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Bubble Fusion Inquiry Under Wraps
hubie writes "Purdue University launched an investigation last March into the questionable research behavior and actions by Prof. Rusi Taleyarkhan following his controversial claims of achieving bubble fusion. The investigation has completed but the results are being kept secret. The alleged behavior is remeniscent of another tabletop fusion incident from a number of years back.
Coincidentally, Purdue University has just secured Federal money to open up a new energy center. A more cynical person than I might suggest that there is a connection between the two."
Must. Invest. Giant. Gobs. Of. Money. (thank god I'm not a VC)
Philosophy.
When I roll my chair wheels over that bubble packing material and pop the plastic bubbles, lots of neutrons come flying up from the floor. Has anyone else noticed this?
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060121/fob7. asp
Fusion reactions take place in the vat because clusters of bubbles form and then violently collapse, explains nuclear engineer and team leader Rusi P. Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. A neutron or another energetic particle triggers a bubble to form in a low-pressure trough of the ultrasound waves, he says. Then, high pressure from the wave crushes the orb to an enormous density and temperature that fuse some atomic nuclei of the bubble's gas.
I tried this bubble wrap fusion.
there is an audible release of energy.
It's what happens when you eat beans right before going in the hottub.
:)
Obviously it's not Cold Fusion, but beggars cannot be choosers
It's too bad about the series of car accidents, toaster explosions, and falling yaks that decimated the staff involved. Praise the Lord though we have clean burning coal!!!
Amazing sounding... I wonder how they stumbled on it.
Well.. I had a vat of this matter, and I was thinking... I should bombard that bastard with ultrasonic waves.
And that was cool, we all laughed and then Dobie thought it would really put a party in that vat if we fired some neutrons through it.
Achieving bubble fusion drives you crazy. Unfortunately, it's awful hard to communicate what's necessary to replicate the experiment while crazy, so practically all successful bubble experiments get written off as fraud.
He's said the the experiments are incredibly touchy, and there are some days when it just won't work. Given that, it's not surprising others have had trouble duplicating the results.
In layman's terms: You take a speaker, dump it in a vat of (heavy) water, and fire it up. Bubbles are produced by the soundwaves (with temperatures that reach many thousands of degrees in their interior), and hence fusion occurs. Duh!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
To be sure, 'tabletop fusion' is not the sensation here, compact (power-hungry) fusion devices have been used for decades as neutron sources. What's exciting here is the way the researchers claim to achieve 'fusion' and the huge energy savings such methods, if true, could lead to.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I'd recommend getting ahold of the BBC documentary on this topic and this particular researcher: "An Experiment to Save the World". The documentary does a reasonable job of explaining the concept. It's also pretty clear from watching this episode that this particular scientist knows deep down inside that he's a fraud but his conscious mind isn't allowing him to accept the reality that his career is over. He keeps saying stuff like "A have to believe the data" even though the show does a good job of explaining that his data is inconclusive and that the technology that would generate conclusive proof exists. The BBC ends up hiring a rival researcher to use the superior lab equipment to try to confirm bubble fusion. No dice. Of course, the original researcher then claims that he they weren't doing the experiment correctly, but refuses to help them redo the experiment with his special modifications.
Good documentary. It made me want to reach into the TV and strangle that asshole for wasting everyone's time. I hope he gets what's coming to him.
GMD
watch this
If this creates an unjustified surge of investment, is that a bubble fusion bubble?
If the startups merge and shed employees and energy, is that bubble fusion bubble fusion?
Sorry.
Quote from second article:
Karl Popper argues that a scientific idea can never be proven true, because no matter how many observations seem to agree with it, it may still be wrong. On the other hand, a single contrary experiment can prove a theory forever false. Therefore, science advances only by demonstrating that theories are false, so that they must be replaced by better ones. The proponents of Cold Fusion took exactly the opposite view: many experiments, including their own, failed to yield the expected results. These were irrelevant, they argued, incompetently done, or lacking some crucial (perhaps unknown) ingredient needed to make the thing work. Instead, all positive results, the appearance of excess heat, or a few neutrons, proved the phenomenon was real. This anti-Popperian flavor of Cold Fusion played no small role in its downfall, since seasoned experimentalists like Lewis and Barnes refused to believe what they couldn't reproduce in their own laboratories. To them, negative results still mattered.
