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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."
Yay! I'm gonna get a Mr. Fusion!
What was once true, is no longer so
Well, maybe in 20 years we'll have plenty of power for electric cars, but then in 20+ years, what will we do with all that bio-fuel?
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Cold Fusion Scientist Exonerated
Was that post-mortem?
Have you read my journal today?
Where's the cold fusion? The article sounds more like Sonofusion. Which, I can assure you, is a long ways from "cold".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The person accusing Taleyarkhan of misinterpreting data was one of his own post-docs. I wonder what that person has to say now? I think it's easy to make allegations and its difficult to shake the effects of false allegations.
First, the article title is VERY misleading. As others have pointed out, the question at hand is whether sonoluminescence can lead to fusion. In some peoples' minds, this is "cold" fusion, because the whole damned apparatus doesn't have to be a plasma. However, where the fusion is claimed to be taking place (in the middle of tremendously cavitating bubbles) *IS* in a plasma state (at least for part of an acoustic cycle). Thus, this might be better termed "locally hot" fusion or something. Or just "sonofusion", which everyone in the field seems to understand.
Second, the New Scientist blurb is interesting in that Rusi seems to have been cleared of scientific fraud. The question, if I remember correctly, was whether the neutrons he was seeing were due to poor experimental techniques, contamination (accidental or purposeful), or simply weren't there in the first place. This blurb SEEMS to clear him of accusations of purposeful contamination and just making up the existence of neutrons. However, it doesn't mean that they were really there, and certainly not that he's really found thermal neutrons from fusion in his experiments. THAT will take a whole lot more "confirmation".
(IAAP, but haven't been following this conflict closely. The last I paid attention was at the ASA meeting last December in Hawai'i. So I'm sure someone will correct my--- inadvertent---mistakes. This is, after all, Slashdot.)
Quick Lets get Val Kilmer to reprise his role as "The Saint". In " The Saint II: Electric Bugaloo- The real cold fusion"
Apparently, Purdue refused to state what the exact allegations investigated were, how many inquiries it conducted, or what its conclusions were based on. Hard to tell if the investigation's conclusions were arrived at fairly or were politically motivated. More details in this NYT article which I found from this blog entry.
Yeah!
Who could have imagined that you'd need a techy background to understand articles posted on Slashdot?
What's next? A puerile sense of humor on Fark.com? And interest in current affairs for the BBC?
Most people seem to think that hydrogen atoms can only get together under extreme pressures and heat. The ones that disagree seem to think that some tricky apparatus is required to get two hydrogen atoms to unite. I want to know: has anybody tried just asking them if they wouldn't mind merging their nuclei? It might just work.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The article says yes. Of course, low temperature fusion is already old hat anyway (Farnsworth Fusor.) The article doesn't say whether the reaction produces more energy than it consumes, which is what would make it interesting.
he ought to publicise the names and email addresses of his accusers.
Because that takes effort, and this is Slashdot?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
So - the question of 'reputation': 'Hard to shake' the reports of a former team-mate? This is primary research, and the results are bloody testable. Screw reputation. This is cricism is expected, required and to be commended. Taleyarkhan is surely not surprised that folks are jumping on every issue that they can find. If his sonofusion is replicated then he will be a hero.
In life in general: *every* accuser of corruption is attacked as a liar. This is not fun - folks don't do this normally unless they really saw something worrisome. The accusation invariably gets themselves investigated as well, and usually by folks sympathetic to the accused. It is *not* easy to make allegations, and folks with even a hair of power constantly bury any and all criticism. Seriously, whistleblowing is not fun - not in academia, not in industry, not in public service, not in religious institutions... nowhere.
His research has been published and folks are replicating (and, of course, mostly failing to replicate) his results. Discussions of the results (and non-results) are ensuing. This is satisfactory science. He was mocked for leaving his name off of a couple of papers that were by *very* close colleagues, which is fair too.
