The Physics of Why Cold Fusion Isn't Real 350
StartsWithABang writes If you can reach the fabled "breakeven point" of nuclear fusion, you'll have opened up an entire new source of clean, reliable, safe, renewable and abundant energy. You will change the world. At present, fusion is one of those things we can make happen through a variety of methods, but — unless you're the Sun — we don't have a way to ignite and sustain that reaction without needing to input more energy than we can extract in a usable fashion from the fusion that occurs. One alternative approach to the norm is, rather than try and up the energy released in a sustained, hot fusion reaction, to instead lower the energy inputted, and try to make fusion happen under "cold" conditions. If you listen in the right (wrong?) places, you'll hear periodic reports that cold fusion is happening, even though those reports have always crumbled under scrutiny. Here's why, most likely, they always will.
Heavier than air flight is impossible (Score:4, Funny)
Heavier than air flight is impossible...the world will only ever need 5 computers...no home will ever need a computer...people don't need a computer with more the 16 megabytes of RAM...
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people don't need a computer with more the 16 megabytes of RAM...
They don't, actually, but it sure is convenient.
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Heavier than air flight is impossible
No scientist ever said that since it is quite self-evidently untrue. Birds are heavier than air and they fly. If someone actually said it, they were retarded.
Re: Heavier than air flight is impossible (Score:3)
Look up Lord Kelvin. The one with tbe temerature measurement unit
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Re: Heavier than air flight is impossible (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heavier than air flight is impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, you don't fully understand the difference between physics and engineering. Technological barriers can often be overcome with advances in materials and design. Declaring them to be insurmountable has been shown to be foolish, many times. Barriers imposed by the properties of matter, on the other hand, are much more durable. Declaring them to be insurmountable is rarely a mistake.
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Not the hydrogen -- it is everything else (Score:2)
It's not the hydrogen, it is everything else that is wrong about it.
The US Navy had these Zeppelin clones, and they crashed every one save the Los Angeles from flying into bad weather, which for a rigid airship, appears to be anything other than a perfect sunny day.
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Well, there's a big difference between saying something won't ever happen because it's never happened yet, and saying that a claim that you've done something is presumptively not credible unless you can meet certain stadnards of proof.
And Rockets Vs. NY-Times (Score:2)
And don't forget the crow NY-Times had to eat in an apology to R. Goddard after claiming rockets wouldn't work in the vacuum of space.
http://www.popsci.com/military... [popsci.com]
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If fusion is really happening then where are the neutrons? Where's the gamma radiation? Nuclear physics doesn't work this way. When pressed about lack of radiation, they (the cold fusion people) always change the subject or make up some gibberish argument that makes no sense. The absolute best argument they can come up with is some bogus idea about reverse beta decay. Unfortunately if you actually crunch the numbers (it's literally a two-line calculation), this turns out to be incredibly impossible. Again,
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I'm reminded of a contraption I've seen used to restore batteries to a usable state via short, high voltage sparks (basically a crude desulfation cycle.) It was called the Bedini SSG... essentially a spinning wheel of whatever size one wants, some magnets around it, and supposedly gave more energy than it took in.
It is just a crude way to try to spark crud off of the plates in a battery, or offering "free" energy? I lean towards the former, but it is an interesting experiment, and apparently does work to
I wish it wasn't (Score:5, Funny)
I've spent years trying to pretend that Coldfusion isn't real, but somehow I keep running into it now and then.
Vulcan Science Directorate (Score:4, Funny)
Are liquid-nitrogen superconductors relevant? (Score:2)
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We were searching for "high temperature" superconductors. (where "high" was well above the 4 K of the day.) And then "room temperature" ones. -- I've made several different chemistries of liquid nitrogen superconductors. (long long ago) Then the problem was (is?) making bendable wires out of it, since it's a ceramic material.
The concept of fusion isn't new to science. We know how to induce fusion via a multitude of methods. The thing is, none of them are net positive in energy production. None. Of. Them. Hi
Things once thought impossible... (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Powered Flight
2. Bending Light
3. Traveling Greater than 300mph
4. Transparent Aluminum
5. Artificial Diamonds
All of these "Feats" of human ingenuity were once thought to be impossible by the physics standards of the day.
Physics and our understanding of it, continues to evolve every moment we live.
To say the words "It Cannot Be Done" after seeing all we have done already... Is kind of foolish.
We will learn how to accomplish this feat, or one very similar that accomplishes the same goal, Eventually...
