Cold Fusion Chickens

Phil Garnock-Jones Bill Malcolm - 1 November 1991

A recent article in the horticultural journal Growing Today suggests that chickens are performing cold fusion reactions within their bodies. It uses a simplistic — and totally incorrect — form of chemical addition to show how this is so.

To most people, the organic movement is a bunch of environmentally-friendly types who want to return to more basic, down- to-earth values, and many of them are just that. However, the organic philosophy has its roots among the vitalists of the days before the chemistry of carbon was understood. Vitalists believed that organic chemistry was somehow mystically different from inorganic chemistry.

Their beliefs still exist today in the pages of a New Zealand farming and horticulture magazine’.

Growing Today was, until recently, the official journal of the NZ Tree Crops Association and the NZ Irrigation Society, but lately it serves only the former organisation. In recent issues, the journal has been publishing material on biodynamic methods in agriculture and horticulture, devised by Rudolf Steiner, and there has been a debate in its pages about what is and is not scientific.

Steiner was invited to come up with answers to the problems of declining agricultural productivity during the 1920s in the United States. Working without the encumbrances of observation, experiment, and the testing of ideas, but with a background interest in homoeopathy, he decided the problem lay in the soil, and set about prescribing remedies.

The best known of these is probably Preparation 501, made by filling a cow’s horn with dung and silica, burying it over summer during certain phases of the moon, digging it up in autumn and diluting the contents many times in homoeopathic style, and spraying the stuff over the soil.

Silica is said to be connected with the planets beyond the sun, and to take up light within the earth, allowing the totality of outer planetary forces to work. Supposedly, silica does not feel at home in 4 wintery ground2.

Preparation 500 is similar, but is made in winter and the silica is omitted. We must say that biodynamics is not the only body of theory in organic farming — many organic growers don’t hold with it, but it’s certainly popular, and it’s often advocated in the pages of Growing Today.

In one startling article, readers were told that a French scientist named Kevran has discovered that chickens fed on nothing but oats could produce, in their eggs and droppings, four times more calcium than was in the oats.

What’s more, although birds on low-calcium diets produced soft-shelled eggs, birds on low-calcium, but high-potassium diets were said to produce normal eggs. The most unusual result is that the chickens are said to hatch out with four times more calcium in their skeletons than was in the newly laid egg.

Where does the extra calcium come from?

Chemical Addition

Up to this point the story presented only results, and we were not told anything about sample sizes or how the measurements were made. But then the author went on to attempt an explanation:

If one wants to look a little more deeply into the work of Kevran and others, a bit of atomic chemistry is helpful… If you take a potassium atom and add a hydrogen atom you get a calcium atom (19K + 1H = 20Ca). Calcium can also be formed by adding oxygen to magnesium (12Mg + 30 = 20Ca) or by adding carbon to silica (148i + 6C = 20Ca). Or you can remove hydrogen from calcium to get potassium…

The author, John Pearce, claims there is an important lesson for farmers here: if a soil is deficient in an essential element like calcium, we shouldn’t just top it up from a handy fertilizer bag. Instead we should balance all the other nutrients in the soil because soil microbes can then use them to make the missing elements. He writes:

This, maybe, is how soil microbes, and some plants, can enrich poor soils with nutrients, and why rotation and companion crops work so well. Kevran believes micro-organisms are of the utmost importance in correcting soil imbalances, while over-use of synthetic NKP fertilisers leads to imbalances and unhealthy crops.

Readers with no high school science might think it all sounds reasonable. But even if their school science had failed them, their school history lessons should give them cause to think again, because here are chickens doing what medieval alchemists tried to do for centuries, the transmutation of elements. If the author is right, what a breakthrough! Even a desperately infertile soil can be goosed into yielding magnificent harvests just by inoculating it with microbes that have a flair for adding up atomic numbers. But before we accept these cold fusion chickens, eggs and compost as fact, we’ll need more convincing evidence, because the notion contradicts some long-held scientific ideas.

Chemistry, Not Alchemy

Modern atomic theory pictures an atom as a central nucleus surrounded by electrons. When atoms react chemically, the outcome depends on how their outermost electrons interact.

Chemical reactions cannot create or destroy atoms — rather they can only recombine atoms into new molecules. Only in nuclear fusion reactions (like the hydrogen bomb or the inside of the sun), can atomic nuclei be combined to produce new, heavier elements. Similarly, the splitting of atoms to produce new, lighter, atoms can only occur in nuclear fission reactions (like the Hiroshima bomb).

We now know enough about fusion and fission reactions to be pretty sure they don’t occur in chickens and eggs. For one thing, fusion requires such a high start-up temperature that it’s been achieved so far only by using a fission bomb as a trigger. It occurs naturally only in the cores of stars, where temperatures and pressures are unimaginably high.

That’s why there was such excitement a couple of years ago when two researchers claimed, incorrectly as it turned out, to have got fusion at room temperature, socalled cold fusion.

Hot Birds

If chickens had done what the world’s best physicists couldn’t do, we’d have noticed, because both fission and fusion reactions give off prodigious amounts of energy. If chicks inside their eggs really are making calcium out of oxygen and magnesium, then they are somehow pulling off a nuclear fusion reaction.

