Cold Fusion and the Reputation Trap (aeon.co) 344
An anonymous reader writes: Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, has written an article about how the scientific community regards research into cold fusion, and those who undertake it. His argument is not that current cold fusion research is necessarily correct, but rather that actual scientific progress is inhibited by what he calls a "reputation trap." "People outside the trap won't go near it, for fear of falling in. ... People inside the trap are already regarded as disreputable, an attitude that trumps any efforts that they might make to argue their way out, by reason and evidence." Central to his case is Andrea Rossi's work, which is not taken seriously throughout the scientific community, and yet he's still doing business.
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:5, Insightful)
Rossi is a huckster who has a black box that he won't let anyone see with inputs that he won't let anyone measure.
If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
Re:Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Cold fusion "researchers" head first to popular journalists, not research journals.
Re: Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had cold fusion i would keep it secret at all cost and cash in.
How, pray tell, would you do so? You "cash in" by selling working units, which, by definition is not secret.
What you propose is, literally, the very definition of pseudoscience.
If someone that can hide such a discovery claims to have it, that's a very good reason to doubt it.
However the claim of pseudoscience is as far as I can see unfounded. What's your references for that claim. It probably isn't possible to do cold fusion but that doesn't make it pseudoscience.
What makes it pseudoscience is that a) no one has every had results that could be reproduced by other researchers, and b) everyone working in the field today is not interested in publishing their results, patenting the design, and selling working units. Most are only interested in collecting money from investors without doing those things.
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How, pray tell, would you do so? You "cash in" by selling working units, which, by definition is not secret.
Well you can also sell electricity while keeping the inner workings of your box secret.
If you invented working cold fusion, you're gonna become very rich regardless. But if your goal is to become the richest man in the world, it might be better to keep it a secret.
A practical fusion generator is such an important device that a lot of countries -- probably the majority -- are going to simply nationalize it claiming "national security". China already steals IP rampantly on silly unimportant patents of minor e
Re: Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:5, Insightful)
Well you can also sell electricity while keeping the inner workings of your box secret.
If you're generating enough power to get rich, by definition, you're not keeping it secret. And the regulators will come knocking on your door, wanting to know a) what the waste products are, b) what you are doing with said waste products, and c) what effect that has on the environment.
Real cold fusion would have very good answers to those questions. Fake cold fusion would involve a lot of pollutants being illegal (and criminally) dumped somewhere.
So no, you can't sell the electricity while keeping it secret.
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How, pray tell, would you do so? You "cash in" by selling working units, which, by definition is not secret.
You get a license to build a small solar or wind farm and sell energy back to the grid. You buy ultra-cheap (mostly non-functional) solar panels, skip on most of the wiring, but have something that looks plausible. You connect up your magic box and sell at a fraction below the amount that you'd have generated in ideal conditions. You slowly expand until you're making enough to be taken seriously as a supplier. Then you connect up an 'experimental' power station that provides a few GW sustained output.
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I'm going with "that which is not science, but pretends to be (for purposes of getting people to invest in some kind of Ponzi scheme)."
Science involves publishing one's research, and inviting commentary from others in the field. Not doing that is Not Science.
Re: Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:4, Insightful)
There is another key aspect that separates true science from imposter pseudoscience. I could publish extensive research on how my cat is secretly telepathically communicating with extra terrestrials, but only when nobody is looking. But no amount of commentary from others in the feline psychic SETI field would make that research 'science'. What sets that absurd scenario apart from genuine science may be counterintuitive to people who don't understand science, which is why pseudoscience is so pervasive. Specifically, the one thing that sets real science apart from pseudoscience is falsifiability. Scientists actually want their theories to be proven false, and formulate them in such a way that it if they were false, it would be (relatively) easy to show it. In fact, the way scientists provide evidence for a theory when they publish it is to assume from the beginning that the theory is false (called the null hypothesis), and provide research which shows that it is statistically very unlikely for the null hypothesis to be true.
Rossi, on the other hand, starts with the premise that his device does work, doesn't entertain any alternative theories that would explain his results as would be required by a null hypothesis, and adamantly rejects anyone else's attempts to do the same. Therefore, his work is soundly in the realm of pseudoscience.
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Not knowing what the word "secret" means?
LOLOLOLOL you moron.
"pseudo" means "fake", not "secret".
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More specifically, he uses a cord with the wires switched or shorted so that power is flowing through what's supposed to be the ground. So when he "cuts the current" it's not actually cut.
Re:Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely.
The reason cold fusion isn't taken seriously is because it's been a consistent source of bullshit, lies, data manipulation, outright fraud, and bogus explanations.
Cold fusion didn't just lose credibility because of Fleischmann and Pons. It's lost credibility because of the 26 years of its history too. A lot of the time, reputable scientists do attempt to verify and duplicate the claims of the cold fusion people only to be rapidly turned away. The cold fusion people don't *want* real experts looking at their work. They want gullible idiots and journalists.
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Precisely.
The reason cold fusion isn't taken seriously is because it's been a consistent source of bullshit, lies, data manipulation, outright fraud, and bogus explanations.
