Slashdot Mirror
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.
Maybe it still gets the cold shoulder because there didn't turn out to be anything to it? Nah, stilly me, must be some kind of conspiracy.
What do you think powers my flying car?
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
This is from the good ole' fortune file. It really has an answer to everything!
- "Yo, Mike!"
- "Yeah, Gabe?"
- "We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
- "I thought you fixed that last century!"
- "No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
- "Blessit! Lemme look... Hey, it's there all right! OK, just a sec... There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?"
-- Cold Fusion, 1989
But the scientist concerned wore a real lab coat, so it must work...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Scientists for the International Society of Alchemy held their 284th annual conference next door to the cold fusion conference. Still under debate is: did Gaythorpe the Great really turn lead into gold?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
My neighbor had a cold fusion plant working like a charm, but he hasn't done much with it since the time he decided to connect to the electricity grid and give all his fellow Ohians free juice.
> Maybe it still gets the cold shoulder because there didn't turn out to be anything to it?
"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't."
That's what I said to a friend the day after the "discovery" hit the news, and I haven't had any cause to reconsider my position since.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I know the popular thing to do is bash psuedo-sciences, and cold fusion because of its shaky introduction into popular thought quickly falls into this quagmire. But, let the human race dream before summarily dismissing the entire concept. I for one dont believe that all I have to look forward to as i grow older is a greater dependence on big oil, old money, and the like. Many groups (and by that I mean countries, companies, and current presidents) would love to convince us that there is no better way to live than under our present conditions. Not giving cold fusion and other radical departures from our current system an honest chance is not far from why were are stuck with Windows as the dominant platform in computers and oil as the backbone of our way of life.
Im not saying that cold fusion itself is the future, but what we are presently using is certainly not the platform for all future generations. Hell, if Bush gets his way there might not even be enough sun left for solar energy so there has to be soemthing to fill the void.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
by grabbing the www.iccf11.org domain before the 11th conference ;)
I read an ethnography about scientists and the detection of gravity waves. It described how scientists, after having decided that something was wrong, persisted in simply ignoring papers that continued the research despite the productivity and interesting results of the further research. It was interesting, too bad I don't have a reference.
Logic, macros, and more
No, the title for that article is:
"6 versions later and ColdFusion still gets the cold shoulder (And crashes now and then for some reason)"
"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.
No win situation for their critics really. They are going to have a tough time getting any support.
Just a Fleisch in the Pons
This was always my favorite re-telling of the story... From David Goodstein at Caltech...
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html
[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
Using the techniques published in the paper, I've been developing a method a quantum communication over great distances. The possibilities of these innovations to the original deuterium breakdown system are staggering; among these breakthroughs are advances in communication.
We all know the typical objection to unlimited data compression. One needs only to Google for "counting argument" to realize that further compression of essentially random (e.g., binary) data is impossible. Searches for better compression algorithms at best have minimal returns (1-2% reductions are considered remarkable) or at worst ineffective or outright hoaxes.
My new technology builds upon quantum duality -- influence at a distance. From first year quantum physics we know that observation of a particle can fix its state. Should a particle and anti-particle be released, we can *at a distance* fix the identity of the opposite particle merely by observation. What does this mean? Well, for one, by sending a stream of anti-particles to a remote observer then observing its opposite, we can then fix the identity of the remote particles *no matter how much distance*. This means we can instantaneously send as a stream of quantum particles. Schroedinger's and Heisenbergs body of work more than amply addresses the mechanics of this remote communication so I won't bore you with the technical details here.
How does my method overcome the inherent randomness of quantum identity? It doesn't. I rely upon a remote lookup table. The receiver will only need to be sent a key of several bits. The remote receiver can then index the key to a table of longer values. For example, a key code of 001 would correspond to a larger sequence such as 00100111. By performing a lookup on this table the receiver can then expand the key to arbitrarily large bit sequences. How are the keys transferred? Our new technology -- Extended Schroedinger Particle (ESP) -- bases itself upon the aforementioned work by Mr. Schroedinger. Of course, trade secrets and corporate lawyers prevent me from revealing the exact method.
Anyhow, please send me money so that I can continue my research. It has the potential to obviate and obsolete all current telecommunications networks.
