U.S. Dept. of Energy Takes A New Look At Cold Fusion 554
lhouk281 writes "Technology Review is reporting that the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion. According to Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, experiments performed under properly controlled conditions reliably produce more heat than standard theory predicts, and nuclear products show up in about the right amounts to account for this excess heat. Maybe we'll get those atomic-powered automobiles after all ..."
However... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it's an area like River Oaks in Houston or the MS campus in Redmond.
Re:It's all a conspiracy! (Score:5, Insightful)
The difficult thing about a comment like that is that you're never sure if someone is trying to be funny or just a typical conspiracy theory nut.
Solve the world's problems (Score:3, Insightful)
If reliable (and not too costly) cold fusion could become a reality, it really could solve many of the world's problems.
Imagine - oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground. We would no longer have to worry about global warming because CO2 production would go right down. And increasingly resource hungry emerging economies like China and India would no longer be such a threat to "our" oil resources.
If the USA spent 10% of it's military budget on alternative energy sources then this nut could be cracked quickly...
Too much to hope for I guess...
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
You think the reason alternative energy projects are moving slowly is lack of money? Please.
Feels safer than nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
This of course assumes many things like Cold Fusion being practical, safe, and nobody screwing things up enough to create a Cold Fusion Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Where did I put that thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
that said, being wrong didn't help them either.
Mod parent up. P&F weren't *wrong*, however, they just made those WAC's that weren't supportable. There *is* something going on in these experiments [I've read some of the DOE and DOD papers on it], but it *ain't* cold fusion, and we really don't know what it is.
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
While it would indeed solve the worlod's energy problems, I have to disagree on the above point. The Middle East was a battleground long before oil meant anything. Perhaps what you meant was it would no longer be a battleground that the US cared about. Without oil, it would be more like Rwanda...bad shit would still happen there, but the developed world would not care.
Re:war will result if true (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:5, Insightful)
You may very well be correct. But even if it's not cold fusion they're possibly going to learn something new or startling or useful about chemical reactions. I'm sure the alchemists, in their desire to turn base metals into gold stumbled upon many interesting things.
Re:However... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where did I put that thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
This isn't some 3rd grade math test. You need to show your work when making claims like this. Just because you have the right answer doesn't mean is wasn't a wild ass guess.
Re:Is there a physicist in the house? (Score:5, Insightful)
The facts are that a lot of people are seeing unexplained excess heat generation when they do these experiments. Whether it's fusion or not, unexplained results eventually lead to fundamental theoretical insights, and that's all to the good.
Re:Where did I put that thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
it went like this. they announced discovery. then the majority of people couldn't reproduce results and their theory was unsupported.
ok pause there. everyone thought they were big dorks. why? i'm saying it wasn't because they were wrong (ie no one could reproduce the results), it was because they announced first, then peer review.
the parent of my post then asked, now that P&F might have be "right" should we say P&F are ok guys and did the right thing?
my answer is no. the reason they didn't do the right thing was because they skipped the peer review, which is still the case now.
It's funny to watch people react here.. (Score:5, Insightful)
When experiment and existing theory produce different results, you need a new theory. That's how science works. The universe is never wrong. If you want to critique this guy, then go show me how smart you are and pick apart his experiments or apparatus, or maybe propose a theory that could explain the results another way - and devise an experiment to test that theory.
People mocked astronomy, planes, cars, space travel, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, television, computers, you name it - as the work of the devil, impossible, blah blah blah.
Yes, he could be wrong, but that's for replicable experiments to decide. I applaud these guys for trying and more importantly publishing their results. Nothing like the herd mentality, though.
Re:From the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just say "no" (Score:2, Insightful)
It's appropriate to ridicule ridiculous claims & bad science; it helps keep fraud and chasing wild ducks (or whatever that idiom is) under control.
But RTFA. When experiments consistently produce results that can't be explained, it's the people pooh-poohing investigating those results that are on crack.
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: It's funny to watch people react here.. (Score:3, Insightful)
> Nothing like the herd mentality, though.
Yeah, how could people possibly be skeptical about the possibility of getting something for nothing?
