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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."
I thought the article was referring to Macromedia Coldfusion!
Phew!
You guys could've fit at least ONE MORE "warming up" pun in the summary. It's like you weren't even trying!
Given the history of cold fusion, the Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. notice seemed strangely appropriate. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
How's about "Cold Fusion warmed over" instead?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Apart from the fact that there were problems reproducing the cold fusion effects, it's very easy to see why cold fusion has always been given the cold shoulder. It would effectively end the fission power-based business aswell as fossil fuel generated electricity.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
...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.
Waffle waffle
Cold fusion regarded as a joke for ages
waffle waffle
"THE FIRST HINT that the tide may be changing came in February 2002, when the U.S. Navy revealed that its researchers had been studying cold fusion on the quiet more or less continuously since the debacle began. "
waffle waffle
"At San Diego and other research centers, scientists built up an impressive body of evidence that something strange happened when a current passed through palladium electrodes placed in heavy water. "
waffle waffle
"Other researchers are finally beginning to explain why the Pons-Fleischmann effect has been difficult to reproduce. Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion, says that the effect can be reliably seen only once the palladium electrodes are packed with deuterium at ratios of 100 percent--one deuterium atom for every palladium atom. His work shows that if the ratio drops by as little as 10 points, to 90 percent, only 2 experimental runs in 12 produce excess heat, while all runs at a ratio of 100 percent produce excess heat. "
Summary: Cold fusion wasn't reproducible because not all factors were accounted for, and millitary scientists think they nailed it.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Now I can power my car for free, and for an indefinite period of time with all of those unused AOL CD's I saved. Not to mention all of the junk mail that has increased exponentially since the DO NOT CALL list came into being.
Cold Fusion Back From the Dead
U.S. Energy Department gives true believers a new hearing
Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion - the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now.
The cold fusion story began at a now infamous press conference in March 1989. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, both electrochemists working at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, announced that they had created fusion using a battery connected to palladium electrodes immersed in a bath of water in which the hydrogen was replaced with its isotope deuterium - so-called heavy water. With this claim came the idea that tabletop fusion could produce more or less unlimited, low-cost, clean energy.
In physicists' traditional view of fusion, forcing two deuterium nuclei close enough together to allow them to fuse usually requires temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Celsius. The claim that it could be done at room temperature with a couple of electrodes connected to a battery stretched credulity [see photo, "Too Good to Be True?"].
But while some scientists reported being able to reproduce the result sporadically, many others reported negative results, and cold fusion soon took on the stigma of junk science.
Today the mainstream view is that champions of cold fusion are little better than purveyors of snake oil and good luck charms. Critics say that the extravagant claims behind cold fusion need to be backed with exceptionally strong evidence, and that such evidence simply has not materialized. "To my knowledge, nothing has changed that makes cold fusion worth a second look," says Steven Koonin, a member of the panel that evaluated cold fusion for the DOE back in 1989, who is now chief scientist at BP, the London-based energy company.
Because of such attitudes, science has all but ignored the phenomenon for 15 years. But a small group of dedicated researchers have continued to investigate it. For them, the DOE's change of heart is a crucial step toward being accepted back into the scientific fold. Behind the scenes, scientists in many countries, but particularly in the United States, Japan, and Italy, have been working quietly for more than a decade to understand the science behind cold fusion. (Today they call it low-energy nuclear reactions, or sometimes chemically assisted nuclear reactions.) For them, the department's change of heart is simply a recognition of what they have said all along - whatever cold fusion may be, it needs explaining by the proper process of science.
THE FIRST HINT that the tide may be changing came in February 2002, when the U.S. Navy revealed that its researchers had been studying cold fusion on the quiet more or less continuously since the debacle began. Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water - a good source of heavy water - may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories.
Many researchers at the center had worked with Fleischmann, a well-respected electrochemist, and found it hard to believe that he was completely mistaken. What's more, the Navy encouraged a culture of risk-taking in research and made available small amounts of funding for researchers to pursue their own interests.