KLL
Stuff on the US Navy and Cold Fusion
s /t r/1862/tr1862-vol1.pdf
http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pub
we will use it to boil water
(you have to know how a nukular power plant works to get this joke)
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
Hi - I just wanted to tell you that there is a guy - Jean-Louis Naudin - who performed many cold fusion experiments recently, using different setups, with different kinds of electrods.
It seems that he is successful in getting more power produced than power eaten (around 200%).
You'll like all his experiments (full description, RealPlayer videos and full results are publicly available) at:
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/cfr/index.htm
If there are real physicists here, please comment his results, it can be interesting.
Jean-Louis is also the guy who successfully replicated the Lifter (electrostatic propulsion).
What the heck kind of shoulder did you expect cold fusion to get?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Coincidentally, it's been 14 years since my Introductory Physics professor blew off pretty much the entire second semester to try to replicate the Pons & Fleischman findings. It worked out well -- he got a cover article in Nature and I got an A+ after he reused all the previous years' exams verbatim.
(You'd think everyone else would have gotten old exams from their friends, but I, though hardly an Alpha Beta, was apparently one of the few students who _had_ friends. For that matter, I could never understand how people could be given a word problem with the force and mass, told to find the acceleration, and given the relevant equations, couldn't locate f=ma and plug the values in.)
The same guy, when he talked about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse pronounced it "Tacomanaros". It was years before I learned that it wasn't in Uruguay or Bolivia...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Maybe you shouldn't rely on your history teacher for anecdotal scientific stories about lasers...
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
SCO has announced they sueing Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.. "SCO owns all rights to bullshit from the state of UTAH. Cold fusion therefore meets our criteria for deritive works." Chris Sontag, VP of SCO..
Well I remember the time when high temperature superconductivity was announced (little pill of material magnetically levitated in a cooled environment). Scientists started spouting on about lossless power lines using superconductors. Engineers skeptically thought that the energy required for the refridgeration was way more than the losses with conventional wiring. High temperature superconductors have very few realworld applications beyond generating Nobel prizes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You're mixing up fission and fusion. When splitting heavy elements like Uranium and/or Plutonium into lighter ones, many of these are radioactive. This is, even while the products are lighter than Uranium, they are still very heavy elements which are mostly instable and thus radioactive.
The light elements produced by fusion (usually He) are mostly stable. Two Deuterium atoms (heavy hydrogen), for example, combine to Helium-4, which is stable. Tritium + Deuterium makes for Helium-4 plus a neutron (which can be a problem, for it may induce decay in other elements of the surrounding material.
I think fusion in general is a very worthwhile field of research. Even if cold fusion may not work, hot fusion (which is technically possible, but still horribly complicated) has a much better energy-output-to-danger ratio than traditional nuclear energy.
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. Appendage: 100 points for anything involving cold fusion, tabletop fusion, or super fusion.
http://almostsmart.com
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
Theyre not rolling out cold fusion powered vehicles.Also fuel cell stacks are being used to generate intermittent power in more than a few cities.
The thing that got me about the coldfusion people was when they started doing the calorimetry to prove it worked.
The surest way you can spot bullshit power generation claims, is when their proponents pull out the calorimeter. Anything thats going to be a real power generation technology isn't going to need a calorimeter to prove it will work. The amount of heat that a calorimeters is orders of magnitude less than generating systems normally waste.
Here are a few different types I have found:
Tokamak Reactor:
Large size, Confines plasma in a toroid.
Stellarator reactor:
Large size, simmilar to a Tokamak.
Laser Ignition Reactor:
Fires extremly powerfull lasers at a target causing fusion.
Inertial Confinement Reactor:
Small size, uses high voltage to fling protons to toward a Tungsten cage. This type of fusion rector can be build easily by anyone with a decent workshop, and acess to a hi-voltage power supply.
Table-top fiusion:
there is evidence that sonoluminescent bubbles could reach temperatures and pressures where fussion can happen.
(my understanding is that cold fusion was an attempt to pull protons into a Palladium electrode increasing the pressure to this sort of level)
I also read that some powered neutron sources use a fusion reaction to create the neutrons.
The tough thing about fusion is not creating fusion, but getting more out than you put in.
-John Fenley
Anyone who presents their data to the popular press prior to being peer reviewed should be heavily criticized. Even the most senior and brightest scientist make mistakes, become too enthusiastic, or may fail to run the proper controls. Furthermore, given that their data changed over time (from one Watt in, four out to one Watt in, ten out) with no reasoning, backing or explanation, one has to question the accuracy of their data.
