Slashdot Log In
20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Mar 23, 2009 03:20 PM
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed-lie-lie-again dept.
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed-lie-lie-again dept.
New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. "Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. 'In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect,' says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. 'Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice ... you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,' he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of 'low-energy nuclear reactions,' and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Bad headline (Score:5, Informative)
There, fixed that for ya.
Hey don't knock it (Score:5, Funny)
It's better than string theory.
Sting theory isn't science, cold fusion is. (Score:5, Insightful)
One is testable, the other not.
Parent
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as I can use this new cold fusion device to power my perpetual motion machine, I'm good.
Agreed. Although IANAP, TANSTAAFL [wikipedia.org].
Although, I do understand what they're trying to achieve on a simple level (fusion at sustainable temperature with a net return of energy, albeit small at first) and wish them the best of luck. My uninformed gut thinks this is a pipe dream but they will most likely discover something.
Also, why is it that everyone jumps to announcements when it would be more sensible to call up another lab somewhere else and ask them to run the experiment and verify your results independently? Another question is why are they using the label of "cold fusion" when it seems largely they are observing things that are hard to explain so they must be cold fusion at work? These two things seem imprudent to me. Interesting though, very interesting.
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
it would be more sensible to call up another lab somewhere else and ask them to run the experiment and verify your results independently?
"Hey Guys, we've been working on this for X years, spent millions building specialized equipment, etc, etc, etc. Think you could you just run up a quick experiment and verify... Hello?"
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Funny)
You clearly fail to understand how "light bulbs" really work. They should really be called Darksuckers. See, what they do is you turn them on, and they suck all the dark out of the immediate area. Once the dark is sucked out, you can see in the area. The more powerful they are, the more Dark they can suck.
Of course, they can't STORE the Dark that they suck in. It has to come out somewhere. That's why the clouds coming out of power plants are usually black - they're chock-full of all the Dark that's been transmitted back down the lines to the power plant. If the clouds are coming up white, then there's not much Dark in them, which means it's probably daytime and more people are keeping their Darksuckers turned off.
It's the same thing as your air conditioner unit, which is just a giant Heatsucker unit that sucks heat out of your home and dumps it back outside...
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
I know you were joking about the lights, but you do realize that is exactly what an air conditioner does right?
There is no such thing as 'cold', just heat and varying amounts of it. Cold is truely just a lack of heat energy, which your air conditioner removes by absorbing it post condenser and emitting it outside pre-condensor.
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
Since we're getting into semantics, an AC unit actually removes moisture from the air. That's why it is called a Air Conditioner, not an Air Cooler. The cooling effect is just a byproduct of the moisture removal.
Exactly opposite. An air conditioner [wikipedia.org] cools the air by passing that air over the cooling element, which is made cool by compressing a refrigerant [wikipedia.org]. It is the refrigerant undergoing phase changes within the sealed coils that causes the cooling.
The removal of water from the air (condensation) is a byproduct of the cooling.
Parent
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:4, Informative)
There still is heat given off, harvestable heat. The key is that you don't need to run the reaction at the sort of temperatures you find in the sun. That's a huge, huge benefit. The biggest problem, however, is finding out whether what's going on is actually fusion. And that's proven to be far more challenging than it would at first appear.
Parent
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
If it's perpetual motion, why does it need power? :)
Because it's HUNGRY. This is known as Sinistar(tm) Syndrome, coward. Beware. *RAWWWWRRRR!!!!*
Parent
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Because while its motion may remain so perpetually, it still needs something to get it spinning :D
That's right! Modernize the scam with "Add-Ons"!
Parent
They've done it! (Score:4, Funny)
Second time lucky... right? right?!?!
Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Insightful)
I know one of the guys who helped debunk the thing way back when, and there's so much disgust for the original guys that it seems to be a foregone conclusion that cold fusion can never work. For example, in the current article, the tone seems to be that people really want to prove these guys wrong, which to me seems too much of an almost religious zeal. Worse, a lot of very prominent scientists have very vocally declared the thing impossible, and it will be a very hard thing for a lot of them to even consider the possibility that they were wrong. I think a lot of people made a false logical step from "these guys haven't proven their case for cold fusion" to "cold fusion can't work".
