20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success 373
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."
Bad headline (Score:5, Informative)
There, fixed that for ya.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Your cynicism is out of date. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.physorg.com/news10682.html
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's perpetual motion, why does it need power? :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
To make the joke funny.
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!!!!*
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"!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
the 80s are notorious for many things, but humour is not one of them.
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.
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I can't find their original presentation or press release anywhere online - but one of the authors of this paper previously authored on with Fleischmann and they explicitly link their work to the cold fusion work of Pons & Fleischmann... So it's not hard to make the inference.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Solar power? Bio-fuels? Petroleum? We have energy from fusion to thank for the vast majority of the energy we use. It has been sustainably making life possible for millions of years.
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....Yes, but that fusion source is both inconveniently large and 93 million miles away...
However, it is a working model and we don't have to build it. It has been running reliably for millions of years and is estimated to last a few million more. Plants have been using its energy reliably and giving us energy to live. What we need to do is to figure out how the plants do it or maybe use plants, such as blue-green algae, to supply us with fuel.
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?"
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK, but it would have to be hot relative to the surroundings in order to gain any worthwhile energy.
It's the "surroundings", or rather the conditions whereby fusion is initiated, that are why it's called "Cold". Every other form of fusion we know about requires tremendous heat and pressure throughout before fusion begins. Like a magnetically contained plasma heated to 100 million C, or a mass much greater than that of Jupiter, before fusion will even start.
From what I understand, even the faux experiment
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I think "Cold" could possibly refer to the not-being-as-hot-as-the-heart-of-our-sun temperature range. Everything's relative, except absolute zero.
OK, but it would have to be hot relative to the surroundings in order to gain any worthwhile energy. I would say it would have to be really really hot.
"Worthwhile energy" can come from anything hot enough to boil water - the trick with fusion is doing it in a way that doesn't obliterate the machine that is attempting to get useful work out of the boiling water.
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...
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They are, in fact, LSDs -- Light-Sucking Diodes.
Have you been eating any ?
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.
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My guess is its cold in relative terms to "hot" fusion which is really, really hot and introduces all kinds of containment problems that complicate the engineering.
You don't need to insane heat to do useful work, either. A lot of good gets done with geothermal heat pumps.
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...power my perpetual motion machine...
You blew it. You never admit that you're powering your perpetual motion machine. You just tell the reporters to "Pay no attention to the black box attached to the machine. It is for decoration only and does not affect the function of my miracle machine."
(It's been done more than once...)
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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.
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I agree on this. When one keeps a closed mind to potentials and possibilities, one allows someone else to find the The Big Discovery.
Or in this case, rediscovery.
If this team in Utah pulls a rabbit out of that deuterium tank, then champagne corks are gonna fly.
The Ponds/Fleischmann deal was half-baked, went off half-cocked with no or poor peer review. The basis seems to hold potential, but so many details need to be worked out before it could be feasible.
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.
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:5, Funny)
Oh lord, bless this thy hand grenade...
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.
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Unless, of course, the rabbit is the necessary catalyst.
Doubtful! I have an experimental setup which produces a net positive of rabbits. I've found that putting the rabbits in a deuterium tank completely kills the reaction (and the reactants). Maybe the opposite is true as well, and rabbits prevent deuterium fusion.
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The only real danger I've seen is labeling your work "cold fusion" -- which you should not do if you want to be taken seriously. (Similar to how, if you were to come up with a legitimate scientific curriculum for grade schools, using the term "intelligent design" anywhere will not help people take you seriously.)
Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basi
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome to the world of real science where the burden of proof lies upon the shoulders of those who's claims fly in the face of established theory.
Scie
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.