And incompetence. Don't forget incompetence.
Cold fusion didn't just lose credibility because of Fleischmann and Pons. It's lost credibility because of the 26 years of its history too. A lot of the time, reputable scientists do attempt to verify and duplicate the claims of the cold fusion people only to be rapidly turned away. The cold fusion people don't *want* real experts looking at their work. They want gullible idiots and journalists.
And investors.
Re:Cold fusion is psuedo-science (Score:5, Interesting)
Rossi is a huckster who has a black box that he won't let anyone see with inputs that he won't let anyone measure.
If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
And note the Slashdot clickbait for the denialists, who have, in fine moonlanding conspiracy dudgeon, have now connected the cold fusion debacle with AGW. Boys, take it up with your buddies at Ezzon, who knew, admitted they knew, and purposefully lied about it. At this point, denialists have to get away from their creationist tactics, and bone up on your conspiracy theory stuff.
But to the actual topic at hand, the cold fusion business is largely neglected for the same reason that the concept of heating your house with two tea candles and a couple clay flowerpots. Because as the scientists say - it ain't bloody likely.
And this bit of silliness, the concept of the evil scientists intimidating others only works in the world of the weak-willed.
Hell, after Fleishmann and Pons announced their discovery, many scientists attempted to duplicate their results - very little luck. Even after many critical reviews, The University of Utah created the National Cold Fusion Institute.
side note - when the NCFI reported negative results, Fleischmann and Pons threatend to sue them.
Is this how people want science to operate? Jeezuz, what a bunch of bullshit.
And all Fleishmann and Pons had to do was to duplicate their own goddamned experiment.
It goes down in history as a physics version of the "Vaccines cause autism" debacle.
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If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
That's not entirely true. The same could be said about super-efficient solar panels. Instead, they don't make you an instant billionaire either. There's always the economic component. Whether Rossi's eCat works or not, it requires fuel, hydrogen, a fat powerline and probably some hard-to-get permits. I can imagine it is very expensive to keep it running for longer terms and I think hydrogen storage is going to be a major issue when running this thing any longer than a few days. For comparison: the hydrogen
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Professor Price mentions "two reports (in 2013 and 2014) on tests of Rossiâ(TM)s device by teams of Swedish and Italian physicists whose scientific credentials are not in doubt, and who had access to one of his devices for extended periods".
Which vaporizes any credibility Professor Price might have for commenting on science.
The two reports, never submitted for peer review, but simply dropped on the Arxiv pre-publication site, have been subjected to careful dissection, and the results are ugly. They never really had "access" to the devices in any meaningful since. Rossi controlled the device at all times, and specified what they could and could not measure. None of the scientists on the teams were independent, all of them had worked with Rossi
Bad argument (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, he's a philosopher but there is no such trap in science. There are people who are reputed to be swindlers like the Rossi guy, keep trying to sell their 'science' regardless that their proofs are irreproducible.
There are plenty of people working on fusion, it's not a dead science, it's just a very, very hard problem with no theoretical or experimental models that currently work and it may never work, hot fusion or even residential-grade fission is a lot closer than cold fusion will ever become.
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residential-grade fission
That's the coolest phrase I've heard all week. Put a smile on my face.
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"...it [cold fusion] may never work, hot fusion or even residential-grade fission is a lot closer than cold fusion will ever become."
Notice how you went from a negatively toned "it may never work" (which, in principle, is the same as saying the positively toned "it may work someday") to the implied "it will never work"?
The last part (about hot fusion, residential-grade fission) implies that none of them work and then states that their level of non-working is more than cold fusion will ever have. So there is
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I think cold fusion may eventually work but by then it will be overshadowed by the cheap availability of small "portable" fission/fusion generators which are actually commercially 'available' (available as in if you want to deal with the restrictions the government puts on it and have a plan for it's maintenance, security and cooling, only viable for large entities (eg. military, universities or data centers)).
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Residential fission is a pipe dream.
The average person is a moron and you don't want the average person near a fission device.
Agreed. You don't even really want the average person near a ladder or power tool.
Re:Bad argument (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked in a large government lab that included a small cold fusion group. The cold fusion scientists at that lab were extremely careful and competent (and never made any claims about power generation). Their work essentially revolved around running nuclear reactions using something other than heat to drive the reaction. Totally non-controversial.
The management and senior scientists at the lab would routinely make fun of these people. They absolutely dealt with a completely undeserved lack of credibility because the words "cold fusion" were associated with their work. Scientists are people, we make human judgments, like it or not.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Seems a touch more nuanced than that, but still concerning.
Re: Bad argument (Score:2)
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"? Surely extraordinary claims just require ordinary proof, to the usual scientific standard. Scientists do have a responsibility to investigate extraordinary claims, like cold fusion or continents moving about and it's a big problem if they then can't even get their papers reviewed, let alone published (as in the article), because all their peers are too scared of falling in to the reputation trap.
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From what I understand, the article claims that because a few people (or their predecessors) seems to be swindlers, the entire field is considered bogus.
The entire field is not considered bogus, there are people that work on it as an actual science and they are well respected even though they work on something that may never be successful or proven.