Adding the atomic masses of oxygen and magnesium gives us 39.979957, but the atomic mass of calcium is 39.962591, which is 0.017366 units of mass less than we would expect. During the reaction, the 0.017366 units of mass are converted to energy.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot of energy: using Einstein’s famous formula E=mc’, we can calculate it at 1.56 x 10” joules per mole of calcium fused’. That’s a lot of energy, over 10 million times the amount of energy released by the explosive, but otherwise ordinary, chemical reaction which makes water from gaseous oxygen and hydrogen.

According to Growing Today, the chicken makes 3/4 of its calcium. How much energy would be released in the process? A 60 gram egg contains about 32 mg of calcium, so our egg has to make 3/4 of that, or 24 mg. That is 0.0006 of a mole. If the fusion reaction which makes a mole of calcium releases 1.56 x 10 joules, the 24 mg in our egg would release 9 x 10° joules, enough to heat a 10,000 litre tankful of water from freezing point to 25°C, or a3 ft x 15 ft home Para swimming pool from ice to steam.

What does that do to our egg? Let’s say it contains 50 g of water, and let’s also say the energy from fusing the calcium is released steadily throughout the egg’s 21-day incubation period. Each gram of water would be heated by 1,000°C every hour, 2.2°C every second. When we soft-boil an egg, we raise it from its refrigerated temperature of 4°C to nearly 100°C in just 3 minutes. Our fusion chicken starts at 37°C, so it reaches 100°C in just under half a minute. It would be hard-boiled in well under three minutes, and probably couldn’t radiate heat quickly enough to escape flashing into steam.

Eggs just don’t do that. We can conclude that it’s very unlikely that chickens make their calcium by fusing oxygen and magnesium. We’ve reached that conclusion because nuclear physics allows us to make predictions of events which clearly don’t happen.

These are the kind of thought experiments which skeptics ponder when faced with a new idea. They say: “If this idea is correct, then what would be the consequences?” But let’s not be killjoys; we can explore this fantasy world a little longer.

Transmutant Chickens

What’s to stop our chicken from going further, and fusing up some really exotic elements? We mentioned medieval alchemists before; our chickens could make gold merely by fusing 1 potassium and 3 calcium atoms together, or silver by fusing just 2 atoms of silicon and 1 of potassium’. Surely by chance alone a few cold fusion chickens would have pulled off that stunt by now?

Admittedly, there has been one report of a goose that laid golden eggs seemingly out of nothing’, but unfortunately the author of the account notes that the only hard evidence was destroyed, and during the 25 centuries since then, no more reliable evidence has emerged.

The chicken story in Growing Today caused quite a storm among some readers. Under headings such as “Joining the 20th Century”, “Back in the Dark Ages”, “A Rap over the Knuckles” and “Biodynamic Alchemy”, readers poured scorn on the editor for publishing the article.

The author was unrepentant’, He declared himself a simple farmer, admitting that his investigations were amateurish and his theories rather controversial. But he said it was reassuring that a “significant portion” of MAF’s research budget was directed to organic agriculture. And he cited “conventionally trained scientists” who have also been wondering about transmutation of elements. Among them is Dr Harold Willis, who has PhDs and who has said that “experiments…indicate that living organisms can change or transmute elements using some mysterious low level energy different from the high energy that nuclear physicists and atomic bombs use”.

This second guessing is wishful thinking typical of those who want to believe even when confronted with reality. The editor made a “plea for wisdom and an open mind”’ aimed at those with a skeptical mind who had questioned the article, and quoting Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.

(Cromwell had no such tolerant self-doubt about what to do with Charles the First’s head, or about how to treat the Irish.)

What seems like an appeal to fairness and tolerance, and a plea to keep the mind open, is in fact a plea not to test extraordinary claims. It’s like the appeal Jesus reportedly made 2,000 years ago to St Thomas, who had the temerity to ask for evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead. According to the Bible (John 21:29) “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed”.

John Pearce might think skeptics are saying “There is no such thing as transmutation of elements in chickens”. They’re not. They’re saying instead “There is no evidence that chickens can transmute elements, and what’s more the idea is contrary to what we already know”.

Our minds are not closed; we’re just more picky about what we fill them with.

Pearce, John 1990: It’s in the bag? Growing Today Dec. 1990: 21-22.
Hyde, Vicki 1991: Unearthing Biodynamics. New Zealand Science Monthly 2(5): 8-11.
A joule is a measurement of heat or work done, and a mole of any substance is its atomic or molecular weight in grams, in this case just under 40 g.
Nuclear physicist Marshall Berman notes that the modern alchemist’s dream of making gold and silver out of common lighter elements is virtually impossible for two reasons — (1) the heavier elements like gold and silver are neutron-rich, and so if you try to make them out of lighter elements like silicon, potassium, and calcium, you can easily enough get the correct proton count just by adding up atomic numbers, but you’ll be missing so many neutrons that the reaction simply won’t go; (2) Almost all nuclear reactions are binary, and the probability of three or more particles’ reacting together is vanishingly low.
Aesop c. 550 BC: The man and his goose. In Aesop’s Fables, Black, London, 1912.
Pearce, John 1991: John Pearce replies. Growing Today Feb 1991: 53.
Anon. 1991: Editorial — A two-edged sword. Growing Today Mar 1991: 3.