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First, that may be the case but the fact remains that all claims, whether it be that cold fusion exists or anything else requires evidence to be taken seriously. Second, to the best of our knowledge, the physics simply isn't supportive of such a phenomenon under these conditions. That doesn't mean that it couldn't happen but it would require conditions not known to exis
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
yes I know about muon catalyzed fusion; it works because the muon is able to form a "molecule" which tightly binds two deuterium or whatever you are fusing together. the molecular interactions occur on a scale that is roughly 200x shorter than any interactions in solid materials. To allow any fusion reaction to occur in such a material you would need to negate/overcome the repulsive force between the two nuclei all the way down to the scale of atomic nuclei. If we found a particle which was stable and co
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Historically, sometimes people in the field tend to have bias towards terminology especially if was related to pseudo science.
On the topic of nuclear transmustation [wikipedia.org].
Huzzah! (Score:5, Funny)
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Odd (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder why they used, from what I can understand of the article, an unusual detection device. Did they try numerous other ones, until they came up with one that "worked"? I'd think that if an actual fusion reaction was occurring, it would produce enough radiation for noramal detection devices to pick it up.
I suspect that this will play out like the original mess.
Re:Odd (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Hagelstein Is A Heavyweight (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That excerpt makes it sound more like Hagelstein has an interesting background in pumping government dollars into far-fetched technologies that never bear fruit.
Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund it (Score:3, Insightful)
You guys are repeating the propaganda of the high energy fusion guys, who don't want it to be seen as 'real science'.
It is, and DOE's review team was careful to discuss all of your criticisms. Cold Fusion is real, and it is science, and it is not quite repeatable yet from lab to lab, tho getting better.
Anyone who says it isn't nuclear has to explain a large amount of energy, far beyond what chemistry can explain.
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's more like alchemy than science.
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.
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?
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.
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go [lenr-canr.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> If it isn't repeatable, it isn't science.
Let me know when you can repeat the formation of star, or the universe. Science only uses repeatability as sufficient, not necessary condition. Just because you can't repeat something, doesn't mean it isn't worth studying.
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.
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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.
This may seem harsh, but:
1. I don't think they have in any sense tried to call you
2. If they are successful in their experiments, I still don't think they'll want to call you.
In summary: I doubt you interest them in the any way what so ever. Sorry.
Cold fusion, or energy-positive fusion (Score:5, Informative)
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There are lots of examples of people building tabletop fusors, but they all have one thing in common; they produce less energy than they consume. Cold fusion isn't the interesting bit, energy-positive fusion is.
Devices like a Farnsworth Fusor aren't "cold fusion". They're small-scale hot fusion.
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.
Olympic sprinters don't run with their first steps (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting past breakeven is likely to require first discovering and understanding a fusion mechanism that makes it possible, followed by a LOT of engineering to make it happen.
The successful path will likely start with something that produces a handfull of reactions - just enough to leave an identifiable signature - just as it did with nuclear fission bombs and reactors.
Unlike nitroglycerine, nuclear fission bombs didn't start with a lab explosion. Simalarly, nuclear fission power plants didn't start with a
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: (Score:3, Funny)
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I'll be sure to tell Gibbs and Carnot to stand down and surrender their physical effects...
They're safe since neither are common names in early 21st century North American demographics.
Oh, you didn't know that was the standard? Yeah, it was proven sometime in the 1980s.
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.
Can somebody explain this to me? (Score:3, Informative)
Can somebody explain all the discussion and discrepancies here? After all, that kind of effect does not seem to require too much effort to reproduce, compared with hot fusion or particle physics.
So -- is there some disagreement about whether the effect is there and measurable or is the disagreement just about how to explain the effect? Is there some agreement on what the energy source *could* be? Obviously if there is an effect but you reject the hypothesis that cold fusion is the cause, something else must cause the effect -- and some material must chemically react or similar.
It is a bit weird in my opinion that there is still so much disagreement about this after 20 years.
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Can somebody explain all the discussion and discrepancies here? After all, that kind of effect does not seem to require too much effort to reproduce, compared with hot fusion or particle physics.
So -- is there some disagreement about whether the effect is there and measurable or is the disagreement just about how to explain the effect? Is there some agreement on what the energy source *could* be? Obviously if there is an effect but you reject the hypothesis that cold fusion is the cause, something else must
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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"Oil, gas, coal, and every other fuel would be valueless."
