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Table Top Fusion Courtesy of Tiny Bubbles
Erik Baard writes: "The peer-reviewed journal Science is carrying a cover story about the possibility of table top fusion. Not cold fusion, mind you, but the apparatus might look that way to some. Oak Ridge and other labs say they have gotten the fingerprints of fusion (neutron production) from collapsing bubbles in liquid, a process that heats a local area to temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun, and releases photons.
The disputes are already here -- notably from Dr. Robert Park of the American Physical Society and from critical reviewers who say they haven't repeated the neutron production. But the authors say the critics didn't calibrate their equipment correctly. Articles regarding the discovery can be found on
Eureka Alert " CD: Looks legit, but Pons and Fleishman (and the University of Utah for that matter) talked a good game. I suppose I'll belive in tabletop fusion when a generator comes atached to my next laptop. The author of this post also has a longer article up at the Village Voice
Isn't this story about 28 days premature?
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
I want my Mr. Fusion!
hopefully they'll come out with a clear casemod for it. . .
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
Ah...so that explains why soda pop explodes when placed next to my subwoofer. Now, I wonder which brand of soda will produce the highest nuclear yield. Talk about energy drinks...
RD
THE CRACKPOT INDEX by John Baez
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.
-5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.
10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.
10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".
10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".
20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.
20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.
20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".
20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)
30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.
30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.
40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)
50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.
"Ain't nothing better than all the powers of the universe right on your tabletop."
You're confusing fusion with zero-point energy.
... which is already in your tabletop, so I guess that still counts...
If you don't get a lot of those pesky neturons, it'd be fun to tinker with one of these in the garage. What's deuterium go for these days?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sonoluminescence: an Introduction
Single Bubble Sonoluminescence HOWTO
Since sonoluminescence dosent seem to scale up (to my knowledge) this seems like a moot point. It is sort of cool to have a cheap way to study micro-fusion though.
Information wants to be free like speech wants to be free, not like we want beer to be free.
PDF copies can be downloaded from here.
I believe that anything related to tabletop fusion coming from Pons and Fleischmann should be treated with the highest circumspection, bearing in mind that those two might have an agenda. I doubt very much top-class scientists around the world would have been trying to build Tokamaks at the cost of billions of dollars, and been through so much frustration with them, if it was even remotely possible to do fusion with a pyrex full of deuterium and a paladium electrode in a second grade lab in Utah.
So, even though there is an infinitesimal chance that P. and F. have stumbled on something legit and promising, there a much greater chance that they're crooked scientists, and an even greater chance that they're just plain crackpots.
Ok, initial comment on this story has been very negative, but... The original Pons et. al. findings also claimed neutron production. So do those results all indicate experimental error or log-book-cooking that would make Michael Fastow weep with fatherly pride? Ever heard this one? ...whatever that means... and it's just the tech hasn't caught up to make an observation? Is it just possible that it's a matter of technology to produce tabletop/cold fusion? Heat treating the metal or something? High temp superconducting seems to still be a alot of hit or miss experimentation. Why would cold fusion be so different a technology from that?
Q: What does a neutrino detector actually detect?
A: The presence of funding.
Theorists were convinced that neutrinos would be observed jumping from tau to mu versions
Or am I just a clever troll?
ceci n'est pas un 'sig'
But i forget which one- The Saint, maybe?
Who is getting their physics PHD's from the university of Hollywood?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
People I respect have been working on this using deuterium. Stainless steel cell, palladium side with the ultrasound attached to it.
Very repeatable response: clean relationships between ultrasound energy, neutrons and helium.
I have thought 'cold fusion' was real from the beginning. It is very normal for scientific breakthroughs to take a long time to reliably replicate: The early work with semi-conductors required elements from particular mines in Chile, etc.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
... I can feed old banana peels into my laptop to power it (cf. the delorean in Back to the Future Part II)
Anything short of that, while it might be "OK", is just not good enough in my opinion.
:)
- a peer-reviewed article appearing in a major (if not the major) scientific journal,
- reporting an experimental result (not a business plan),
- that we're hearing about because the article is going to press (not because it was planned or submitted; admittedly, we're hearing it a little early because of advance reports).