At San Diego and other research centers, scientists built up an impressive body of evidence that something strange happened when a current passed through palladium electrodes placed in h
In the next Slashdot story perpetual motion is shown to be possible.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
It is good to finally see a fair balance in the study of this idea. It may not generate anything usable, but then agin, it might. I think that is the key... to get real science studying the situation, not having the ideas tested and approved through the media.
With ITER in a political freeze, there is ample time to study cold fusion concepts further. I don't see how one can create fusion conditions at room temperature. But if we understand how to control the collisions of the atoms better, then we may lower ignition temperatures. If the temperatures required were only several tens of thousands of degrees, then we do away with the complex containment systems and have a very viable energy source without multi billion dollar energy stations.
Bottom line: Let real science work. The worst case scenario is that we have a better understanding of the atomic interactions that will be used in whatever fusion reaction processes that we eventually use.
Heh... Cold Fusion Back From The Dead is almost as good as Stealing Fire from the Gods
Something there is producing some serious heat. Nobody ever denied that. But if it were fusion that were doing it, the researchers would be dead from radiation poisoning. I think that the phenomenon needs research, but I wouldn't hold my breath as to actually getting fusion out. There could still be a chemical basis for the energy.
From the article it seems like Fleischmann saw more energy coming out than he put in (up to 250% apparently) and thought to himself:
"Aha! This must be cold fusion."
Is it just me, or does that seem to be a bit of a leap of faith? After all, if one sets light to petrol one gets more energy out than a match puts in. Surely there are other possibilities.
Occam's razor anyone?
I'm not sure about "strong evidence" from a single research laboratory either...
Over the years, a number of groups around the world have reproduced the original Pons-Fleischmann excess heat effect, yielding sometimes as much as 250 percent of the energy put in.
(snip)
Other researchers are finally beginning to explain why the Pons-Fleischmann effect has been difficult to reproduce. Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion, says that the effect can be reliably seen only once the palladium electrodes are packed with deuterium at ratios of 100 percent--one deuterium atom for every palladium atom. His work shows that if the ratio drops by as little as 10 points, to 90 percent, only 2 experimental runs in 12 produce excess heat, while all runs at a ratio of 100 percent produce excess heat.
Something is going on here that we don't understand, and it looks like it can be reproduced. Yeah I would say it would be worth looking into further. The 250% heat output sounds like a good thing (especially if no toxic by-products are produced) so how does that compare to other types of heat generation I wonder?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Yeah. Physically impossible. It would be cool if you could just, oh, 'tunnel' through the barrier or something, but that would be absurd...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Oh, shit! This again and again.
Cold fusion is impossible and Physics have long demostrated it.
Robert L. Park, the President of the American Physical Society, wrote a book that deals with this and explains it clearly: Voodoo Science. He will probably treat this "rebirth" of the hype on his What's new science column.
How long until the USA Government understands they cannot beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
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?
Pons and Fleischmann, the original perpertrators of Cold Fusion, were from the University of Utah.
What's the bet that this "re-birth" of Cold Fusion has something to do with SCO?
Judge: Mr McBride, do you have anything to say before the jury adjourn to find you guilty and sentence you to death by stoning?
Darl: Look! Excess neutrons!
Jugde: Where? [Looks away]
Darl: [Exit, stage left]
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
If your that sure, you've obviously never worked in academia. An absolute minimum of half of all proposals for funding of experiments get rejected in entirely noncontentious fields. In fields that suffered all the hype and disappointment of cold-fusion (I can't actually think of an example that faired quite so badly in the press) I can't imagine any government research organisation funding research, and they control most of the academic funding. There's not a lot of opportunity for publishing papers either, which is the key factor in securing research funding.
Only a few companies have a large enough R&D budget to do basic research in areas directly related to their core businesses, and the power companies have much more plausible, if less groundbreaking research to do, as well as hot-fusion research.
What worries me is the military interest. It's all a push to build bigger and better ways to kill people, now powered with more efficient means! Don't get me wrong, historically we have many great things coming from military driven technology (space program, wireless comm., nuclear power, etc.) but at what cost?
