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 ..."
OMFG, what if (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:OMFG, what if (Score:5, Funny)
Start with luke-warm fusion.
Re:OMFG, what if (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cold Fusion possibly already achieved! (Score:5, Insightful)
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?
Re:Cold Fusion possibly already achieved! (Score:3, Informative)
Why would you want Cold Fusion? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Why would you want Cold Fusion? (Score:3, Funny)
Not good enough (Score:4, Funny)
I want an atomic powered FLYING car. Until they get those babies off the ground I'm not interested.
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it'll look great in your garage right next to your atomic powered flying pig.
Re:Not good enough (Score:5, Funny)
Mmmmm, pre-nuked bacon to go...
Back in the 20th century (Score:3, Funny)
Re:ARE YOU MAD?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well.. (Score:4, Funny)
But since it relies on dihydrogen monoxide, it'll never make it through congress
Poly water (Score:5, Interesting)
Although it was considered unexplainable, repeated tests showed that the one and only thing inside the glass beaker was infact water. So it had to be a new form of water. A kind of ice-9 but for real.
It was eventually found to be accumulated soluble silica products from the glassware. Which of course was the one chemical that could not be tested for inside a glass beaker. Got people exited like cold fusion for a while, since like cold fusion is was not utterly implausible.
Links on Polywater (Score:5, Informative)
here [216.239.39.104] and links to more links [216.239.39.104]
it was called polywater because it was thought to be polymerized water. Because it had a much different freezing point polywater was the inspiration for the cat's cradle story. (ice9). It took a long time to figure out the problem because it was hard to reproduce and only minute amounts could be generated at a time.
Re:Poly water (Score:5, Funny)
One day I was going to south to visit my gal.
But I had to stay and keep watch over the equipment.
My Sal she is a spunky gal,
But I was on polywater duty all day.
Re:Poly water (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Bit late (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bit late (Score:3, Informative)
Though I've seen some JSP tag libraries that come close.
Where did I put that thing? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Where did I put that thing? (Score:5, Informative)
that said, being wrong didn't help them either.
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: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.
Re:Where did I put that thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
It was as crass as the infomercial's that tell you to "order now! time is limited! only ten minutes left!"
Even if they had a good idea, they established all the credibility of the hawkers of weight-loss formulas.
Ain't no gettin yer dignity back from that....
Re:Where did I put that thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
While academics at the event lambasted his unprofessional conduct - all I could say is that whatever Dr. Fleischman had been working on, it had no hope of supporting his highly unusual theories.
WMDs and cold fusion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WMDs and cold fusion (Score:5, Funny)
However... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless it's an area like River Oaks in Houston or the MS campus in Redmond.
Re:However... (Score:2)
Where are the neutrons? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I guess that is still my question. It always seemed to me that there was some sort of poorly understood reaction going on, but it was more likely a physical chemistry issue than a nuclear issue.
sPh
Bubble fusion produces neutrons (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:4, Interesting)
The way I see it, cold fusion is such a tremendously holy grail, and the Pons-Fleischman experiment was simple enough to replicate, it would've made more sense to throw some more experimental funding at it years ago. A handful of failed attempts to replicate the results are discouraging, yes, but the potential benefits should've justified a bit more tinkering back when it was announced.
Maybe I'm missing it, maybe the threshhold of debunking was passed and everyone gave up on it as a fluke. Maybe it still is a fluke, albeit a somewhat more convincing one.
Obviously not the whole scientific community gave up on the idea, or today's announcement never would've happened. What did these folks know that kept them working on it?
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, whatever the mythical secret-suppressing automobile manufacturers/oil drillers don't want revealed, the the electic industry very much does want a new energy source. However, nothing was ever found and the work was de-funded after about 8 years.
sPh
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:3, Funny)
A handful of failed attempts to replicate the results are discouraging, yes, but the potential benefits should've justified a bit more tinkering back when it was announced.
I'd like to announce that I've produced a fusion reaction in my sock drawer. I await further funding. Surely the potential benefits justify a bit more tinkering?
