"Tabletop" Fusion Researcher Committed Scientific Misconduct 161
Geoffrey.landis writes "A Purdue University panel investigated allegations against nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, finding that he had in fact committed scientific misconduct in his work.
Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation — a finding that would be groundbreaking, if true, but one that apparently could not be replicated by other researchers. The allegations against Taleyarkhan were made in March of 2006. A local Indiana paper gives the full list of allegations against Taleyarkhan, and the resolution of each by the panel. The full report (PDF) is also available. Of the nine specific allegations, only two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,' but notes that this comes 'just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent.'"
We've discussed this gentleman's work and the scrutiny it has received several times, and members of the scientific community seem to have given him the benefit of the doubt in many cases.
Re:Fraud... (Score:5, Informative)
When I first heard about his whole ultrasonic bubble excitation fusion experiment, I honestly thought: WTF?
The bubble itself is a quite interesting phenomenon, thought it is most likley not fusion as Taleyarkhan claims.
For those not familiar of Taleyarkhan and the issue of the bubble this is a good BBC video [google.com] I saw a while back on the who topic and controversy. Either way the bubble was discovered by someone else and I personally think should be investigated for other properties other than table top fusion.
looking back (Score:5, Informative)
When I was in graduate school/postdoc, I wrote for the Stanford Daily a couple of times for fun as way to practice my writing skills. One of the articles I wrote was on this research [stanforddaily.com]. Interestingly, I interviewed Nobel winner Douglas Osheroff and he shared his thoughts with me on this research. If memory serves me, he thought it was interesting, but prematurely published.
Interesting to look back on this in light of this finding.
Because one did commit misconduct... (Score:5, Informative)
you still shouldn't out the others working on similar things:
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By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[73] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals (see indices in further reading, below). In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat and articles have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy (see indices in further reading, below).
The generation of excess heat has been reported by (among others):
* Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
* Giuliano Preparata (ENEA (Italy))
* Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
* Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
* Yoshiaki Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
* T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
* T. Ohmori (Japan),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Experimental_reports [wikipedia.org]
"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."
"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all# [wired.com]
U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue44/navy.html [infinite-energy.com]
""Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat.""
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312 [concordmonitor.com]
"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design."
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_team_confirms_ucla_tabletop_fusion_10017.html [scienceblog.com]
Science in Neglect - Nobel Laureate S
Scientific Fraud (Score:3, Informative)
There was a TV programme on this guy a couple of years ago. No other scientists were able to duplicate his work so as part of the investigation the TV production company gathered together the finest fusion scientists they could find and they tried one last time to duplicate the experiment. Although Rusi Taleyarkhan agreed to interviews he refused point-blank to take part in the on camera experiment and (surprise surprise) there was no evidence of fusion.
Ganty
Re:How disappointing. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Because one did commit misconduct... (Score:4, Informative)
Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research.
The same can be said of creationism, but that doesn't mean it isn't totally bullshit.
BTW, the "tabletop" fusion in the current article isn't at all the same thing as CNF. This work is based on the observation that collapsing bubbles in a fluid generate extremely high temperatures, which some people think could be used to trigger ordinary hot fusion.
You don't need future tech (Score:4, Informative)
You don't need future tech to give the middle finger to the Middle East - you can do it now.
One way you can reduce the Middle East's influence is to drive down the value of oil and you can do that by switching your car to natural gas. There are several companies like this one [cngoutfitters.com] that will sell you a kit to make the switch. Googling "cng conversion kits gas" brings up a host of sources.
Since natural gas is not taxed as heavily and demand is lower, a gallon-equivalent of natural gas costs about half what gasoline costs. The conversion kits allow you to choose between natural gas and gasoline so if you're somewhere you can't find a natural gas station, you can switch back to gasoline. If you there isn't a natural gas station near where you live, you can install a natural gas compressor [myphill.com] in your garage that'll fill your car overnight. The downsides are you lose some trunk space to the extra tank, natural gas stations aren't as numerous as gasoline stations and since methane doesn't store as many calories as gasoline, you lose about 10% of your engine's power. For me, the later issue isn't a big deal since my car has more power than it needs to get me around.
Natural gas is domestically produced and there's enough of it to last 100 years and that's not counting the undersea hydrate fields. I'd rather burn domestic gas than give Al-Qaeda a cut of every dollar I spend on gasoline.
Both not repeatable and a tiny effect (Score:5, Informative)
It's really frustrating. When Pons and Fleischman originally announced "cold fusion", there was an immediate attempt at Stanford to replicate the result. The researchers gave a talk, which drew hundreds of people. In their first attempts, they had the apparatus surrounded with radiation detectors and alarms, in case there was a sudden burst of radiation. After a while, they realized that wasn't going to happen. The effect, if any, resulted in a few extra neutrons per hour over background.
They saw some variations in neutron flux, but discovered that people standing around the apparatus affected the result. Humans have lots of water and are neutron reflectors. So they moved the apparatus into a cube of lead blocks. No more neutron emissions.
Somebody may eventually get fusion this way, but probably won't get out more power than they put in. If you can figure out some way to put a macroscopic amount of energy into a microscopic volume, you can get a little fusion. It's been done with big capacitor banks, with lasers, with explosive compression, and with the Farnsworth Fusor. But far more energy goes in than comes out.
Re:How disappointing. (Score:5, Informative)
This ain't copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, there is no copyright in data (that is, in the facts); actually, using data published by others is a hallmark of scientific progress. That's why they published the data in the first place. If he had claimed the data as his own it would be scientific misconduct; if he failed to attribute the data to its authors it would be scientific misconduct. But there is no way for him to break copyright laws by publishing facts that were generated by others. In fact, even if he used the author's actual graphs and tables (which may be copyrighted), it is not so obvious that he actually broke copyright laws -- scientific use (with attribution) may very well come under the defense of fair use. We are seeing here the results of the propaganda campaign to extend copyright beyond all bounds.
Re:This ain't copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
scientific use (with attribution) may very well come under the defense of fair use.
It helps to read the report. Attribution was missing, that was the whole point of this allegation.