Palladium, tritium? Even if they can consistently get more heat out than energy in, that only describes the current event.
It does not describe the entire economic input. That palladium and tritium has to come from somewhere, and it's expensive.
Until this can be done with non-exotic materials, it will probably be a push as its worthiness.
... In the next Slashdot story perpetual motion is shown to be possible.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
The article is a good look at the whole CF phenomenon as of 1993.
The article blurb referred to Technology Review as a "leading science journal". It isn't. It's a magazine. I like to think it's a good magazine, as I've written for it, but it is most definitely not a scientific journal.
Think quantum mechanics/quantum probabilities. 'Tunneling' is a very real possibility. Electron tunneling is widely used in electronics.
My thinking is that the palladium matrix is somehow modifying the quantum probability functions such that when the matrix is sufficiently saturated with deuterium nucleii, it allows superposition, which gives rise to fusion. I actually came up with this explanation years ago when some people had success and others failed, now it turns out there may actually be evidence to support it.
I love this notion that "the POWERS THAT BE suppressed the IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE for their own evil ends!" It's such a charming fantasy.
The Evil Vested Interests of the world are regularly blindsided by new technology. The usual pattern (*cough*RIAA*cough*) is that they ignore it until it really starts to hurt them, and then they try to make it go away through legal action. Those folks do not have a magic ability to predict the future. In fact, they demonstrably suck at it.
When "cold fusion" was announced, the people who discredited it were academics who tried like hell to reproduce the effect, and found it to be irreproducible based on the information they had at the time. This is called "peer review". Scientists are supposed to be profoundly skeptical. In that respect, they differ from conspiracy theorists.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that no extravagant claims are being made. If it turns out that there's something there which really is both reproducible and interesting, we'll hear more about it.
I find you statement scary. Public funding for basic research is critical for development of new technology.
Research costs real money. Salaries must be paid, and equipment must be purchased and maintained. State of the art scientific equipment isn't cheap, and neither are Ph.D. researchers. (Well, OK, grad students, post-docs are cheap but that's another story.)
Where do you think these "well funded" universities you write about get their money? While many of these universities, especially the private universities have large endowments and alumni donations, this money typically goes to bricks and mortar infrastructure. That's where the buildings come from. The truth is that the bulk of the day-to-day operating resources for scientific research come from the Federal Government. Without federal funding, the science buildings at even the most richly endowed ivy league institutions would be empty shells.
Furthermore, most research is high-risk. Even if the payoff is potentially high, the probability of hitting a commercial home-run from basic research is low. Most companies and private investors are averse to that level of risk, and their tolerance for such risk is no longer what it was in the good old days. Bell Labs, for example, is no longer the institution that generated Nobel prize winning research decades ago.
The bottom line is without federal funding, science in the US would stagnate, and we would no longer be a world leader in science and technology.
The fission power business depends on massive subsidy, at least in .uk. As for fossil-fuel energy, that may have the clout to squash new technologies in .uk and .us, but I suspect that in .jp, where they're wholly dependent on imported power, any alternative would be welcomed.
.cx
We all know that these kinds of experiments opened a blackhole in
I beg to differ. Palladium only costs about as much as gold, and is used commonly for things like spark plugs and catalytic converters for cars. It's also not consumed by the reaction, so it's a one-time cost.
In regards to tritium, I'll agree that it's expensive now. This may not always be the case, though, especially if there's a use for it besides thermonuclear devices and glowing keychains. The article seemed quite optimistic about the possiblity of getting the needed heavy water from the sea ("Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water--a good source of heavy water--may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories." - emphasis added).
