Cold Fusion Back From The Dead 635
misterfusion writes "Looks like the IEEE is warming up to cold fusion with the latest story "Cold Fusion Back from the Dead". This has been a good year for this field with several leading science journals (Physics Today, MIT Technology Review, etc) contributing stories. Things are warming up and if science Research & Development funding can be stimulated with a positive DoE report (due soon), it might be an interesting rebirth."
Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Interesting)
...apologies to the pioneers of cold fusion, like Pons and Fleischman? Seems to me like a positive finding in a DoE report would at least be some verification that they might deserve one.
Probably not fusion . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:3, Interesting)
IMNSHO (see profile for why I don't have a humble opinion on this) fusion may or may not be happening, but energy might be released by some mechanism, so it's certainly worth funding proper research into it as a possible energy storage or generation mechanism.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:1, Interesting)
obviously been a real nuclear effect, in my mind,
as I have publically argued, often on slashdot,
since 1986. But its rejection has nothing to do
with power-generation and fuel interests and
everything to do with
1) mindless, authority-seeking crowd-following
2) facile James Randi/snopes.com style sophomoric skepticism
3) overweening arrogance
4) academic turf-protection
5) funding for hot fusion research
in what I think is an approximation of the
increasing order of importance.
No matter how remarkable and even eventually useful
aneutronic catalyzed fusion proves to be,
it's not going to threaten electrical generation
or fuel industries in our lifetimes, or the
lifetimes of their current investors.
New energy sources always blocked by the industry (Score:1, Interesting)
As some of you know Tesla already envisioned a realistic nearly perfect method for harnessing energy from Earth's atmosphere [amasci.com]. But that would have destroyed the monopoly of electrical companies and was thus never allowed to come into existence. Cold fusion research was not as promising, but it was nipped in the bud for the very same reason. Progress standing in the way of the profit of a select few.
Free power? Unheard of. Free software? Unheard - wait a minute!
Pseudoscience Warning Signs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily. They could just have been extraordinarily lucky.
Re:This statement always scares me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only a few companies have a large enough R&D budget to do basic research in areas directly related to their core businesses, and the power companies have much more plausible, if less groundbreaking research to do, as well as hot-fusion research.
Re:Bob Park (Score:3, Interesting)
I always go by the adage that when a distinguished scientist says something is possible, (s)he is generally right, but that if they say something is not possible, (s)he is generally wrong. To this end I am willing to be skeptical, not only of the looneys, but of the skeptics as well.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Interesting)
sPh
Makes me think of Tetris (Score:2, Interesting)
But once you position them right, they slide right in.
Perhaps the way the molecules bump into each other is influenced in a similar way and they don't need to be smashed into each other at incredibly high temperatures.
Re:This statement always scares me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Research costs real money. Salaries must be paid, and equipment must be purchased and maintained. State of the art scientific equipment isn't cheap, and neither are Ph.D. researchers. (Well, OK, grad students, post-docs are cheap but that's another story.)
Where do you think these "well funded" universities you write about get their money? While many of these universities, especially the private universities have large endowments and alumni donations, this money typically goes to bricks and mortar infrastructure. That's where the buildings come from. The truth is that the bulk of the day-to-day operating resources for scientific research come from the Federal Government. Without federal funding, the science buildings at even the most richly endowed ivy league institutions would be empty shells.
Furthermore, most research is high-risk. Even if the payoff is potentially high, the probability of hitting a commercial home-run from basic research is low. Most companies and private investors are averse to that level of risk, and their tolerance for such risk is no longer what it was in the good old days. Bell Labs, for example, is no longer the institution that generated Nobel prize winning research decades ago.
The bottom line is without federal funding, science in the US would stagnate, and we would no longer be a world leader in science and technology.
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that we know with certainty is that whatever is going on, it is not a nuclear effect.
It goes like this: in any nuclear effect, you wind up with lots of energy being dumped into a single nucleus. That energy can come out in only a small number of ways, because no matter what process produced the energy, all energy is created equal. And the nucleus is a well understood system.
So either you get gamma rays, neutrons, or nuclear recoil. The suggestion that you get lattice recoil, as occurs in the Mossbauer effect, does not hold water as it would require the lattice to behave in ways that are contrary to known physics, and again: all energy is created equal. Simply because an exotic process produces the energy does not allow us to suspend the rest of the laws of physics once that energy has been created.
If you have gamma rays or neurtrons, particularly in the quantities implied by the rate of energy creation, they are easily detectable. If you have nuclear recoil, you also, necessarily have neutron creation, because given the energies involved you'll knock nuetrons off the recoiling nucleus or the lattice nuclei. Again, it does not matter what exotic unknown process makes the nucleus move: once it is in motion in the lattice we can predict quite accurately how many neutrons will be produced.
Nothing like the expected numbers of neutrons or gamma rays are produced. Ergo, whatever is happening is not a nuclear process.
