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14 Years Later, Cold Fusion Still Gets The Cold Shoulder
segment writes "It has been 14 years since two little-known electrochemists announced what sounded like the biggest physics breakthrough since Enrico Fermi produced a nuclear chain reaction on a squash court in Chicago. Using a tabletop setup, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of the University of Utah, said they had induced deuterium nuclei to fuse inside metal electrodes, producing measurable quantities of heat. That was the opening bell for one of the craziest periods in science. Cold fusion, if real, promised to solve the world's energy problems forever. Scientists around the world dropped what they were doing to try to replicate the astounding claim."
The linked AP story (carried on SFGate.com) is about the
Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion, which took place in the last week of August.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
"It has been 14 years"
It been at least that long since we were promised Hydrogen fuel cells. Where's my fuel cell powered truck?
I think consumers have been patient enough. Now it is time for companies to deliver something.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Did you RTFA or anything else on cold fusion in the last few years??? There IS something, though whether it is caused by cold fusion or not is the question. In fact, the article is specifically about people like you who deny things before they investigate them.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
[disclaimer: from memory]
The Pons and Fleischmann "cold fusion" experiment was thoroughly discredited shortly after the press conference (in which they grossly overstated their results). Apparently they were spooked by another researcher working in a similar area. They had signed an agreement with him not to release any results, but got paranoid that he was going to "claim the credit", and went ahead and announced - kind of an "announce and hope the results back you up" gamble. Well, the results *didn't* back them up, although it is interesting that many reputable teams who sought to replicate the results initially did so, but one by one retracted their findings when they discovered various flaws in their methodologies.
I think the basic problem with the original Pons and Fleischmann experiment was that their calorimeter (which they used to get their "excess heat" measurements) was either faulty, or inappropriate for the experiement they were performing, and they didn't control for it.
grib.
maybe
Stuff on the US Navy and Cold Fusion
s /t r/1862/tr1862-vol1.pdf
http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pub
Some quick facts:
Science by press release is almost never ever good science.
Big physics has been getting more money than big chemistry. Many chemists jumped on the bandwagon in the hopes of getting research grants in their discipline.
The nature of fusion makes the whole idea of "cold fussion" an oxymoron.
A lot of ameteur's have been getting closer to fusion in their homes than the cold fusion people have ever gotten.
See sig for final thoughts on this subject.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Here is where the "magic" really is. You see, the "Cold Fusion Reactor" is plugged into a 220volt socket. If you unplug the 220volt power supply the light goes out.
If he really had a reaction that was actually creating energy, you could unplug the power supply and the reaction would continue. Infact the reaction would continue to grow and a means of throttling the reaction would be necessary.
What he really has here is a rather dangerous light bulb. It's none too efficient either.
To briefly summarize the tale of woe, Frank Rosenblatt invented the perceptron in 1957. It had one layer of artificial neurons and sparked an entire field of research in artificial learning. In 1969, Marvin Minsky at MIT wrote a book called "Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry"; in it, he mathematically proved that the perceptron could not solve certain classes of problems. This book essentially decimated funding for neural-network research for about 15 years.
In 1982, John Hopfield at Caltech revived the field with the invention of the Hopfield Networks. Further, several researchers invented backpropagation as a way to train neural networks with 2 or more layers or artificial neurons and overcame the limitations that Minsky indicated. Now, the field of neural networks has plenty of money to do research.
So, there is a possibility that research into cold fusion will grow hot again.
... from the desk of the reporter
There are two things that could be at work here. First, scientists may hate everything to do with cold fusion and not want to see it go anywhere. And/Or, Two, the media may be fueling the perception that scientists don't want anything to do with it.
I spoke with a nobel laureate physicist about cold fusion. I found that while he didn't think there was much to cold fusion (it isn't his primary area of research, but if he can't comment on it, who can?), I didn't get the feeling he held the anomosity usually attributed to the scientific community at large. (I frankly don't either) I think that the media plays a significant role in blackening the field. Kind of like the kid on the playground who eggs on fights, but never participates in them.
Scientists believe in publication, in particular good ones. If cold fusion-ites publish interesting/good research on the subject, they will be recognized. As pointed out in the above link, there was a seemingly cold fusion-like experiment that was published in science quite recently (it isn't quite cold fusion, because the events themselves are hot and very small).