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 replicat
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:4, Interesting)
Along with this, measurements of reaction products like alphas, neutrons, and tritium can be very difficult to perform reliably at low levels.
I heard a talk by someone who did some recent work, and he talked about one gap in how physicists see the problem. He said that a lot of what is done to prepare containers and catalysts for some reactions in normal chemistry is practically voodoo. Some samples just do not work, for no known reason. Things have to be baked under vacuum ten times longer than what should be required to clean them. The truth is that some things are not as reproducible as they are expected to be, and the absence of easy reproducibility does not mean the original results were erroneous. Chemists understand this, but most physicists do not. If this applies to normal chemistry, it may apply equally to cold fusion experiments.
"There have been a lot of interesting results with various setups reported over the years"
Unfortunately, there has also been a lot of garbage touted as interesting results. I once read through a few reports suggested by CF advocates as some of the best evidence, and they did not meet the standards of a high school science project. Most scientists will not take CF seriously until the CF community polices itself. When lousy scientific work recieves acclaim because it shows the desired result, credibility is demolished. (I would never claim the CF is the only place this happens, but that is not an excuse.) When the CF community separates the serious work from the chaff itself, offering only solid experimental results to the world, then other scientists can start to pay attention.
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 c
Re:same nutbags who brought us CIA ESP research (Score:4, Informative)
Uganda slashed AIDS infections because the women got together and pulled a Lysistrata - The Aristophanes play where the women of Athens stop having sex with the men until the men stop fighting the Peloponesian war. In this case, the women said no sex until the men stopped having extra-marital sex and started using condoms. Abstinence was a temporary ploy used to get the men's attention and force some behavioral changes. It had zero to do with abstinence as the moral choice that conservatives have tried to foist on the world. And it worked in large part because the campaign also included a large dose of sex education (something conservatives don't like either) which empowered the women by letting them understand the choices they could make along with the consequences of those choices.
Merely stating that abstinence works is too simple. It is like proclaiming cold fusion exists in the absence of a theory that can predict the experimental results.
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:Where are the neutrons? (Score:4, Funny)
-B
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:5, Informative)
At the time, Dr. Jones was a peer-referee for the article that Pons & Fleischman were writing, and it turned out that their research was following similar lines that he and other researchers at BYU were following. He asked for permission (and was granted) to break the confidentiality agreement with the publisher to share research information. (Details of this are well documented elsewhere, including things I saw on the PBS-TV show Nova about this episode.... I can confirm this so far as this is what Dr. Jones mentioned to our class prior to the whole fiasco breaking loose).
Dr. Jones was following an earlier line of research where he was studying Muon-induced fusion (where a Muon would take the place of a normal electron and bring atomic nuclei closer together under certain conditions... potentially triggering a fusion reaction). He was also studying natural phenomina including a speculation that there might be some other process besides nuclear fission and meteoric landfall that causes volcanic hotspots around the earth. I'm not here suggesting that cold fusion causes Mauna Loa, but some isotopic measurements of gasses emitted by that volcano contained traces of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that could not otherwise be accounted for. The speculation was that perhaps a limited form of fusion might also be taking place.
The key element of Dr. Jones' research was that he was indeed measuring emitted particles instead of measuring heat. Some graphs he showed to our class (after the big fiasco) included some very telling information about some of the particles being emmitted, but at levels so low that it seemed improbable that a calorimeter would be able to measure the effect.
When all was said and done, the best that could be offered by the researchers I talked to afterward was that this research could be used to make a neutrino emmitter that could be turned on and off electronically. Now that does indeed have some interesting uses, but neutrino detectors are another problem. As a futuristic energy source, there were many other much more productive lines of research to consider.
The other nice thing about cold fusion was that it didn't require huge laboratories to study the effects, which is convient to relatively underfunded universities for research activities (like BYU), it also brings out the weirdos, scammers and crooks. As a result, research discussions tend to have a very low S/N level. This makes finding information all that more difficult.