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
It's not clear at this point that it *is* cold fusion, but the result is interesting enough that cold fusion seems to be a good possibility. Certainly it warrants investigation by other researchers who can keep an open mind. It would be funny if the biggest scientific joke of the last half of the 20th century ended up being the biggest discovery of the 21st.
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
Well yeah, of course they got a lot of well-earned ire for going around standard scientific channels, and a lot of well-earned derision when nobody else was able to reproduce their results. Ironically enough this was largely a case of cause and effect -- by skipping the peer-review and reproduction of experiments that usually precede such dramatic announcements, they skipped the step whereby the unknown factors in their experiment that prevented others from being able to reproduce the results from being discovered. So instead of "Hey we have this neat experiment, try to reproduce it" followed by "we couldn't, hey maybe there's a variable not accounted for", we got "Look world! Cold fusion!" followed by "We couldn't reproduce it, you're full of shit!"
My understanding is that these days people are regularly getting excess (as in more than expected, not net-positive) energy from the same experiment. It may not be fusion, but it's interesting, and would have a completely different image if not for the buffoonery of the experimenters.
So you're absolutely right, these guys are doing it the right way. Even if Krivit is right and the cold fusion hypothesis is just "physics fantasies", they're still doing "excellent empirical work" and that should be the key to figuring out what is going on.
Parent
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Most cold fusion press releases sound like this:
Most cold fusion efforts seem to be little better than alchemy - tossing and mixing things together and then describing the effects in mystical technobabble. It would help a lot if they acted and sounded more like actual scientists with an actual theory of what they were trying to accomplish and actual test protocols describing how they intend to test elements of the theory and what the expected results are and why.
It doesn't help that cold fusion community has had problems in peer reviewing themselves (when all your 'peers' are True Believers, peer review really isn't worth much) and (worse yet) in demonstrating repeatable experiments.
The original (P&F) announcement generated a lot of fury - because the announcement was all they had. No papers, reviewed or not, no test protocols, nothing but a press release. It took a long time for any details to become available, as P&F's attention was concentrated on self aggrandizement rather than science.
Except they haven't actually had the results validated... They've produced something that looks like neutron tracks, and had an expert go "yeah, that looks like neutron tracks", but that's a long way from "is confirmed to be neutron tracks". This announcement sounds dangerously like P&F's - in that they found signs in a specific test setup, but didn't vary the setup. That they seem to have found neutrons with one very specific detection method, but don't appear to have tried any other detection methods raises huge red flags.
Parent
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Funny)
If they pull a rabbit out of a deuterium tank, that's going to be one seriously pissed off rabbit.
Parent
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Funny)
Oh lord, bless this thy hand grenade...
Parent
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Funny)
If they pull a rabbit out of a deuterium tank, they should probably rerun the experiment without putting the rabbit in first...
Unless, of course, the rabbit is the necessary catalyst.
Parent
Huzzah! (Score:5, Funny)
Do or Do Not, There is No Try. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but anyone can try to achieve cold fusion, just as you can try to build a perpetual motion machine. Call me when you've actually achieved something.
Cold fusion, or energy-positive fusion (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cold fusion, or energy-positive fusion (Score:4, Informative)
True. Muon-catalysed fusion[1] has been demonstrated in the lab as early as the late '50s and is an example of cold fusion. It occurs spontaneously as a byproduct of some experiments which produce muons, but in very small quantities. The energy required to produce the (very short-lived) muons needed for the reaction is orders of magnitude higher than the energy released by the fusion. If the muons stayed around for a few hours, then it might be energy positive, but they decay incredibly quickly.
[1] Muon-catalysed fusion works by replacing the electron around the hydrogen atom with a muon. This has the same charge but a much smaller orbit. This means that two muon-proton atoms will get much closer before their charge repels them, often close enough for the two protons to get close enough that the strong attractions overpowers the electromagnetic repulsion and causes fusion.
