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."

Comments

Pseudoscience Warning Signs

[Critter92]

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?

Re:How do they know it's fusion?

[radtea]

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