That, is the power of Consciousness My Friends.
All hail the thinking, reasoning, Problem Solving, Human Consciousness!
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1. Powered Flight 2. Bending Light 3. Traveling Greater than 300mph 4. Transparent Aluminum 5. Artificial Diamonds
All of these "Feats" of human ingenuity were once thought to be impossible by the physics standards of the day.
Physics and our understanding of it, continues to evolve every moment we live.
To say the words "It Cannot Be Done" after seeing all we have done already... Is kind of foolish.
We will learn how to accomplish this feat, or one very similar that accomplishes the same goal, Eventually...
That, is the power of Consciousness My Friends.
All hail the thinking, reasoning, Problem Solving, Human Consciousness!
Hold up there, turbo. Transparent aluminum? Surely you're not serious. And don't post a link to something about aluminum oxide or other ceramics.
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Transparent aluminum would probably be sapphire, and Im not sure what genius thought it impossible.
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n this week’s Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.
The aluminum is still opaque to visible light.
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Going further, they used the FLASH laser (meaning a very expensive process) and produced "a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a h
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guess this needs to be said again
"Apparently, you don't fully understand the difference between physics and engineering. Technological barriers can often be overcome with advances in materials and design. Declaring them to be insurmountable has been shown to be foolish, many times. Barriers imposed by the properties of matter, on the other hand, are much more durable. Declaring them to be insurmountable is rarely a mistake"
Re:Things once thought impossible... (Score:4, Insightful)
guess this needs to be said again
"Apparently, you don't fully understand the difference between physics and engineering. Technological barriers can often be overcome with advances in materials and design. Declaring them to be insurmountable has been shown to be foolish, many times. Barriers imposed by the properties of matter, on the other hand, are much more durable. Declaring them to be insurmountable is rarely a mistake"
Hmm, yes, let's see. Nowhere in the history of science has any fundamental "property of matter" been found to be completely in error. Nope. Never.
Oh wait...
-- According to Aristotelean physics, each "element" has its fundamental natural place of rest. So the idea that matter would continue in motion forever was impossible. The idea that the Earth could possibly be in motion was ridiculous, since "earth" (the element) was heavy and came to a state of rest. Well, until Newton and Galileo and those folks came up with the idea that inertia allows things to keep moving forever and the entire Earth (and all matter on it) were actually in motion.
-- Phlogiston was a fundamental component of matter that made combustion possible. It was ascribed increasingly bizarre properties (including negative mass) until it was shown to be a myth.
-- Waves can't propagate without a medium -- that's a fundamental property of matter. Light therefore required luminiferous ether to travel through space... until Einstein showed it didn't.
-- Atoms are fundamental indivisible parts of elements, an idea that had been around since the Greeks. Until the electron was discovered. But even then, electrons and other parts of atoms were fundamentally a kind of "plum pudding" mixed in creating solids... until Rutherford showed they were mostly empty space, with a concentrated positive nucleus. But they were immutable, until things like nuclear fission showed they could be changed. And we could go on with the various problems with all the atomic models that assumed to be the fundamental structure of matter, but which were wrong.
-- Matter is made up of particles which are definite things which are in a particular place... until theories of uncertainty and wavelike characteristics showed that things were a lot more complicated and sometimes apparently indeterminate.
-- Etc., etc.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Throughout the history of science, there have been multitudes of assumptions about the fundamental, essential, and immutable "properties of matter" which must be the case. And these theories have often been shown to be incomplete misunderstandings or sometimes utter falsehoods.
I have no idea whether cold fusion will ever be possible. I have no idea what holes or misunderstandings may still be present in our current understanding of the "properties of matter."
But I'm not so stupid as to ignore history and declare that our current understanding of the the laws of physics and fundamental "properties of matter" is so utterly complete that we could declare such a thing impossible for all time.
Given our track record for thinking we've come to a final complete understanding of nature, only to realize we were completely wrong, I'd say it's a pretty egotistical perspective to say that we actually know exactly the "barriers imposed by properties of matter" to a high degree of certainty FOR ALL TIME.
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All of these "Feats" of human ingenuity were once thought to be impossible by the physics standards of the day.
These "feats" you describe were engineering problems, not physics problems.
The "Boy Mechanic" of 1880 could build a rubber-band powered model plane. Samuel Pierpont Langley built elegant steam powered miniatures, no less appealing and no more practical.