End quote.
This seems a grand failure of basic logic. Getting negative results does not mean that something (in this case, cold fusion) can not actually happen.
For instance, I make an announcement that I have tied a piece of string to an object, threw the object in the air, and it stayed up floating for over an hour. Seems impossible, but heaps of people try to replicate it. Some try tying string to a wooden table, and throwing it in the air. It comes down after a couple of seconds. Other try other objects with similar failures. However, someone tried attaching string to a sheet of paper, and it floated for over 20 seconds before coming down. A partial success perhaps? But most people look at the equations of gravity and acceleration, and say that nothing will stay up for more than a few seconds, depending on how high you throw it. The original announcement is written off as a joke.
A few years later, it is well known that if you shape paper over a frame of rigid sticks in a diamond shape, add a tail, and have an air flow of at least so many metres per second, the object will fly so long as the wind keeps blowing. It is now called a kite. So do the initial negative results mean that the positive result is false, even though there was currently no known theory??
I respect several people who work in my field of science and they are not idiots. I assume the same applies to other scientific fields. So when several top-class individuals (eg. McKubre, director at SRI) say after a period of time they have achieved worthy cold fusion experimental results, I assume they are not incompentent or idiotic, and have actually achived something worthwhile. Perhaps one could be wrong, but the if all of them are wrong, then we are talking mass hallucinations of a lot of previously highly respected and compentent (in their field) people.
Or I could believe the other side, who seem to all have multi-trillion dollar interests in keeping cold fusion passive for as long as possible (energy companies and high energy physicists eg. CERN).
From last semester's Intro to Nuclear and Particle Physics textbook, The Physics of Nuclei and Particles by Richard A. Dunlap, 2004: According to a plot in the book, magnetic confinement projects (tokamaks, stellerators, etc) have just barely entered the thermalized breakeven region. It is not clear from another plot where inertial confinement projects stand, except to say that they are still quite far from the ignition region.
Anyway, all that to say that even if the Purdue claims are correct, it isn't anything to get too excited about, merely yet another technique for producing extremely endothermic fusion.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
No, it should be "I" /. is home of many a grammatically incorrect story, but that is not a mistake.
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
If you were to read the articles on Wikipedia and around the web in general regarding cold fusion, somoluminescence, and other "cold" fusion reactions you would come away with two very wrong impressions. First would be that these technologies are very close to fruition and second that they are the holy grail of energy production and the answer to all of our problems. You would think that the fusion reactions are not dangerous, do not pollute, and the fuels involved are of infinite supply.
The reality is that the only reproducable, controlled, fusion reactions mankind has managed to generate in a reproducable manner consume much more power than they generate, and are many, many years before becoming a source of power.
Regarding fusion by-products, the fact is that most fusion reactions produce deadly forms of radiation, weather "cold" or "hot", and the fuels required for a-neutronic reactions are not in infinite supply.
Granted that the idea of "Mr. Fusion" powering our automobiles on flat beer with helium, water vapour, and heat as it's only waste is captivating. Having a near infinite supply of energy would solve many of our and the world's problems (and I'm sure cause many of it's own as well).
We should not lose sight that there are real, proven sources of energy that are renewable, cleaner and longer term than fossil fuels, that also require our investment of research, money, time, and education. Although they are not a "Magic Bullet" like Cold or Bubble fusion, they are the reality we should be focused on.
Experimental protocol.
Fankly who modded that insightful ? It ain't even a good thougth experiment since the protocol would have inside "incredible when I add a piece of paper in such and such form now the piece of wood float in the air for a few second. And if in addition there is such and such wind condition it can stays in air for hours !" that is what experimental protocol are for : to enable other to reproduce under the same condition the experiment.
There are good reason to not ignore negative result in science : because those are NOT failed experiment. They are *RESULTS* in themselves. I do not want to do an ad-hominem, but frankly, Your propention to plaid for and beg to look at positive result more than negative means that you should stay away from any experimental lab.
Negative and positive experimental results are both as important.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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