For what it's worth, IAANP, I have heard Fleishmann speak, and was peripherally involved in some early experiments to (in)validate the 1989 results. I've not thought much about the subject in the past decade, and hope not to do so for another decade. There's too much real science to think about instead.
--Tom
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:2, Interesting)
This stuff is real... (Score:2, Interesting)
During my year and a half as a personal assistant (one of several), one of my main responsibilities was to help with correspondence with other scientists. I'd open their mail, scan it for importance, and act on it (usually forward it to the Dr. Bockris if it was personal correspondence or reply back to the sender with relevant publications if it was a request for information). Needless to say, I saw a lot of unpublished information about "cold fusion".
Among many, one particular hand-written note stands out in my mind: it described the palladium cathode melting during the course of the experiment, with no apparent cause, other than "cold fusion". I don't remember the researcher, but I do remember that this particular guy had tons of papers to his name & was a highly respected scientist.
Of course among the correspondence, there was also some petty squabbling. I was most disturbed by the fact that anyone that researched "cold fusion" was regarded as a wacko by the entrenched scientific community. The attitude that normal physicists seemed to have was that "cold fusion" was a hoax & that further investigation was an entire waste of time. They'd cry "But where are all the neutrons", or "You'd be dead by now if that much excess heat were actually being produced." What most of these so-called entrenched scientists failed to realize was, this was something entirely new. Maybe it doesn't follow the laws of nuclear physics as we understand them now. But the same thing can be said for almost any major change in our understanding of the universe (relativity and quantum physics certainly fit the bill). But the effect of their collective crying, bitching, and moaning was to make funding for "cold fusion" research a difficult thing to acquire. All this did was slow down progress on research on something that could radically alter our understanding
Anyway, the constant influx of reports during those years ('92-'93?) showed that there was something new going on. The problem was that nobody could reliably reproduce their results. But regardless, in the decade since I worked there, "rogue researchers" kept pounding away at the problem & the damned problem just won't go away. In fact, it seems (from this article and many other publications: http://www.defusion.com/ [defusion.com] & http://www.infinite-energy.com/ [infinite-energy.com]) that people are making real progress on the problem.
I still read some of the lighter publications & summaries, but to tell you the truth, I'm a programmer with a BS in engineering and that stuff is WAY over my head. But progress is being made. It's about freakin' time the main-stream science community stopped their bitching & started taking a good, long, hard look at this problem.
As my grandma says, "Many hands make light work."
Have ANY of you naysayers... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you had, you might have noticed that there have been papers posted from labs around the world with consistent, reproducible results, for the past 10 years. I realize it's fashionable in some circles to read Skeptical Inquirer and be devotees of The Annoying Randi, but an open mind and a real scientific inquiry is actually sometimes needed. Rejecting something out of hand because you don't understand what's occurring doesn't qualify as objective scientific inquiry, no matter what experts are doing the rejection. (And yes, that's exactly what the reaction was of many of the experts in both the fusion and fission communities... "I don't understand what's happening here and it contradicts all my pet theories, and, more importantly, may affect my sources of funding and research grants... so it MUST be a lot of crap. Even though I've never investigated it, I just know it.")
BTW, for the tinfoil hat crowd, shortly after the DoE announced that they going to reinvestigate the published research, the founder and editor of Infinite Energy magazine, Dr. Eugene Mallove, was found murdered in his home. Make of it what you will.
Re:Perpetual motion ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, since time and space appear to be intertwined, there may be an end to time in which case there is no such thing as eternity. Also, since time also acts very screwy around singularities, your parent poster might have it correct. IANAP (Physicist)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, Not sure what the first deduction is all about, so really couldn't say.
The second they mention is a "cost of doing business" thing. Every company in the USA gets to deduct that sort of thing from their taxes (when my employer buys me a new test box, it gets the same kind of deduction).
The third is the tax credit for alternative fuels! So you're complaining because oil companies are making ethanol/gasoline mixtures, and getting tax credits for it?! Wow, if you were to take that tax credit away, then there'd be LESS alternate fuels, not more!
Sorry, tax deductions aren't subsidies. Or do you consider the deduction for your children on your individual income taxes a "subsidy"? If so, you should refuse to accept it, by the simple expedient of not declaring your child(ren) as dependents.
Tax credits are a lot more like a subsidy. Not entirely, but more. In this case, the credit is for making alternate fuels. Which means that the oil companies are making MORE EXPENSIVE fuels and selling them at below cost. And making up the difference with the tax credit.
Wouldn't want to have oil companies making any efforts to develop alternate fuels, would we? They're "evil", so no doubt if they made alternate fuels, it would be just a trick, right?
I don't consider free roads a gasoline subsidy. We had roads before we had cars. If you consider free roads to be a gasoline subsidy, perhaps you should stop using them, until the price of gasoline is raised to support them. However...
I note on checking old Federal highway funding reports that ~84% of HIghway funding comes from oil/gas taxes, motor vehicle taxes, and tolls. But some of that is eaten up in subsidizing Mass Transit system, rather than maintaining the Highways.