It is also something to note that BYU is also where Philo Farsnworth did his final research on the Fusor technology. In fact, the cold fusion research was conducted in the very same laboratory (buried underground just south of the HBLL library). They were indeed worried about radiation damage, and chose to buy $20,000 worth of pennies to build a cheap radiation shield. I'm not sure if they ever put them back into circulation, but it was a sort of joke when walking into the lab and it looked more like the inside of a bank vault.
Don't need neutrons if you have a third object. (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, the reason plasma-based fusion reactions tend to produce neutrons is that you need to dump the excess energy from the reaction product for the fused neucleus to "settle down" in the lower-energy bound state, and that means you need to spit out an additionl particle to dump the energy as momentum. Thus D+D -> T+n, or D+T -> He+n.
In "cold fusion" the reaction is taking place in a dense metal matrix - at a deuterium density far too low for the "normal" two-particle fusion rate to be significant. This implies that, if there is significant fusion going on, it's because of some interaction with the surrounding metal, or with other hydrogen neuclei. This implies that some of the normal D+D->He->D+D might stop at He by dumping the excess energy as a recoil off another D or the surrounding matrix of electrons and metal neuclei.
I want to see this experiment retried:
- In a large single-crystal.
- In a large single-crystal with a tiny trace of impurities.
- In a polycrystal of a very few, very large crystals (in case the reaction occurs at crystal boundaries and is enhanced by the size of the crystal).
- With the magnetic field tightly controlled - and varied in both strengh and directon with respect to the crystal lattice.
- With the electric field similarly controlled.
- With controlled electric currents through the metal in various directions.
- With sudden strong pulses of electric and/or magnetic fields once the metal has been "loaded" with deuterium.
- With small bombardments of various charged particles at assorted energies (in case some component of bacground or cosmic radiation is a trigger of a short chain-reaction).
When thinking about hypothetical cold-fusion mechanisms I'm constantly bothered by the similarity of the system to early point-contact diodes, and how quickly the junction transistor, and then the rest of semiconductor technology, fell out of the development of a physical model for the long-range, room-temperature, quanum-mechanical phenomena underlying electrical conduction within a highly-ordered, slightly impure crystal.
Pumping deuterons into a dense and potentially crystaline metal by electrical pressure seems to me to be just begging for the deuterons' wave functions to be stretched out and overlapped in a similar way to those of the electrons, resulting in lots of potential for interactions that would not be observed in the disordered environment of a plasma or liquid.
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:4, Informative)
2.0147 + 2.0147 = 4.00260324 + (0.02679676 * C^2).
This is actualy a considerable amount of energy.
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:5, Interesting)
The possible reactions are listed below:
Note that there is no way to control which of these reactions occurs, so half the fusions should produce neutrons. The other half produce protons which are also relatively easily detected, usually with a kind of silicon diode.
Furthermore if enough fusion is occuring to give a measureable temperature increase then the thing will be really roasting with neutrons and protons. It should make a geiger counter go nuts from activation products alone.
As nice as cold fusion would be, it doesn't work. And wishing it did won't help any.
N.B. I am omitting hydrogen-hydrogen reactions as those take place so slowly that it's not feasible. Also they'd be easy to check for simply by using non-deuterated water or acetone.
Re:Where are the neutrons? (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA:
Experiments that produce excess heat also have yielded helium-4, one potential product of the fusion of two deuterium nuclei, in amounts that correlate with the excess heat. Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy p
Just say "no" (Score:4, Funny)
Atomic Laptops: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Atomic Laptops: (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
From the article (Score:3, Funny)
Really?
I can't think why
Re:From the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:From the article (Score:3, Funny)
war will result if true (Score:3, Interesting)
Just my first thought
Oil company nukes (Score:3, Funny)
Damn oil-company overlords... I'll never welcome them! Never!
Got to go - I hear the medi
Re:war will result if true (Score:3, Insightful)
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 th
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.
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: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: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.
Global Warming would get worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the paths that Arthur C. Clarke went down exposed this issue with cheap and nearly unlimited energy.
CO2 would go down, but do we really know enough about how the enviroment works to say that that is the only cause or the biggest?