Great scientists sometimes make big mistakes, such as with Dr. Atassi and his experiment with pepzymes. Unlike the cold fusion scientists, Dr. Atassi went through the peer review process and later didn't play the ego game. Personally, I think Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann were greatly mislead by their enthusiasm (I wouldn't go nearly so far as to call them frauds). Just as the mistakes of these two scientists don't invalidate the field of cold fusion, the successes of the field don't make their claims any more accurate.
Carl Sagan addressed this issue in his essay, "The Burden of Skepticism." (See also lecture version).
Sagan explained:
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
>>plus a neutron (which can be a problem
Can be a problem? It is one of the major problems. Most (hot) fusion reactions produce a 14.1 MeV neutron as a primary or secondary reaction. The neutron flux (initial current + reflected and slowed neutrons) is sufficient enough so that, at the power levels a commercial fusion reactor would probably operate, every-single atom in the first wall of the reactor containment would be displaced from its lattice every few months!
Plus, there is no way to deflect or stop a neutron without letting it run into something, and whatever it hits will become radioactive itself as its atomic structure is blown apart from the bombardment. This means that a large, radioactive shield structure could have to be replaced every few months, making fusion not very much better than fission.
One of the few reactions that does not produce the neutron is the helium-3 helium-3 reaction. (He-3 + He-3 -> He-4 + 2 protons) Of course, helium 3 isn't that easy to find either. This is where the stories about "mining the moon for helium" come from; the moon is constantly blasted with miniscule trace amounts of helium-3 from the sun.
Reference: Roth, J. R. Introduction to Fusion Energy. Ibis Publishing, 1986. Pages 210, 295-296.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
First:
....
The Pons and Fleischmann "cold fusion" experiments where reproduced by several labs(including my university). However, it has nothing to do with cold fusion, that is the resume. As fusion, cold or not, creates measureable amounts of neutrons. Those did not get detected.
What remains is a heat producing aparatus with unknown reaction.
Second:
There are a lot of other ways to get a cold fusin reaction. And that is old science from the late 70th. One is "myon catalised fusion". In that case you bombard H atoms with myons. Myons are particls with similar behaviour likel electrons. Those can replace the electorns of an H atom. As a myon has about 300,000 times the mass of an electron it orbits the H atom very close. When two H atoms with their electrons replaced by myons form a mulecule, the two H cores are brought so close together that a fusion can happen.
There are likely other ways for "cold fusion".
Interesting, that a "geek net magazine" where posters/readers are supposed to have a clue about computers and related sciences behave like inquisitors when it goes about cold fusion and behave like experts when it goes about asteroid deflection or near earth misses
Probably it would be at least nice, if not wise, to open up your mind.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Not true--cold fusion is possible, just not like Pons and Fleischmann described. (Nothing like it, in fact.) The quantum mechanical description of the energy states of a hydrogen atom are identical whether you use electrons or muons; use either, the hydrogen atom doesn't care. (Now, when you ask the very important question "yeah, genius, now how do you create quintillions of muon-replaced hydrogen atoms?", I'll resort to the classic physicist's dodge: "that's an engineering issue; go ask an engineer.")
:)
QMech says that if you've got hydrogens with muon shells instead of electron shells, you'll see spontaneous fusion reactions at very low temperatures. The reasons why are hard to explain without going into a lot of math, but it's quite possible according to the Standard Model.
Of course, there's a world of difference between possible and feasible. But physicists are only concerned with the possible. Feasible is for engineers.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
" It's a travesty for a scientist to say cold fusion is wrong because of his faith... Since when does peer review mean you only test things that fit into your view of the universe? "
It's always been this way. Theres a big difference between the scientific method, and Science, Inc. And while you're at it, realize that Science Inc is as much a religion as any other faiths. It has its orthodoxies just like anything else. The Atkins Diet has always had its detractors. It took them, what, over two decades to admit that you can lose weight with it? And even now some doctors refuse to acknowledge that it can work. It violated the dogma of low fat/high carbs. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, science has its dogmas. Stephen Hawking is considered a genius now, but back when he was starting his career, the Steady State theory was the reigning dogma of physics. Some scientists simply refused to acknowledge any other possibilities.
Revolutionary ideas in science are often met with skepticism at first.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Muon-catalyzed fusion is real and comes within a factor of 15 of being commercially viable--muon-catalyzed reactions became self-sustaining in a theoretical sense in the 1980s (generating more energy out than was put in), but there's a long way between theoretical and practical self-sufficiency.