Most scientists deal with skeptical peers regularly, this isn't just a property of the cold fusion community. That said, just because there is a conference on it doesn't make it real or even interesting. I personally find it interesting, but I wouldn't bet on seeing commercial applications of this in our lifetimes.
-Sean
Seems there were a lot of complex things interacting, electrical, chemical, thermal and *mechanical*. The palladium electode absorbing hydrogen gets visibly larger as it pulls the ions in - there was speculation that a lot of energy was being stored this way via a spring-loading effect, but nobody on the forum knew or cared to calculate how much. Spontaneous collapse of many microscopic internal structures in the electrode could account for episodes of heat release IF enough energy is stored this way.
The CFers also claimed elevated radiation near the experiments once. It turned out they were measuring radon levels in the basement where the experiment was being conducted.
Wish I'd saved my Compuserve logs of this stuff, but I couldn't afford the floppies, $5 each at the time. :-)
Anyway, once it became apparent the experiments had many possible flaws and were failing to produce any clear positive results, researchers who valued their career would have been crazy to waste the time.
Anybody here participate in the Science & Math forum back then? I've always wondered what happened to the moderator, Emory Kimbrough.
"A worthy cause has never been harmed by the truth" - Gandhi
Carl Sagan addressed this issue in his essay, "The Burden of Skepticism." (See also lecture version).
Sagan explained:
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
It is true that physicists can be a prideful lot, but that tends be truer than not for smart people in general. But to reject what would be remarkable new science because they 'got burned' would be beyond pride and well into hubris.
Lots of physicists tried the experiments back in 1989 because the claims were so remarkable, the recipe so simple and the researchers apparently credible enough that they had to at least give it a try. No new science was found. The cold fusion community failed to demonstrate unambiguously that their experimental results were real, trustworthy and replicable.
FOURTEEN years later, and the cold fusion community STILL can't seem to agree on what their results are (neutrons? heat?) nevermind finding unambiguous signs of fusion and it's somehow the critic's fault for being prideful?
Cold fusion researchers are never going to get any attention even negative) at all until they can demonstrate absolutely that there is something there!
I'm an electrical engineer; a chemist could give a better explanation of what's happening.
. htm
Source of reactor info:
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/cfr/html/cfrtiny2
Experimental setup:
Place tungsten welding rods in a corrosive solution of NaHCO3. Use a AC/DC rectifier to convert wall current to a high DC potential across the rods. Measure the input energy using a power meter. Calculate the output energy by measuring the evaporated water and increase in heat (like you would with a cheapo calorimeter). Compare.
Test and analysis:
Run the system for approximately 3 minutes. Note that, as the rods corrode, their conductance goes down, bringing down the Wattage as well.
This is easily predicted. Resistance (R) is roughly proportional to the rod corrosion. Current (I) equals the applied voltage (V) divided by the resistance; I=V/R. Power (P) is P=I^2*R; for our system, P=(V/R)^2*R=V^2/R. Therefore, as R goes up, the input power goes down. This agrees with the experiment.
The "researcher" then makes several obvious mistakes in calculating the output energy. First, he ignores the effect of the NaHCO3, and pretends the rods were dipped in pure water. Second, he forgets to subtract the 6mL of evaporated water from the 150mL of water that rose in temperature. He also ignores the chemical effect of eating away at the tungsten rods.
His experiment does show more energy output than input, and I believe his numbers are roughly accurate (barring the mistakes outlined above).
My analysis:
This experiment shows that exothermic chemical reactions exist. Other famous examples of exothermic chemical reactions which corrode metal are Energizer and Duracell batteries. Burning a match is also characteristically similar.
His experiment has nothing to do with nuclear reactions. Just chemical ones.
Obviously some crackpot mixing chemicals in his crucible isn't going to achieve the same (and may as well be pissing in the wind for all the good it would do him). But the underlying principle that you can make turn base metals or anything else into gold is true if you have a spare ten billion years and a star or two to do it with.
I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, but I would say that there were a series of steps that occurred to turn Fleischmann and Pons' discovery into a joke when it was real, serious science.
If you have a chance, check out the book The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief and Their Lightbulb: The Biggest Scandal in the History of Science. Other than greats like Tesla, it talks about the political maneuvering that took place at their university, and institutions and other scientists with which they worked.