That rate might argue for a 20% increase in gasoline taxes, to meet the shortfall (assuming we first removed the subsidy for mass transit). Which would push gasoline prices up by ~$0.04. I have no problem with paying an extra four cents a gallon for my gas. Hell, normal price fluctuations this summer have been far greater than that.
Decentralized Electricity (Score:4, Interesting)
This could have been decided a long time ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
A former head of the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion program -- indeed one of the 3 primary founders of the Tokamak program, Robert Bussard, picked up that legislation and sent it to all members of the Congressional committees on energy as well as to the various physics labs. In his cover letter he admitted that the Tokamak program had been a sham program -- promoted in the wake of the Apollo program -- to try and get funding to try out all the "hopeful ideas" out there. The Tokamak program turned into a Frankenstein monster and instead started killing all the hopeful ideas they had originally set out to fund.
It's taken quite a while for the government to lose its fixation on the Tokamak.
Maybe now they'll reconsider my legislation -- especially now that the prize award approach has been largely vindicated.
Or will it take another Viet Nam, or worse, WW III for them to wake up to the stupidity of their energy policies?
Re:Almost had a heart attack! (Score:2, Interesting)
What may be needed here (Score:3, Interesting)
These CF-bashers are totally clueless (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's certainly been interesting that the rate of neutron creation has been so low, but that doesn't rule out nuclear processes. It just rules out d+d --> He3 + n + gamma as the dominant reaction. d+d --> He4 is, even in conventional nuclear physics, very possible, and indeed that's what we see the most of. The underlying mechanism for why this is the favored reaction isn't fully understood, but the data does fit with a nuclear process.
Our present lack of a cogent theory widely accepted in the community is definitely a point against us, but having a theory like that is not a prerequisite to believing what you're seeing. Elemental transmutation in d+Z reactions is common, and if you're turning Cs into Pr, and the amount of Cs is decreasing proportional to the increase in Pr, you're going to have a VERY hard time arguing that it's not a nuclear process. (See Iwamura, www.lenr-canr.org )
Apparently, the nucleus isn't such a well understood system after all, and we'd all be smart to not assume we know that much about anything. The field really does deserve more credence than you mainstream NPs have been willing to give it.
Ha! I linked to a cold fusion article last week! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh? I seem to recall hearing about a neutron emission energy spectrum plot with a peak that kept wandering around between press conferences, until they finally withdrew it.
I'm going to have to pick up a copy of "Yes, We Have No Neutrons" [barnesandnoble.com] one of these days so that I can have all of the questionable bits at my fingertips for situations like this.
Re:What if Slashdot was right... (Score:3, Interesting)
2) Palladium coated carbon spheres, according to the Wired article from 1998 discussing the progress on Cold Fusion that really revived popular interest, have been used a number of times with success. Also, even in a pure palladium setup, the situation isn't bad: a device that produces 1kw of power per cubic centimeter of palladium ran for 50 days - and this on minimal research funding.
Well, the fire alarm is going off, so I better flee. Ciao.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it didn't. MIT retracted when they realized the errors in their calorimetry. By Texas A&M I assume you mean Bockris, you who is a crank with tenure. Regardless, there were some spotty "confirmations" - but no sustainable experimental confirmation. The essence of science is that I can write down how to do an experiment and you can go and do it and we get the same results. No one in cold fusion was getting five or even four sigma events based on recreating the P&F paper or anything else - they'd do 1000 experiments and in one of them there was an anomaly and that was a "confirmation".
The history of cold fusion really needs some clarification. It was really discovered in 1986, not 1989, by Steven Jones of BYU.
Jones was working on peizonuclear fusion and his lab books make it pretty obvious that he glommed on to P&F's work after hearing about it.
Their avenue of approach focused a lot on calorimetry, while Dr. Jones had been focusing on looking for nuclear products (neutrons, tritium, helium-3, etc).
Yeah, from inside volcanos...uh-huh...
That was to be on March 24th, 1989. Instead, Pons and Fleischman had a press conference on March 23rd, completely stabbing Jones in the back.
True enough. Pons is slime - he later tried to bilk the state of Utah for hundreds of thousands in special equipment to do CF experiments...which conveniently only his company made.
They had a data chart which showed an energy spike at 2.5 MeV, and when somebody pointed out to them that it should have been 2.2 MeV for a d+d reaction, they adjusted the chart downward for their next presentation. Exactly - it's fraud. Gratefully, there have been quite a few who decided to continue working in the field. Researchers from Los Alamos, MIT, Naval Research, all over Japan and Italy, BYU, for a good while Texas A&M (there was some controversy there),
What a charitable way to put it! Dr. Bockris was walking around spiking cells with tritium to get positive results...
Theory and evidence (Score:2, Interesting)
I would prefer much more that they were going to the moon to harvesting helium 3 and trying to fuse it with deuterium, the fact that helium 3 lacks something and dueterium has bit to much of something could make a fusion reaction easier to achieve. A link here. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html/ [space.com]