Power was never a problem in aviation. The problem was the need for dynamic control of an aircraft moving in three dimensions. The Wrights taught themselves to fly by building and refining man-sized gliders. In parallel with their work on lift and propulsion
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Snort. A particular form of aluminum oxide is no more aluminum than water is hydrogen - or ammonia is nitrogen - or rust is iron.
It's not a question of "arguing". It's a question of understanding. You should start with high school science and chemistry.
See also the poll: Favorite click-bait hook? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Here's why, most likely, they always will."
Amusing (Score:2)
I find it amusing how people continuously claim to "know" what is and isn't possible based on our infinitesimally short stint into the sciences. We have had electricity in any meaningful fashion for what, 120 years? I'm not saying that cold fusion is possible, and even if it is it may take a society that has been advancing technologically for over a million years to achieve it. But we aren't even children when it comes to knowing the intricacies of the universe, we're a few cells dividing. Claiming what
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I find it amusing how people continuously claim to "know" what is and isn't possible based on our infinitesimally short stint into the sciences.
Exactly!
When I see articles like this, and especially with a "[likely] always will be" clincher I like to imagine how the exact same tone could be (and often was) applied prior to previous breakthru advances. Such as traveling several times faster than a horse could run. (Breathing would be impossible at such speeds!) Such as heavier than air flight. (A bird can fly because its body is optimized for flight but no matter what heavier substance you add to the body of a man it only makes him heavier and thus
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Wrong (Score:2)
Only the sun you say?
A hydrogen bomb yields more energy than was put it, by a large margin.
We can do fusion, we just cannot control it yet.
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Article doesn't make sense (Score:2)
The article seems to contradict itself:
While perpetual motion machines would violate known physical phenomena—like the conservation of energy—cold fusion is possible in principle.
Oh, so it's possible!
The combination of the energy barrier of normal matter, the Coulomb barrier of individual nuclei, the negligibly low probability of quantum tunneling at all but the shortest distances, and the fact that the physics of nuclear reactions is so incredibly well-understood (and verified) all tells us that low-energy cold fusion should be impossible.
Oh, so it's impossible. But even here, don't you mean it's just unlikely?
Even though I’m a theoretical physicist myself, I’m open to the possibility that physics has it wrong, and that cold fusion could be possible
Wait, you said it was possible in principle. Now you're saying that cold fusion contradicts theory.
Why this article should be ignored (Score:2)
I'd like to know how elemental hydrogen is a renewable source of energy. Sure you could rip apart the more complex elements that are the product of said fusion to make more hydrogen, but that's hardly what I consider "renewable".
As for the viability of cold fusion, it's a great software tool, but I don't think it's got much of a future as a solution for any energy crisis.
Lastly, you can't ever extract more en
Bollocks. (Score:3)
Bollocks. The break-even point was passed this year. Sure it's not reached a point of economy-of-scale, but it was a critical change in the fusion story.
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/news/story/1.2534140 [www.cbc.ca]
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Look at the link you posted. Read the subtitle.
What about all those .cfm pages I've been seeing? (Score:3)
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.
The first condition hasn't happened once much less hundreds of times, hence there is no "crime" for which the American Physical Society need acknowledge.
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Argument by assertion doesn't make it with me Karl.
Read the Naturwissenschaften article by Ed Storms to which I linked to justify my claim.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:4, Funny)
It's not real science if it's in a journal whose name I can't pronounce.
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Wikipedia on Naturwissenschaften: [wikipedia.org]
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There is no conspiracy in science. Facts rule. The fact is cold fusion is myth that needs to die.
Proving a negative is a foolish enterprise.
You cannot over come the columb barrier without sufficient energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's possible there are as yet unknown natural laws. It's even possible that there are natural laws our species is just too dumb to discover, ever. But the chance of undiscoverable laws is lower than the more general chance of as yet undiscovered laws.
In the same way, the chance that there's an as yet undiscovered law which applies to this particular technology, and which has certain properties making it at all likely it gets inadvertently followed sometimes is pos
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Nah toor viss uhn shof ten
I think.
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Reality proves you wrong, Storms only claims it's possible, he has not demonstrated cold fusion. Almost all nuclear chemists and physicists would agree cold fusion is pretty much like trying to crack a bank vault with a boiled noodle.
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Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements. He does not deny that the experiments he surveys are overwhelming evidence for the fulfillment of Ramsey's criterion.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Funny)
Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements. He does not deny that the experiments he surveys are overwhelming evidence for the fulfillment of Ramsey's criterion.
