Slashdot Mirror
DOE Report on Cold Fusion
thhamm writes "The DOE Report on Cold Fusion (mentioned here too) is out. Take a look at it on the DOE Website. Well, looks like there is nothing really new since Pons & Fleischmann in 1989, because "While significant progress has been made in the sophistication of calorimeters since the review of this subject in 1989, the conclusions reached by the reviewers today are similar to those found in the 1989 review.""
Finally, a news that is "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.".
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Only old koreans use cold fusion. Everyone else has moved to J2EE and then LAMP
I've been using Coldfusion for years.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
How about the Department of Fish and Game releasing their report on Bigfoot? That coming soon?
I think it is commendable that so much effort is being put into a field of research that there has been little result in in the past 20 years. The results simply are not important, as we have seen in the race to defeat The NP Problem, it is the struggle to further the scientific knowledge. Even bearded terminal hackers should bow to the (surely bearded) physics hackers who thanklessly work on this day and night
We salute you!
What with fossil fuels not going to last forever something like this really could be great for all of us, hell Bush wouldn't even have to keep killing soldiers to boot.
Back to peak oil panic.
Lots of people felt the same way about nuclear energy in the 40s (both for war and peacetime use). Just because we can't make it work now doesn't mean that will be the case in the future. Nor does it mean we should abandon all avenues of research pertaining to it.
DOE! /ducks
Oh dear!
Cold fusion here!
Unknown host pong.
You want real progress? An X-Prive for cold fusion or something. Offer a million bucks and suddenly everyone's falling over themselves to spend 2 million in order to win.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Actually, that was the second draft. I believe the first draft read: "Despite committing some of the best minds in Physics to the task, we seem to have been one-uped by a bunch of chemists who clearly know more about energy than the er, Department formerly known as 'Energy.' We apologize for wasting tax payer money." "Ok guys, shut those experiments down. Steve got cold fusion. Turns out that the reaction only occurs in people's basements." Damn. Time for a career change. -WF
Not nearly as good as PHP ... ow wait.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
... to provide evidence for low energy nuclear reactions. These experiments involved low energy deuterium beams impinging on deuterium loaded metal foils such as titanium.
In moments like these I'm glad I bought the tin foil hat and not the more luxurious titanium one.
Hey, don't knock Cold Fusion. Despite being a much shunned language, its other form could also garner you lauds and praises from the IgNobel Prize Committee. Of course, dabbling in alchemy always enhances your popularity in the scientific community.
The reviewers have a heavy investment in their own careers, especially as it relates to hot fusion an accepted theories. When Congress was holding hearings on cold fusion back in 1989, some of these hot-fusion types were telling Congress it was baloney and worthless while at the same time requesting funding for cold fusion research from the NSF.
Wait another 40 or 50 years, and see what happens once the hot-fusion crowd isn't calling the shots anymore.
Not only am I a scientist, I play one on TV
After all the years and all the hundreds of millions spent you have to wonder if fusion is a practical answer. It appears that a commercial reactor is fifty to a hundred years off. By all accounts we have maybe fifty years before our energy needs hit a critical point with things starting to go down hill in another twenty. No one has yet proven that a reactor can function at better than break even. Should the efforts be redirected at existing technologies? Solar, wind and methane solutions exist now. Isn't it better to solve our short term problems before counting on long term solutions that can't be implemented in time to avoid disaster. Won't this force us to resort to coal and nuclear when oil runs out or is that the plan?
The "conclusion" is in this PDF document: Looks like it's a mixed bag. Apparently 1/3rd of the reviewers were very intrigued by the new results [and at least one reviewer was convinced].
Funding recommendations are similarly indecisive:
when there really is nothing new, there are all kinds of possibilities announced but now that they say there's nothing really new I really hear an appeal for others to not bother trying because they want to be the only ones.
You know, I'm starting that this tin foil on my head is cramping my style.