The problem is that those particular people (eg. Rossi) are ACTUALLY swindlers, they may taint the field in the public's eye (as if anyone really knows/cares out
Hair Restoration and "Snake Oil" Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, then Rogaine and Propecia were invented and proven to cure baldness, and eventually the courts had to step in and tell the patent office that they were wrong and that hair restoration was at least theoretically possible.
Pons and Fleishmann are like the early snake oil salesmen, selling "tonics" for hair restoration from their carts. Their "evidence" is non-reproducible and poorly tested, and they lacked even a theory for how their machine worked, instead insisting only that it generated more energy than could be explained. Like hair restoration, that doesn't make the entire field impossible - it just means that at best, they had no idea what they were talking about, and at worst, they personally were frauds.
That doesn't mean that Rossi and his ilk are automatically frauds either - maybe they are (they're certainly in the "have no idea what they're talking about" camp, since they have no theories for why they're getting the results they're getting), or maybe they're like the first researchers for Rogaine who have some strange evidence of new hair growth. Until we have something that can be repeatedly and reliably tested and confirmed or rejected, or a defined theory that either works out mathematically or doesn't, then it should neither be accepted nor dismissed out of hand.
Real power generation doesn't need belief (Score:5, Insightful)
If Rossi's or anyone's claim that cold fusion (or some other power generation technique) worked was real, then they don't need anyone to believe them. They could just sell power and bootstrap themselves to millions/billions.
For example, if I could produce a few MW of electricity cheap, with a compact form factor, I'd just go to Hawaii (which has really expensive electricity) and undercut the price of electricity there and sell the power to a datacenter or a high rise building. With the profits, I could bootstrap and make more power generators, and displace more competing capacity.
And with generators that were powering MWs of buildings/datacenters, with no visible fuel inputs other than deuterium, I think credibility would soon be a non-issue.
--PM
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The problem with that reasoning is it assumes someone has secretly funded a potentially long and expensive development path that extends well beyond what a first stage researcher may have discovered.
For example, let's say the Pons & Fleischmann experiment actually did work and was reproducible. It still wouldn't have sufficient output to do anything useful without further research. So there is no way they could sit on their discovery and make their own megawatt scale cold fusion generator.
The key to dea
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In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles".
Can you give any more details on that? Googling didn't turn up anything by way of confirmation.
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In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles".
Can you give any more details on that? Googling didn't turn up anything by way of confirmation.
Sure. In re Cortright [ipo.org] is a Federal Circuit case that discusses it, and cites to earlier cases:
The PTO may establish a reason to doubt an invention’s asserted utility when the written description “suggest[s] an inherently unbelievable undertaking or involve[s] implausible scientific principles.” Brana, 51 F.3d at 1566, 34 USPQ2d at 1441; see also In re Eltgroth, 419 F.2d 918, 164 USPQ 221 (CCPA 1970) (control of aging process). Treating baldness was once considered an inherently unbelievable undertaking. See In re Ferens, 417 F.2d 1072, 1074, 163 USPQ 609, 611 (CCPA 1969); In re Oberwener, 115 F.2d 826, 829, 47 USPQ 455, 458 (CCPA 1940).
And Oberweger (the above cite is a typo) [casetext.com] includes the quotes:
It was the view of the tribunals below that the affidavits were weak in character and were not sufficient to show utility for a concoction which belongs to a class of compositions which from common knowledge has long been the subject matter of much humbuggery and fraud...
Very much like the situation at bar, the affidavits in that case did not afford convincing proof of utility. Certainly there is nothing in this record to show that appellant's composition is any better than the many hundreds of similar concoctions that have been advertised and sold to a credulous public since the beginning of recorded history. It is a matter of common knowledge that numerous preparations, similar in many respects to the one at bar, have been advertised and sold for the purpose of producing hair on bald heads and which were totally lacking in utility, often harmful to the human body, and whose sale was generally understood to be a fraud upon the public.
Having in mind the particular subject matter involved in the instant alleged invention, we are in full agreement with the tribunals of the Patent Office that the claims which are before us on their merits were properly rejected for lack of patentable utility and that the board committed no error in affirming the action of the examiner requiring division of the claims as aforesaid.
35 USC 101 is the relevant statute and it gets a lot of discussion lately with regard to whether software is/should be patentable, and whether isolated genes are/should be patentable, but it's also had a long and interesting history. In addition to baldness cures and perpetual motion machines, slot machines used to be rejected under 35 USC 101 as unpatent
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In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles". This was the same rejection applied to applications for perpetual motion machines, teleporters, etc. - they can't possibly work, by definition, so the application is claiming a useless invention and is therefore ineligible for a patent.
Of course, then Rogaine and Propecia were invented and proven to cure baldness, and eventually the courts had to step in and tell the patent office that they were wrong and that hair restoration was at least theoretically possible.
Any citation for this story?
No account I have found about the discovery of the hair-growing properties of minoxidil, and its patenting (like this one [webcitation.org]) mentions any such rejection, or lawsuit. I find lawsuits about patent priority, profit-sharing, about misleading marketing of the drug, and patent infringement, but absolutely nothing about the USPO rejecting the patent or being forced to grant one by any court.
