in the next millennium must satisfy, among these being validity in all curvilinear coordinate systems and a correct postulate for the speed of light.

After lunch Dr. Lawrence B. Crowell spoke on "The New Maxwell Electromagnetic Equations." This was supposed to be one of the big breakthrough announcements of the conference. Unfortunately, after the talk, Dr. Spencer was forced to ask him, "What are the new Maxwell's equations?", since Dr. Crowell didn't give us any! At best, I guess it could be said that Dr. Crowell presented evidence for a non-linear correction in Maxwell's equations, and his talk likely would have gone well at a physics department seminar. But he spoke way over the heads of most of those in attendance, his title was misleading, and he seemed unaware of much of the other work going on that has been attacking the foundations of electrodynamics for years. I'll never forget the moment that Dr. Spencer asked him about the force law he was using. He said that it was just the Lorentz Force law. She responded: "But that's wrong!"

Following Crowell came Mark McLaughlin of the Alternative Energy Institute. This group disseminates all kinds of alternative energy information via the web. They have links to Infinite Energy's website, for instance. Mark's talk was clear and concise, and I encourage you to check the site out for yourselves at www.altenergy.org.

After McLaughlin, Dr. Panos T. Pappas spoke on both "Na-K Nuclear Transmutation Inside the Living Cell" and "The Lost Unified Theory: The Ring Model of the Electron." The first of these involves the exciting hypothesis that, essentially, cold fusion reactions go on within the human body. It has been reported for years that forms of transmutation occur in biological systems. (See IE No. 27 for the report by Mallove and Bockris.) Pappas presented evidence that potassium increases in the presence of excess sodium in the human body. He also suggested that what powers the human body is not a chemical reaction, but a cold fusion one!

The ring model of the electron is an old one dating from at least 1915, though precursors to that in vortex models of the "atom" can be found in the previous century. It is felt by Pappas and many others that a model of the electron involving structure, ring or otherwise, answers far more questions more simply than does the usual ad hocery of standard QM. According to Pappas, the ring model "explains more completely the atomic spectra, including the new experimentally verified radiation in the range of 80-650 A, (Labov, 1990) for hydrogen and helium, which is not explained or predicted by classical Quantum Mechanics."

Dr. Dan Sewell Ward spoke next on "Inertial Field Theory: A Radical Change of Pace." The abstract for this talk has more meat in it than I can give the talk here, and I recommend that you read it at the INE website. Much of this work builds on the pioneering achievements of William O. Davis and G. Harry Stine in the early sixties. The goal of such research is to make propulsion systems which do not require reaction mass. I enjoyed the talk and I enjoy this kind of work, but I want to put in a couple of cents worth of my own. At one point Dr. Ward brought up connections of his work with the ZPE and, frankly, I couldn't see the relevance. I welcome a correction on this from Dr. Ward, but it seemed to me that his theoretical work will get along just fine without resorting to the zero-point field. He also brought up Mach's Principle and suggested that "by Otweaking' the rest of the universe in a clever way, unlimited amounts of energy may be obtained."

Mach's principle is enjoying something of a resurgence lately. I don't mean to take issue with Dr. Ward's talk, but I do want to alert readers to my own view, which is that my own Warlock's Wheel, reported on in the last issue (IE No. 27, p. 49), both violates Newton's third law and can be explained entirely locally

Tom Bearden was scheduled to speak after Dr. Ward, but Bearden couldn't make it. Hal Fox filled in and summarized Bearden's paper, but since we were already running late, Hal made that presentation very brief. Moray King followed Hal. Since we have reprinted King's article in this issue, I'll refer you there since the amount of overlap of that paper with King's talk is significant (see page 64 of IE No. 28).

The final talk on Friday was by Don Reed on the topic of "Torsion Field Research and Implications for New Physics and Energy Technologies." I have to confess that, though I have been aware of torsion field research for a few years now, I still don't have a nice, simple way to describe just what a torsion field is or how one could describe it in layman's terms. Although Reed's talk was interesting, the subject can't be summarized easily. It's well worth your time to look into, though, and since you should be going to the INE website anyway, I suggest that you read up a bit on torsion fields.

I could only stay for a short time on Saturday before I had to catch a flight, and I spent most of that time having a nice conversation with Jeane Manning. So I was only able to hear a portion, albeit a delightful one, of Domina Spencer's second talk of the Symposium. She recounted the story of how Professor Parry Moon and Dr. Vannevar Bush nearly blew themselves up while trying to pursue an experimental refutation of Einstein's Theory of Relativity.