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, but that was the catch. It sounded simple to replicate -- stick a palladium electrode electrolysis setup in some heavy water and run the whole thing in a calorimeter -- but the devil turned out to be in the details.
For one, precise calorimetry at that level is actually pretty hard -- Pons & Fleischman were old hands at it but it's not something your typical physicist does much of.
More significantly, it may be (judging by the replication attempts that seem to show results) that the setup is far more sensitive to uncontrolled variables like the manufacture method, exact composition (impurities, crystal structure etc) and the like of the electrode than P-F were aware.
There have been a lot of interesting results with various setups reported over the years, just not in the premier journals. The whole field acquired a bit of a stigma after the P&F furor.
Re:It's funny to watch people react here.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being persecuted for your beliefs doesn't make them right. Sometimes, it just means that you really are a crackpot and that the other children are right to laugh at you.
Re:On par with Bush administration science (Score:4, Insightful)
honestly, the whole 'cold fusion' debacle needs to be looked at without a single, narrow link. there is something there, to be sure, but noone is entirely sure what. the stigma that came from the original announcement is still there, and that stigma won't die anytime soon.
but really, turning all of it into *yet another* Bush-Bash is just fucking sad. honestly, grow up. the current Administration is bad, but you slashbots would have the world believe that its the worst thing to ever happen, ever ever ever ever ever.
and that's just tired and petty.
moreover, tell me that you wouldn't be sitting there whining if a different Administration was still making bad decisions. Americans do one thing well, bitch (this is why lawyers and politicians hold all the cards). everything else that Americans want done, they'll get the rest of the world to do for them, because the rest of the world will do it without demanding wages to fufil a pie-in-the-sky lifestyle preached 24/7 through print, radio and televised media.
that was a real rant.
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
So the reason Cold Fusion doesn't work is now ALSO the USA's fault?
You people are amazing.
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:war will result if true (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:4, Insightful)
So how, exactly, did French and Belgian colonial actions of 30-plus years ago *cause* a bunch of Rwandans to massacre each other? Did they put a gun to their heads and say "kill each other"? Were the Rwandans once peaceful people for whom war and killing were completely foreign?
I'm all for a certain amount of historical blame, but at a certain point I have to ask myself if the people in these places (Rwanda, Zaire/Congo, Liberia, Angola, and so on) aren't actually victims of their own sociocultural problems inherent to their own cultures, and that they should be held accountable for them as well.
Re:OMFG, what if (Score:5, Insightful)
To think that mere crackpottery is indicitive of actual evidence is a laughable lapse of judgement.
They also laughed at Bozo the clown, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
New Physics? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the very early days of radio, it was common for hobbyists to use a geranium "cat's whisker" to demodulate signals. Nobody was sure how it worked at the time, so it was more of an art than a science. You would simply fiddle with the cat's whisker contact until you got the best signal possible. It wasn't until well after WW2 with the invention of the transistor that semiconductor physics were understood from a theoretical basis.
*IF* cold fusion is real, it may be much like that. They may have stumbed onto something, but the results are not reproducible, becuase we don't really understand what we are doing from even a theoretical, let alone an engineering basis. It is as if somebody had reported high temperature superconductivity before we had any theory explaining how may work, but couldn't reproduce it, since they didn't really know how to manufacture a high temperature superconductor, they just got lucky in the process.
Penicillin was discovered totally by accident, (contamination of a bacteria culture by a very rare strain of mould) but at least we could grow more of it to reproduce the results. Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, when JFK said he would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he did it.
"go to the moon" was a problem with a clear path to the desired result. In the R&D department it required a whole lot more D than R. We already knew we were going to stick those guys on a rocket full of life support and guidance equipment-- it was just a matter of designing and testing the rockets and equipment.
The problem of "find an alternative energy source" is mostly a question of research, and research is usually pretty open-ended. Once they find a usable non-dilute source of energy, then it will be comparable to the JFK/moon thing. At present, we have no idea what the suitable alternative will be, much less how we'll deploy it.
Perhaps it's not just lack of money but lack of the vision and determination to try hard enough.