Re:Solve the world's problems (Score:3, Interesting)
a palladium cell at quite a high efficiency for quite a long time in order to pay for the mass of palladium. While it has been obvious to me that cold fusion was real, on the basis of the published papers, since 1990, it seems equally obvious that it is not a sufficient basis for a commercially viable power technology, without substantial further innovation.
Leave alone the cost of palladium, which is probably going to exceed that of gold in the near futu
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)
USDOE Likes It? (Score:5, Interesting)
A colleague of mine walked into our DOE monitor's office one day to deliver a milestone report. That report was hand delivered to the DOE employee. The DOE employee sets the report down, engages my colleague in a bit of small talk, and then asks if he has the report ready for delivery.
DOE is a bureaucracy. It has some very bright and engaging people working in it's ranks. On the other hand, it has some "lifers" who haven't a clue. These poor souls are in a position to not only accidentily make policy decisions (see: a million monkeys), but they are also in a position to ignore good advice and strong scientific evidence.
I would put DOE's support for Cold Fusion down as one of those brain farts that they occasionally pull (much like the CIA's $200M experiment in remote viewing).
Is there a physicist in the house? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll believe it when I see it running my car. Actually, I probably won't believe it even then.
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:Is there a physicist in the house? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pray tell how much heat is "unexplained excess heat" when the experimenter cannot tell how much energy went into binding the deuterium into the palladium matrix in the first place? You do realize that usually the deuterium is put into the palladium matrix under rather high pressure. Like, high enough pressure to rupture metal. When you have a gas being pressurized, and then later, excess energy appears, don't you think it's appropriate to wonder how much energy was used pressurizing the gas? If you'll note from the above referenced article:
"McKubre has also found that the seeming inconsistency in experimental heat production arose from differences in the amount of deuterium packed into the palladium electrode. Whenever the number of deuterium atoms loaded into the metal matched or exceeded the number of palladium atoms, excess heat was generated. Palladium loaded with slightly less deuterium produced inconsistent results, and if the deuterium level was reduced by a great amount, then no excess heat at all was produced. Deuterium loading was hard to control and limited by the strength of the metal. Unfortunately, palladium strength is difficult to predict or control, and is not improved by purification; indeed, the purest palladium ruptured at lower loadings, and the highest strength was seen only in one impure batch."
I used to lurk on sci.physics.fusion, back in the day when Dick Blue, Deiter Britz and Stephen Jones used to wrangle it out (names are from 12 years old memory, could be incorrect). The real issue is not that the scientific community refuses to look at the cold fusion community's data (they do refuse, and I'm not defending them) but rather that the cold fusion community refuses to meaningfully communicate with themselves. It's been understood for a while that deuterium binding theory is not well understood. This is a huge missing variable in the "excess energy" they are always talking about. They are exploring the amount of energy involved in deuterium binding, but at the same time they are ignoring it! The cold fusion community puts tremendous effort into proving that cold fusion is a nuclear effect, but cannot answer the simple question - how much energy did you store in your deuterium?
Bah... US Dept of Energy only needs 3 people! (Score:4, Funny)
2. A Russian scientist who is forced to decipher the formula on said post-it notes
3. An international spy that uses names of saints as a disguise
Don't believe me? Here's proof! [imdb.com]
periodical for cold fusion... (Score:5, Informative)
There are many more CF and LENR resources at their web site.
Bob Park Said it Best (Score:3, Interesting)
... in his What's New [aps.org] column on April 2:
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.
What the fark??? (Score:5, Funny)
About? About?
Is that the kind of "precise" measurement that will lead to three eyed fish and babys with 12 toes in twenty years?
Man, I would give a volkswagon worth of dollars to have a more precise way of measuring nuclear by-products!
What will we make fun of now? (Score:3, Funny)
*Sounds* like cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
"The research team used a standing ultrasonic wave to help form and then implode the cavitation bubbles of deuterated acetone vapor. The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and inside the bubbles. Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin."
Obligatory Mr. Fusion™ Post (Score:5, Funny)
The second biggest mistake P&F made. . . (Score:5, Informative)
It produces infintesimal amounts of excess energy.