Indeed when Upjohn filed a patent for hair loss prevention in 1971 it was granted right away [findlaw.com].
But, a
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Any citation for this story?
Yep - just to avoid copypasta spam, check out my reply to the same question here [slashdot.org].
petrodragon (Score:2)
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...maybe they're like the first researchers for Rogaine who have some strange evidence...
No, Rossi and his supporters are NOTHING AT ALL like that ;-)
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Time travel powered by cold fusion is the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Actually cold fusion works just fine, and powered the first practical time travel engine. Unfortunately, inevitably time travel leads to paradoxes until the universe (well the one with observers remaining) settles into a consistent steady state as increasingly improbably events take place until the result is no time travel.
Last time it was the bird with a baguette sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider at a critical point in time (ha!). http://www.theguardian.com/sci... [theguardian.com]
And poor Pons and Fleishmann are victims of the same process. No one (who will be believed) will ever be able to replicate their work. Something will always go wrong.
Oh, and don't try and take advantage of this information to do anything about it. I barely survived the Orca landing on my garage where my experiment was running, and I was 200 miles inland.
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Branding Problem (Score:2)
COOL FUSION - Gota have it!
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It's what plants crave...
Coulomb Barrier (Score:4, Informative)
What a load of horseshit.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible. Now, maybe there's a clever way around that, but it would have to be something truly extraordinary. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Some nut like Rossi with a black box isn't going to convince anybody. He's got to explain precisely how it manages to circumvent the Coulomb barrier before his claims, or those of any other cold fusion researcher, are remotely credible.
Re:Coulomb Barrier (Score:5, Informative)
I'm no fan of cold fusion, but the Coulomb barrier alone does not make cold fusion impossible. For example, muon-catalyzed fusion works at room temperature. (Muon-catalyzed fusion is currently impractical as a power source for reasons unrelated to the Coulomb barrier.)
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It can be done at low temperatures. That doesn't mean, however, that this mechanism does it.
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Not to imply that this is the mechanism for cold fusion, or even a mechanism for cold fusion, but quantum tunnelling allows subatomic particles to move through space without traveling through the space between the start and end points. Given the oddities involved with quantum effects, it is at least theoretically possible for fusion to occur locally without a high-temperature environment. The results to date, however, argue that if it does occur, it does not occur at a rate that makes it viable as an energy
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What a load of horseshit.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier
About 5000 electron volts or so. Which is well under a quadrillionth of a joule.
It's not the amount of energy. It's getting that energy focused to a single particle.
which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible.
Yes, one thing we can say for sure is that cold fusion has to have some mechanism other than thermal.
But that was already obvious, and hardly needs to be pointed out.
I think it's pretty unlikely, myself, and I think that the previous generation of researchers damn well made me want to see very extraordinary evidence before believing in su
There are reasons behind that "trap" (Score:4, Informative)
It's not like mainstream scientists give low credits to cold fusion out of nowhere.
There are strong theoretical reasons against cold fusion being possible. The repulsion force between two charged nucleus gets very, very strong when they get close (inverse square law, if they are twice as close, the repulsion is 4 times bigger) and they need to get very close in order for "fusion" to happen. That's called the Coulomb barrier. So charged nucleus need to go very, very fast in order to have a chance to get close enough to fuse, and that's why fusion requires very high temperature (temperature being directly linked with average particle speed).
Pretending to have "cold fusion" mean that the Standard Model of physics is wrong. It might be wrong (or more likely, incomplete), sure. But that's an extraordinary claim to make, and an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. That's what the "reputation trap" is all about. The same goes for FTL travel, or perpetual motion. Those things defies our current understanding of physics, and while our current understanding might be wrong, it's solid enough so we ask for very strong evidence before even considering it seriously.
And sure, you can try to find loopholes without actually breaking the Standard Model, like, doing neutron capture and then beta-decay. It doesn't need to break the Coulomb barrier, and it might look like fusion. But first it's not fusion (although it might serve the same energy-production role), and then even that is not as easy as it seems. Getting a reliable source of neutron isn't easy, the neutrons need to have the required speed for the capture to be efficient, and even then, the capture tends to be not be complete, so you would detect leaking neutrons.
Re:There are reasons behind that "trap" (Score:4, Interesting)
That's called the Coulomb barrier. So charged nucleus need to go very, very fast in order to have a chance to get close enough to fuse, and that's why fusion requires very high temperature (temperature being directly linked with average particle speed) ;D
You are explaining "high temperature fusion" here. Not cold fusion, nor why cold fusion can't work
At very low temperatures, nucleii can come close enough to fusion, too ;D
Anyway, the general term for cold fusion is: low energy nuclear reaction.
We know since roughly 1890-1910 (well, we, as in "we who care") that cold fusion is possible. If you google for it you find hundreds of especially Italian and Japanese PhDs working in that area before roughly 1930.