Parent
I have proof that it's real.... (Score:5, Funny)
Now Pamela Mosier-Boss and colleagues...
Now, if all of you remember from college, ALL of the physical effects were named after folks with obscure last names. There was never the Jones effect, or the Wang principle, it was always something the like "Heisenberg Principle" or something. Now, we'll have the Mosier-Boss effect to study. See? If she was named Jones, then it would definitely have been a fake because physical and chemical phenomena are never named after common surnames.
QED.
Re:I have proof that it's real.... (Score:5, Funny)
>or the Wang principle
Well, only if you ignore the adult DVD of the same name.
Parent
Nuclear battery explosions? (Score:4, Funny)
Nuclear laptop battery explosions? And that wasn't in the Slashdot summary? You're slipping!
Stupid Crazies (Score:4, Interesting)
I expect nothing less this time around if there's even a glimmer of a spark of something like that happening here again.
Mosier-Boss and Fleichmann? (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, look who Dr. Mosier-Boss authored a paper [sciencedirect.com] with!
Not a Utah based team (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, the team is based at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California. The announcement was made at a conference in Utah.
Cold fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
It may have been science fiction to the general public (which includes all non physicists), but it did in fact have a sound theoretical basis. (Unlike cold fusion.) It didn't take a war to make them work, it took a war to spur their engineering development. They would have worked regardless.
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Not as far as you fantasize they were 45 years ago. (You don't seem to have kept up with the field, at lot has been declassified since 1963.) I invite you to check out Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ [nuclearweaponarchive.org] and then join us on the Usenet group alt.war.nuclear for further discussion.
I can envision plaid polka dotted elephants - but their only basis in fact is the consumption of psychoactive chemicals.
Yeah, when all else fails - invoke a conspiracy theory. It relieves you of dealing with the really hard questions... Like the lack of a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Like the fact that despite twenty years of trying, the experiments cannot be replicated on a reliable basis. It's all Big Oil and their evil minions.
Parent
Re:Cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Well, I'm with you with the rifle grenade, but the "Davy Crockett" [wikipedia.org] was real and could have probably stretched to 1kT.
Parent
Yep still good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Better idea (Score:5, Funny)
Along with cold fusion, we can throw intelligent design in there as well,... ;-)
Plus, look at the bright side: If enough Slashdotters catch on to this, it'll dilute the term "Sy Fy" enough and ruin the trademark that the network is seeking,... ;-)
Re:Nice way to get tenure (Score:5, Interesting)
I was under the impression that announcing cold fusion was more likely to destroy your career than launch it to new heights. Besides, tenure comes with a much improved budget and more money means better equipment and more thorough experiments. It makes sense that results that were marginal before are shown to be incorrect when more time and effort is invested into them.
In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what. There have been anomalous neutrons detected many times by many different researchers using this basic setup, in this case they even appear to be high energy. If you wanted to fake the results of your research, why would you pick a topic that is guaranteed to be either laughed out of the room or scrutinized like no other topic would?
Parent
Re:Nice way to get tenure (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what.
Which is precisely why the Department of Energy unanimously recommended further study [archive.org] on an individual-case basis for well-designed experiments (Charge Element 3). Which this one would definitely seem to qualify as.
One thing that occurred to me a while back was wondering whether there could be any influence from phonons [wikipedia.org] on the fusion process. Phonons are the virtual particles associated with crystal lattice vibrations that arise due to the wave-particle duality. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me; after all, other particles such as muons can outright catalyze fusion reactions, and phonon effects might play a significant role even there [google.com] (in the solid state). Yet most of the basic "disproofs" of fusion in the cell act as though there's no lattice at all and only focus on the Dt density (which on its own is way too low for fusion at a relevant rate). I just thought to google for it, and what do you know... others have been considering that very idea [google.com] and think that it has merit.