I took three toenail clippings, wrapped them in aluminum foil and added three drops of rosemary oil. I then placed a fiberoptic inside the foil, connected to a photomultiplier tube, and recorded the optical emission. There was excess light emission, that I couldn't otherwise account for.
I have no good theory to explain why toenails and rosemary oil should produce light. But, since I applied no energy source to produce this light, it should be considered as one of the most astounding scientific experiments of all time, because if true, it would solve our lighting problems for all of time until we run out of toenails (which I did last week, so if you have some clipping to donate, please email me...)
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I could tell you precisely why. It would involve the assumption that your rosemary oil was somehow contaminated with peptide aminoluciferin which causes spontaneous bioluminescence in certain epithelial keratins.
You're welcome.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Interesting)
Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements.
There is an excellent theory to explain the "excess heat" measurements: the people doing the research are some mixture of dishonest and incompetent. This theory also has the nice features that:
a) it is consistent with the spectacularly incompetent work we see whenever anyone attempts to carefully document an experiment, such as the one on the Rossi device we have seen recently
b) it is consistent with the litany of results that require well-established phenomenology to be turned off, for example the need to magically suppress neutrons and gamma rays that would otherwise be produced in any nuclear reaction or its aftermath, regardless of its origin.
After a quarter of a century with no reproducible results and no "positive" experiments that do not require the magical suppression of other laws of physics to account for the lack of radiation, no other theory is close to as plausible as this one.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Informative)
The latest report [elforsk.se] on Rossi's device actually contains clear evidence that the experimental set-up has been tampered with. On page 14 it says:
"Measurements performed during the dummy run with the PCE and ammeter clamps allowed us to measure an average current, for each of the three C_1 cables, of I_1 = 19.7A, and, for each C_2 cable, a current of I_1/2 = I_2 = 9.85 A."
Here, I_1 and I_2 are the line and phase currents of a set of delta-connected resistive load inside the "reactor". The ratio between these currents should therefore be sqrt(3) (approximately 1.73). Since the measured ratio is 2, the curcuit diagram cannot correspond to reality. The reactor probably contains two separate sets of star-connected resistors instead. By feeding current to the second set out of phase with the first, like I suggested in a previous slashdot comment [slashdot.org], the current clamps are fooled into giving a too low measurement.
This document [sharelatex.com] (in Swedish) explains it all in detail.
The fact that these measurements were performed and reported also implies that the authors of the report were not part of the fraud. Rossi simply fooled them all.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a very good theory known for over two centuries to explain heat meaurements, disimilar conductors in an electrolyte form a galvanic cell. Ascribing that to fusion is junk science. Storm seeks popularity and hooplah, never mind his credentials.
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If it were valid, it would be reproducible.
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TIL history isnt valid.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Things aren't that simple. The early transistors weren't reproducible...not predictably. And nobody knew why. It eventually turned out that they could be poisoned by trace amount of materials below the amounts chemically detectable at the time. IIRC it took over a decade of very careful work to figure that our, or it may just have been to figure out how to prevent the poisoning. And that had significant money behind it. (I think it was pre-breakup AT&T.)
Now I haven't seen anything convincing that indicates that cold fusion will work, but I also haven't heard of any significant investigation. Merely various spot checks by people who say either they can't get it to work or "I'll sell you this black box.". I'm dubious about its actually working, but not convinced, and don't see any reason that anyone else is convinced...either way.
To me this seems like "this is a low probability proposal which has some claimed marginal evidence and no reasonable theoretical justification and no convincing evidence". Remember just how difficult it is to actually prove that something is false, where you don't know care what mechanism that might be causing it. Were I investing, I don't think I'd invest in it, because even though the potential payoff is astronomical, the probability is extremely small, and the difficulty in reaching a definite negative proof is extreme. And other people have already failed to reach a positive proof. And only a positive proof has a reasonable payoff. (Buying Lockheed stock seems like a better use of the money.)
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You will never reach the denialists with facts and logic.
Those Lockheed guys... (Score:3)
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Actually, current numbers indicate this is one of the most peaceful era of humans.
Until fresh water runs out.
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I haven't seen anything convincing that indicates that cold fusion will work, but I also haven't heard of any significant investigation.
Cold fusion has been heavily investigated. There is one striking thing about all of the supposed "positive" results: they are physically impossible.
Suppose I said I had invented a car that ran on water, and that my claimed proof was that I had driven this car along the streets of a distant city. I give a talk on my results and show a map of the route.