Pons and Fleischmann simply had bad luck. They found something in their lab and hurried to go public. Unfortunately as only a few other researchers could reproduce the stuff they found. On top of that as they accidentally said in an interview "might be cold fusion", they got disgraced by the news networks. (Actually at my university the experiments where reproduced as well, UniversitÃt Karlsruhe, KIT)
Regarding Rossi, as far as I can tell, there is nothing into it. The proclaimed reaction is ofc possible ... wasn't it some fusion that leads it excited Bor that decays then? However the apparatus seems not to make any sense.
Pretending to have "cold fusion" mean that the Standard Model of physics is wrong.
No, it does not mean that. Why should it?
Superconductivity was not explainable by the standard model either, until Cooper had an idea. And that idea makes absolutely no sense at all (looking at paired electrons as if it was a sound wave in a crystal). Nevertheless it is the standard in our days how we work with super conductivity.
I would not be surprised if H - H cold fusion in a crystal matrix works similar than Cooper pairs in a super conducting matrix.
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At very low temperatures, nuclei can come close enough to fusion, too
No it cannot.
Well of course a single nuclei cannot fusion with itself.
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There's one other way... it's what happens to super massive stars when they die. Gravity collapsing the matter into a "neutron star", or black hole. Of course, we don't have the technology to even begin to approach that. We can get shit wicked hot, but pushing nuclei together to the point of fusion is beyond us.
[Yes, there have been ultrasonic devices claimed to have done it, but they're just as much snake oil as the rest. 'tho it is theoretically plausible -- it's how atomic weapons work (shockwave takes a
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Low-temperature fusion is possible without breaking the Standard Model, e.g. muon-catalyzed fusion. You've oversimplified the issues.
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the Standard Model of physics is wrong [...] or more likely, incomplete. But that's an extraordinary claim to make
I don't see that as extraordinary. I'd go, in either case, with 'very likely' or 'most certainly'. This isn't my area, by any stretch, but even I could tell you that.
an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.
Never has a more vacuous statement been repeated so often. There is so little meaning here. So little grounding. Why not just say, simply, 'claims require proof'. It doesn't alter the meaning in the slightest. It takes away nothing, save a bit of empty rhetorical punch. Oh, I see. It's the empty rhetoric you're after. That's the whol
The history of science is littered with crazy (Score:3)
The history of science is littered with ideas considered crazy.
The problem is that something is considered crazy until it isn't, and there's no way a priori to tell if something considered crazy will pan out. That doesn't stop people from having an opinion about it.
Of course, it's difficult for a reporter to actually quote someone saying "well, I really have no idea." Reportage is biased towards certainty, and the reporter can always find someone willing to say something.
I've seen this in action myself. (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work in the public health field of vector-borne disease surveillance, and there is a long-standing myth that you can tell the species of a mosquito by the frequency of its wingbeats. This is nonsense -- like claiming you can always tell the difference between a flute and a saxophone by the notes they happen to be playing: their frequency ranges largely overlap. Nonetheless the myth resurfaces on a regular basis, and every few years someone will come up with a machine for identifying mosquitoes by their wingbeat frequency.
Why do people keep coming back to this myth? Because if you could do it that would be incredibly useful. Not all mosquito species bite humans, and not all species that bite humans or animals transmit diseases. In a West Nile Virus outbreak you'd set up listening stations all around your area. You'd roll the spray trucks if your equipment told you Culex pipiens was on the wing, because Cx. pipiens vectors WNV and bites both humans and avian WNV hosts. If it were Culiseta melanura you probably wouldn't because that species almost never bites humans. But using wingbeat frequencies this way can't possibly work, and mosquito researchers get thoroughly sick of debunking these devices every few years.
Now I was at a meeting, and I ran into a guy that had an acoustic mosquito identifier that worked on a slightly different principle: it did a fast fourier transform of the acoustic signal and attempted to distinguish between species based on the pattern of frequencies. I was intrigued; if you know anything about math you know this is very different from just taking the loudest frequency of a signal. It's more like telling the difference between a flute and a saxophone playing the same note by the instruments' timbre.
Now the idea that you could actually distinguish between species this way is far-fetched, because species is largely an arbitrary human construct. But if you could distinguish between distantly related mosquito clades that would be very useful (e.g. genus Anopheles is a severe concern in a Malaria sitaution but genus Culex is not). Now I have a friend who was editor of an entomology journal at the time. I ran into him at the same conference and as I was chatting with him I asked him whether he'd heard this guy's pitch. As soon as he heard the words "identification" and "frequency" come out of my mouth he literally turned his back on me and walked away -- and he was a personal friend of mine.
Now the chances that this FFT mosquito ID device worked and was practical were pretty small. It may even have been crackpottery, but it wasn't the same old crackpottery. It just sounded enough like the old crackpottery to elicit a strong disgust reaction from an expert.
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Now I was at a meeting, and I ran into a guy that had an acoustic mosquito identifier that worked on a slightly different principle: it did a fast fourier transform of the acoustic signal and attempted to distinguish between species based on the pattern of frequencies. I was intrigued; if you know anything about math you know this is very different from just taking the loudest frequency of a signal. It's more like telling the difference between a flute and a saxophone playing the same note by the instruments' timbre.