I'm also particularly interested in the possibility of surface reactions due to localized quantum effects. Palladium electrodes can form dendtritic palladium hydride spines on their surfaces in some circumstances, and most of the direct evidence of cold-fusion reactions, such as hot spots with associated pitting, occur at microscopic features on the surface of the electrodes. If it were such a surface effect, that could also go a long way toward explaining the inconsistency of results.
Parent
Re:Odd (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Odd (Score:5, Informative)
According to the journal article:
Advantages of CR-39 for ICF experiments include its insensitivity to electromagnetic noise; its resistance to mechanical damage; and its relative insensitivity to electrons, X-rays, and gamma-rays.
So they chose it because it would give more reliable data, less prone to interference.
Parent
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's more like alchemy than science.
Parent
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. Back in the day people had no idea how beer was made (and it wasn't always directly repeatable) but somehow the fermenting process started and beer was formed. Only later did scientists realize it was free flying yeast that got into the vats of mash that were out in the open.
I'm not saying this new CF is real, but looking for the yeast is how discoveries are made.
Parent
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:4, Funny)
Not necessarily. Back in the day people had no idea how beer was made (and it wasn't always directly repeatable) but somehow the fermenting process started and beer was formed. Only later did scientists realize it was free flying yeast that got into the vats of mash that were out in the open.
Free flying? Ever notice that most of the beer and bread makers of old were women?
Parent
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:4, Insightful)
Cold Fusion is real, and it is science, and it is not quite repeatable yet from lab to lab, tho getting better.
So it's more like alchemy than science.
It just means we don't understand all the factors involved in repeating it. Semiconductor-based electronics have been around almost as long as vacuum tubes, but back in the pre-forties they didn't have a good grasp of, say, what made one galena crystal or copper-oxide rectifier work and another not. It took a while before the technology was up to making pure enough germanium or silicon to produce reliable components (and even now, there's something of an art to getting a fab up and running).
It may be that cold fusion effects are dependent on the microcrystalline structure of the e.g. palladium, but without knowing exactly how to reproduce that (or what exactly to reproduce), lab results will differ from one lab to another. It's not at all uncommon for a lab attempting to "duplicate" a result to actually follow some different steps, depending on what equipment and materials they have handy, especially if nobody quite realizes yet how critical some of those steps might be.
Parent
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go [lenr-canr.org].
Parent
Re:Fool me once (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen a documentary on these guys. In the documentary they had several, highly sceptical, well respected physicists review their work - as in a couple of days, not weeks and weeks of peer review. All of them walked away saying stuff like, "I don't know what is going on but they are observing something. It may be a new phenomenon or an existing, well understood reaction created in an unconventional manner. I've not seen enough to say it is cold fusion - but more study is clearly indicated."
The people who have performed critical peer reviews have been equally stymied. Given the stigma associated with cold-fusion no one wants to stamp it accordingly. Just the same, just about everyone who critically reviews the available data and experiments walk away unable to explain the experiment. Furthermore, the more vocal saying its impossible and assuring everyone they have not created cold fusion have never even seen the data or talked with the group.
So to summarize:
o Everyone is seeing an effect which can easily be characterized as "cold fusion"-like.
o No one is willing to call it "cold fusion" because of the stigma. Saying it is cold fusion can be a career ending position - even if they are right - because of the stigma.
o All of the data thus far validates this is not fraud and clearly indicates something worthwhile is being observed in recreatable experiments.
o The people saying its impossible look like idiots because they refuse to consider the possibility, participate in a peer review, or even attempt to better understand and/or learn more about the experiment.
It may not be cold fusion but thus far, it smells and tastes like it. Regardless of what you call it, more research is clearly indicated.
Parent
Re:Fool me once (Score:4, Insightful)
If it smells like chicken, and tastes like chicken then yes, it could very-well BE chicken... but it could also just be grilled frog.
And that's exactly the point. Even if it is not chicken (cold fusion) it (frog) is still edible. Should further research result in a useful product, ultimately who cares if it is frog or chicken - so long as the meal is free.
Parent
Re:bad science question (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe they were talking about nuclear power plants.
Parent