They hit the theoretical; they're within a factor of 15 of practical. This makes muon-catalyzed fusion the closest to viability of any fusion method so far. On the other hand, people have been throwing themselves at it for 20 years now trying to close that factor-of-15 gap and haven't gotten anywhere. Nowadays it's thought that there are some physical limitations on muon fusion which will prevent it from closing that factor-of-15 gap, and muon catalysis is no longer considered to be the most promising light on the horizon.
Muons are not 300,000 times the mass of an electron; they're 207 times the mass of an electron (or appreciably close to the mass of a proton).
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.
Sort of. That version of the 2nd law is true in classical thermodynamics. But when you throw relativity and nuclear reactions into the mix, it breaks down. Instead, you have talk about both mass and energy, which are equivalent in the good old ratio E=mc^2. This is why atomic fission (nuclear reactors and fission bombs) and "hot" fusion (hydrogen bombs) work. A small fraction of the mass is converted into energy. The classical versions of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics are being violated, but if you take the equivalence of mass and energy into account then it all works again. (It's been ages since I studied this stuff, but I think I have that basically right.)
You mean "muons". Also: fusion isn't defined by neutron production, though that does occur in many fusion reactions. (A counterexample would be the fusion of two Helium-3 atoms.)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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).
and go for nano-fusion. How hard would it be to etch an accerator onto a chip?
I saw a paper once which even offered up the possibility of non-radioactive nano-fusion -- boron and carbon, I think.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Whow leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Whot keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do! We do!
Why do I get the feeling that this fusion project has the codename "Duke Nukem Forever"
Nobody uses Cold Fusion anymore, now that Macromedia bought it. Everyone has switched to PHP.
Software Wars
Cold fusion is the poster boy for what is wrong with modern science practice.
... call it what you will) can't serve a purpose in science.
Facts don't decide how to investigate ... people have to sift facts and decide how to pursue things.
That decision process is biased.
... as one other poster pointed out, doing "science by press release" is an extraordinarily bad practice.
It oozes political need while letting sharp investgation fall by the wayside.
... since once again, agenda oozed into the picture and certain scientists could milk grants on the basis of uncertainty and greed.
... on non-disclosure terms alone.
We should be relegating CF to the same graveyard of fraud.
Like the cart pulling the horse, agenda is leading all aspects of investigation. The end result doesn't function.
Now, I'm not densedly supposing that agenda (bias, philosophy
But
In addition, I often wonder if the majority of scientists today are simply too badly trained to even begin to address their serious lack of objectivity. As their mentors become progressively more whores for government and industry grants, that agenda-rich attitude can only pervade their students. The developing product is what we clearly see today: cold fusion is still an "I don't know" topic when all they had to do was run some arguably cheap and computationally simple experiments. Forgetting to take into account mass and heat loss from evaporation? These people aren't scientists.
Let's not forget the brouhaha over Pons's and Fle.'s legendary reluctance to be forthcoming about methods in order to have their experiment duplicated. That alone should have had the claim laughed off the press (non full disclosure is a hallmark of a hoax). But it wasn't
Cold fusion is right freakin' up there with perpetual motion. PM claims are easy to debunk
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
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
Yet, it was a phenomenon worthy enough of a Keanu Reeves movie.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Stanly Pons and Martin Fleischmann were both separately employeed by the University, but the research was not sponsored by the school. They were using some of the school's facilities with permission, basically because of the high cost of the equipment.
See http://www.chem.utah.edu/depthistory/ChemDept_Hist ory.pdf for some of this:
Because the original press conference was conveniend at the University, and because both professors were affiliated with the U of U, and that further research was taken up by the University at the time of the press conference, many journalists jumped to the conclusion that it was the University's project.Other than the /. error, the article iteself is rather interesting, including this answer from a professor: "The question I get more than any other is, 'Are you still doing this?', " says Prof. Jones. "The answer is yes, and what we are seeing is very difficult to explain outside of cold fusion. The repeatability of these experiments now approaches 80 percent." [Insert comparison to Microsoft here.]
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Other countries are still working on it, as the article states about Japan. What is the chance that it is just ostrasized in the US, or maybe even "blacklisted" media-wise? It's alot like the stem-cell debate in a way.