Fleischmann and Pons' discovery may be considered a hoax by many, but in fact their research has been duplicated (and often with even better "cold fusion" results) by hundreds of scientists all over the world, including here in the US, Japan, and India.
Before you pan something as a conspiracy, do try and do a bit more research, read a book or two on the subject, and ask yourself if you didn't have all the information you needed to make an informed decision in the first place.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
No, but hydrogen is has decent energy density, and without worries of efficient use of energy you could electrolyze water 'til the cows come home. As I recall, hydrogen (either in pressurized tanks or in powdered sodium borohydride form) has a decent energy density, and if not, I'm sure this would give someone sufficient reason to develop more economical H containment.
While I attended Texas A&M, I spent 2 (93-94) years as a personal assistant (gofer, typist, etc) to James Bockris (Distinguished Professor of Electro-Chemestry - the first scientist to "confirm" Pons & Fleischmann). As such, I had full access to his corespondance (I had to open it all, sort it by subject, & reply to some of the simplier inquiries) & was able to learn quite a bit.
Although it's now been 10 years since I've done any serious research on the subject (every now & then I read the symposium notes), I can give you my opinions of the whole Cold Fusion uproar:
-There is something strange & new going on in these experiments
-This something strange & new has been very difficult to reproduce consistently (much of the research focuses on certain types of atomic level imperfections in the cathodes)
-Pons & Fleischmann screwed the pooch by announcing their results before they could reproduce them. This basically had the effect of turning 95% of the scientific community against them. This has led to many people assuming the entire field of study as bogus.
-Many scientist around the world have reported "good results" - ranging from melted cathodes (excess heat) to extra helium (fusion of hydrogen atoms?).
My guess is that there is some new type of reaction occuring in these experiments. It may or may not be able to produce excess heat. Regardless, I'd bet in 10-20 years, a paper will be published that will explain it all.
As a side note, Dr. Bockris was a very "interesting" fellow to work with - he was the epitomy of the absent minded professor; one day he came in to work with his button down dress shirt on INSIDE OUT (think about how much effort it would take you to button a dress shirt in such a fashion); he frequently would put a MARKER in his front pocket without the cap on - leading to a HUGE ink stain on many of his dress shirts. And yes, I know he's done some weird stuff in his life (alchemy, anyone?! - http://www.spectrometer.org/path/free.html).
No, in the opinion of the vast majority of scientists the 'evidence' (such as it is, being most self-contradictory) is the result of misinterpretation, error, or outright fraud.
Nonsense like this breaks out periodically in physics. Remember polywater? The '14 KeV neutrino'? The 'fifth force'? The 'Allison Effect'? 'N rays'? All of these were big in their day, but died away because there turned out not to be anything there.
It is unfair to critize the scientist saying that what they do doesn't have applications. Some of it does, some of it doesn't, but they ARE discovering new phenomena after all. You talk about High Tc Super Conductors, but forget about the transistor and many other. It is hard to predict what will be the big next thing. Scientist try to milk phenomenas as much as they can, sometimes with high hopes, and sometimes their expectations were not realistic. This happens in engineering too. The good thing about science that even if there isn't an immediate application, maybe in the far future there will be. And, you can always do science just because understanding the universe can't be a bad thing.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Lots of interesting things happen with electrons in crystals, especially in stretched crystals. I'm not claiming that I know that cold fusion works, I just object to folks saying that "it goes against physics" as thought physics were a religion or something. If cold fusion were a fact, physics could accomodate it easily in the existing framework of things. No need to change quantum mechanics or anything, just some previously unknown nano-scale effects. We've already seen some things like this that did pan out, the light microscope that uses a metalized glass fiber with an aperature smaller than 1 wavelength of light to illuminate the specimen.
My there friend, if the New Scientist runs a story about it and can't decide, as some respected scientist actually do at this moment of time, that it is all a fake I can't really think that there isn't something going on that we do not understand. Something is going on. Whether it is something spectacular or not is to be seen but things like contradictory evidence pops up everywhere, even amongst "respected" scientists. It's difficult to refute it saying that results are contradictory. Time will tell.
Anyway, if scientists still are going for it ten years after the facts, risking their careers, I can't think nothing is going on. Think twice, quite a lot of what are accepted facts nowadays where called totally outrageous and ungrounded at the time they were published. History teaches us not to dismiss something at first sight, even if it seems totally outrageous.
I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability. -- Oscar Wilde