Charge Element 1: Examine and evaluate the experimental evidence for the occurrences of nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low energies (less that a few electron volts).
Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented.
Charge Element 2: Determine whether the evidence is sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that such nuclear reactions occur.
The preponderance of the reviewers' evaluations indicated that Charge Element 2, the occurrence of low energy nuclear reactions, is not conclusively demonstrated by the evidence presented. One reviewer believed that the occurrence was demonstrated, and several reviewers did not address the question.
Charge Element 3: Determine whether there is a scientific case for continued efforts in these studies and, if so, to identify the most promising areas to be pursued.
The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.
If I recall correctly from Science News several months or year ago, such phenomena have been observed in other experiments. Specifically, sonoluminesence (not spelled correctly) in certain solutions has had the the proposed origin in cold fusion. note that cold fusion in this sense would have no real practical application because the scale is sooo small that the only observable result is flashes of light
Maybe one day this cold fusion nonsense would lead to progress in something - maybe calorimeters... I'm an optimist - so shoot me :)
I dont know where my mind is... I read that as Dept. of Education Report on Cold Fusion (Macromedia)...
Research into string theory and zero potential energy could mean warp travel, and unlimited energy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[comment on research]
[faulty logic]
[hope for future advancement]
[signature]
all i could think of was the wonderfully done cinimatic on Starcraft where they open up the case to the bomb, and they have a bunch of beer cans being kept cool by cold fusion. Of course the beers would be completely frozen, but a funny cinimatic nontheless...
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
for basement mad scientists is that the attachment to the doc finally has a clear diagram for building a cold fusion cell. I know that when this all splashed fifteen years ago, the biggest gripe other scientists had was the lack of a clear experiment plan to replicate. Well, now we've got the diagrams and the electrolysis Palladium loading protocol. So if you really wanna find out for yourself, you can.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
So does that mean the cold fusion claim is just as fatuous now as it was 16 years ago?
You've got two first posts within a few hours. That's absolutely amazing! You've completely beat the odds. I must ask, though, how you accomplished such a feat. Did it involve clicking on reload slightly less than a billion times?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Something is happening which we do not understand. Whether you believe that it is cold fusion doesn't matter. We don't understand it. Anything we don't understand is worth researching. Although this has a very attractive possible outcome, that is not the point of pure science. We do pure science for its own sake. If engineers and technologists can make use of scientists' research, so much the better.
The point of science is understanding. It isn't application.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Twelve years ago fusion prize award legislation was proposed. It had the support not only of cold fusion researchers but of one of the three primary founders of the US fusion program supported the legislation. Prizes actually work. Let the DoE go ahead and do its skeptical measurements and the let private sector do what it does best -- take risks and compete -- peacefully -- while we still can compete peacefully.
Seastead this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Something over a year ago I came up with an alternative to the Pons-Fleischman testing apparatus that eliminated some of the problems with their design. (The biggest problem is that the operation of the cell pumps large amounts of heat into it, orders of magnitude larger than the amount being measured, making it difficult to detect the effect.) I was too lazy to set it up as an experiment so I made it available to the public. I also sent it to a few of labs doing research in cold fusion. Never heard back, so I guess they're deluged with ideas from other crackpots too. :-D
I thought they were talking about Macromedia ColdFusion...
:-D
everyone I knew who used that junk is jumping off the ship like it hit an iceburg.
Then again, DOE using ColdFusion... wouldn't be shocking. Perhaps for security purposes?
Even Pons admitted it. A few months into cold fusion's hayday in the 1989s, a scientist asked them to use regular water instead of heavy water, as a control. They did--and got the *exact same results*. Hydrogen will NOT fuse with hydrogen except under extreme circumstances--deuterium might. Of course Pons covered it up and cold fusion went from foolishness to fraud.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and two disappeared in a pair of 340 kiloton thermonuclear blasts"
All I have to say about this is two words, "Bogdan Malich". Let me add another, "Migma".