We are just ignoring something that might be possible "out of hand". The MIT prof said several times "I wish some physicist would prove us wrong now", but they don't. It's just completly ignored, even though there is some current evidence. But other countries continue work.
There is a vested intrest against cold-fushion and pro hot-fushion in the US. Hot fushion is a hard thing to do, therefor it's not really profitable as an energy source for the public. Plus, the US already is against nuclear plants after three-mile island and such. So, we stay dependent on...coal. Oil for the initial energy source.
Other countries don't need to be tied to oil like the US is, and are moving on. Just as our prohibition on stem-cell research is mostly religious based. Someone else will figure it out, and we will have some problems dealing with someone else with the upper technological hand for once...especially if they don't like us.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Indeed. And that can be extended to, "Just because the media tells you something which you are too lazy to investigate more deeply on your own, doesn't make popular concensus true either."
Hell, popular concensus is never particularly reliable.
-FL
The organizers always schedule it to be coincident with the annual Perpetual Motion Machine conference.
The middle mind speaks!
Scientist sees a wee spark in a test tube and starts ranting about free energy etc.
From what I hear, George W Bush strongly advocates further research into free energy and antigravity.
Here's a scary thought: do you think some lines of fusion research have been suppressed because they could lead to "pure" fusion bombs (H-bombs without an A-bomb trigger)?
No. Hydrogen bombs are horribly misnamed; they're really just very, very large fission bombs. The initial fission core goes off; the heat and pressure creates a very brief fusion reaction; as a consequence of this fusion reaction a huge amount of very energetic neutrons are produced; and the neutrons from the fusion reaction are then used to induce a critical reaction in a thick jacket of U-238 which surrounds the nuclear core.
U-238 normally has no critical mass, so you can put as much of it around the core as you like. But when there's a fusion reaction going on inside the U-238 jacket, and it's bathed in a sea of energetic neutrons, U-238 goes nuclear.
The only purpose of the hydrogen step is to create the neutrons required for an extremely large fissile step. In the '60s we did some experiments (the Bassoon Tests) with true fusion H-bombs and the results were generally not as impressive as with fusion-boosted A-bombs.
and to top it off, the "excess heat gains" that got everybody's attention, the 2500 percent stuff, were hypotheticals on the order of "if we didn't have to charge the cell to make the effect happen, we'd get this much power."
that's like saying if I didn't have to spend a trillion dollars to fly to the moon, I'd do it monthly. if M$ didn't have bugs and undocumented exploits, they'd be putting out stable software. if I don't care about rules and science, I can convince myself that anything is possible, like making Buicks from shaving cream and squirrel hair.
it's a collection of failed experiments poorly calculated with no controls, and a few Jack Daniels insights.
read "Bad Science" by Gary Taubes, ISBN 0-394-58456-2, or "Voodoo Science" by Robert Park, ISBN 0-19-513515-6.
there is no wiggle room, Pons and Fleischman have been caught like shined deer in a scam. the "experiment" never was, the results never happened, and being non-reproduceable is the correct result.
"believers" need medical help and tutoring in 3rd grade science.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Papers, or in the case of the cold fusion scientists - press conferences, that go against conventional thought must provide additional evidence, additional controls, and extremely meticulous record keeping. Simply because you are a fan of cold fusion, does not make Dr. Pons' and Dr. Fleischmann's experiments quality experiments. Cold fusion could be shown to be a reality tomorrow, and Dr. Pons' and Dr. Fleischmann's experiments still wouldn't be considered good science (nor would they win the Nobel prize). Likewise, just because some individuals made a mistake regarding cold fusion, doesn't mean that the field should be disregarded entirely.
You'll find that scientists in general are very open minded about accepting unconventional ideas, provided there is strong evidence to support those ideas. In fact, I know that both my peers and I would absolutely love to have papers which show some well accepted dogma to be incorrect. Similarly, you'll also find that after reading story after story of "Scientist finds amazing cure for cancer!!", scientists tend to give the mass media very little, if any, attention regarding scientific issues. We know the media doesn't know the first thing about science (though we'd like them to, and we work hard to educate them), and that our results are unfortunately often grossly over exaggerated and only half the story told (sometimes in our favor, sometimes painting us as unethical, evil beings).