These are all good signs of good science. The better sign will be attempts to reproduce the experiment, with both successes and failures published in the same professional manner.It's an extraordinary claim, and will require extraordinary evidence. Yes, this is just a first step; but at least it's in the right direction.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
You too can make sonoluminescence happen. Try it with some deuterium and see if you can get fusion. Sound complicated, just use this easy to follow guide. It will give you step by step instructions for reproducing that special kind of magic that is sonoluminescence. All you need is:
- sinus generator: (sounds a bit painful)any function generator working around 25kHz, adjustable to +/-1Hz
(+/-10Hz may work, too)
- amplifier: nearly any kind of audio amplifier will do. If you're not sure, measure
the saturation voltage: 40V peak-to-peak should be enough.
- 2-trace oscilloscope
- 2 piezoceramic Transducers (drivers):around d=16mm in diameter, h=8mm thick
- piezoceramic pill-transducer (microphone):around 3mm in diameter, 1mm thick
- three finger clamp
- laboratory stand
- flask:take a 100ml Pyrex/Duran spherical flask, diameter 65mm, with a small neck. An industrial one has poor optical quality, so better take a free blown one.
- coil(s): around 20mH, see text
- resistors: 1M, 10k, 1R
- coaxial cable
- quick-drying epoxy glue
- an eyedropper or a syringe (one of those little do-it-yourself subcutaneous is very good)
- degassed distilled water:
- Pyrex/Duran Erlenmeyer flask (0.5 or 1l) and airtight stopper with pipe, rubber hose and clamp to close it
- aluminium/highgrade steel drinking bottle (0.5 or 1l) with screw cap; one of those found in camping stores, a bare one without varnish
- a bubble
;-)
oh, and it is nice to have:or
- second oscilloscope
- vacuum pump
- high-pass filter
- laser
Go for it kids. By the way, my favourite part is this quote: "Increase the driving voltage until you hear a horrible screeching noise, which sounds like your flask is going to crack. Don't be surprised if it does".I have to fill in some more text here, becasue slashdot sais I have too few characters per line. Well its just a bloody list of things. Of course there won't be much to each line, what do you expect?
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
The surface of the sun is at about 5700K, far below that required for fusion. I thought this meant the science was totally implausible, but it turns out to be an error in the Slashdot summary. ...".
The article claims "simulations also indicate that temperatures inside the collapsing bubbles may reach up to 10 million degrees Kelvin, as hot as the center of the sun." and "Temperatures inside these bubbles can be as high as 5000-7000 degrees Kelvin, about as hot as the sun?s surface. But, recent experiments by a number of researchers suggest that bubble temperatures can reach even higher temperatures--closer to the heat needed for nuclear fusion
Deuterium 'burns' at much lower temperatures than the ordinary hydrogen burning that powers our sun (where reaction rates are so slow it will take billions of years to use up the fuel supply.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Warning: Do not fuse your dog to anything. If you do decide to fuse a cat, use a strong superglue or firm adhesive to ensure they don't escape and claw your head off. Because it doesn't take Einstein to tell you, Cats = Evil^2.
Here is a link Science Magazine is providing:
Science Magazine
It has a pdf version of the article in question. Here is the abstract.
The evidence for fusion-capable temperatures inside a sonoluminescing bubble lies in two main categories:
- You can examine the emission spectrum of the bubble. The spectrum is continuous, with a peak which depends on a variety of factors (noble gas content, temperature of the fluid, etc.), so you can try to figure out the temperature based on the emission expected from a blackbody of a similar temperature. The last I heard, the temperature was at least an order of magnitude less than what you would need.
- You can run simulations which make assumptions about the bubble collapse mechanism. If the bubble remains perfectly spherical during the collapse, then you may get the temperatures being quoted in the article. But there are other theories for the collapse, and requiring the bubble to remain perfectly spherical during a violent collapse doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me.
It's been a few years since I worked with this stuff, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm not optimistic about this paper being validated."she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
Jack Daniels isn't carbonated.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The idea of fusion in sonoluminescence is nothing new. I sat through a talk on it by some computational hydrodynamics experts from Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1997 at a the Gaseous Electronics Conference in Hawaii (if you really care, you can probably look up the conference proceedings at http://www.aps.org).
... [pause during the palpable bristling of the audience] ... it's either an implosion or an explosion.'
