Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Dept. of Energy Takes A New Look At Cold Fusion
lhouk281 writes "Technology Review is reporting that the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion. According to Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, experiments performed under properly controlled conditions reliably produce more heat than standard theory predicts, and nuclear products show up in about the right amounts to account for this excess heat. Maybe we'll get those atomic-powered automobiles after all ..."
That still doesn't solve the issue of cost-feasibility on a scale that would power a metropolitan/regional/national area.
Unless it's an area like River Oaks in Houston or the MS campus in Redmond.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
The difficult thing about a comment like that is that you're never sure if someone is trying to be funny or just a typical conspiracy theory nut.
If reliable (and not too costly) cold fusion could become a reality, it really could solve many of the world's problems.
Imagine - oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground. We would no longer have to worry about global warming because CO2 production would go right down. And increasingly resource hungry emerging economies like China and India would no longer be such a threat to "our" oil resources.
If the USA spent 10% of it's military budget on alternative energy sources then this nut could be cracked quickly...
Too much to hope for I guess...
A Cold Fusion Power Plant would not have the bad reputation that Nuclear Power Plants do (thank you Three Mile Island). With a new source of cheap and safe electricity people in the US can finally buy economical electric cars and use electric heating and begin to break the US dependancies on forign oil.
This of course assumes many things like Cold Fusion being practical, safe, and nobody screwing things up enough to create a Cold Fusion Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
2+2!=4 in fusion, though. If we had 2+2=4 in a fusion reaction, the reaction wouldn't give off any energy.
no. P&F weren't reviled because they were wrong. they were reviled because they circumvented the whole publishing and peer review part of science and went directly to the 'make wild-ass claims to the press' part.
that said, being wrong didn't help them either.
Mod parent up. P&F weren't *wrong*, however, they just made those WAC's that weren't supportable. There *is* something going on in these experiments [I've read some of the DOE and DOD papers on it], but it *ain't* cold fusion, and we really don't know what it is.
Perhaps you have missed the news the last few nights but war has been pretty much constant in the main oil producing region of the world.
You may very well be correct. But even if it's not cold fusion they're possibly going to learn something new or startling or useful about chemical reactions. I'm sure the alchemists, in their desire to turn base metals into gold stumbled upon many interesting things.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Were they right in suggesting that it is possible or were the right in that they had the method to make it work?
This isn't some 3rd grade math test. You need to show your work when making claims like this. Just because you have the right answer doesn't mean is wasn't a wild ass guess.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
The facts are that a lot of people are seeing unexplained excess heat generation when they do these experiments. Whether it's fusion or not, unexplained results eventually lead to fundamental theoretical insights, and that's all to the good.
Less is more.
i'm not saying they were wrong.
it went like this. they announced discovery. then the majority of people couldn't reproduce results and their theory was unsupported.
ok pause there. everyone thought they were big dorks. why? i'm saying it wasn't because they were wrong (ie no one could reproduce the results), it was because they announced first, then peer review.
the parent of my post then asked, now that P&F might have be "right" should we say P&F are ok guys and did the right thing?
my answer is no. the reason they didn't do the right thing was because they skipped the peer review, which is still the case now.
Look, everyone seems all full of their intelligence here - so why not approach things with a neutral opinion until proven one way or the other? This guy is not selling you anything. He has an experimental apparatus and theory behind analmous heat production and can reproduce it; Ergo, either something is going on or he made a mistake. This can be determined on the basis of his experiment.
:sigh:
When experiment and existing theory produce different results, you need a new theory. That's how science works. The universe is never wrong. If you want to critique this guy, then go show me how smart you are and pick apart his experiments or apparatus, or maybe propose a theory that could explain the results another way - and devise an experiment to test that theory.
People mocked astronomy, planes, cars, space travel, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, television, computers, you name it - as the work of the devil, impossible, blah blah blah.
Yes, he could be wrong, but that's for replicable experiments to decide. I applaud these guys for trying and more importantly publishing their results. Nothing like the herd mentality, though.
..don't panic
Just because people are not published does not mean they are wrong. There have been plenty of cases where people have been refused publication because of political views--the world revolving around the sun being one of them that comes to mind. What impressed me the report is they targeted the issue of why it appears there is such a discrepancy in the results, not that there was one. It appears we have a lack of understanding of how to cause the deuterium to bind in sufficient amounts to palladium. Even if Cold Fusion remains a simple curiosity, at a minimum we now know that not all catalytic bindings are the same. It makes me wonder if catalytic converts for cars could be made substantially better with these understandings.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
It's appropriate to demand a high level of evidence for extraordinary claims.
It's appropriate to ridicule ridiculous claims & bad science; it helps keep fraud and chasing wild ducks (or whatever that idiom is) under control.
But RTFA. When experiments consistently produce results that can't be explained, it's the people pooh-poohing investigating those results that are on crack.
And why they didn't occur. :) They seem to be getting a better handle on why different Palladium rods give different results.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
the Pons-Fleischman experiment was simple enough to replicate,
Ah, but that was the catch. It sounded simple to replicate -- stick a palladium electrode electrolysis setup in some heavy water and run the whole thing in a calorimeter -- but the devil turned out to be in the details.