If cold fusion turns out to be the Real Deal (TM), then there will be scientists and engineers falling over themselves to find economical ways of producing the fuel, I guarantee it.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Yes, but think of the scale here. On the atomic level, it may be possible to have tiny, localized areas where particles can be accelerated to very high speeds. Granted, it would be extremely rare and definitely not generate energy on the scale of hot fusion, which basically depends on having a "nuclei soup".
n g_launcher/ring_launcher.html. Only a small force is actually added to each element, but the whiplash effect accelerates the last object to high speeds. What if the forces between palladium and deuterium are such that the deuterium atoms are arranged in straight rows and matrices on the surface of palladium? And what if the applied electrical current tugs each atom slightly, which when released allows a cascading whiplash effect on rows millions of atoms long? Pure conjecture, but it illustrates a mechanism by which a few atoms might be accelerated to very high speeds, and in a somewhate accurate linear way (as opposed to hot fusion which hopes for accidental collisions between randomly moving nuclei).
How could we get a massive acceleration using only objects that repel each other? This is an interesting experiment: http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/ri
No, they don't magically get around the coulomb barrier. Its just that the potential across the surface of an electrolytic cell is enough, in theory, to overcome it. We did the calcs in freshmen materials science.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
I'd highly recomend the wikipedia article on cold fusion, here.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
There is a huge difference though. Most fusion research focuses on the plasma state of the fuel, cold fusion focuses on the liquid state. I don't think anyone is saying that the electric forces do not need to be overcome, but that the probability of overcomming them is great in a liquid. Essentially, imagine 3 people in a 10'X10'x10' room running and jumping around blindfolded as fast as they can. That's "hot fusion". Then imagine 100 people being piled into a 10'x10'x10' room maybe they don't run fast, but there is a lot greater chance one of them is going to get a bloody nose. That's "cold fusion". It doesn't mean it's cold, it just means it's not plasma.
Aside from that, the charges balance out in cold fusion thus effectively removing the need to add energy for the majority of the collision path, once the nuclei get close enough the cancelling effect becomes very small and then you need to increase the pressure... which is exactly what the electricity is doing.
Back in the early 90's I was a personal assistant to Dr. John O'M. Bockris (Professor of Electro-Chemistry at Texas A&M University). His laboratory was the first in the world to "verify" the results of Pons & Fleischmann.
During my year and a half as a personal assistant (one of several), one of my main responsibilities was to help with correspondence with other scientists. I'd open their mail, scan it for importance, and act on it (usually forward it to the Dr. Bockris if it was personal correspondence or reply back to the sender with relevant publications if it was a request for information). Needless to say, I saw a lot of unpublished information about "cold fusion".
Among many, one particular hand-written note stands out in my mind: it described the palladium cathode melting during the course of the experiment, with no apparent cause, other than "cold fusion". I don't remember the researcher, but I do remember that this particular guy had tons of papers to his name & was a highly respected scientist.
Of course among the correspondence, there was also some petty squabbling. I was most disturbed by the fact that anyone that researched "cold fusion" was regarded as a wacko by the entrenched scientific community. The attitude that normal physicists seemed to have was that "cold fusion" was a hoax & that further investigation was an entire waste of time. They'd cry "But where are all the neutrons", or "You'd be dead by now if that much excess heat were actually being produced." What most of these so-called entrenched scientists failed to realize was, this was something entirely new. Maybe it doesn't follow the laws of nuclear physics as we understand them now. But the same thing can be said for almost any major change in our understanding of the universe (relativity and quantum physics certainly fit the bill). But the effect of their collective crying, bitching, and moaning was to make funding for "cold fusion" research a difficult thing to acquire. All this did was slow down progress on research on something that could radically alter our understanding
Anyway, the constant influx of reports during those years ('92-'93?) showed that there was something new going on. The problem was that nobody could reliably reproduce their results. But regardless, in the decade since I worked there, "rogue researchers" kept pounding away at the problem & the damned problem just won't go away. In fact, it seems (from this article and many other publications: http://www.defusion.com/ & http://www.infinite-energy.com/) that people are making real progress on the problem.
I still read some of the lighter publications & summaries, but to tell you the truth, I'm a programmer with a BS in engineering and that stuff is WAY over my head. But progress is being made. It's about freakin' time the main-stream science community stopped their bitching & started taking a good, long, hard look at this problem.
As my grandma says, "Many hands make light work."