... yes the temperatures are very low compared to fusion. However, a minuscule amount of fusion (think in terms of one or two atoms per microsecond) would occur and thus there would be measureable neutron flux (in theory). However, in practice, the neutron flux would be so low that it would be nearly impossible to distinguish from the background noise.
... that happens in the core. In fact, it is hotter inside a flourescent light tube (~50K-100K) than at the surface (but the heat conduction is so low that it isn't a safety issue).
The talk was pretty good. Their models were able to explain most of the features reasonably well without having to resort to exotic physics (i.e. quantum electrodynamic weirdness). I mostly remember sitting at this talk because the presenter made a reasonable witty comment (remember, talks like this are usually dry and boring with many audience members nodding off because they are always scheduled after lunch): `Scientists at LLNL have an innately superior understanding of all physics
However, the talk did run into a credibility problem when the presenter said the next step was too look for fusion. Several people in the audience correctly pointed out that the temperatures were several orders of magnitude too low. The presenter's response was that the
Without seeing the paper from the ORNL people, I really can't say if they have upped the sophistication or not though.
By the way, the temperatures at the surface of the sun are only ~6K (except in the wispy corona). Not nearly hot enough for fusion
Kevin
Yes, if this turns out to be true, it will be an
interesting way to demonstrate nuclear fusion
to freshman physics students. However, if it
works, it is just another unproductive fusion
technique. Call me when they refine it to
give off more energy than it consumes.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Okay, if you had read the article, you would know that this is barely the first step. They haven't even ascertained if the reaction produces more energy than what it requires to sustain. If it doesn't (with this method), then it's just an interesting way to produce neutrons and tritium, period.
Second, IF it is determined that more energy is coming out than goes in, a way has to be devised for the neutrons of one set of reactions to seed the next set (preferably the next hundred set).
Third, just because something is potentially dangerous doesn't mean we should restrict it. AN OBJECT IS DEAD WITHOUT AN ACT OF WILL TO USE IT! If you've got problems with the way people use technology, then you need to go after the causes, the reasons WHY people decide to do nasty things, not try to restrict the technology itself.
You know, if flight technology had been restricted, the events of 9/11 would never have occured..
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
Just because there's fusion of 2 D's into T doesn't necessarily mean it puts out more energy than went in.
And wouldn't it be cool if these guys get together with the guys that figured out how Guiness makes some bubbles sink. They could make a movie with Yahoo Serious.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
looks like space.com has an article disputing this claim.
That would be cool, but it's probably not going to help on airplane trips...
"Once again, the operation of nuclear fusion reactors is not permitted on this aircraft while in the air or while taxiing on the ground. Nuclear fusion reactors are also not permitted at any time when sitting in a row with a child under 3 years old, due to the neutron flux. Please be considerate of your fellow travelers who have small children."
There have been table top sized nuclear bombs for a long time. The USSR had one that fit in a suitcase. There was a tube mounted diagonally in the suitcase that smashed the two nuclear masses into each other to cause the explosion.
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
A Dean drive generates reactionless force of a special type. To measure this force, we use a special unit, the Bathroom Scale pound. BS pounds are whatever my bathroom scale measures. My bathroom scale seems to be more sensitive than Dean's. When I stand still on it, I weigh about 195 BS pounds. If I shake my arms at the right speed, my weight drops to 175 BS pounds. That is better than .1 BS G thrust. I suspect a carefully tuned counter-weighted drill motor can do far better.
So when I finally get my device perfected and my paper published, some mean professor is going to explain that measurement equipment may produce incorrect readings in certain situations. That it isn't enough to get the reading you want, you actually have to show you got a valid reading.
For those who want to duplicate my experiments so far, get an aged Health-O-Meter spring scale. Other types of scale have some weird reality field around them that interferes with crack pot physics.
In the "nice to have" section, it mentions a laser.
Well, der, I think this is obvious. Its always nice to have a laser. You could put this on basicaly any list of "nice to haves" for anything:
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
See for example this, or this.
"I'm not hot doggin ya!"