A person in the audience interrupts and says, "Hey, I know that city! That's my home town! The route you've shown is impossible: you say you drove it between 4:30 and 5:30 PM on Tuesday June the 6th, which is in the middle of rush-hour, and you've shown yourself going the wrong way on half-a-dozen one-way streets! Why didn't you collide with anything?"
I reply: "This car runs on water! Weren't you listening? It doesn't collide with other cars, because it is propelled by water!"
You would be correct to suspect that you need not take my claims very seriously after that, and this kind of exchange is typical of cold fusion talks.
I saw Pons give a talk at Caltech, where one of my colleagues interrupted with the question, "Where are the neutrons? You say you don't see any radiation because all the energy comes out in high-energy alpha particles, but if you make alpha particles move with that energy through the palladium lattice you will get neutrons? Where are they?"
Pons answered: "New physics."
But alpha particles don't care what made them move, and more than a car cares what fuel it runs on. You can't just invoke "new physics" and say that the lack of neutrons or gamma rays doesn't matter, because you aren't really invoking new physics, you are throwing out old physics: you are saying that high energy alphas don't produce neutrons, even though that would require all of nuclear physics to be wrong.
So while I agree that new phenomena are often difficult to reproduce and we should be cautious about dismissing them on that basis, cold fusion, after twenty-five years of testing, has proven to be:
a) impossible to reproduce (there is no reliably reproducible experimental setup)
and
b) what experiments that have claimed positive results have always (to the best of my knowledge) required almost all of nuclear physics to be wrong to explain the absence of radiation.
I cannot think of any other phenomenon that eventually proved to exist that shares anything like this history of failure. Maybe Lister's work on sterile technique in surgery, which had a decade or two of rough handling? But even it was frequently reproducible, even if not universally so, and it didn't contradict any well-established, empirically founded, reasonably comprehensive theories of the time.
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Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Insightful)
Cold fusion - a hot mess (Score:2)
Pressure is equivalent to temperature, one begets the other. Since all cases of observable fusion requires high pressure, explain to me how you are going to get the pressure without the temperature? Are you going to crazy glue the atoms together?
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It isn't the first time that some scientific experiments were not always reproduced in independent experiments.
One particular early experiment in electricity showed how a magnetically charged needle would move when put in a field caused by a coiled wire and have that needle change orientation. You would think this is a no-brainer and even something taught in junior high schools today.
Unfortunately this experiment was done by researchers who had their labs and lecture rooms oriented so the field was oriente
Re:Cold fusion - a hot mess (Score:5, Insightful)
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(E|e)volution (Score:4, Insightful)
We can unequivocally, repeatedly, and successfully demonstrate evolution in software as well. It's a done deal. Period. No doubt whatsoever that evolution is a real process, and works just as advertised.
Anyone who denies the process works is either mired in denial or ignorance, no exceptions whatsoever.
As for how it applies to reproduction and the changes that occur from generation to generation ("Evolution"), once you actually know how evolution the process works, it is a lot harder to explain why it would not apply to such biological/temporal sequencing, than it is to explain how it does.
Add that to the fact that we have no other competing theory with anywhere near the repeated validation of the process for how things managed to get as they are, and it's clear that it is definitely time to apply a reasonable level of confidence to Evolution, cap E.
The (very) sad thing is how deeply a lack of basic scientific understanding pervades the citizens. Not so they could do science, just so they could learn science is a tool that actually works to directly advance our understanding of the reality around us, unlike superstition and myth, which only serve to obfuscate and delay understanding.
Our K-12 schools are terrible.
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Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:4, Insightful)
No, he'll compare the original and the dupe looking for anomalies between them, starting with the phase of the moon and working down.
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What does he mean by a "cold fusion period"?
Does he mean a transient reaction in the test set-up that produces the byproducts of fusion, but not long enough to generate useful power? I'm hoping he doesn't mean a period in time when the experiments work, then stop working. That would imply periodic changes in physical laws, which is a much more far-fetched scenario. The idea that some physical constants are not as constant as we think has been proposed, but AFAIK no experiment has indicated that this happ
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It could also mean a dependency on time-varying material properties. From what Ive heard one of the things researchers suspect is a necessary precondition is certain imperfections in the host material - impurities, microfractures, etc. Microfractures especially would be expected to vary over time as thermal stresses altered the atomic structure.
Also, is that sig supposed to be a joke? For all intensive purposes I'm focused and forceful, the rest of the time for all intents and purposes I'm pretty laid ba
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Does he mean a transient reaction in the test set-up that produces the byproducts of fusion, but not long enough to generate useful power?