That's cool, but you left off the punchline! Did the FFT identification work?
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Well, I don't know. You'd think the guy's claim would be easy enough to test, but to do it properly you'd have to set up some kind of double blind test against an expert mosquito identifier, because it's clearly possible to delude yourself into thinking something like this works. All I know is that he wasn't back again the following year. That could be because his device didn't work, or because he couldn't convince anyone to test it, or (very likely) even if it worked in principle, there was no obvious w
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That happens all the time in mosquito control, which attracts way more than its share of Rube Goldberg inventions.
Like the bug zapper.
Re:I've seen this in action myself. (Score:5, Interesting)
Stuff way cooler than a bug zapper for sure. The coolest thing I ever saw was a sonar device that killed mosquito larvae. Mosquito larvae are aquatic, but they can't extract oxygen from the water; they have to attach to the surface. This device emitted a powerful, upward sweeping frequency chirp, and when it hit the resonant frequency of the larvae's buoyancy bladder the larvae would pop like popcorn and sink to the bottom of the tank. All you needed was a fish tank full of larvae and he had one hell of an impressive demo.
The guy thought he was going to sell tens of thousands of these things, that mosquito control agencies would send armies of workers out to lower these things into stuff like storm drains to kill all the larvae. The thing is it's a lot cheaper to hire a college student at the beginning of summer, put him on a scooter with a bag of 180 day briquets; he doesn't even have to stop the scooter to chuck them into the storm drains as he passes. Even the environmental justification is relatively weak; the pesticides used on mosquito larvae tend to be very narrow spectrum to aquatic flies or arthropods and break down rapidly in the environment after being emitted by an extended release briquet. Used in things like storm drains and abandoned swimming pools they're extremely benign.
But the guy has been moderately successful; from what I hear agencies buy them to bring to public education events and fairs to do the same awesome demo he'd done, then they put them away.
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Now the idea that you could actually distinguish between species this way is far-fetched, because species is largely an arbitrary human construct. But if you could distinguish between distantly related mosquito clades that would be very useful
That's getting into rather advanced pedantry about species. I'd also argue that they're not entirely a human construct. Life forms a DAG (causality means it must be directed). The graph is for many things (well eukaryotes) pretty similar to a tree at coarse scales.
Spec
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Taxonomy is pedantry. For example someone noticed that sum populations of the mosquito Cx pipiens have a couple of little white dots on their abdomen, so they proposed a new species Cx restuans, and the proposal was accepted. Cx pipiens and Cx restuans are except for a couple of minor color markings interchangeable, and they interbreed in many places to produce populations of fully fertile "hybrids".
Life is a DAG because an organism can't be an ancestor of one of its own ancestors; however that doesn't me
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Well, I'm not so sure that different mosquitoes sound different enough for the idea to work, but if it did clearly you wouldn't want to wait for a mosquito to fly close enough you can pick it up against all the background noise. What you would do is bait a sound insulated trap with octenol and CO2 so it smells like a sweaty animal. This is very similar to one technique used to to collect mosquitoes for identification; the advantage is that you wouldn't have to bring a bag of mosquitoes and assorted duff ba
Hot Fusion (Score:3)
One of the most frustrating things about this is the extent to which *hot* fusion has also been tarred by cold fusion's reputation -- not among scientists, but among businesses, investors and government agencies -- the people who fund research. Scientists know perfectly well the difference between hot fusion research and cold fusion (or LENR), but a lot of people who control funding just hear "fusion" and think it's bogus.
Hot fusion also has its own semi-justified reputation for not working. We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!" Well, for 40 years we've funded very little fusion research, which has resulted in very little progress, which has resulted in a belief that fusion research isn't worthy of funding. The whole cold fusion flap only aggravated this situation.
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We've all heard the old semi-joke: "Fusion power is 40 years away -- and always will be!"
Fusion was around the corner in the 1940s. It was ten years away in the 1950s, twenty years away in the 1960s, thirty years away in the 1970s, forty years away in the 1980s...
The problem is, fusion probably isn't worth doing (Score:2)
At least DT fusion of thermal plasmas that are magnetically confined.
Most of the energy comes out as fast neutrons or gammas, and getting energy from those requires a large thermal conversion plant (steam generator).
Check out this link, where it is argued that direct electric conversion technologies will win on cost vs. thermal conversion plants:
https://matter2energy.wordpres... [wordpress.com]
Basically, fusion will always fail on economics. Unless someone comes up with a way to do fusion of species that produce energetic
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I reject the arguments in that article. First, his economic analysis is simplistic and naive, and if followed to its logical conclusion would imply that coal-fired power plants can never -- ever -- be viable either. (Taken even further, it also seems to imply that there can never be more than one economically viable energy source at a time. Whichever source has the most favorable financial numbers is the only thing that gets built! But it has never worked that way, and it isn't going to start working th
Summary says it, but the writer doesn't get it. (Score:3)
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Which is true somewhat, although the wrong words are used: IF a well-performed (and repeatedly verifiable) experiment OVERCOMES the failure to replicate, it would be of interest. Lost in this is: THAT HASN'T HAPPENED. The author seems to think that because Rossi is "still doing business," then somehow his claim to fame is justified, and everyone else is wrong. That ain't it. Rossi may be selling something (PT Barnum knew about how that worked), but it isn't cold fusion... and given this guy is a convicted fraud, it's not hard to think that the device he claims to do something that physics says shouldn't be able to happen, while refusing to submit it to 3rd party testing... or any peer review at all, nor explain how it performs the physics/miracle, and yet seems to be constantly "seeking investors" (you know, that whole con man looking for a mark part), is probably just that... a con.