Determination isn't the issue. We have to discover the path to the goal first. Until that's done, no amount of urging people to run faster will get us closer to the goal. True, no progress can be made with no funding, but beyond a very basic minimum level of necessary manpower and equipment, the timetable of discovery can't be halved by doubling the funding.
As for "vision", yeah, I suppose you could say there's a lack of vision, but that assumes there's something to "see" that nobody's looking at, and all we're lacking is enough people with this "vision" skill to see it. Even if you try to brute-force the problem by hiring every scientist in the world to think about it all day, there's no guarantee of success because the goal is too dependent on advances in secondary technology to even be within reach. You could hire every scientist in the 18th century to work on it, but none of them would have the "vision" to see the technological path to a fission reactor.
Basically, elapsed time till results doesn't scale to money spent when it comes to research.
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Please what?
"Please" as in "please don't confuse research with development". The pace of development scales almost directly with money spent. Research is, by its very nature, unknown. Saying that research will magically produce results if only we put 10% of the defense budget into it completely fails to understand the nature of research.
Re:The second biggest mistake P&F made. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you're right, that there is not a huge amount of energy being produced over and above what theory predicts. That pales in significance, though, next to the fact that extra energy is being created over and above what theory predicts, and the reasons why -- well, until we know the reasons why, we don't know what else is possible that our current state of theory cannot account for.
As pointed out in the article, the difference may be that in the actual experiments, where we're seeing extra heat production, the interaction between particles is taking place inside a lattice, whereas theory assumes that it makes no difference whether it's in a lattice or a vacuum -- that the atomic forces from the lattice need not be taken into account.
Now if this assumption is wrong -- well, let me put it this way. If our current knowledge of chemistry was based on the presumption that only those substances transformed during a chemical reaction were relevant to the reaction -- if we had no knowledge or concept of catalysts -- what things that we take for granted today would actually be unknown to us? What would be out there, overlooked, waiting for us to discover it?
To say this is trivial just because there is not a lot of extra heat production is like saying to Alexander Fleming that he's making too big a deal out of that petri dish where he can't get the cultures to grow -- after all, it's just one dish.
Re: It's funny to watch people react here.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or even instantaneous communications between two sub-atomic particles? [newscientist.com] What fools!
Re:Cold Fusion possibly already achieved! (Score:5, Insightful)
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?
Re:war will result if true (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh. And this gets modded +4 interesting. Way to go, mods.
Take off your tin-foil hat. No war is going to result from oil being displaced as an energy source, and there are two main reasons for this.
The first reason is that having less a dependency on oil will mean that nations like the US won't have to give a shit about the unrest in the Middle East. Reducing the need for oil for power generation means the world could do without the Middle East oil. Oil from non-Middle East countries would suffice, obviating the need to be directly involved in Middle Eastern affairs. This would remove a huge thorn in the side of US foreign policy, for example.
The second reason is that we will still need a fair amount of petroleum products for the forseeable future. The reason? Plastics. Petroleum products are used in the production of many forms of plastic, and the industrial world uses a hell of a lot of plastic.
At least you didn't mention the auto industry, or perhaps that was an oversight. Auto manufacturers are already investing in alternate energy sources for cars, so this would simply continue the trend.
Re:same nutbags who brought us CIA ESP research (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, I hate to break this to you, Mr. "Scientist", but abstinence is proven to be very nearly 100% effective in preventing AIDS, a conclusion that in no way flies in the face of science, but instead, simply stands to reason.
That's astounding, since abstinence is only about 20% successful in teenagers. See, 80% of the time, abstainers will get horny and screw anyway.
African countries are now pushing abstinence because *it works*, and if they don't, most of their population will be dead in 20 years.
Of course, if it does work, then 100% of the population will be dead in 60-80 years.
Re:It's funny to watch people react here.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of saying 'we don't yet fully understand the isotopic effects of hydrogen in a palladium lattice' the "Cold Fusion" crowd is begging the question and assuming any energy they don't immediately understand the source of must be caused by cold fusion, and when they find "extra" energy they proclaim their preconceived supposition of fusion as fact.
I hope DOE doesn't squander any of its limited research budget on these quacks.