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
What really gets my goat is that the editors of Slashdot are apparently unaware of the position of the U.S. Navy's Naval Ocean Systems Center in favor of cold fusion, and their long-suffering and pioneering work on the particular kind known as codeposition fusion:
http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/t r/1696/tr1696.pdf
I have copied that tech report, along with a diagram you can use to do cold fusion on your desktop for less than US$500, in this directory:
http://www.bovik.org/codeposition
Please mod me up; I am posting as AC due to time pressures and a different browser in use at the moment. Thanks in advance.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
james at bovik dot org
Here's the problem: Copyright violations. Believe me, I'd love to. But we can't because of that. People have asked how Google caches - frankly, I don't know how they legally do that. But because we're a content site, versus a search engine, we would be more liable for reprinting without permission which is a big No No in all print/editorial media.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
100 points more for getting Village Voice Slashdotted at the same time.
I'm patient, really I am. I have a friend who told me a couple of years ago that he sees the future in his dreams. I'd like him to prove it and suggested methods to do so. One day, he will supprise me. It will come before somnambulist fusion.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here's a suggested course of action, it might suck, but its just a suggestion:
/. reports breaking news; cool stuff yes, breaking and time sensitive, no. If there is no reply, just link the original site. If the webmaster gives permission, link both the mirror and the original, and encourage the original unless the webmaster says otherwise (give this choice in your sp^H^H form letter)
1) Mirror the site privately, no public links. This should fall under fair use as long as nobody is able to access it from the slashdot main page.
2) Send an email to the webmaster stating that you are about to link to his site, thus throwing an ungodly amount of hits his way, and that you can toss up a mirror to reduce the strain on his poor, poor webservers.
3) Wait a hour or two for a reply. Its not like
Tim
Okay, this seems really exciting to me. Some questions, though.
:-)
1) What is cold fusion and how does this compare to it?
2) It doesn't produce nuclear waste, but what are still the side-effects?
3) How far away are we from ever using this as a real energy producing system?
4) Were we "supposed" to be at this point so soon? I always thought fusion was "hundreds of years away."
Thank you. I'm trying to better grasp this.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I just finished reading Park's book "Voodoo Science - The Road From Foolishness to Fraud" (ISBN 0-19-514710-3) - and a central theme throughout the book is his "annoyance" (ok, that is putting it kindly) with scientists and inventors who either get caught up in their experiments and go down a self-deception path (Pons/Fleishmann, Joseph Newmann) or those who outright deceive others for monetary gain.
The way this is sounding - it is sounding like so much "voodoo science", simply because of the irreproducibility of it (but, who knows? Maybe others will have success - may be too early to tell)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
"If the creation of nuclear technology became this simple, it not only gives terrorists an easier method to attain nuclear energy, but a way to actually create it themselves."
People like you are going to drive me prematurely bald...
Fusion reactors != fusion bombs
Fustion reactors are so damned far removed from fusion bombs that it's been about 50 years since we developed the second and we still haven't figured out the first. I'm willing to bet it will take at least another 50 years after the development of fusion reactors before we can make a fusion bomb that doesn't require a fission bomb to actually get the thing to go off.
"While it's true that a nuclear explosive based on this current method wouldn't spread as much harmful radiation as a uranium based explosive,"
You're right about that, but you have no idea how right you are.
First and foremost, the act of fission frees neutrons from their parent atoms. A lot of neutrons. Enough neutrons to set off the fission reaction. Fusion generates far fewer free neutrons (if at all, depending on your fuel) because it's busy trying to form atoms instead of breaking them apart.
Secondly, when people think of "radiation" from a bomb they think of the fallout (since the actual radiation from the explosion lasts as long as the actual explosion). Fusion in and of itself has no fallout. The fallout from modern hydrogen bombs is from the fission bomb that's used to set it off. No fission bomb, no fallout.
"it's potential damage far outweighs that of a dirty bomb."
Now here is where you need to lay off the crack pipe.
Getting a fission reaction to start is pretty easy: get a neutron-producer close to a clump of unstable atoms. Getting a fusion reaction to start, on the other hand, requires a LOT of input heat in the beginning in order to generate the plasma the reactions takes place in. So much heat that the pressure at the heart of Jupiter isn't enough to start a sustainable reaction. In the past 50 years the only way we've been able to pull it off is with a fission bomb.
But let's pretend that a pure fusion bomb is possible in the short term. Although it's possible to squeeze a fission bomb into something the size of a suitcase, your average 20 megaton device is more or less a cubic meter in size. But it's only that small because the heat generator is a tiny little suitcase-sized fission bomb. If we try to use a fusion reactor to generate the heat instead of a fission bomb, I don't see the device being small enough to fit into a cargo container (probably the largest possible size for a device to be useful to terrorists).