For one, precise calorimetry at that level is actually pretty hard -- Pons & Fleischman were old hands at it but it's not something your typical physicist does much of.
More significantly, it may be (judging by the replication attempts that seem to show results) that the setup is far more sensitive to uncontrolled variables like the manufacture method, exact composition (impurities, crystal structure etc) and the like of the electrode than P-F were aware.
There have been a lot of interesting results with various setups reported over the years, just not in the premier journals. The whole field acquired a bit of a stigma after the P&F furor.
-- Alastair
please, no more mod points for this drivel.
honestly, the whole 'cold fusion' debacle needs to be looked at without a single, narrow link. there is something there, to be sure, but noone is entirely sure what. the stigma that came from the original announcement is still there, and that stigma won't die anytime soon.
but really, turning all of it into *yet another* Bush-Bash is just fucking sad. honestly, grow up. the current Administration is bad, but you slashbots would have the world believe that its the worst thing to ever happen, ever ever ever ever ever.
and that's just tired and petty.
moreover, tell me that you wouldn't be sitting there whining if a different Administration was still making bad decisions. Americans do one thing well, bitch (this is why lawyers and politicians hold all the cards). everything else that Americans want done, they'll get the rest of the world to do for them, because the rest of the world will do it without demanding wages to fufil a pie-in-the-sky lifestyle preached 24/7 through print, radio and televised media.
that was a real rant.
Don't worry, there are other important uses for petroleum besides burning it.
Yeah! And what if the same crackpots who brought you homeopathy, a flat earth, creationism, phlogiston theory, alchemy and vitalism turn out to be right about the existance of magical dragons?-say it ain't so!!
To think that mere crackpottery is indicitive of actual evidence is a laughable lapse of judgement.
They also laughed at Bozo the clown, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
In the very early days of radio, it was common for hobbyists to use a geranium "cat's whisker" to demodulate signals. Nobody was sure how it worked at the time, so it was more of an art than a science. You would simply fiddle with the cat's whisker contact until you got the best signal possible. It wasn't until well after WW2 with the invention of the transistor that semiconductor physics were understood from a theoretical basis.
*IF* cold fusion is real, it may be much like that. They may have stumbed onto something, but the results are not reproducible, becuase we don't really understand what we are doing from even a theoretical, let alone an engineering basis. It is as if somebody had reported high temperature superconductivity before we had any theory explaining how may work, but couldn't reproduce it, since they didn't really know how to manufacture a high temperature superconductor, they just got lucky in the process.
Penicillin was discovered totally by accident, (contamination of a bacteria culture by a very rare strain of mould) but at least we could grow more of it to reproduce the results. Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
My rights don't need management.
But it has the potential to achieve one of the most important breakthroughs possible in science, which is to prove existing assumptions wrong.
Yes, you're right, that there is not a huge amount of energy being produced over and above what theory predicts. That pales in significance, though, next to the fact that extra energy is being created over and above what theory predicts, and the reasons why -- well, until we know the reasons why, we don't know what else is possible that our current state of theory cannot account for.
As pointed out in the article, the difference may be that in the actual experiments, where we're seeing extra heat production, the interaction between particles is taking place inside a lattice, whereas theory assumes that it makes no difference whether it's in a lattice or a vacuum -- that the atomic forces from the lattice need not be taken into account.
Now if this assumption is wrong -- well, let me put it this way. If our current knowledge of chemistry was based on the presumption that only those substances transformed during a chemical reaction were relevant to the reaction -- if we had no knowledge or concept of catalysts -- what things that we take for granted today would actually be unknown to us? What would be out there, overlooked, waiting for us to discover it?
To say this is trivial just because there is not a lot of extra heat production is like saying to Alexander Fleming that he's making too big a deal out of that petri dish where he can't get the cultures to grow -- after all, it's just one dish.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Sigh. And this gets modded +4 interesting. Way to go, mods.
Take off your tin-foil hat. No war is going to result from oil being displaced as an energy source, and there are two main reasons for this.
The first reason is that having less a dependency on oil will mean that nations like the US won't have to give a shit about the unrest in the Middle East. Reducing the need for oil for power generation means the world could do without the Middle East oil. Oil from non-Middle East countries would suffice, obviating the need to be directly involved in Middle Eastern affairs. This would remove a huge thorn in the side of US foreign policy, for example.
The second reason is that we will still need a fair amount of petroleum products for the forseeable future. The reason? Plastics. Petroleum products are used in the production of many forms of plastic, and the industrial world uses a hell of a lot of plastic.
At least you didn't mention the auto industry, or perhaps that was an oversight. Auto manufacturers are already investing in alternate energy sources for cars, so this would simply continue the trend.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Uh, I hate to break this to you, Mr. "Scientist", but abstinence is proven to be very nearly 100% effective in preventing AIDS, a conclusion that in no way flies in the face of science, but instead, simply stands to reason.
That's astounding, since abstinence is only about 20% successful in teenagers. See, 80% of the time, abstainers will get horny and screw anyway.
African countries are now pushing abstinence because *it works*, and if they don't, most of their population will be dead in 20 years.
Of course, if it does work, then 100% of the population will be dead in 60-80 years.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"