Energy production (by burning them) is only one of their many competing uses. Petrochemicals are an important source of bulk raw chemical compounds that nearly every industry uses. Oil- and coal-derived chemicals are used to create plastics, crop fertilizers, cleaning products, pharmaceuticals--you name it. Even if everybody switched overnight to non-fossil fuel sources, there would still be a thriving industry digging black stuff out of the groun
Something in the Water or Air? (Score:2)
A lot of kooky stuff seems to come out of Utah, it might be worth looking at environmental causes.
bad science question (Score:2)
I read something a while back that absolutely seemed like it had to be wrong. Someone casually mentioned how plants transmute elements into different elements naturally. As far as I am aware, there are only two ways elements transmute in nature:
1.a) Inside a normal star, fusing merrily from hydrogen on up to iron
2.b) Inside super-nova, still a matter of stellar fusion but this is how we get anything heavier than lead.
3. Radioactive decay, heavier elements decaying into stabler lighter elements, no star requ
Re:bad science question (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe they were talking about nuclear power plants.
Just finished a book about this... (Score:2, Offtopic)
If you're into this sort of thing and other scientific anomalies check out 13 Things That Don't Make Sense. Looks at a variety of scientific topics that scientists can't explain or are deeply divided on. Good book.
http://www.amazon.com/Things-That-Dont-Make-Sense/dp/0385520689 [amazon.com]
Cold Fusion hypothesis on thin ice (Score:3, Funny)
They're really skating around the weakness of their evidence. They are bound to be given the cold shoulder from the scientific community. They may need to cool their heels for a bit.
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I forgot about the Davy Crockett.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
An atomic rifle grenade would be physically impossible, since the minimum critical mass for pure weapons grade material is on the order of ~10 kg.
Historic bomb material like Pu-239 and U-235 aren't the only fissile (or even fissionable) isotopes out there, some of the others (most artificial) have quite significantly smaller critical mass. (On the other hand, they also have relatively short half-lives which make them less than ideal for practical munitions - but they may well have been used in experimental
Yep still good. (Score:5, Insightful)
The State of Cold Fusion Research (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen a whole bunch of ignorance here with /. readers about what Cold Fusion actually can bring.
Yeah, I suppose if the fundamental mechanism is discovered and perfected, it could used for some semi-useful devices. I guess the best example to compare this to is super-conduction that happens in materials at very cold temperatures. Even "high temperature super-conductors" are pretty damn cold for most practical application like a superconducting CPU in a home PC. Don't expect to see one soon.
This is an interesting physical science phenomena and certainly deserves scientific research. Something is happening with cold fusion, and it certainly is producing some of the by-products (including neutron emission) of nuclear fusion.
The oil companies have nothing to fear either, as just with the example of super-conductors (especially when they were first discovered), this doesn't produce quantities of energy large enough to be useful for practical energy production. If you want a "Mr. Fusion" device, it is likely to be more along the lines of an Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC... aka the "Farnsworth-Hurch Fusor" [wikipedia.org]) or the Polywell [wikipedia.org] approaches.
The only practical application that I've heard that would be useful to operate a cold fusion reactor for is to have a neutron source that you can turn on and off with a standard household light switch. There certainly are some people interested in something like that, but the market is pretty small and already filled by commercial IEC devices anyway. This will very likely never amount to anything other than a whole bunch of scientific papers and an interesting Wikipedia article. That is even assuming it is "proven" to be a scientifically valid phenomena.
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?
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.
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Are they seriously basing all their conclusions on the presence of one neutron track?
No.
One is a small number, true, but honestly...?
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Seriously, anyone who skips this "news" completely will have missed nothing. I have not read the FA, I have not read the /. story summary or any of the 8 comments thus far. There's literally nothing to see here except BS.
So, in other words, dogma trumps the scientific method? I'm pretty skeptical of cold fusion, but that's no reason to dismiss the results without bothering to read them.
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.
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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.
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.
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Damn text based communication! I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not! How am I supposed to know whether to laugh or get angry?!