But what if they try to blow up a fusion power plant? Fission reactors are heavily shielded to keep the inside in. Probable fusion reactors would be heavily shielded to keep the outside out. If a tokomak loses magnetic containment, the plasma expands, cools, and reverts back to a gas. If it loses its physical containment, air gets in, conducts/convects away heat from the plasma, the plasma cools and reverts back to a gas. If you try to blow it up you just end up with a negligible amount of hot gas on top of the explosive.
Personally, I'd be a hell of a lot more frightened of an attack at a coal-fired plant. Have you ever seen what a spark can make coal dust do? Or what about popping off the fuel tanks at a natural gas power plant? And while I'm on the subject of boiling liquid-vapor explosions, oil refineries look awfully unprotected...
It also explains why 2.45 Mev neutrons, which Teleyarkhan claims are the byproduct of the fusion of Hydrogen-2 into Helium-3, are seen coming out of the flask. They are simply 14 Mev neutrons which have slowed down by bouncing off various nuclei.
My coffee cup is clearly fused to the Ikea bookshelf beside my computer.
Trust those Nordic types to always be one step ahead! Next they're going to be inventing, like, operating systems, or something, on their tabletops!
- undoware.ca
It's only fair to point out a similarly amusing sarcastic list from the "other side". By no means all the "believers" are cranks or blinkered zealots. That certainly doesn't necessarily mean that they're at all right or even very credible, but it's certainly possible to find problems in the standards of argument of the crusading "skeptics" too.
Another reason /. editors should have to post comments along with the rest us. 'Looks legit', well that's ok then, move along nothing to see here, move along.
/. giving subscribers the ability to get rid of the editors inane comments.
How about about
Ah well that's better a good venting always helps the old blood pressure.
Just finished reading the pdf of the manuscript. My biggest concern is the magnitude of the observed effect- a few standard deviations above background. The data acquisition runs lasted 7 or 12 hrs (or for several iterated 300s runs with another detector). The question raised here is, if you've got marginal statistics (particularly for an exceptional effect, if truly observed), then why not run the experiment longer, like a month? That should yield a strong enough signal that statistics are no longer an issue. With a small set of runs, there lies a risk of subconsicously self-selecting a fraction of the runs as the 'good' ones. I'm not saying that's what happened, but it can't be ruled out based on the data at hand.
Second concern is the accuracy of the shock hydrodynamic simulations, both the assumption of perfect spherical symmetry (which is crucial to a high concentration of energy at the very center) and the treatment of the complex interactions in the plasma during compression (Born-Mayer potentials, as used here, are outside their realm of validity when the substance ionizes, I suspect).
I'm not prepared to say "obviously wrong," (open mind = good) but there are red flags...
Curtains for windows?
This observation doesn't seem to be especially useful, at least for power generation. The article doesn't give any numbers, but I'm guessing that they number of hydrogen atoms they are claiming reacted is quite small, like hundreds. In that case the energy generated would be quite small, just a few joules, on the close order of 1-10.
I think it would be foolish to assert that hydrogen fusion NEVER occurs at low energies, thats just ridiculous, random hydrogen atoms must bump into each other occasionally and undergo fusion, its just very unlikely to occur frequently at low temperatures.
BUT, this discovery, if it checks out, will probably just be a scientific curiosity, it's almost certain that this reaction would be unable to scale up to levels required for practical power generation of any kind. On the upside for the scientists, they'll probably get a footnote in the history books as the first people to observe and produce proof of nuclear fusion at low energies. Which is worth something, if not the nobel prize.
I first heard about it when I spent a summer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab two years ago. An abstract of the Nature paper that group at Livermore published is available here
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Don't these science guys go to the movies?
The solution to desktop fusion is simple:
You take P and F's deuterium electrolysis experiment and stick it inside a sonoluminescence vessel.
The electrolysis produces the bubbles, the sound waves batter them so hard that fusion is created within them.
Hell, if Keanau Reeves can do it in the movie Chain Reaction then surely these researcher types can manage it.
(big fat grin)
The article that is linked to does NOT claim that this is a viable source of energy.