Now, it sounds like the author has been duped, and now either wants to cover his embarrassment, or still believes the con is real. Name recognition isn't what's making the whole cold fusion thing a reputation trap.... it's the fact that it's pseudo-science that's been beaten to death for almost 100 years now (cold fusion was first brought up in the 1920's), and now attracts people like Rossi and, well, Huw Price, who apparently are "simply looking for investors," while ignoring reality.
Why were those cold fusion experiments done?. (Score:2)
Here's something that the original article did not really discuss...
Most of science proceeds by small steps. Someone notices an anomaly. Someone manages to repeat it. Someone manages to extend the current theory to fit it. Someone may come up with a radical theory that also fits. Someone finds another prediction from the radical theory, and looks for verification of that. And so it goes on.
We know that there is a large potential barrier to getting light nucleii close enough to fuse. We can whack a few
Elephant in the room (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an elephant in this room and it's the oil and gas industry.
It's not so much that so many of us dream of a world where energy is free and limitless as a glass of cold water.
It's that most of us realise how much less horror would be in the world if there wasn't constant fighting over the limited fossil fuels that cold fusion would replace.
Scientific reputation and the laws of physics can go to hell if these are the things that are preventing us from living in a better, safer, cleaner world.
I'm willing to believe that it's all a hoax if it's 100% certain it is BS.
However, for the love of humanity, if there's even a shadow of a possibility that any of these experiments have shown something worth checking further then please can everyone shut up and stop shouting it down until we really are 100% certain it's snake oil.
Otherwise, it looks to many of us, like the elephant in the room is behind the angry mob goading them on to burn the heretics...
Falling into the genetic fallacy (Score:2)
Re:So?! (Score:5, Insightful)
If some area of research is claimed as "discredited" it should mean that a higher burden of proof is required. There's no reason to shun cold fusion and declare that any research in it is wasted, that's unscientific. However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab. Part of the shunning of cold fusion also came from the embarrassment factor, as a lot of people had been quickly interested in it, world wide news reports, early hype followed by disappointment.
For astrology, it's been discredited over and over and over. There's never been any hint of evidence into validity, not even preliminary theories. The burden of proof to be accepted as a valid scientific researcher here is vastly higher than with cold fusion.
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"However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab." How to go beyond that when you can't even get your simple papers published, that's the problem.
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However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab.
No! That's the very trap that we are trying to avoid!
If we follow that rule, then 100 independent labs may get "relevant results" and they won't publish, so they won't know about each other. Nobody is going to fund some big effort to try to reproduce this in a bunch of labs. The only way to move forward is for 1 lab at a time to test it, and publish their results - positive or negative. Then, after a time, meta-studies will correlate what the labs did and their results, and patterns may emerge. THAT is
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For astrology, it's been discredited over and over and over. There's never been any hint of evidence into validity, not even preliminary theories.
OTOH, there are good reasons to think that certain things, like eg. an opposition between the Sun and any of the inner planets, would have a negative influence on events on Earth ;-)
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Well said, however, I disagree regarding cold fusion in particular. It should be shunned because it flies in the face of physical laws.
Proved these physical laws beyond a shadow of a doubt, have you? Then why is there still so much of phsysics, cosmology, etc still unexplained? Why bother with the LHC or anything else, let's just shut it all down. Ramze apparently knows all the physical laws already.
They said the same about radiation back when the Curies first demonstrated that radium was generating ex
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Nobody in their right mind would really call Muon-catalyzed fusion as 'cold fusion'.
cold fusion - it worked like claimed, would be damn easy to verify to actually happen.
but.. for some strange reason they skip peer reviews and scientific process and look for private money they then use.
"Fine, the excess heat produced by "cold fusion" is not produced by nuclear reactions as high-energy physicists understand them. So, where is it coming from?" uh. you would need to have the excess heat first, after that you
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The only known way to do that is with intense heat (heat is just movement -- so fast moving particles) and pressure (pressure is just density of the fast-moving particles).
But see, Muon-catalyzed fusion [wikipedia.org]. As the article notes, it allows room temperature fusion, but requires significantly more energy to make the muons than you get out of fusing the hydrogen so it doesn't seem to be a viable research path. However, it's been known for 60 years, lab tested and was predicted by and agrees with theories, so we can't say that fusion can only be done with intense heat and pressure.