You're absolutely correct - there are many stories where (now) heroes like Galileo, Tesla and Darwin who were outcast and discredited for their revolutionary ideas. However, simply being shunned and discredited for one's ideas doesn't make them a hero - Water memory, Vitamin O, polywater, and (dare I say) timecube. Should the people who came up with these ideas be regarded as heroes? For every hero, there are plenty of individuals who were forgotten, disregarded and even labeled as frauds - and rightfully so.
Scientists who disregard cold fusion do so, not because of Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann, but for other reasons all together. As far as I can tell, the only people that are angry with the two scientists are those working in the field of cold fusion, who believe that it may be possible, and now have to work under a legacy of some poor experimental work. If cold fusion is shown to be true, it'll be despite of Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann's work, not because of it.
One of my jobs was sysadmin for a departmental computer lab that was in a big glass-fishbowl room (remember when computers were big?) I was heading off for a week to see a customer on another project, but I took a few minutes to print out a line-printer banner about "Cold Fusion Research Laboratory" and cobble together some random parts and wires and 5-gallon jars of liquid and set them up in the window before I left. They were gone by the time I got back :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Christ -- Americans even have to take credit for the best mistakes!
While Pons was from the University of Utah, Fleischmann was professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton (in the UK). He did visit Utah, and apparently first mentioned his ideas about it to Pons there, but basically it was a Southampton collaboration. Even the scriptwriters of The Saint got that right!
Incidentally, in spite of the subject heading, it isn't clear to me that it necessarily was a mistake. I listened to a talk by Fleischmann a couple of years ago (I did a PhD at Southampton), and he talked at length about how quantum electrodynamics is necessary to truly understand the physics. He appeared to imply that hot fusion physicists were making unfounded theoretical assumptions in their rubbishing of CF. Since Julian Schwinger, one of the creators of QED, apparently agreed, the theory surely cannot be as clear-cut as some of the alleged experts in this forum, and others, claim. While Fleischmann and Pons's mode of announcement -- essentially not waiting for refereed publication -- was unwise, the Stalinist anti-CF attitude of mainstream journals seems even worse.
People tend to forget that Texas A&M claimed to be able to produce Cold Fusion, too, shortly after the Utah "discoveries."
Folks in the lab had t-shirts that said "I might have discovered cold fusion and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"
Check FAS. Quoting liberally from that document, and with minor editing for clarity:
=====
The quest for the H-bomb was based in part on a false premise: that there is an inherent limitation on the size and power of a uranium fission bomb, namely the limitation imposed by critical mass considerations. When a sphere of uranium-235 any larger than a softball is assembled, a nuclear chain reaction will start prematurely. This must, of course, be avoided until the moment of detonation. If only one critical mass (one softball) is used, the size of the explosion is limited to a few tens of kilotons. This was the supposed limitation.
[After some discussion of ways to get around the limitation...] Another technique was to use uranium-238, which has no critical mass limitation and which, by the way, is dirt cheap. The bomb can have as much uranium-238 as the designer wants, in any shape, but the neutrons for fission must come from an outside source, namely fusion.
Despite the public hype about the hydrogen bomb contest, there was a serious problem with any weapon based mostly on fusion energy. It doesn't produce a very satisfactory explosion. In uranium fission, 90% of the energy is released as the kinetic energy of highly-charged, fully-ionized fission fragments. With a high electrostatic charge, these fission fragments convert their energy to heat quickly and within inches, producing an intense point source of heat. The resulting blast and fire is the whole point of a nuclear explosion.
In fusion, on the other hand, only 20% of the energy is released as the kinetic energy of charged fusion products, and their electrostatic charge is only a plus two. Because of the lower charge, the Bremsstrahlung Effect, which produces the heat, is much less powerful with fusion products than with fission products. More importantly, the bulk of the fusion energy (80%) is carried off by neutrally-charged neutrons which can travel hundreds of yards before colliding with something and giving up their energy. By themselves, neutrons are very inefficient producers of blast and fire. But an H-bomb which is designed so that every fusion-produced neutron results in a uranium fission event is very efficient. It not only converts relatively useless neutron energy into blast and fire energy, it also multiplies the total energy release by a factor of ten or more. The neutron, with an energy value of 14 MeV, produces a fission event worth 180 MeV.
In a weapon optimized for fission-fusion symbiosis, fission actually dominates the explosion, providing 90% of the total energy and virtually all of the energy that contributes to blast and fire.
=====
Read the entire article if you have time, BTW. It's absolutely excellent.