It does claim that fusion is a possible explanation for sonoluminescence and that the results are still under review.
I would like to say this at this juncture. The discipline of science requires the vigorous investigation of phenomena, explanation of phenomena, and the vigorous critical review of explanations of phenomena.
All of this requires public review as often as possible. Vast misinterpretation of reports and massive derision do not help the cause of science.
The researchers claim simply that sonoluminescence may be explained by fusion achieved when a)the proper isotopes are present and b)small bubbles collapse to generate high energy for a moment. This ocurs after seeding with neutrons.
Sounds plausible to me. They do explain how this is happening, and performed a control test. Next comes replication of results. And please folks, dont rely on the first two attempts. Do you think the first replications of experiments by the Wright Brothers, Fermi, Marconi, or Tesla worked? Science is rife with failure to the extent that after something graduates to technology it is still not reproducible. Anyone ever buy a solid state laser that did not work? Does that mean that laser theory is wrong?
Besides, one reason we all measure gravity in high school physics is because we are rigorosly testing Newton. Every time. Every calculation. To make sure.
This is not religion, it does not happen overnight. The Science Pope cannot decree "fusion in a bottle". It might just mean that here there be fusion at an overall loss.
I for one hope it is true, it could be a way to regain energy as pressure increases outside an airframe during reentry, utilizing the increasing air pressure to drive the fusion process.
Dont be so quick to deride this, dont be too quick to embrace it. Remain skeptical as to it's possibility and it's uses. Just cause it seems so, dont mean it is. And just cause it's not know dont mean it wont.
While small bubbles do make for high pressure, and appearently temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun. Last I checked that wasn't terribly hot, certainly very cold where fusion is concerned.
The fact of the matter is the "academics" who originally wrote an article and did the little experiment had an enourmous burden of proof. They knew this at the outset. To claim that at temperatures as hot as the sun, and tiny bubbles were enough to provide the enourmous pressures needed for fusion is the very definition of increadible. Frankly, they should have been VERY suspicious of their own results. Skepticism isn't something that should have even HAD to have come from outside their project.
At least they'll have the comfort of knowing that networks will probably not pick up the story, credibility being in such short supply. Except for Fox News, they appearently don't have the exacting standards The Weekly World News insists on.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
and D-T fusion does produce both ...
but we look for fast (Mev) neutron production to verify fusion, since they're much easier to detect.
this test was what fail F&P as well, BTW.
Working for necessity's mother.
At the close of 1939, a woman sat on a snow covered log in a Swedish forest and re-read a letter from a chemist in Germany. The chemist had detected barium where he hadn't expected to find any. He wrote her because he couldn't figure out where the barium was coming from. The woman, Liese Mietner, figured out that the chemist, Otto Hahn, had split Uranium. Without Mietner's insight into the underlying physics, Hahn's observation might have been dismissed. So there might indeed be "some crazy chemistry..." taking place.
On the other hand, as soon as Mietner's nephew got back to England from his Christmas break, the British were reproducing Hahn's experiment. Without reproducible results, the results could just be background noise.
Before the Matrix, Keanu did a movie called Chain Reaction where he plays a physicist that develops table top fusion based on acoustic cavitation. Since cheap, non hydrocarbon based power will bring down Oil conglomerates, and with them the corrupt government they support, the FBI tries to catch Reeves and suppress his findings.
BTW, Sonoluminescence (a form of acoustic cavitation) is the same effect behind Wint-o-Green lifesavers making 'sparks' when you crunch them. Luckily the temperatures of the lifesavers doesn't get anywhere near the temperature needed for nuclear fusion.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
2) To Publish or Not to Publish: Publication is the right option. byt topics/b ubble/1793.pdf
Donald Kennedy, Editor
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/ho
Every once in a while, we at Science receive a paper that causes us to
exercise particular care in handling, because it may be controversial or
because it is importantor both. The paper by Taleyarkhan et al. on p. 1868
of this issue is a case in point. It qualified for careful, responsible
treatment on both counts. And its history with us has exposed some of the
more unusual challenges that can arise in the publication process.