This doesn't mean that that's what Rossi's doing. He's most likely a fraud, which is why he has no theo
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Labeling certain topics as taboo and censorship is a dangerous slippery (political) slope. Politics has NO place in Science.
Isaac Newton wrote more about alchemy then physics; just because someone has an interest outside the rigid straight-jacket of Science doesn't imply that there are no interesting discoveries to be made. We don't know unless someone does the research regardless of people's perception.
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Politics has NO place in Science.
Which is why science as an institution is always problematic.
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It's widely believed he died a virgin. I'm not going to claim it as definitely true that he never had sex, it's one of those historical claims that's basically impossible to verify, but there you go. He did have issues with women, though.
I think it's safe to say that, if Isaac Newton were alive today, he'd be posting to slashdot.
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Since the advent of computers and large data sets of accurate birth records, it is now possible to develop falsifiable astrological hypotheses. This would be inexpensive research. But I doubt that this will be done in the next decade or so, since the scientific community is too strongly invested in its irrational prejudice against astrology.
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Many Early Astronomers would cast Horoscopes for rich Patrons to finance their science.
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I don't know about perpetual motion but I have often thought that there should be a way to use gravity outside of the ways it's already commonly used, I just have never come up with one.
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$0. You just have to submit it and get voted onto the front page. Easy as pie.
I like pie.
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most of them claim to be "not a scientist, but..."
I think it starts there.
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Part of the problem is that while they claim there's no proof that it's caused by man, they also implicitly take the next step and imply that it's not that big a disaster.
ORLY?
The last I heard, the only way the issue of whether the claimed climate change is, as also claimed, caused by man (by fossil-fuel sourced carbon dioxide emissions) entered into it is that, if such human emissions are not a major causative factor, reduction of them by draconian government intervention is useless. (Worse than useless,
Economic Change (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is as an excuse to do nothing; the thinking that if it's not our fault then we don't have to fix it.
I disagree. The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is to attempt to *absolve* us from the sin of doing it.
Take for instance a forest fire. It happens. We attempt to blame someone. When the cause appears "natural" (e.g., a lightning strike or similar), then we as a species seem somehow *absolved* from responsibility. However, regardless of the blame, we often still attempt to stop a forest fire and attempt remediation afterwards, not because of some moral duty to the planet, but becau
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As far as religion goes in some parts of Christianity, God has promised not to destroy the planet again until the second coming. Ie, no more global deluge. So a man made global delute would be considered heresy in some places. Also the idea that something as puny as mankind could destroy God's creation is also denied and I have seen that sort of opinion expressed (not that anyone is predicting the earth would be destroyed mind you, just a climate change).
It's all a part of big business (in this case oil
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Important Theology Nitpick: the actual promise is that God will not destroy the world via water/flood again. This doesn't mean that He wouldn't use other means, just not *that*.
Back to the rest of the conversation...
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Re:Climate Change (Score:4, Insightful)
So we wait until the sky falls? Given lots and lots of evidence of climate change already happening? Don't give up smoking until the xrays show a tumor.
Your "way of life" is trivial to change. Stop driving some wannabe-cowboy SUV that does 3mpg on a good day, start recycling, turn the lights off when you're not in the room, etc. Cut back on American style conspicuous consumption.
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Don't give up smoking until the xrays show a tumor.
I think I'll get a 100th opinion [wordpress.com].
Re:Climate Change (Score:4, Insightful)
No, wait until the sky falls then blame the scientists for not being able to convince you before it was too late.
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From the linked article: "Fossil and temperature records over the past 520 million years show a correlation between extinctions and climate change"
And we all know that correlation equals causation, don't we? The article points out the single charted metric of atmospheric composition and matches that against extinctions, and derives the foregone conclusion that CO2 increase causes extinctions. Nothing about any other possible causes; the goal is to show that increased CO2 is evil, and they've found this corr
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The climate constantly changes, always has, always will; so say what you really mean.
OK. The best models we have of climate suggest that anthropogenic gasses emitted into the atmosphere (most importantly carbon dioxide) have the same effect as naturally occurring gasses, and the current best estimate for the warming effect of carbon dioxide is that is causes between 1.5 C and 4.5C average global temperature rise per doubling of concentration.
The effect has been known for over a hundred years. It explains why the Earth is not frozen.
There has been no warming for over 18 years in RSS data,
If you cherry pick the right data. Here you go: https://w [noaa.gov]
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Or, we could just make the upgrades we have known for years we need to make and solve it that way.
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since we don't have another depopulated Earth to use as a control.
If the other earth was depopulated, it would not be a "control".
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Since anthropogenic global warming has only been possible since the 1950's, there would be plenty of control group in the historical records, if they would quit adjusting the data.
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I'd say there is a chance (never thought I'd defend cold fusion) because muon catalyzed fusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion) almost works, though I mean 'almost' in the sense that if the physics of muons were a little bit different then it would work, not that it can be made to work with just a little more trying on our part. If muon catalyzed fusion almost works then maybe there is something else out there that does, but that's a big 'maybe'.
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I don't want to heat up an oven, so I will develop "cold cooking".
You mean like a microwave? Or perhaps induction cooking?