I also am not a nuclear physicist, but I think I know the answer to your question (if I'm wrong, hopefully someone will correct me.) There are two, interrelated problems. The first is that the plasma where the fusion occurs is incredibly hot, so as you said it needs to be contained. In tokamaks this is done with a toroidal magnetic field. The problem with this is that, since plasma have very low densities (basically a necessity for it to be a plasma) there's not really all that many nuclei in the contained volume that can undergo fusion. So, the reactions tend to be very short, and we don't get back as much energy as we put in. That's why the tokamaks they're building to get to break even are so huuuge--larger contained volume means more fuel means more energy out for the amount we had to put in. Some researchers are also trying to figure out how to continually inject more fuel into the contained volume and keep the reaction running that way.
Anyway, this is my understanding of the main problems in the field from the outside looking in.
...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.
I was at the APS meeting where Cold Fusion was officially debunked.
About five different highly respected labs, including at UMD and
Caltech, tried and failed to reproduce the results.
BUT.
Here's the thing: at least one (maybe two?) of the labs noted that
Pons & Fleischmann's results could be reproduced if one neglected one
of the steps needed to reproduce it (stirring?). If one failed to do
that step, you would get a chemical reaction of about the magnitude
P&F described.
Note well that the likeliest reason for any other researcher to
observe the reaction P&F describe would be a similar carelessness.
Could it be cold fusion? Could be. But it's very, very, very
unlikely. The chances of human error are alot higher than the
chances that physical theory is so wrong.
There was one embarrassing mistake. The funding agencies had already
promised funding for cold fusion. Thus, a (sometimes persuasive)
constituency was created for keeping cold fusion research dollars
flowing. That constituency is basically being paid to keep the cold
fusion myth alive. That's anothing thing you should keep in mind when
you hear about cold fusion nonfailures (because it's as likely that
you'll see cold fusion generators as it is that you'll get a real
opportunity to own the Brooklyn Bridge...)
D2O production takes a reasonably large amount of electrical power and a lot of water to produce.
Pd is used all over the place as a catalyst (in car exhausts for one) so isn't particularly hard to get hold of. It's also believed to be a catalyst in the alleged reaction, so it isn't used up.
Cold Fusion is simply Fusion at a lower macro-temperature (as in a room-temperature room). Fusion clearly is possible, unless you care to explain atomic weapons, stars, nuclear power another way (do I hear giant government conspiracy maybe? matrix-like pseudo-reality?).
Cold fusion may or may not be possible, but clearly science hasn't proven it either way. And as another form of Fusion, it certainly does not violate the 2nd law.
Let's not forget the other uses for oil, such as plastics, lubrication, and just about anything in organic chemistry.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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...
Oil companies would be richer than ever if this pans out.
I disagree.
The oil won't stop being needed, it'll just stop being burned.
The question isn't "will oil still be needed", it's "HOW MUCH oil will still be needed?" And the answer (quite obviously) is "much less than is needed right now."
Yes, some oil will still be needed, but the fact that a great deal of it is burned means that the *demand* side of the "supply and demand" equation will drop. Significantly.
And guess what happens then?
quite a few "oil companies" have figured out that they are in the energy business, not the oil business.
Oil companies currently have it pretty good - why would they want to actually have to go out and *compete* if they don't have to? It's just like the RIAA and the MPAA - when new technology comes out that creates competition for their current business model, they're more inclined to fight the technology, rather than embrace it, even if embracing it would provide a new revenue stream that will dwarf their current profits.
A former head of the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion program -- indeed one of the 3 primary founders of the Tokamak program, Robert Bussard, picked up that legislation and sent it to all members of the Congressional committees on energy as well as to the various physics labs. In his cover letter he admitted that the Tokamak program had been a sham program -- promoted in the wake of the Apollo program -- to try and get funding to try out all the "hopeful ideas" out there. The Tokamak program turned into a Frankenstein monster and instead started killing all the hopeful ideas they had originally set out to fund.
It's taken quite a while for the government to lose its fixation on the Tokamak.
Maybe now they'll reconsider my legislation -- especially now that the prize award approach has been largely vindicated.