The paper reports experiments in which sonoluminescence is induced in
solutions of deuterated acetone subjected to sound waves and neutron
irradiation. These conditions cause bubbles to grow and then implode,
locally generating high pressures and temperatures and the emission of
sonoluminescent light. The authors present evidence for the production of
tritium in the solution, and for neutron emission coincident with the light
emission. They cautiously interpret these observations as evidence that
deuterium-deuterium fusion occurred in the imploding bubbles. That prospect
naturally encouraged us to treat the paper with care.
After the external review process had been completed, we scheduled the paper
for publication. Then we were contacted by senior science managers at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), who said that certain reservations had
developed
about the findings and their interpretation. In a series of telephone and
e-mail contacts, they urged that we delay the scheduled publication of the
paper. The authors participated in a series of meetings to discuss
objections raised by the ORNL managers, including some findings made by a
second group of scientists who had been asked to perform additional tests,
using the same apparatus but a different detector.
After some negotiation, a compromise was reached in which the authors
responded to criticisms and subsequently made some modifications in the text
to accommodate them. They also agreed to cite a short nonpeer-reviewed
communication in which the second group present measurements that disagree
in some respects with theirs, along with their own response to it. While
these agreements were being reached, Science received communications from
two distinguished scientists in this field, raising objections to the paper
and urging that we reconsider our plans to publish it. And the matter became
even more public on 1 March when Robert Park issued an airy, premature
dismissal from the American Physical Society. By this time, it had become
clear that a number of people didnt want us to publish this paper.
I have been asked, "Why are you going forward with a paper attached to so
much controversy?" Well, thats what we do; our mission is to put
interesting, potentially important science into public view after ensuring
its quality as best as we possibly can. After that, efforts at repetition
and reinterpretation can take place out in the open. Thats where it
belongs, not in an alternative universe in which anonymity prevails, rumor
leaks out, and facts stay inside. It goes without saying that we cannot
publish papers with a guarantee that every result is right. Were not that
smart. That is why we are prepared for occasional disappointment when our
internal judgments and our processes of external review turn out to be
wrong, and a provocative
result is not fully confirmed. What we ARE very sure of is that publication
is the right option, evenand perhaps especially
when there is some controversy.
A reporter also asked me whether this was the only time pressure has been
put on Science not to publish a paper. Although this case is exceptional, it
is not unique; we have been there before. The motivations for urging us not
to publish have varied from one case to another. Often they rest on serious
legitimate scientific differences of opinion, although sometimes that is not
so clear. In this instance, we see no good reason for abandoning our plans
to publish the paper, and we can see no merit whatsoever in the efforts to
discredit it in advance. Both the premature critics and those who believe in
the result would do well to wait for the scientific process to do its work.
As I take off on another spring break trip this week,
I remember the cold fusion begin on the start of a
spring break exactly 13 years ago.
Must be something in the air that turns men's minds
to fantasy.
Let's not forget that they were way ahead of the curve on that breaking news story that was Blacklight Power. I'd link to Blacklight's website, but last I checked it was down, and hadn't been updated since 1999, which struck me as odd considering the millions of dollars of funding and promises of a product demonstration in early 2000.
Which is to say take their article with the requisite grain of NaCl.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I mostly agree to you, but I just have to be a little pedantic...:)
Regarding the number of neutrons produced by fusion and fission reactions, yes a D-T fusion reaction produces only one neutron while a U or Pu fission produces between about 3, depending on energy. But take into account that a single fusion reaction produces only 17.6 MeV while a single fission produces about 200 MeV. Add to that the fact that a large fraction of the neutrons in a fission reaction are used for inducing further fissions in the material. Remember neutron bombs? Tactical nukes meant to kill the crews of sovient tank hordes, while hopefully leaving the rest of West Germany relatively intact. They had very minimal amount of fission material in them, about 95% of the energy produced was by fusion. The reason was to have a as high as possible neutron flux, and also to minimize fallout. Most strategic warheads deployed today have only about 50% fusion output. The reason is that the casings are made of enriched uranium, the reason being that the Ulam-Teller staged radiation implosion type bomb needs a casing made of high-Z material for refllecting x-rays produced by the primary. So by additionally making the casing of fissionable material (it wont fission by itself, only fission induced by the fusion neutrons) you get better bang-for-weight.
And regarding detonating a fusion bomb without a fission primary, I read some rumors a while ago that the russians reportedly had some chemical explosive called "red mercury" capable of detonating a fusion bomb directly. As it IMHO sounds quite improbable, I'd guess it's just some rumor.