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
Cold Fusion? Hah, maybe they could limber up with something easy and pick up a million bucks while they are at it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Just hope you remember to ground it when the waves of Tesla beams at 8hz start zapping humanity....Remember the Woodpecker signal out of Murmansk, boy that one just about started my hair on fire!
Shouldn't it be U238?
In case you don't know, the EU commission is discussing right now the building site of a future test fussion reactor called ITER. It'll cost over 10bn euros and it will be a proof of concept. The most likely location is somewhere in France and the construction will start in a few years. But don't hold your breath. We're at least 50 years away from the first commercial one.
i l_europa&lng=1&option=9,europa
Lots of info with drawings and hard-science here: http://www.iter.org/
EuroNews: http://www.euronews.net/create_html.php?page=deta
If they generate Helium from Hydrogen or Deuterium or so on then that's fusion.
Atomic fusion releases a lot of energy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My first though reading this article was "Why the hell would the DOE care about ColdFusion?"
This article was in the November 16 Washington Post Sunday magazine. Not chock full of technical details, but it does provide some insight into the personalities and the process involved.
APS is the American Physical Society. They had a short session on cold fusion, and Chubb was the session chair. The skepticism surrounding this research is so great; my impression was that these people are driving themselves half mad with their efforts to get anyone to take them seriously. But addressing the data presented at that session alone, I would agree with the DOE's findings. I think it is good for the DOE to recommend funding for peer reviewed research. But, I cant imagine what clear eyed researcher with a sufficiently broad perspective would be tempted to invest their time and reputation in this research, given the attitude of the scientific community in general. Too risky.
what good is the technology when the power output difference is so small that they have to come up with better hardware to even measure the difference?
and no, it isn't just taking place in people's basements. folks at Oak Ridge and the russian academy of science have both repeated experiments involving ultrasound ...
I first read about this (sonoluminescence - putting ultrasound into specially prepared water in a spherical beaker causes a small bubble in it to emit light) in the February, 1995 issue of Scientific American. In the column The Amateur Scientist, it tells how to do it. It is quite an interesting phenomenon with no good explanation of what causes it. It had been known decades earlier, but only recently had a method been developed to consistently generate it.
In the last year or two I read an online science article that speculates the light is caused by the bubble becoming so highly compressed and reaching such a high temperature (apparently during the peaks of the ultrasonic wave - the frequency is tuned to the resonant frequency of the beaker, which then focuses all the acoustic energy into a point in the center) that for a brief moment nuclear reactions take place. But last I read this is yet to be verified.
After writing the above (I'd rather just correct it than rewrite it) I did some online research: Nuclear reactions are NOT suspected as the source of light, but it is believed that the setups to make sonoluminescence can momentarily achieve the temperature (a million degrees) and pressure required for fusion.
Here are two relevant links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence Wiki article on Sonoluminescence
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/4/8 "Bubble Fusion" claim at Oak Ridge
It's nothing like the Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion and has NO relation to it.
Tag lost or not installed.
what good is the technology when the power output difference is so small that they have to come up with better hardware to even measure the difference?
Then they can get more funding for research to make it more efficient and put out substantially more power than put into it, finally leading to economically viable energy generation by cold fusion.
Just like the "hot fusion" researchers have been doing for the last five decades. There are BILLIONS of dollars of research money at stake!
Tag lost or not installed.
Of course Pons covered it up and cold fusion went from foolishness to fraud.
I've wondered if Pons and/or Fleischman, before their infamous press conference, had made any significant investments in palladium.
Tag lost or not installed.
Still have mp3's of yer old shows.. they were great :)
For those wanting pictures and diagrams: http://www.lenr-canr.org/Experiments.htm
This is like hearing the following newscast:
"In other news, the news we told you about yesterday is still true news today."
I'm wondering how much taxpayer money went in to this ground breaking work to reprove those silly Laws of Thermodynamics?
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
I don't find it offensive, but I think these all 'template' jokes are really stupid and not funny at all. If you want to be witty, be more creative and come up with your own joke for god's sake. I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but, in Korea, only old people make 'template' jokes.
...they cook dogs over an open fire!
They agreed to review it, and the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.
Whether or not there is enough excess heat to be useful is one question. Whether there is nuclear transmutation is yet another. I've spent the past year doing research with Steven Jones at BYU, and in surveying the literature and conducting our own experiments, we've seen some very intriguing results. Sr + d -> Y, Zr, Mo. If you look at Japanese research, Iwamura has had Cs -> Pr, which is a rare earth and you DON'T get Cesium dropping in proportion to Pr's increase by any sort of environmental contamination. Especially not when it's in a sealed vacuum chamber with d2 gas permeation through the metal complex (Pa, CaO) the Cs is deposited on.
There's data from a Japanese researcher (Ikegami) in Sweden (University of Uppsala) who has found that with deuterium ion beams at various target metals, the nuclear cross sectional area for capture increases dramatically at 10 keV and just gets larger the lower you get. He wasn't even doing CF research, but it's quite interesting to see that you don't require enormous energies in order to achieve d+Z transmutation.
Perhaps at this point it would be smart to realize that foreign researcher are leaving us in the dust. Myself, I have real doubts about the usefulness of any supposed excess heat, but low energy nuclear transmutation has a lot of intriguing stuff. At the very least, we need to look at the effect of electronic structures in metal lattices on the coulomb barrier for d+Z reactions. In Iwamura's experiments, for example, he got null results when he did it without CaO, when he used H2 instead of D2, etc. What did the addition (in thin film deposition) of an impurity like CaO do to enable a reaction that straight palladium couldn't do?
Anyway, yeah, there's SOMETHING going on.
"In June Professor Brian Josephson gave a remakable lecture during the 54th meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany during which he ridiculed the attacks on Cold Fusion, likening the situation to the initial rejection of Alfred Wegener's continental drift proposal, despite the overwhelming evidence for it."
o nB-LindauLecture.pdf
PDF of the lecture:
http://www.newenergytimes.com/library/2004Josephs
From this page-
Sound barrier:
"The term sound barrier is often associated with supersonic flight. In particular, "breaking the sound barrier" is the process of accelerating through Mach 1 and going from subsonic to supersonic speeds. The term originated in the 1940s when researchers discovered a large increase in drag that seemed to indicate that an infinite amount of thrust would be needed to fly at the speed of sound. In other words, some believed that a physical barrier existed that would prevent an aircraft from ever being able to travel at supersonic speeds. Since there obviously is no such barrier, the term sound barrier is outdated and really should not be used any more. Nevertheless, it has become a popular part of the human language, and continues in use."
Obviously the people who believed this were using flawed methods of reasoning. However, claiming there were none who thought this way is simply denying history. The Wikipedia article has a good synopsis. Yes the fact that bullets were known to travel at supersonic velocities should have clued these people in as to the errors in their equations. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in another reply, scientists sometimes choose to ignore factual data that contradicts their preferred theories.
In fact, there is at least one prize, out of the lot of milestone prizes proposed, that would almost certainly not be within the reach of any form of cold fusion people have proposed. It is for high energy density fusion systems -- systems that would most probably be useful for propulsion rather than mere energy production.
Seastead this.
Science is ideally ground-up observation, hypothesization, experimentation, observation and so on. However, if some "ideal" factoid is intruded into the process, it can convert the lazy and unimaginative worker from a properly scientific sceptic to an authoritarian priest of current dogma.
Once this happens the only means of progress is by waiting for the old guardians of the faith to die of old age, or by shooting them earlier. The "sound barrier" had the magical authority of an equation behind it, "natural law" expressed in mathmematics. Given the ritual efficacy of a mathematical equation at freezing thought processes, it's a wonder we aren't STILL flying at less than the speed of sound. Actually, I suppose that generally we still are, but we know we don't have to.
Similar situations have occurred repeatedly in science. It's why we actually need crackpots. Occasionally the effort of debunking them can open up entire new vistas.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
"While significant progress has been made in the sophistication of calorimeters..."
Sorry, my lab just got a new Parr 6300 Isoperibol Calorimeter, it's twice as slow as our old calorimeter (Parr 1600 or 1610 or whatever it is when I'm not drunk). Actually, it's not twice as slow, it takes anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes (about 12 minutes on average) while our old one runs a sample in 7 minutes.
That doesn't sound like much of a difference until you have to run 30 samples in one sitting. On top of that, the water cooling system that comes with the new calorimeter sucks (we don't have seperate heating and cooling for the room it's located in, so I'm sure that doesn't help).
To be fair, I wasn't dealing with calorimeters in 1989, so I don't know if they were still Adiabatic back then (everything I have read says they aren't as accurate). Also, the 6300 is linux based (which is awesome).
In the 1950's a lot of aerospace journals were talking about antigravity research (specifically, electro-gravitics). They said it was a coming revolution and that by the late 1960's or early 1970's it would be cracked and everyone would be zipping around the planet at 5,000 mph. Then by 1957 all the mentions in the journals ended without conclusions. It just disappeared.
Bottom line: technologies like antigravity and cold fusion will continue to be ignored because their implications on the modern military-industrial complex. Can you imagine a world where anyone can fly anywhere in under an hour for FREE? I would love to see that world, but unfortunately the powers that be don't.
So it goes. I'm going to lick my wounds by driving in my gas guzzling 1989 Dodge Caravan to the nearby pub and drown my sorrows in the bleak future we all face.
Well, I guess we're out of luck for cold fusion, so now let's all throw our support to zero point energy! Come on, Tesla believed in it! And he invented the radio and alternating current!
Cold fusion offers the world cheap energy that are practically limitless. But, of course, it doesn't work, it it will require a major scientific breakthrough before it does. But people still make vain research on it because they so much want it to work...
It's a bit sad, really.
Sounds interesting. Where can I get a book that teaches this "human language"?
Cold fusion doesn't need a major scientific breakthrough to happen -- it never will. It is utter, utter bunkum, and i speak from the point of view of someone with a Physics degree who spent several months doing painstaking experiments to prove same.
There are many interesting avenues that can be explored with reference to fusion itself, but 'cold fusion' is utter bunkum.
There were no new experiments done. Scientists selected by the Department of Energy simply did a peer review of several experiments which had been done over the past ten years by various labs.
18 scientists were selected to review the collected studies.
According to the report. .
So basically, the jury is split. And if the DOE's sampling of experts is a fair yard stick, then it would seem that when the question is put forth, about half the scientific community would say that there is compelling evidence supporting Cold Fusion. --And given the massive bias and fear related with the subject, (where scientists do not want to be associated with unpopular theories for fear of losing their jobs and professional credibility), the results of this peer review are especially intriguing.
In any case, this is a rather different picture than the one usually painted around here where most Slashdotters foam at the mouth and yell absurdities about it being impossible to get something from nothing, despite the fact that there was never once made any such claim regarding Cold Fusion.
I believe (from hearsay in the field) that the reason cold fusion has been investigated so long is that oil companies in the US are required to invest in alternative energy research.
Where better for them to put their money than in an area firmly believed by most nuclear pyhsicists to have a near zero chance of challenging oil.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
the conclusions reached by the reviewers today are similar to those found in the 1989 review.
What? That Cold fusion would destroy the US energy industry and therefor rather than spend a small fraction of today's national energy bill researching it, should be chucked away and called a pipe-dream.
I just can't take any cold fusion story seriously, if it doesn't contain any references to the researchers' enjoyment of Jack Daniel's.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
is that no one really looked to see if the raction was reversible. Once they got their excess heat, they either concluded or made a cursory measurement to see if the heat energy went back into the reaction. This and the lack of any conclusive evidence of reaction products suggests the coon is not in the tree that the dog is barking under.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
I don't know how that reads to you, but to me it sounds like they've been consistently observing this dramatic effect for 15 years and they can't explain it. I think this is exactly the right thing for scientists to muck around with. I'm not saying it's cold fusion, but it's something they can't explain. So they had better get cracking and explain it!
If I remember correctly, there's a project going on here at Purdue with deuterated acetone called "sonofusion" or something...why dont we just nickname that "coldfusion"? *searches for a story about it on public server* http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/040302.T aleyarkhan.fusion.html
The following joke is circulating at the Cold Fusion
Institute:
Why do you never see neutrons, tritium, and heat all in the same experiment?
Nobody can make that many mistakes.
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
There's been plenty going on in the field of fusion. The first experiments which investigated sonoluminescence were thought to include fusion. These were disproven. Since then, however, sonic experiments have been conducted with heavy acetone and evidence of fusion has been certain.
And yes... people are always trying to disprove it.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
PHP rulez
Even Classical ASP is better.
The milestones toward profitable fusion technology include stages that are either unprofitable or so environmentally nasty that there is no hope of making a profit from them. Moreover, when venture capitalists look for a return of 5 years on high risk investments and the ITER program advocates say they're 20 years from a profitable reactor, the normal profit incentives are not working for fusion.
Seastead this.
I suppose I ought to post to the article instead of responding to the first post, but this is slashdot and no one reads down that far.
I have seen a lot of posts suggesting prizes similar to the X-prize to stimulate fusion research in the private sector. Prizes are always a great idea if you set the criteria for them properly - after all, if no one meets the criteria, you don't spend the money! I ran a private sector fusion research project from 1994-1999. A prize would have been very helpful as it may have given a reward at a halfway point; sort of lowering the activation energy for success, as it were.
The real problem with fusion research is the extremely large cost/time of experiments. I blame this less on the nature of fusion and lay it squarely on the lack of imagination of the experimenters. Imagine how long it would take to design a working car if each prototype took 10 years to finance and build. We worked in beam-collision fusion (similar to the work of N. Rostoker, but with significant differences) where a prototype could be built in 6-12 months. It made development a lot faster. If we had more money, we could have done a lot more, but we did an awful lot for under $0.5 million.
As far as cold fusion goes, well, I have been watching that situation for a while. The best conclusion I can draw from the evidence is that it is a reaction which probably occurs due to gas pressure in the lattice. I ran experiments involving deuterium beams hitting deuterated titanium plates, and I can tell you we didn't get jack at energies below 5 keV. The reaction cross section is way too low. On the other hand, if you jack the energy up to 150 keV, the neutron flux in the room reaches dangerous levels. I have never seen any convincing evidence of nuclear reactions from CF experiments.
I haven't seen any mention of it yet so here goes:
If you'd like to do a little fusion work on the cheap (a few grand), check out webs sites dedicated to the Farnsworth Fusor. Yes, it does work. Well enough to be a safty hazard.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
As far as I know (and I actually have a physiics degree, believe it or not) all of the cold fusion experiments are claiming to demonstrate Deuterium-Deuterium fusion (D-D) at low reaction energies. Now, when I built MY fusion reactor (a Farnsworth-Hirsch based design, in my 2nd year lab project, since you ask), and the boys at JET built their slightly more impressive one the fusion signature that we (and you)care about isn't heat. More or less anything can account for excess heat, especially when you're talking about miniscule amounts. No, what you care about is NEUTRONS. I refer to the two possible reactions for D-D fusion (these are equally likely and each accounts for half of occuring reactions):
Deuteron + Deuteron -> Helium-3 + Neutron + 3.268 MeV
Deuteron + Deuteron -> Triton + Proton + 4.03 MeV
Now, in the case of the first of these reactions, 2.45 MeV of the resultant energy is carried by the neutron and it's these bad boys that we're looking for. So, any of the cold fusion experiments shown a neut signature? No. So in summary: Nothing to see here, move along
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
i was on the thought of how supercooled plasma is not actually insanely cool, its just cooler than the plasma state, same with cold fusion. i just kinda kept it there because they were prolly containing liquid hydrogen in the container to save storage space and to get the most out of the hydrogen bomb, and that is extremely cold. But yes, cold fusion doesnt mean uber-cold/near 0-K kind of cold.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
See the "Crackpot Index". Enjoy: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
Even if Heisenberg had figured his sums correctly, Germany still would have been unable to construct an atomic bomb before the regime collapsed.
At the time, the only known method of producing U235 was an expensive process that required huge amounts of electricity; I've heard that up to 25% of the entire USA's electrical output went into making 3 bombs, 1 to test, and 2 to drop on Japan.
Maybe we would have been better off if Germany had tried; they would have failed and their industrial capacity might've failed!
Cold fusion works, but at the levels claimed, can't be a viable commercial source of energy. It's too cold.
what does this report have to do with a server technology and a markup language.
Obviously, all you carpers who are claiming the knowledge of supersonic bullets means the concept of the sound barrier was impossible are lacking in subtlety.
A "Sound Barrier" or a region of infinitely (or prohibitively) high drag at the transition point between supersonic and subsonic flight makes perfect sense, and, in fact, exists.
The sound barrier is the shock wave created AT THE TRANSITION POINT between subsonic and supersonic flight. During the period of research that resulted in supersonic flight, it was a terrific barrier to overcome. Planes were being torn apart as they carefully approached supersonic speed.
Chuch Yeager was the guy who figured out it was necessary to smash through the barrier (accelerate rapidly) and get the shock wave behind the aircraft in order to survive it. Machine gun bullets, being blasted almost instantaneously to supersonic speeds, had no problem with an instant of atmospheric shock wave (especially since they are designed to ride an explosion).
But aircraft (and pilots) cannot be accelerated like bullets. They have to accelerate through the Sound Barrier relatively slowly, and this was and is still a challenge.
It's still a barrier today. We may have figured out how to overcome it, but we've figured out how to overcome many barriers to progress. It remains a barrier that has to be dealt with.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
...a science daily article last year that spoke of fusion occuring at low temperatures in a liquid (some type of acetate?) bombarded with sound waves. IIRC, the sound waves created tiny vacuum bubbles in the liquid. When the bubbles collapsed, they did with enough force to produce small amounts of fusion byproducts. Anyone recall that article?
People keep assuming that the only acceptable signature for Fusion is Neuts. That's your achilles heel. Until you can begin to get beyond that, you and the other "traditional" fusion physicists are stuck.
Neutrons are not required. They are just what you've seen in a certain set of common experiments with a certain set of conditions. Change the conditions significantly and they are no longer produced. End of story.
None of this contradicts "accepted theory". It's just that most people don't dig into the theory deeply enought to understand the exceptions to the rule.
- literate
- healthy
- good eyesight
- average or better intelligence
- honest
- civically responsible
- volunteers
- not wealthy
- not drug users
- not pervs
and getting them out of circulation. Delay in reproduction reduces the fitness and delay can be achieved by circumstance (in a combat zone) or stress, injury, induced psychological disorders, chemical contamination or plain old death.So what you have, whether intentional or not, is in effect a eugenics program to shape the US population to be more like Bush.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Here is my list:
Nature
Science
Bioscience
JAMA
The promoters of these are either bought and paid for or are worshipers of status quo.
Instead of getting rid of the journals we can get rid of the notion of 'nature' and of 'science' and keep the idea of technology. I am sorry but I cannot see these journals as anything but a means to assign credit where none is warrented or to slow down and drown out good things.