A transient reaction that can't be reliably reproduced despite recreating the same conditions to the best of our ability. Which might be because the conditions necessary are so extremely specific that they only got them right once by accident or because of some contamination or malfunction that somehow produced the necessary conditions yet attempts to recreate them fail. Or the results of the initial experiment were wrong, but here they've clearly put their desire to believe it was real over their good judg
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:5, Insightful)
> Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.
Where's the proof that it happened even once? Similar assertions have been made by proponents of perpetual motion machines.
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We do shit over him when he was being a ding bat. He also backed up some of his claims with science. We applaud him for those.
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See Los Alamos nuclear chemist Ed Storms's peer reviewed paper published in the German counterpart of the British "Nature":
Status of Cold-Fusion (2010) [coldfusionnow.org]
Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:4, Funny)
Similar assertions have been made by proponents of perpetual motion machines.
They do tend to keep going on and on about that. It never ends.
Here are your odds (Score:3)
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You're on.
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Re:Why Cold Fusion (or something like it) Is Real (Score:4, Informative)
Actually astrology was a science. It was quite successful at predicting eclipses, and determining when to plant which crop. Also at scheduling religious festivals.
Perhaps, though, instead of saying it was a science I should say it was engineering, but it did have (several different) theoretical backstories, so science is probably better. It caused the Babylonians considerable grief when they discovered that the goddess of love was also the god of war. So it even made reliable predictions...that people were loath to accept.
Now none of this has much to do with what you see in daily newspapers, or even what professional astrologists predict. but that is really "cargo cult astrology", it copies the outward shape of the real thing, but it's missing the genuine internals. It derives more from Roman fascination with various means of prognostication than from actual living astrology.
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Actually astrology was a science
I am going to disagree with this one. Here's how. There has been two aspects to studying the stars historically. One is the study of the movement of celestial bodies and predicting various aspects of their positions etc learned from this studying. The second one is the interpretation of those movements and how they related to events on earth. The former we now call astronomy, the latter we call astrology. Historically they were typically performed by the same person, but they were still two vastly different
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The right solution is to get as much of the ambiguous detail of one working power plant complete (under the guise of a coal plant or something) and then build in the technology worth protecting immediately upon gaining Patent Pending status. Then, once the plant goes online and
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A patent only matters if those who you are trying to protect against are under (or cave or submit) to the jurisdiction of the region in which the patent is held. Unless you file a patent in every single industrialized nation for something as significant as this, and the idea is to make money, the better option is to keep it a trade secret so you don't need to disclose any details that those outside of the jurisdiction of the patent don't have the details handed to them.
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If you patent it, and the government considers it valuable enough, they can just take the patent (and classify it so that you can't reveal it).
If you patent it, and you don't have a stable of lawyers and an indefinitely large war chest, then a major corporation can just take it, rephrase the patent, and patent it themselves.
If it's a trade secret, and you can produce a working plant (wouldn't need to be more than a pilot plant) then you can sell the secret to someone who can afford to get into patent battle
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I think a better summery is "blogger creates click-bait post by sowing acute ancetodes about mechanical turk, etc. and a few technical looking graphs together to form a article that appears interesting, but really is just a bunch of waffle."
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Actually the main reason muon catalyzed fusion doesn't produce positive energy is that with each fusion event the muon involved has a 1% chance of being captured by the helium nucleus fusion product and is no longer available to bring more hydrogen nuclei together. At least according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion). For some reason I just looked that up today. Impressively, this pathway which quenches the fusion reaction was figured out theoretically in 1957, just one ye
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He actually doesn't even get to the part about WHY cold fusion is bollocks. He explains the criteria for a reproducible experiment, states that no cold fusion experiment to date has succeeded in meeting these criteria, and then launches into a couple of ideas about how cold fusion might work before the article just kind of ... stops.
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If you find it necessary to compare Rossi to Tesla to support your point, I think Rossi is the clear winner of the exchange.
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see muon-catalyzed fusion (Wikipedia) [wikipedia.org].
Very much this.
The problem I have with this article is that it's basically pointing out a tautology. The kind of fusion created by slamming atoms together at high speed (in other words, high temperature fusion) can't be done at low temperatures. OK, but we have empirical evidence of other mechanisms for causing fusion.
Other forms of catalyzed fusion, if they exist, probably also require some pretty exotic physics, or we'd see lots of evidence of unusually high energy output in nature.