I was at the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at FSU during the P & F cold fusion period. This institute was heavy on physicist. We had nuclear physicists, high-energy physicists, string theorists, physicists working on QCD, spin systems up the wazoo, and incestuous connections with CERN and Fermilab.
Of all of those people, at first, every single one wanted cold fusion to be true.
Let me repeat that for jelly-brained Kuhn addicts: Every. Single. Physicist.
It was one of the most exciting times at the Institute. Every week we had "brown bag lunches" where some researcher from somewhere gave an informal lecture on some possibility for the mechanism.
It was only after various groups withdrew their early claims of replication, when the details didn't come, and after the fateful exposition of the calorimetry problems that physicists, in some cases almost reluctantly, concluded that it was a tempest in a teapot.
The so-called snubbing of "upstart chemists" by a physics priesthood never happened. At all. Even remotely. In spite of the fact that chemists and physicists hate each others' guts, it never happened and was entirely made up after the fact by people with sociological leanings who were not in the thick of things.
The "real" reason you can't get to absolute zero is because of the classical laws of thermodynamics, not quantum fluctuations.
The third law of thermodynamics: "as the temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a closed system approaches a constant which is independent of the system's parameters" is equivalent (given the other laws) to the statement that "a system cannot be brought to absolute zero in any finite number of steps."
These statements do not require quantum mechanics in order to be valid. (They probably require QM to understand why they are true, but that is statistical mechanics, not thermodynamics.)
Unfortunately, you need to realize that heat is much more difficult than you think. Heat is energy, plain and simple. And 10 MK is the value thrown around because that's the temperature such that on average, particles have enough energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier to fuse into the nucleus (actually, to tunnel through the Coulomb barrier).
:) Now, it might be that some exotic material can create collapsable bubbles that reach 10 MK, but even then, I doubt it will be helpful. Don't scorn plasma physicists - they can GENERATE fusion plenty good. It's just that it takes more energy to create it than you get out of it. I doubt that, in this case, you're getting any noticeable extra energy.
So, thus, what you need to do, if you're not going to raise the ENTIRE thing to 10 MK, is find a way to give particles the same energy. Thus, you need to accelerate them somehow. So, there's your two different ways to generate fusion - create a steady state environment of 10 MK (the sun's approach) or find a way to accelerate a few particles enough to fuse as well.
The problem here is that accelerating particles is a LOT harder than heating them! Heating them you just have to throw energy at them. That's easy. OK, to get to 10 MK, you need to throw A LOT of energy at them, but still, there's no fundamental 'challenge'. Accelerating particles is a challenge - you're fighting against the second law of thermodynamics here.
So, WHATEVER you do, you need to find a way to generate a situation where you have particles with an average energy corresponding to 10 MK (I *think* it's E = (some constant)*kT but I'm probably wrong) and they're in a situation where they can slam into a deuterium particle before losing energy.
"Before losing energy" means you're probably going to be doing this in vacuum, and particle accelerators all basically use electromagnetism, so that's probably what you're going to try to do. It's highly unlikely that you'll ever find a material that has zero resistivity to your extremely high energy particles (it's just too easy to spallate other nuclei, collide, etc). Keep in mind that superconductors rely on the fact that electrons hop into the -lowest- energy state - keeping something with extremely high energy from transferring its energy to a lower energy object is really difficult (white dwarf stars do it, with densities beyond mortal comprehension).
Just one more point - ANYTHING that produces fusion via conventional methods is doing it via plasma physics. What the sonoluminescence guys are saying is that they're creating a 10 MK plasma. I unfortunately find that hard to believe. Give me neutrons, or give me death.
</tongueincheek>
I have copied that tech report, along with a diagram you can use to do cold fusion on your desktop for less than US$500, in this directory:
http://www.bovik.org/codeposition [bovik.org]
Well, for $500 after you've somehow acquired the Heavy Water, which might as well be unobtainium. An educated guess is that D20 is even harder to get hold of now than it was a few months ago...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Or at least that's how I understand Science tells it. I am sure that you will now willingly either accept that you got your facts wrong in the above post, produce evidence to contradict the Science editorial, or show that I have misread it.