Or will it take another Viet Nam, or worse, WW III for them to wake up to the stupidity of their energy policies?
Seastead this.
Just as an example: Proton tunnelling has been observed over 0.5 Å with a 2E-23 J barrier. (as a contribting effect in hydroxyl group proton exchange)
It takes 100,000,000 times that energy to get a proton just within 1E-13 m of another proton.
Now consider that the tunneling rate is exponentially dependent on the barrier. Uh-huh.
With all due respect to the above journals, they are not peer-reviewed journals where research results are reported. If the journals had been Nature, Science and Physics Review, then I'd be excited. But they aren't, so I'm not. Besides, I read the articles, and I didn't get the impression they were all that enthusiastic...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Oh please. "Creation science" isn't science at all. Science makes predictions based on theories, and often has applicable uses. "Creation science" just attacks an evolutionary strawman. Nothing useful has come out of it, and no predictions can be made from it, and its practicioners don't follow the scientific method of empirical research.
To believe that crap, you have to discard physics (radioactive dating), astrophysics (age of the universe), biology (evolution and DNA), geology (age of the earth), paleoclimatology (ancient weather), and probably several other scientific disciplines that I just can't think of at the moment. Every one of THOSE sciences actually produce results. The atomic clock which you set your watch by in the morning is based on the same rate of radioactive decay which allows us to date rocks and sediment and fossils. The rockets that we send into space calculate their trajectory based on the same science which tells us how old the universe is. DNA and evolutionary research have given us new prescription drugs that are used to treat diseases. Paleoclimatology tells us what happens when the cabon dioxide levels get too high and cause global warming.
Has "Creation science" contributed anything to mankind, other than a bunch of wrongheaded thinking? Can you use "creation science" to make a better retrovirus drug? No. It's not science, it's muddle headed philosophy, and it will never be any more than that because it is fundamentally wrong.
When scientists say the earth is billions of years old, that theory is not based on pseudo-science, but cold, hard facts that "creation science" doesn't deal with, because it can't. If we used "creation science" geology to build our buildings, they would collapse. If we used "creation science" nuclear physics to build our nuclear reactors, they would explode. The only way you could possibly believe that crap is if you are woefully or intentionally ignorant of the facts.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I thought they meant Macromedia Cold Fusion was back from the dead.
Is a more generic form of prize devoted to energy sources. It would be worthwhile to have a prize that would simply related to non-patented technological changes that make their way into energy sources-particularly power plants.
Figured I'd move this to the top thread so that as many people saw it as possible. Wow, you people really have no idea, at all, what you are talking about. ColdFusion 4? Uh, that was 6 years ago! ColdFusion MX is a Java/J2EE application that runs on JRun, WebSphere, Tomcat, etc. and utterly trounces other web development languages. It has tags that make all common needs simple to solve (create a web service with one line of code?!) and if you need to do anything complex, call anything in the Java API straight from your CFML code. Any statements about lack of scalability or security are utterly false and are clearly coming from someone who has no clue about what CFMX is. I've been a CF developer for 6 years and do very well at it, building extremely large and complex ecommerce and data warehouse systems. It's just hilarious to see people show their ignorance by saying things as "facts" that are actually totally incorrect.
"...The only thing in the body that heavy water might affect is osmosis, so I think that is a very unlikely suggestion..."
No Nobel prize. Not even a White Owl. Here's a more knowledgeable view of heavy water toxicity
To quote:
"When body deuterium reaches about 50%, it inhibits mitosis because spindle microtubules won't form (some hydrogen bond effect inhibiting self-polymerization, I think). So all eucaryotic cells are poisoned about about these concentrations, or a little higher (bacteria can survive full deuteration-- they just grow half as fast). The consequences of failure of cell division for an intact animal like a rodent, are somewhat like those of radiation or chemo-- the bone marrow and gut lining cells suffer. Animals die of infection or diarrhea. "
T&K.
Political language
I read a lot about cold fusion when the controversy first erupted and in the next few years. It's much more difficult to evaluate than you would think.
