Cold Fusion Scientist Exonerated

Icarus1919 writes "New Scientist reports that the scientist who discovered a possible cold fusion reaction by bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sonic waves has recently been exonerated of accusations of scientific misconduct following the verification of his results by another scientist."

Comments

Re:Odd.

[gardyloo]

I can assure you that Taleyarkhan is *not* stupid. The problem is, his main (or at least one of the originals) detractor is Seth Putterman, who is also decidedly *not* stupid. This is one of the few issues I feel a little more familiarity with than most slashdot readers, and nothing in this case is as clear-cut as "he's obviously dumb or a liar".

Re:Doesn't mean he's *right*

[Otter]

This blurb SEEMS to clear him of accusations of purposeful contamination and just making up the existence of neutrons.

A New York Times article with more detail suggests they didn't even clear him of that, just of passing off his own work as independent replication. It sounds like no one's interests have been especially well-served here.

Re:Doesn't mean he's *right*

[angel'o'sphere]

You are repeating urban legends:

• The original cold fusion experiments by Pons and Fleischman (using electrochemistry) didn't have any detectors in place to detect neutrons. In fact, if the experiment had been producing the level of power they were claiming, they'd have been dead from the neutrons

You don't die from a few hundret neutrons ... and also not all fusion reactions create neutrons.

There are really only two ways of interpreting the electrochemistry experiments at this point: (1) they didn't produce fusion; or (2) there are huge, fundamental mistakes in our understanding of the hydrogen atom (e.g., there's another state whose energy is lower than the normal ground state's).

Regarding (2): I don't think our understanding is fundamentally wrong. However I believe there are options no one really payed attention to. After all our first ideas about fusion comes from watching the sun. Our first attempt on fusion likely was the H-Bomb. Both are pretty hot fusion processes. They both are explainable with fusion reaction formulas, so we gain confidence that our formulas and our understanding of fusion and fission processes are viable. OTOH in such a fusion experiment we could imagine that 3 or 4 protons fuse etc.

Well, 40 years ago "high temperature" super conduction was physically impossible. If a scientist had claimed super conduction does exist on high temperatures as well, his colleagues had declared him mad. I think that fusion processes in analogous ways like super conduction might be possible, or in other words that the underlying principles might be similar.

angel'o'sphere