At this point, it is a scientific curiosity that in need of an explanation, but not something that is going to produce enough energy to blow your nose.
I don't know if it will ever lead to anything practical or even useful, but it does beg explaining.
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.
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: 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: 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: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:It's funny to watch people react here.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, one explanation for why more heat energy might be given off in the deuterium case over the hydronium case is a well-known chemical phenomenon- an isotope effect. [qmul.ac.uk] Here's an example [nii.ac.jp] of how a reasonable scientist might study an initially inexplicable temperature anomaly which was found when using different isotopes in the same chemical environment.
Instead of saying 'we don't yet fully understand the isotopic effects of hydrogen in a p
Physics Today article (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Thoughts from a physicist (Score:5, Interesting)
Standard physics says cold fusion shouldn't work because photon exchanges result in nuclei repelling each other.
However, they think it works here because they think that the palladium atoms are aborbing all the photons which would normally result in the nuclei repelling each other. As a result the nuclei don't exchange photons, so arn't repelled by each other, so they can collide and combine into He.
So, they've somehow developed a lattice who's quantum structure results in creating a barrier between the two nuclei which repels photons, but allows the nuclei to pass through. The nuclei effectivly can't "see" each other until they've already collided.
I found it really interesting that they said they got better results with the impure samples. I did a quick search and discovered that Palladium Ore [webmineral.com] contains Platinum [webmineral.com] Certain isotopes of which are radioactive and produce alpha particles (alpha particles = helium).
So, if their impure samples are the ones that are producing the most helium and heat, its possible that it is simply the platinum in the palladium ore which is providing alpha decays, and that is skewing their results.
Its hard to guess if this is really the case though without knowing what kinds of numbers they are getting. How many helium atoms from how much palladium and how much deuterium.
misrepresentation (Score:4, Informative)
If proven... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me, the more viable and truly scientific work is going on with cold-fusion.
On one camp, we have tons and tons of money and theory and no experiment shown to support that theory (AFAIK; correct me as needed). On spite of this, hot-fusion is thought of as accepted and proven science.
In the other camp, we can scientists performing experiments which are roughly meeting or exceeding expectations and simply lacking in some portions of theory which might explain everything that is going on. In spite of this, cold-fusion is ignored and rejected.
Which is real science? Science finding new things it doesn't understand and attempts to explain or science failing to prove which it hopes might work, one day, given enough funding. Seems to me, hot-fusion is looking more like snake-oil than cold-fusion ever did. Cold-fusion, during the early days of just plain fraud, was quickly shown for what it is. The fact that two guys were invalidated hardly invalidates a whole field of study. My point? Would seem that many "scientists" and failing to look beyond their ego to do real science. If it's being peer reviewed and being replicated, that's science.
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.
Re:It's all a conspiracy! (Score:2)
The same people who say this is because we don't need oil anymore are also the ones who say we invaded Iraq to get their oil. Yeah, makes PERFECT sense that we'd immediately try to develop a technology that would make that investment obsolete.
Now watch for the pathetic attempts to say that this is just to discredit the "war for oil" argument for the November election, and that t
Re:It's all a conspiracy! (Score:3, Informative)
I remember when I was first told that. 1976, I think it was. I recall they taught us in school that it'd all be gone by 2000.
My father laughed about hearing it last in the '50s, when gas prices (adjusted for inflation) were higher than they are now.
In SovietRussia (Score:3, Funny)
Omg, i can't believe I just did that...
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.
Didn't you read the article? (Score:3, Informative)
"Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV-- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV."
From what I understand, they have seen energy readings consistent with trace amounts of Helium. Perhaps they can't read the Helium directly because they don't have the money for the equipment.
I'm always
Re:Didn't you read the article? (Score:3, Interesting)
It goes like this: if I give any light nucleus more than a few MeV in a metal lattice, it's going to knock neutrons loose left and right. It doesn't matter if it's a proton, a deuteron, tritium, 4He, whatever. And it doesn't matter if I give it that energy via fission or