The problem is that there is a pre-loading phase where you are running the current and nothing is happening. This is when the hydrogen is being taken up by the palladium electrodes. Then after a while you start to get some heat, often sporadically.
But is it excess heat? Or are you merely recovering energy you spent in the pre-loading phase?
This question is the subject of calorimetry, or heat measurement, and it is one of the most difficult types of measurements to do precisely. Making it harder is the fact that the experiments run for several days or even weeks and you have to monitor the energy spent and recovered throughout that time. Some of the early experiments went bad because the stirring of the water by convection wasn't properly taken into account. That's how subtle and difficult it is.
It seems clear that at least some of the early cold fusion results were merely calorimetric errors. Now, it's possible that they have improved their experimental technique and that the new data is more convincing. But the nature of the experiment - long periods of feeding energy in, then short bursts of heat out - makes it inherently difficult to come up with convincing proof of what is happening.
I linked to a article about renewed DOE interest in cold fusion in one of my comments and was throughly ridiculed. Well just goes to show that being ahead of the curve is never easy.
"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."
Ok, I'll bite. Why aren't these people now all billionaires, having developed and sold their new fusion technologies as a practical energy source?
If it is reliably reproducable, someone ought to be able to make a practical 'cold fusion reactor' and sell it, even if we don't entirely understand the effect. People were burning wood for energy long before we knew anything about combustion chemistry.
Twentieth-century physics also gave us the solid state (quantum mechanical) theories needed to understand semiconductor rectification and other phenomena used to make things like, oh, TRANSISTORS. And the atomic physics necessary to make LASERS. So that computer with its CD-ROM drive in front of you wouldn't exist without the efforts of 20th century PHYSICISTS.
None of these were "technologists" working on something they didn't understand, but scientists who actually used the full power of modern physical theories to predict and discover useful phenomena.
And I haven't even reached back to the 19th century to mention a guy by the name of Maxwell, and all the great things made possible by his theoretical research. Like, oh, I don't know, radio.
Even Edison wouldn't have gotten very far if it hadn't been for Ampere, Coulomb, and Faraday. All that funky telegraph stuff that gave Edison his start depended on what was once cutting-edge physics.
I'll freely admit general relativity hasn't (and almost certainly won't) lead to technological breakthroughs. But quantum mechanics has pretty clearly kicked ass.
Pons and Fleishman told of trying an experiment in a portable cooler; when no positive results were immediately apparent, the cooler was put into a closet and forgotten about for years -- until there was a fire which the arson investigators deduced started in the closet, in the cooler....
Pons and Fleishman were clear (to me) in saying the "apparatus" had to spend years "charging." Their words.
Right after their announcement, a Palo Alto, CA laboratory charged with trying to replicate their experiment used the same brand cooler and put it in a closet for years.... Students graduated, professors retired or moved on, and suddenly, there was a fire in the lab, which investigators reported started in a closet....
(This based on contemporary news reports carried in the SF CHronicle.)
I doubt the PA replication experiment was designed to start a fire inadvertently, but that appears to be what happened.
Pons and Fleishman's explanation of their apparatus was MORE accurate than most of the doubters realized or even accepted.
It appears to me (an interested amateur) that the battery uses time to somehow attract a Deuterium atom to each palladium atom, at which time, according to the article, energy amplification ("cold fusion") occurs 100 per cent of the time.
The big fuss over cold fusion came about the same time as the bogus theory that water had a memory. If you can believe that the water in your next can of Pepsi (or Coke) "remembers" that it was most recently in your bladder, more power to you, but it's this same quackery that gives us homeopathic remedies. Let's not confuse what we would like to be, with what is reality. Bad science is just that and wishing that it wasn't doesn't make it so.
--When it's my time, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather -- not screaming like all the passengers in his car
I would prefer much more that they were going to the moon to harvesting helium 3 and trying to fuse it with deuterium, the fact that helium 3 lacks something and dueterium has bit to much of something could make a fusion reaction easier to achieve. A link here. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html/
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet