Slashdot Mirror
Cold Fusion in a Breadbox Instead of a Bottle
rawbytes writes "For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings. After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that's all about to change. A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it looks like the real thing." From the article: "Scientists have gotten fusion to occur in the laboratory before, but for the most part, they've tried to mimic conditions inside the sun by whipping hydrogen gas up to extreme temperatures or slamming atoms together in particle accelerators. Both of those options require huge energies and gigantic equipment, not the sort of stuff easily available to build a generator. Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesnt require the energy output of a large city to make it happen? The answer, it turns out, is yes."
Thursday April 28, @16:57
Sounds like a naquedah generator. You know that power had to come from somewhere.
This story seems familiar somehow...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
...when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Am I completely wrong in saying... That is some pretty sweet stuff!
"For the time being, don't expect fusion to become a readily available energy option. The current cold fusion apparatus still takes much more energy to start up than you get back out, and it may never end up breaking even. In the mean time, the crystal-fusion device might be used as a compact source of neutrons and X-rays, something that could turn out to be useful making small scanning machines. But it really may not be long until we have the first nuclear fusion-powered devices in common use."
While it may "work", if more energy has to be put in than is gotten out, I don't think the size of the apparatus really matters. And she contradicts herself, too: "don't expect fusion to become readily available", followed with "it really may not be long...".
libertarianswag.com
The unit must be placed within several feet of the chromosphere before the fusion reaction occurs.
Would somebody please learn how attribute correctly instead of just copping the original article verbatim? Jeez!
It was reported on in the press (MSNBC) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website.
More info here: http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The article clearly notes that this is nowhere near break-even. Yet, as it notes, there are many applications beyond positive energy production. If it is a good source of neutrons, then it is well worth the effort.
I am optimistic. We have a slightly-puritanical mindset that we have to work for everything. Well...we are coming upon an easy and elegant solution to our energy problems. Even fission needs to be explored more as we find newer ways to contain the radiation (nuclear batteries lasting years could come soon if we get over our hangups).
Transcend Humanity. Please.
FTFA:
Every time my fists clenched and jerked and I had nothing consciously do with it, my stomach turned.
In addition, I have long, fine hair, and was often made a victim
Please, mods, RTFA. I am quoting from it!
is that an accredited research institution?
google doesn't seem to think there is a "University of Los Angeles"
Need to get away?
Adirondack Vacations
Is this the Week of the Geek or what? Seriously, how long before this is absorbed by some oil giant or some "mysterious accident" occurs to the researchers?
it took me a second to figure out why a macromedia product was even coming in a bottle in the first place
No, i'm not talking about a dupe...
This just reminds me of a really bad keanu reeves movie.
What is that in cubic millifootballfields? About a hundred blue pills squared?
I don't want to be on the offensive side to anyone, but the Christian Science Monitor doesn't seem like the best source for science news. I mean, with all the news of anti-evolution campaigns and intelligent design, couldn't we find a better source for the story?
That's a pretty heady group.
Putterman is particularly famous for his work on sonoluminescence.
Funnily enough, this is not really the core research of Putterman, his earlier work has largely been in the area of blackbody radiation, sonoluminescence and certain related quantum phenomena.
More technical details would be nice.
but I wouldn't get too excited just yet, the article states that energy input versus output may never even break even. Would be great though...
no need for plutonium anymore?
Apple -> Intel
Transmeta go out of business
Cold fusion
What the hell can happen next? My money's on Bill Gates being found dead with a grapefruit up his arse up a crack whore alley...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
forgive me for not jumping into the air at the sight of christiansciencemonitor.com and alternativesience.com I don't know about the other one, but the Christian Science Monitor is a reputable mainstream newspaper.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
It's when and how you get that reaction started and how you get the energy back out that makes the difference.
It's not super clear, but I don't think it's a contradiction. Saying "don't expect fusion to become readily available" doesn't mean that it won't, just that you shouldn't expect it. Saying "it really may not be long" doesn't mean it will happen soon, just that it could.
The summary of that is, "readily available fusion could happen soon, but don't count on it."
Where? At 8484 Wilshire Blvd.? :^)
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5 i8192
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
I expect an even greater number of such clowns hitting the news any time now. It's only a shame that each will get far more than the 15 minutes they've already used up.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This threw me for a second, as I've never heard of this place, and I'm in Physics so I try and keep up with Physics depvelopments. One of the guys involved in this experiment has done work with somnoluminescense, which for those of you that don't know is when you see tiny flashes of light coming from collapsing bubbles in high-pressure underwater situations. There's some type of shrimp that can cause it by snapping its claws, which is what started the study of the process. They thought for a while that this might be a feasible way of producing fusion, but the last I heard they decided that the flashes of light were actually reflections off the bubbles from the camera equipment used to record the phenomenon and not, as they hoped, tiny fusion reactions caused by the pressure of the bubble collapsing.
Anyway, back to my original point, which has nothing to do with the science itself- this is from UCLA, which is a far more familiar place to see Physics research coming from.
Evil will always win, because Good is DUMB
nice, very simply nice.
now i have an x86 powermac run on my coldfusion generator.
nice
you forgot the most important part: "For the time being". That means that, in the future (perhaps not very long), things could change. She doesn't contradict yourself unless you take words out of context. :]
First: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/2 7/1930218
2 8/1518226
0 7/1635251
Second: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/
And now Third: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In addition to this being old news, as noted by others...
Let me just note that cold fusion works and always has. This has been known since the 1920's; it is called quantum tunneling. This isn't even a matter of debate. The only "small" issue is the many orders of magnitude difference between the yield obtainable in practice and what is needed for breakeven.
So just saying that cold fusion was achieved is no data at all. The question of whether the technique scales to the breakeven point is absolutely critical.
(Though as I recall, this particular application wasn't touted as being an approach to energy generation anyway).
The contradiction was referring to the time part, as in "not ready soon", versus "may not be long now".
;)
And if you like putting more into things than you get back out, I'll happily give you this $5 bill for one of your $10 bills. We'll repeat the process a few times, too, for good measure, just to make sure that you're completely satisfied.
libertarianswag.com
Not to be crass, but what was the point of your post aside from demonstrating that you're a dick?
It is always amusing with the idiot posting can't even be bothered to read the text he is quoting.
...").
"... readily available **energy** option". Doesn't mean it's not good for something else, which is then immediatly mentioned.
I'll leave your 'size' comment alone. That one is too dumb to even argue with.
Me thinks you are are in love with the fancy italics of quoting. Not that you can even quote the quote properly ( "become *a* readily
I didn't read it as a contradiction: she said it won't be an energy option any time soon, but described how it can be used for other purposes (to generate x-rays) and then said it won't be long until that happens.
Cheers.
MSNBC (ugh.. I know) April 27
---
So how come we haven't heard more about this? Does it not produce a lot of energy?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
OMG, I'm on slashdot!!
/sorry
//had to
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
UCLA -- they have a crappy football team. Let me know when a university with a decent football team has some results.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I can't believe I didn't know about AlternativeScience. I haven't laughed so hard since I discovered Chick.com (Safe for work, fundamentalist Christian website).
The size of the apparatus matters insofar as this isn't a warehouse-sized gizmo, such as a Tokamak reactor. Even if they eventually need a device fifty times as voluminous as this one to actually generate power, you're still looking at something you can move in the back of an ordinary delivery truck and install in an electrical substation, submarine, office building, or house. That is significant.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
My network staff has it running in the server room :)
You might want to stick your bigoted, knee-jerk, bottom-feeding, ignorant reaction up your ass.
Seriously, you REALLY made a fucking pig's ass of yourself here.
McGuyver did this in Ep. 26 with a matchbox, two cotton buds, a filling from his tooth and some scotch tape.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
From the article:
Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal.
That crystal wouldn't happen to be Dilithium would it?
A rechargable battery takes more energy to make and charge than you get back out of it, but that hasn't stopped battery powered devices from being in common use.
A battery is an energy storage device, while fusion is supposed to be an energy source.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
"unless you take words out of context"
/. - that's what we DO here!
This is
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You are 100% total ignoramous. Get out of your little tiny geek universe (about three Plank lengths wide, I imagine) and learn something outside of IT and coding, you useless sack.
Was it just me, or did anyone else out there jump at the first mention of "crystals" in the article? My first thought was "OMG lightsabers".
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
We can use some of the excess heat that Pentiums put out to power cold fusion devices. Sweet.
IEEE Spectrum in May (05) ran a great article on fusion inside a jar:
e /may05/0505sono.html
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeatur
Something to read for those interested in current fusion ideas.
If putting more into things than you get back out is that much of a problem for you, then I know of a couple Laws of Thermodynamics than you may not want to hear about.
it was done decades ago by philo farnsworth (who also invented the television)
it was even done by a college freshman a few years ago
this isn't news!
the REAL news is when we have a fusion device that releases more energy than it consumes
so until the slashdot editors catch the clueboat
"For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings."
should read
"For the last few story dupes, mentioning old news about cold fusion around slashdotters has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because without us posters and viewers, this site would be fucking worthless to whomever owns this fucking site. And buy posting Dupes, they (the owners) lose eyeballs.
Thank you,
MisanthropicProgram, MBA.
Fusion could be useful once they learn how to make true superconductors that operate at normal tempatures so the loss of energy is minimal and possibly can make more energy than is required to maintain the reaction.
And here I thought pyrofusion was what happened to a slashdotted CPU...
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I had a beowulf cluster of these in my pants ...
I could use it to power my chaotically aligned holographic french maid pokemon manga sex kitten.
oh the love we would share.
Once you get 10000 scientists experimenting with fusion on a daily basis, other interesting stuff will happen soon.
The CSM deliberately limits its religious content to a few columns. They have their own international reporting offices. They ate lauded for their accuracy by people from all over the political spectrum.
For pity's sake, at least wiki something before you spouting off. You should change you nickname because "Stranger4U" now equals "Astonishingly Ignorant Fuckhead Bigot"
If you are a high voltage, Tesla coil like, electronics geek/nerd and ham radio operator (haha just joking) it appears that we might have enough stuff in our typical junkboxes to accomplish the same experiment. Technology rules!!
Sincerely, Rob N3FT
back in my day we didn't have protons
you had to go hunting for your electricity and if you came home empty-handed you went to bed cold and hungry.
now you kids talkin bout cold fusion, I tell you there was this darkie in our neighborhood and he could fuse you cold like none other. My friend chipped a tooth that day. you wouldn't believe... who's still reading this
If you are an electronics, ham radio geek/nerd (haha, just joking) it appears that the typical junk box has enough stuff in it to repeat this experiment at home, especially if like me, you are interested in high voltage, Tesla coils, etc like me!
Wow technology is getting so exciting 100 years later than Tesla!!
Sincerely, Rob N3FT
...it obviously represents a huge paradigm shift for civilization. We'll be able to stop destroying our climate with green-house gases and keep our air clean (or rather, as clean as it is now, assuming the new process has no destructive by-products). Feeding the poor, curing cancer, and world peace are sure to follow. Excess power is a great thing, of course.
None of this, however, will ever stop my horrible Game Gear flashbacks...
*shudders*
When and where can I pre-order my Mr. Fusion energy system? And does it come with the DeLorean retro-fit kit?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I stand corrected - I think ;-)
It is a Lithium Tantalite crystal. Perhaps marketing will rebrand it "Dilitium(tm)" once the system is workable outside the lab.
He's been saying this for years, and everyone assumed he'd gone off the deep end.
I still think he's nuts, but it looks like he may have called this one correctly after all.
The socio-economic earthquake would be 11.0 on the Richter scale. The oil companies would go bankrupt. 99 out of 100 'service stations' would be abandoned, dilapidated blights on the landscape. The Middle East would be all of a sudden much less important to the western world, and Israel would all of a sudden have no big body guard named Uncle Sam. All cars would be electric and have 1000 HP at the wheels (ok, some things would be good!).
Be careful what you wish for!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Umn they are using lithuimn crystals and no star terk references have been made? Is this slashdot or some other site?
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
How typical. Just last week I was abducted by a UFO, and while onboard Bigfoot told me the secret to nuclear fusion in a breadbox.
This kind of fuson (using electrical charge) has been achieved already. Many decades ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
This technique has the same problems. The reaction just can't ramped up to the level to be self sustaining.
The upshot of the article seems to be: If you can create enough charge, you can make protons go fast enough to overcome their electrostatic repulsion and make them collide with each other. So, other than creating a high charge, what is the purpose of the crystal?
So, what are we excited about really? They have created a perfect tiny particle collider?
What am I missing?
The term cold refers to the energies of the particles and as such the quoted experiment cannot be classified as cold fusion at all. The acceleration of particles with an electric field to generate fusion is commonly used, for instance in triggers for nuclear weapons. Creating fusion of a bulk amount of material is nearly impossible using this method, especially if the goal is to liberate more energy from the nuclei than is consumed by the system.
Rather, I call "[-1, Off-Topic]" on the article's author and the entire Christian Science Monitor editorial staff.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Apple switching to intel.
Cold Fusion.
OMG?
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
Indeed, there is nothing new about producing fusion using strong electric fields. What is notable about this demonstration is summed up in the last line of the abstract of the published paper: The last few paragraphs of the New Scientist article on this experiment (published 27 April) is also interesting:
My motorbike travels in Chile.
They'd get better results if they increased the lithium by two fold in the lithium tantalite crystal, thereby creating a "dilithium" tantalite crystal. *Ahem* Tough crowd in here.
Reputable institutions usually have a physical existence. No such place as University of Los Angeles; however, we have place named University of California, Los Angeles.
signature pending slashdot approval
I almost said the same thing but I'll thank you for taking the karma hit instead ;)
I definately react negatively to anything that contains the words christian and science in close proximety... (and I call myself christian)
But hey I read that article that my sibling posted about evolution and intelligent design and was pleasantly surprised.
Now as for TFA, while there is a place for dumbed-down science and over-simplified physics I don't think they need to be linked on slashdot.
The people here (for the most part) can understand at least the principles of how the device works w/o having to explain that protons have positive charges...
I'd appreciate it if slashdot could steer away from science for english majors. (This is not a slam on English majors, If I were on a page advertising reviews for bibliophiles I wouldn't expect a break down on whay symbolism is)
You'll never get the electric field strong enough to bring protons together - it is the same crap as bottled fusion.
Real cold fusion is about meso-atoms that are much smaller because muons are heavier than electrons. And so they could be moved closer to each other while being still neutral. Use Google - http://www.google.com/search?&q=mesoatom+fusion
While it may "work", if more energy has to be put in than is gotten out, I don't think the size of the apparatus really matters.
Well obviously they just need to make it bigger!
Is this the same CSM that printed the really obviously faked 'evidence' that George Galloway had accepted a gazillion dollars in crude oil from Sadam Husian and then had to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars in libel damages?
Tabletop Accelerator Breaks 'Cold Fusion' Jinx But Won't Yield Energy, Physicists Say
Charles Seife
Science 29 April 2005; 308: 613 [DOI: 10.1126/science.308.5722.613a] (in News of the Week)
Yeah, the worlds changing fast lately.
The CSM is actually a very well respected paper.
Yeah, I could tell... Right about when the author gets to "Do you remember learning about electricity in high school? I sure do - I dreaded it whenever that topic came around", I felt overwhelmed with confidence in her ability to comment on such a friendly, fluffy topic as cold fusion.
Or perhaps "Here's where an amazing and mysterious force comes in" (mysterious... Like the author's credibility?) is what you meant to refer to?
Nonono, don't tell me, "Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesnt require the energy output of a large city to make it happen?" Golly, we just need to put all our large cities in pairs, and they can each use the energy output of the other for all those pesky things like lights and heat and such! Then we can tear down all the nukular reactors, build parks in their place, and hold hands while singing kum-ba-fuckin'-ya!
Wake me up when people start realizing that some people will want to know about the road to the goal, not just about the goal.
Could be said of just all matter... Gasoline is a form of energy storage, as is wood, trans uranic fissile elements, di-hydrogen oxide, etc. All store energy, and release (or absorb) it in certain ways.
But imagine if I could start my cold fusion car by just plugging it into the wall, and dumping some hydrogen in there every few months/years. Even without breaking even, it would be better than our dependence on oil.
wake me up when they can make it produce more energy than it consumes
Hate to break it to you, but you might want to read up on a couple things...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I dont know , I'm still into the whole cover-your-roof-in-solar-pannels and get-the-powe-company-to-pay-you idea.
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000680030047/
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
Scientist 2: Yeah, hold on... I forgot to put in the crystals.
or else!
So where do we find dilithium crytals for the next step in this experiment? This is obviously where this is going. They are currently using the wrong crystals to get to break even and positive energy return.
:)
"I'll happily give you this $5 bill for one of your $10 bills."
You mean like every credit card, loan and other money lending scheme on earth? They'll lend you this $5 in exchange for $10 over the life of the loan in interest.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
In the case of cold fusion, here's hoping for the monkeys.
While most people were focussed on the claimed "cold fusion" at the time (ie. a nuclear process), the most interesting lesson learned from the fiasco for physicists and engineers was that we couldn't figure out what was causing the observed anomalous thermal behaviours.
While it wasn't fusion in any accepted sense, the anomalies were so often outside experimental error bounds that it was clear that *something* was happening that current understanding couldn't predict. It's a shame that the whole thing had to be shoved rapidly under the carpet by most labs to avoid damage to academic reputations and funding.
Has anyone heard of any extended followup work to put the thermal aspects of that kind of setup on solid footing, ie. without mentioning the dreaded phrase "cold fusion"?
Once you get 10000 scientists experimenting with fusion on a daily basis, other interesting stuff will happen soon.
If it's real, you'll soon have 9999 scientists trying to reproduce, SAFELY, whatever it was the 10,000th scientist did...
Perhaps all these scientists should have live webcams on them with remote data saving.
Tag lost or not installed.
"fusing two hydrogen nuclei together to get helium, famously powers our sun (good), as well as hydrogen bombs (bad)."
Personally, I was confused as to which was good, and which bad. Excellent in depth reporting.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
pyroelectric fusion, first reported in April
That's neat how you mix two things that have nothing to do with each other together into an incoherent semi-thought.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I am curious about something related to this - we have all heard about dinosaur industries fighting very hard to stay on top. RIAA is a great example of this as everyone knows. The fallout includes them stifling inovation with lawsuits and lobbying. Eventually I do believe they will fall. But what do you think the backlash might be when the oil industry is no longer needed? Our government is pretty heavily in bed with oil tycoons and the like, and those are the guys in power for goodness sake. We are talking about a president willing to throw all caution to the wind in order to drill for oil in protected teritories. How do we know that our government will be altruistic in helping the world achieve what would be an immense victory against the dependence on oil and other heavily polluting natural resources? Is there even anything we can do about it? All it would take is one REALLY bad "cold fusion incident" or "cold fusion terrorist attack" to make the whole process illegal. Crazier things have happened.
Um, no... it's the University Of *CALIFORNIA* LA. Aside from that, and the fact this is a dupe. (And of course the fact that it's copied verbatum.) nice story.
Duke Nukem Forever goes on sale?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
No, grandparent is correct in making the distinction. It is exceedingly important to find substances and processes which are energy sources relative to us.
Relative to us, an energy storage device is something to which we supply energy in order to release it later. Batteries, fuel cells, capacitors all fall in this category.
Energy sources, OTOH, give out more energy than we put in. Gasoline, nuclear fission, and solar radiation fall in that category. Without sources, our lovely storage devices are worthless.
Relative to nature, of course, the distinction is meaningless; everything is simply a transfer of energy from one form to another.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
What do you think powers the generators that generate the electricity that powers the electric plug in the wall where you will be plugging your car into?
If you read the submitters "summary", you'll see that it's nearly identical to the first paragraph of the CS Monitor article. The only changes are phrases like "(myself included)" and ", so to speak," being removed from the "summary". This is plagiarism, unless "Zonk" is the same person as Michelle Thaller of the CS Monitor. If you think plagiarism is too strong a word, then you obviously don't know what it means.
Second, as others have pointed out, this is not news. This was previously reported on slashdot, and as far as I can tell, there have been no new developments since then.
Its a typo it should be UCLA, the University of California at Los Angeles. Silly reporters messing up an institutions name.
Duh! You could attach a generator to the wheels of the car that could be plugged in to the wall to charge the generators that power the plug in the wall where you will be plugging your car into.
Best of all, it's 100% efficient, just like the Cattus-Panes method of perpetual motion.
(or so, depending on my ability to count)out of 27 paragraphs. P. 22 starts with "The new cold fusion experiment went something like this:" so you have to skip through 3/4'th of the article to get to the meat of the story. It's mostly a subatomics physics tutorial rather than a news story.
As others said, CSM is a respectable enough news source, but I get weary of science reporting like this where so much 'stuff' is explained before getting to the actual description of what the scientists did.
Tag lost or not installed.
not oil
Exactly, and according to the doctrine of Quantum Uncertainty, it is entirely possible.
^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Chances are good that it's coal. Maybe natural gas. A fair chance that it's gravity (hydroelectric), and very slim chances that it's nuclear fission or wind power. Of course, it could be wheel-bound hamsters, but the likelihood of that is... let's just say small.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
s/produce/release
This is (for once) not the same. For starters, fusors require intense vacuum to sustain the reaction. They also require high thermal temperatures to initiate the reaction. Once the fusion reaction starts in a fusor, it is onlysustainable for a few moments because there is no reliable way to inject new hydrogen atoms into the core. Finally, a fusor uses Inertial Electrostatic Confinement to keep the reaction together. This device is less of a fusion reactor and more of a particle accelerator which does uses energies too low to crack particles, but high enough to fuse them together. Different animals, same results.
Take your last sentence and scrap the rest. Coal and oil are simply energy that was "stored" before people were around. When you burn your coal, you are not creating energy, as I see you understand from that last line you wrote, but simply "unstoring" it. Gasoline is simply a way for me to have energy at hand when my car needs it while zipping down the road at 80MPH. Whether I store the energy myself in a battery, or a giant fern did it for me 120 million years ago doesn't matter. Hell the fern was even less efficient at storing the energy than I was with my battery. By orders of magnitude.
All that matters to me is that I have the energy I need, at the time I need, where I need it.
take words out of context
Ok, if you want me to, I will.
contradict yourself
Ok, I won't take words out of context.
Was it just me, or did anyone else out there jump at the first mention of "crystals" in the article? My first thought was "OMG lightsabers".
My first thought was "Did they get the fusion to take place inside a crystal by some tunneling effect produced by the presence of multiple hydrogen ions properly positioned within the periodic lattice - potentially leading to a semiconductor fusion fuel-cell?"
Nope. The crystal was just an extreme high-voltage generator for something going on outside of it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Saying "it really may not be long" doesn't mean it will happen soon, just that it could.
Unfortunately, it is not the case that "it could". This is ordinary hot fusion without benefit of containment. The vast majority of accelerated (i.e. hot) nuclei slow down without fusing. This is a fundamental consequence of the ratio of the Coulomb scattering cross-section to the fusion cross-section.
Ergo, this cannot get close to break-even fusion power generation, any more than the Farnsworth-Hirsch device can. When you make a proton or dueteron go fast in a material (gas or solid or whatever) it can only do a small number of things. One of those things is scatter and lose energy. Another is fuse. The cross-sections give the probabilities of these things occuring.
So long as the scattering cross-section is much higher than the fusion cross-section, no uncontained hot fusion device will reach break-even. For a contained device, each particle has the opportunity for many encounters with other particles before being scattered out of containment, so it has a good overall chance of fusing.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Very good observation!
So lending companies break the laws of thermodynamics... Wonder if those are federal laws...
"Do you people still use fossil fuels or have you discovered crystallic fusion?"
At last, reality has caught up with science fiction. Eat it buzz lightyear >=O
Hydrogen Bomb is only bad in the third person:
Their Hydrogen Bomb(bad)
Our Hydrogen bomb(good)
Yeah, but in all fairness it's the same CSM that discovered themselves that the documents were forged, and printed a correction. It was the rest of the right-wing media that didn't catch the "correction" because it didn't help Tom Delay, but CSM did report it.
I have to admit that I was leery of a "Christian Science" Monitor, but over time I've actually come to respect the publication. It's certainly a far cry from the blatant propaganda one can expect from Fox, and in fact (IMHO) seems actually a pretty solid source of news.
Is this the first tripe article ever!br>br> No, most of the articles on slashdot are tripe. Yet for some reason we all keep coming back.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I wish that people would get over the term cold fusion and just move on with life! Who that hell cares that someone fused nuclei together at room temperatures? - They expended tramendous amounts of energy to do it! Big deal, particle physicists have been doing it for years and any slightly talented high school student could due this with a 60 Hz linear accelerater built in their basement. This was some stupid attempt to get press for some silly cavendish experiment that will ultimately further hinder those of us trying to get funding for legitimate fusion research... The kind that attempts to recover more power from a reaction than is put in.
The problem was that it was unrelyable, impractical and highly dangerous. (A researcher at SRI was killed when a hydrogen cell exploded.) But it did work.
What I never understood about cold fusion, is why that would be desirable. Isn't the goal of fusion to produce heat to turn steam into mechanical energy that we can transform into general purpose electricity ?
Disclaimer: I am a plasma physicist conducting active research on a magnetic confinement device.
TFA implies towards the end that crystal fusion has potential to become an energy source (i.e. exceeding "breakeaven," the condition where energy input is balanced by energy output). I sincerely doubt this will be the case. That said, the real benefit to this crystal fusion device is not producing energy, but as a cheap neutron generator.
To put things in perspective, consider the fusion rates between crystal fusion and TFTR (the most successful D-T "hot" fusion device built to date). From the FIRE place:
"Note: crystal fusion produced 800 deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions per second compared to 50,000,000,000,000,000 deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions per second in magnetic fusion (e.g., TFTR)."
Small, cheap neutron sources would be a great boon for many fields, such as petroleum reserve discovery and material science research. When it comes to a real energy source, though, a practical first step is to actually decide where to build the ITER.
Holy shit, can you be any more of a vacuumhead? Dude, change your nickname, because "pla" now is the same as "piss-sucking ignorant sack of valueless rat semen". Or better yet, drop the fuck dead. Who needs hatemongering human crapfests like you?
It's like picking on Christian Slater because his name is Christian. Gawds, I can't get over what a fucking asshat you are! Absolutely LOL! :D
Kind of like how for the last 15 years people were saying that Macs would run on Intel, but don't count on it. So by the end year I should have a Mr. Fusion powered engine on my Delorean/Time machine. Wohoo!
--Residential Interior Design
"Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal."
:)
Dilithium, here we come.
Steve
The CSM also discovered the forgery and printed a retraction.
Conclusion: you are an ill-informed dumbass with a tiny dick, horrific ass odor and pimples.
OK, I made up the pimple part. :)
if everyone had a cold fusion device to generate electricity we'd have some severe environmental challenges.
1) the hydrogen needed would come from the oceans causing them to be sucked dry over the centuries
2) the leftover helium and oxygen from the process of fusion and electrolysis, where would we put it?
not using the renewable energies like wind and solar would seem wasteful.
So they got a lot of energy out, but it's less than the energy in... What was the energy in, here? Heating the crystal? 100 degrees seems small. Separating the hydrogen from oxygen? Unless they turn it all into helium, it seems like they can recover most of that energy from any unspent hydrogen.
So where's the input energy?
And how much real energy are we talking about, here. Volts is only part of the equation. How about amps or watts or some other unit which gives us a real sense of the amount of power, not voltage?
According to some of the other posters, this device dosn't get back as much energy as it puts out. We've been able to do that for decades.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This has got to be one of the worst written articals I've ever read.
Imagine starting a story on cold fusion and rabling on about having fine hair.
Clearly she doesn't know about the work of Philo farnsworth either. Why this artical receives mention in slashdot is beyond me.
Go sleep then, we won't wake you up.
How about this: energy storage devices require us to put the energy in them initially, whereas energy sources have energy that was put there by some natural process. Acceptable definitions?
What do you think powers the generators that generate the electricity that powers the electric plug in the wall where you will be plugging your car into?
Well, um, don't you think if we had cold fusion cars we might have cold fusion power plants too?
Someone replaces their lithium tantalate with foldgers crystals to see if they can tell the difference and wind up blowing a crater half the size of the state...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Dr. Eugene Mallove, one of the nations most prominent advocates of Cold Fusion because of his ability to let people in high level of government know about the issue was killed one year ago in May, 2004. This killing was NO ACCIDENT contrary to existing belief. The investigation of his death continues, while one man has been charged. The Norwich PD expects there was other individuals involved. The suspected KILLER of Eugene Mallove also was wearing what appeared to be a military dogtag as seen in the media released photo which I found interesting. If this was a random robbery, why would multiple individuals have been involved in his death over a cellphone and a digital camera and a watch? Norwich PD is still looking for more individuals. Dr. Henry Lee's forensics have indicated multiple individuals at the crime scene. There is now a full scale governmental battle between the Bush admin who is COMPLICIT IN KEEPING COLD FUSION FROM YOU. Many high level governmental figures in the USA in classified hearings are well aware of what the issues are and thankfully it includes individuals of both political parties. Even Former President Clinton has said on Larry King live that he wishes he was president against because of the way the Bush admin is running energy policy. There is more involved in this as to classified information that top officials know.
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. IT'S HAPPENED!!!!!
lameness filter avoidance system deployed.
Well, mostly coal, maybe some oil. It should be uranium, but that's a different flamewar altogether. However, we would only have small pockets of smog producing power plants, rather than hundreds of millions of them spread across the landscape on all our roads.
Octavius - "Ladies and gentlemen, my wife Rosie and I would like to welcome you this afternoon. But first, before we start, has anyone lost a large roll of twenty dollar bills in a rubber band? Because we've found the rubber band."
(assorted crowd laughs)
Octavius - (laughs) "It's a terrible joke. But thank you for coming. Today, you will witness the birth of a new fusion based energy source. Safe, renewable energy, and cheap electricity for everyone."
Octavius - "These four actuators were developed and programmed for the sole purpous of creating successful fusion. They are impervious to heat and magnetism."
Octavius - "These smart arms are controlled by my brain through a neural link. Nanowires feed directly into my cerebellum, allowing me to use these arms to control fusion reaction in an environment that no human hand could enter."
Member of press - "Doctor, if the artificial intelligence in the arms is as advanced as you suggest, couldn't that make you vulnerable to them?"
Octavius - "How right you are. Which is why I developed this inhibitor chip to protect my higher brain functions. It means I maintain control of these arms, instead of them controlling me."
Common argument, but it's still better to have centralized "dirty" energy sources that are controlled, maintained, and 100% regulated rather than millions of vehicles, a lot of which aren't maintained very much.
Secondly, it takes a non-trivial amount of energy to make gasoline. Getting rid of many oil refineries will help offset the addition electrical production.
Lastly, even though now power plants, and by exention hydrogen plants would be powered by coal, they don't have to be. They can be phased out with cleaner sources with fairly little impact on the rest of the infrastructure.
Thus, though it seems like you're just pushing the pollution sources around, by switching to a hydrogen transportation and moble energy infrastructure you gain many benefits over the current oil system.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Maybe it's just "don't expect fusion to become readily available" means net energy yielding fusion and "it really may not be long" means that the technologies for "cold fusion" such as H-S devices , the pon's device, and this latest with pyro-electric crystals devices are really High-School science fair grade projects; you can buy everything you need on the internet, right now.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Maybe they could try something like this with anti-particles, rather than fusing regular protons. I suppose they will need to use dilithim crystals rather than lithium tantalite.
and how do you propose to start those power plants up? If the energy output is less than what was put in, then how do you justify the existence of the fusion power plant? You're back to coal/nuclear/hydro/oil/hamster plants.
UCLA -- they have a crappy football team. Let me know when a university with a decent football team has some results.
;)
Yes, but at UCLA, they also has mod points.
And no sense of humor...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I was assuming we were talking about a mythical cold fusion method with a positive net energy production, whereas I see you must be talking about one of the existing methods that do not have this feature.
See? We were both right, just about different things!
Agree with the other replies. You are a complete moron. I say this as an atheist who eats xtians for breakfast.
..is that the inventors don't mention Jack Daniels.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
From TFA:
"Scientists have gotten fusion to occur in the laboratory before, but for the most part..."
I wish people would stop using the word "got" altogether. It's so ugly.
--Your local grammar pedant awaiting her "-1, offtopic"
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
This isn't cold fusion, in the region where the fusion occurs there are very high temperatures. This basically just increases the hydrogen gas pressure in a very small region thus "emulating conditions in the sun" by using electric forces rather than gravitational or magnetic. It's very cool, but it's not cold.
Thank you, Mr. Heisenberg!
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Isn't it dihydrogen monoxyide?
>>In fact, Fusion tends to produce far MORE energy than Fission (as shown by thermonuclear weapons) but the problem is that no one has found a method for creating a self-maintaining Fusion reaction.
;-)
>>
I'd just like to helpfully point out that a single fusion event, say:
(D+T -> 4He + n)
produces much less energy than a single fission event, say:
(235U + n -> 144Ba + 89Kr +n+n+n).
Fusion: 17.6MeV excess energy
Fission: ~200 MeV excess energy
(However, fusion does have a higher release of energy per nucleon)
Now, bombs. A fission weapon, you know what you're going to get. You design it carefully to precisely go critical, use up your fuel and that's it. The goal of a thermonuclear (fusion) bomb is a little different. You instead basically build it to be as wildly uncontrolled as possible - which isn't hard, since fusion is tremendously difficult to control in the first place. I mean, it takes a fission bomb just to set it off!
So yeah, fusion will "produce more energy". It's the difference between a stick of dynamite and a stick of dynamite shoved into a barrel of thermite molded out of C4
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
University of Los Angeles?? I have never heard of that prestigous intstitution. It must be somewhere closer to Compton, not in the posh hills of beverly like UCLA.
What is really scarry is that in the first Toy Story movie, Buzz Lightyear talked about Crystalic Fusion.... McF
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
...that this technology will be buried by the petroleum-powers-that-be* just like every other energy technology that perceivably threatens oil-based energy production.
*oh you know, the same people who forced America to war in Iraq?
Ahh, I knew there had to be someone who crawled out from under that rock...
;^)
I don't know if Whittier or Loyola Marymount is older, (didn't go to either one and neither was mentioned), but I guess you spoiled children would know if your father could beat up their fathers...
Can you spell inferiority complex? I knew you could...
I'm probably posting too late for most people to read, but it seems weird to me that the two original scientists made the discovery, and believe that it works, why not go into the electrical power industry? (of course, I also ask the same question of the crackpots who make perpetual motion machines, though this does not reflect on my stance on whether cold fusion)
If the material is easy to find, and equipment cheap, then they should be able to produce cheap power with little overhead. From my understanding, it's pretty easy to sell power back to the electrical company, so a very small scale start-up would be possible as a first step.
Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.
...
Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?
If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built?
Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up
If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).
Or, a wholly different approach --
I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.
Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?
Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.
The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:
http://www.focusfusion.org/energy2.html
Bob Park has a short but good comment on this, now old, news:
http://www.bobpark.org/WN05/wn050605.html
i'm not sure, is it larger than a breadbox?, slashdot
This "news" is WEEKS old and the title and commentary are COMPLETELY misleading. In fact the article itself is misleading and there was no critical commentary or reference to comentary about it posted.
In short, there are multiple reasons why this article should not have ben posted today or indeed ever in it's curent form. If this were only the first time, well, things happen. Unfortunately this is merely one more in a series of laughable "news" blunders that this site makes daily.
PACK IT UP! You're done!
From the way that I typically use alkaline batteries, they really are a convient energy source... using your definition. It says right on the label that you should not recharge them.
And what about hydroelectric resevoirs? They do get discharged, with sometimes considerable effort to get them "recharged". Or a tank of gasoline?
It really is just a matter of viewpoint. The advantage of an "energy storage device" is that you can take it from the energy source, use it at a distance, and then return to the original energy source to "refill" or "recharge" with a fresh supply of energy.
Next thing Microsoft will be friendly to other OS'... wait a minute...damn..
The world is ending i tell ya!
Only if you're dumb. If you're smart, you take their money for the interest free grace period, invest, then repay when due. You make money and they don't.
In other words, there's no concrete path to discovery, they're waiting for a miraculous crack breakthrough, like Newton's laws of general physics.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Paying interest isn't dumb. Paying *unnecessary* interest is.
If you can find someone to lend you $300,000 with an interest free grace period, give me a call so I can take advantage as well. When I borrow $300,000, on a 30 year amortization, even though it will cost closer to $700,000 in the end (worse than the $5 and $10 example), I'll *still* make money on the deal and much much more than the few bucks messing with credit card interest. While that $300,000 will cost a grand total of $700,000, that property will be worth about $1.7 million 30 years later, meaning I triple the money and, given my recent 0% down setup, will be tripling money that I don't even have to come up with, resulting in a situation where, for the cost of rent, by being willing to pay $2 for $1 over the long haul, I make $1 million net in 30 years.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
for my web servers. Would save me a bundle in power costs.
Affordable Business Web Hosting with a Personal touch.
wow, y'all are too busy writing things like "verily, i say" and "surely you do not foolishly infer" and "peer review is not the only guarantee of veracity" to make, after 375 comments, a single joke on macromedia's cold fusion (yes, i know that's already a joke). i'm going to quote something i saw on some lefty blog, but... WILL YOU ALL PLEASE STOP TALKING LIKE CARTOON VILLAINS!!!!
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Ignorant? Obviously. Bigoted? Probably not.
The guy doesn't know what the CSM and the SIL are, but he's clearly familiar with the conservative Christian attitude toward science that makes it into the newspaper. Given the kind of bad, bad, bad press the Christians have been getting, I can't blame anyone for being skeptical about organizations professing to be Christian.
I'll build a massive solar reflector on the island next to my secret lair focusing the suns power on my cold fusion crystal. That will easily heat it 100 C for a 100 KV output even on cloudy days.
Next, I'll use dangerously exposed vats of liquid nitrogen to cool the super-conducting power source for my web server and missile defense lasers.
Shouldn't they be numbered 0, 1, and 2?
Electrically initiated fusion is used in the trigger for nuclear weapons as a neutron source. Why is 100K volts from a crystal such a big deal? I can grab a few old flyback transformers, put them in series, charge up a lieden (sp?) jar, discharge it into a tube with some deuterium and irradiate myself with neutrons if I so wished.
Any old nerd can make a fusion reaction, the hard part is making one thats self sustaining energy wise.
I think there are further hinderances to practical applications of fusion other then just the science. As soon as this stuff tries to sneak out of the labaratory (and often long before), there will be a whole bunch of hippie "enviornmentalists" screaming their heads off about how its not safe, and how it will kill all of the baby seals. These people just plain don't want nuclear reactions running their cars or their houses and they don't even wanna listen to all of the perfectly good reasons why it is perfectly safe if done right. As I understand this is already putting pretty good obstacles in the way of current research, and would only get worse if we actually tried to move it to the real world.
What a trip, man!
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Lithium requires a lot of energy and sophisticated and highly energetic processes:
http://www.nccp.ru/EN/Li/
and tantalum requires enormous energy to dig up, melt the rock and process it to get the tantalum.
I realise that the experiment was more a "proof of concept" and not an energy producing victory, BUT:
Any cold fusion process is going to have to kick out a FUCKLOAD of energy to merit attention, given the energy intensiveness of the process of just assembling the parts. Otherwise, it fails the EROEI test.
http://www.eroei.com/
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I once created cold fusion... I took a cold lemon and inserted an electrode in either end. When the two leads are brought closer together a spark is created...
When the energy input into the system is less than the energy produced... then I will get excited.
Although the GP post obviously knows little about the CSM, the only hate mongering I can find is in YOUR cowardly expletive ridden reply. As for wiki and ignorance, they define bigot as "a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from their own". The bigot tag (using your own source) seems to fit YOUR post much better than the GP's
BTW: Like it or not the GP was correct when they stated the CSM is not the best source for science news but this has more to do with the "layman" nature of the content rather than any perceptible bias.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"fusing two hydrogen nuclei together to get helium" isn't what happens, you need four... seems like a very basic error to make.
As far as the car is concerned it _doesn't_matter_ where the electricity comes from. It receives a charging current, uses it to store energy and then off it goes. The plug in the wall can be powered by coal, oil or burning cow poop and it won't make a bit of difference to the car.
Suppose that today all of the city's electricity comes from oil and coal plants. They are big, well controlled power plants which put out a good deal less pollution per unit of electrical energy than the tiny gas powered generators that traditional cars use, but let's pretend that that's not still good enough and some wacky environmentalists convince the city to scrap them in favour of some alternative form of power like a million lemmings on treadmills.
All they need to do is to build a new lemming-power facility, hook it up to the electrical grid and then shut down the old oil and coal plants. Everybody who plugs their car into the wall will still receive the same electricity and if they don't pay attention to the news (or work as lemming wranglers down at the plant) they will never even notice that they stopped using oil.
_That_ is not being dependent on oil. To do the same thing with conventional automobiles would involve replacing every single engine and every single gas station to achieve the same result. By taking the oil burning one step away from the end user you break their dependence on oil and replace it with a dependence on electrical power which can come from any source at all.
Science isn't about belief, so why would you believe it? How about going beyond belief to actual knowledge? For this we'll just have to either build one ourselves or wait till one reaches the market, or seeing one demonstrated live might also work to begin to enter the domain of knowledge on this device.
Belief has it's place. A belief in the future, sure, but belief in some science experiment. Yikes, that sounds like religion. Ick, if it floats it must be a duck, sheesh.
Beliefs are suspect. Take knowledge when possible, and question that too.
A list of common thermonuclear fusion reactions with various elements can be found here
The links on the page lead to the rest of the NRL Plasma Physics formulary, which has lots of useful info on fusion-related stuff.
As far as how far this one method can be pushed, this design is basically a very compact neutron generator. This type of design suffers from the problem that the electrons in the target on average absorb the majority of the incoming particle's energy before it hits an ion and fuses. This is because the electrons in the target are very cold (from a plasma physics point of view) and cold electrons are light mass and absorb energy easily. Consider it similar to trying bowling in gravel - the little gravel pieces absorb so much energy from the bowling ball that it is really hard to knock over a pin. Even if you got 10 new bowling balls every time you knocked over a pin, you would still run out of balls pretty fast if you only hit a pin one out of every 1000 balls.
About ten years ago I accidentally made a neutron generator, similar to the one in the article, although without the cool little pyrocrysal accelerator. I was working on a beam collision fusion project (where the idea is to have two recirculating ion beams which cross and collide, avoiding the electron energy absorption), and instead of the beam recirculating, it was hitting a titanium wall. We started getting neutron counts, and when we measured the energy, they were 2.45 MeV, which meant they were fusion reactions. We thought everything was going well, until I tried a control experiment where we blocked the beam recirculation path. We still were getting neutrons. We found out that the deuteron beam was depositing deuterium on the titanium wall, and the incoming deuterons were fusing with the deuterium on the wall. Another back to the drawing board moment...
So, if all it takes is a very high voltage, why don't we see fusion happening around lightning?
OK, I know about libraries of Congress, hogsheads and rods, but what is this breadbox unit of measurement?
Sounds like the energy and reactant density needs to be raised to some now unknown activation energy and gas density. At only 100 degree differential and some unknown density of H2, some fusion was detected. This may be because the statistical collision cross sections are too small for most energetic neutrons to find another particle to directly hit. A higher density and a higher voltage potential, etc. , may be necessary to raise the energy produced vs energy supplied ratio. Given the relative simplicity of the apparatus used, apparently, this may be easy to do in conveniently small steps so as to see which way the chain of processes is going. More work is required. Once it really does produce more than it consumes and it repeatable, then it will be cigar time.
If it took an apple falling on Newton's head for him to discover gravity, then I think someone's head fusing would sorta prevent any further investigation.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
McGuyver did this in Ep. 26 with a matchbox, two cotton buds, a filling from his tooth and some scotch tape.
Clearly you never watched the show. He used duct tape.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Thanks for the pointer !
http://www.bobpark.org/WN05/wn050605.html#3
Basically, fusion is obtained using the 1934 Rutherford setup where deuterium ions are accelerated by an electric field towards a deuterium-rich target.
The novelty is how the electric field is obtained: piezo-electricity induced by a temperature change.
This is also the mechanism envisioned for spacecraft propulsion (which has nothing to do with fusion).
If this does work, just imagine the cool new stuff that we could have. There could feasibly be a matter printer, that could print off individual molecules if the fusion reaction could be controll well enough, or just a really complex way to fill up balloons for a party if it's not controlled very well.
if this pans out as a viable source of "new" energy, get ready for "old" energy industry to rail against it at first-- that is what is literally keeping us dependent on "old" (petroleum) energy now-- hello, US Government: give the "old" industry types the incentive to develop the "new" energy sources such as electric-field hydrogen fusion, and not FORCE them into it by using cost-prohibitive regulatory schemes-- they will simply shut their plants DOWN when you do that!
I saw "Christian Science", "Cold fusion" and "unusual crystal" together in the same article, and triggered my "pseudoscience" flag....
I googled Brian Naranjo and came up with UCLA. I figured it was that, or Caltech (because of the Pasadena dateline).
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Observation of nuclear fusion driven by a pyroelectric crystal is a press release dated Apr 27, 2005, from the journal Nature.
It sounds like they have achieved "nanoscale hot fusion," rather than P&F cold fusion.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Yes, "I'll believe it when I see it" is a common expression that usually isn't meant to be taken literally. Often there is a fine line between "figures of speech" and "literal denotations". Since the prelevant social cult(ure) is based upon "belief" and "faith", rather than re-testable-knowledge, many of our figures of speech are actually belief reinforcers encouraging people to accept the whole concept of belief as a valid way of life. I'll therefore, choose to not-believe but seek knowledge instead, if and when it's possible to do so. This involves examining your own belief systems and learning self transformation technologies to alter ones beliefs so that they either don't exist or are more evidence based. Check out the neuro-linguistic works of Robert Dilts and Milton Erickson. While it may not be possbile to eliminate beleifs from one's life entirely it's desireable to reduce them to a dull roar rather than letting them drive your life. Be the belief reducing/illuminating/eliminating zone, by replacing belief with fact or knowledge when posisble.
In the case of Cold Fusion - an area of "science" that is chock full of beliefs and un-re-testable theories and claims - it's best to raise the standards of discussion to zero-belief tollerance even in "non-literal expressions".