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Cold Fusion Back From The Dead
misterfusion writes "Looks like the IEEE is warming up to cold fusion with the latest story "Cold Fusion Back from the Dead". This has been a good year for this field with several leading science journals (Physics Today, MIT Technology Review, etc) contributing stories. Things are warming up and if science Research & Development funding can be stimulated with a positive DoE report (due soon), it might be an interesting rebirth."
...apologies to the pioneers of cold fusion, like Pons and Fleischman? Seems to me like a positive finding in a DoE report would at least be some verification that they might deserve one.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
1) The research will only go forward with more funding 2) SRI International is involved ("No, really, Uri Geller *is* a psychic!") 3) "Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion" is not the same as "Mike McKubre, a respected researched who is also working on cold fusion" 4) It's an election year and DOE, hardly a bastion of good science under Bush, is about to announce Cold Fusion is workable at a time of record world oil prices?
The thing that we know with certainty is that whatever is going on, it is not a nuclear effect.
It goes like this: in any nuclear effect, you wind up with lots of energy being dumped into a single nucleus. That energy can come out in only a small number of ways, because no matter what process produced the energy, all energy is created equal. And the nucleus is a well understood system.
So either you get gamma rays, neutrons, or nuclear recoil. The suggestion that you get lattice recoil, as occurs in the Mossbauer effect, does not hold water as it would require the lattice to behave in ways that are contrary to known physics, and again: all energy is created equal. Simply because an exotic process produces the energy does not allow us to suspend the rest of the laws of physics once that energy has been created.
If you have gamma rays or neurtrons, particularly in the quantities implied by the rate of energy creation, they are easily detectable. If you have nuclear recoil, you also, necessarily have neutron creation, because given the energies involved you'll knock nuetrons off the recoiling nucleus or the lattice nuclei. Again, it does not matter what exotic unknown process makes the nucleus move: once it is in motion in the lattice we can predict quite accurately how many neutrons will be produced.
Nothing like the expected numbers of neutrons or gamma rays are produced. Ergo, whatever is happening is not a nuclear process.
For what it's worth, IAANP, I have heard Fleishmann speak, and was peripherally involved in some early experiments to (in)validate the 1989 results. I've not thought much about the subject in the past decade, and hope not to do so for another decade. There's too much real science to think about instead.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
...ever bothered to pick up a copy of Infinite Energy magazine?
If you had, you might have noticed that there have been papers posted from labs around the world with consistent, reproducible results, for the past 10 years. I realize it's fashionable in some circles to read Skeptical Inquirer and be devotees of The Annoying Randi, but an open mind and a real scientific inquiry is actually sometimes needed. Rejecting something out of hand because you don't understand what's occurring doesn't qualify as objective scientific inquiry, no matter what experts are doing the rejection. (And yes, that's exactly what the reaction was of many of the experts in both the fusion and fission communities... "I don't understand what's happening here and it contradicts all my pet theories, and, more importantly, may affect my sources of funding and research grants... so it MUST be a lot of crap. Even though I've never investigated it, I just know it.")
BTW, for the tinfoil hat crowd, shortly after the DoE announced that they going to reinvestigate the published research, the founder and editor of Infinite Energy magazine, Dr. Eugene Mallove, was found murdered in his home. Make of it what you will.
Does anybody really think that the providers of centralized x would not be threatened by the prospect of decentralized x? And that, threatened, they would do nothing to stop or delay it? Has the cold war between proprietary and open source software taught us nothing?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Unfortunately, most of our models for fusion involve bare nuclei and we don't really know what's going on when it's not in a plasma state. The presence of an electron cloud can do funky things with the coulomb barrier, and we know that nuclear cross sectional areas are increased dramatically at low energies, 10 keV or less.
It's certainly been interesting that the rate of neutron creation has been so low, but that doesn't rule out nuclear processes. It just rules out d+d --> He3 + n + gamma as the dominant reaction. d+d --> He4 is, even in conventional nuclear physics, very possible, and indeed that's what we see the most of. The underlying mechanism for why this is the favored reaction isn't fully understood, but the data does fit with a nuclear process.
Our present lack of a cogent theory widely accepted in the community is definitely a point against us, but having a theory like that is not a prerequisite to believing what you're seeing. Elemental transmutation in d+Z reactions is common, and if you're turning Cs into Pr, and the amount of Cs is decreasing proportional to the increase in Pr, you're going to have a VERY hard time arguing that it's not a nuclear process. (See Iwamura, www.lenr-canr.org )
Apparently, the nucleus isn't such a well understood system after all, and we'd all be smart to not assume we know that much about anything. The field really does deserve more credence than you mainstream NPs have been willing to give it.