Good news everybody...
http://www.proton21.com.ua/index_en.html
The first successful experiment was performed on February 24, 2000 in a specially created and proprietary set up. In fact, the 5,000+ successful experiments in controlled nuclei-synthesis performed since 1999, using various targets made of light, medium, or heavy elements; have allowed the research team at EDL to comprehend and evaluate this unique scientific breakthrough.
The discovered process has been noted for its practical, environmentally friendly and extraordinary energy efficient attributes.
Two major outcomes have emerged from this process:
* First, the creation of an energy output far exceeding the initial impact.
* Second, the creation of an array of unique nuclei-synthesis elements. These new elements were tested by leading scientific laboratories in Ukraine, Russia, USA, etc, and their artificial origin was confirmed.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
From the article you link:The Farnsworth Fusor is a high-temperature fusion device, just like sonofusion systems are high temperature fusion devices (if they really do produce fusion.)
Do not confuse "table top" with "cold". The only reason conventional hot fusion systems are big is because the plasma losses scale as the surface area while the energy production scales as the volume, so the ratio of losses to energy goes down linearly with the size of the system. If one could produce a non-equilibrium device that had relatively smaller losses or larger energy production one could have a table-top fusion generator. Unfortunately, there is a quite general theoretical proof as to why such non-equilibrium devices cannot ever produce net power.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Or maybe it's been dumbed down for/by the press.
Physicists often over-simplify or inappropriately categorize things when trying to explain their papers to reporters (note that most journalism programs don't include courses on nuclear physics). Even if the reporter knows the difference between genuine cold fusion and sonofusion (keeping in mind that "cold" can be used somewhat ambiguously in regards to fusion), they might not expect their readers to and dumb it down themselves.
Most likely of all is the stereotypical Professor Frink sitting in his lab babbling excitedly away about how it works while the reporter sits there and nods. When he says something like, "While individual Alpha particles are created with energies of N electron-volts, the system temperatures are on par with hypothetical cold fusion scenarios," guess which two words out such a statement will actually get written down in the reporter's notes.
Taleyarkhan didn't claim he had caused cold fusion. He claimed sonofusion.
For all readers getting excited about Mr. Fusion and nuclear jetpacks, I hate to inform you that Taleyarkan's experiments, assuming they genuinely did induce fusion, fell far, far short of unity.
On a slightly off-topic note, for those who have not been following the details in the cold fusion field, some very persuasive evidence has emerged FOR the original cold fusion experiments (the Pons-Fleischmann style cold fusion using Palladium and Deuterium). The evidence was presented by researchers at the US Navy's SPAWAR labs late in 2006. The reserchers are highly experienced scientists who have taken their time and performed the experiments thoroughly. A description of the evidence is at http://www.newenergytimes.com/news/2006/NET19.htm# ee.
Some of the biggest problems in cold fusion experiments has been long incubation periods, perhaps weeks/months, difficulty in calorimetry experiments for determining if heat was being generated, and replication.
Two techniques have been detailed by SPAWAR. The first is the using chemical co-deposition methods to combine Palladium and Deuterium, allowing a solid Palladium structure to form with Deuterium already 'mixed' in with it. Previously, weeks were often needed to allow absorption of Deuterium into the Palladium. Using the co-deposition technique, cold fusion effects become apparent within minutes, such as anomalous amounts of tritium, low-intensity x-ray radiation, and increased heat. This happens on a highly repeatable basis.
The second, highly outstanding experimental result is the use of nuclear industry standard CR-39 nuclear track detectors, which look like small pieces of plastic and are permently etched with tiny impact craters whenever a high energy nuclear particle hits them. Chemical reactions cannot produce the craters or tracks. The experiment involved placing a CR-39 track detector physically next to the Palladium-Deuterium electrode.
What resulted was the detection of some of the highest density counts ever seen on the detectors of high energy nuclear particles. Independent nuclear experts who have examined the CR-39 detectors recognized the signature tracks of protons and alpha particles, which, to be ejected from the atoms where they reside, require millions of volts - at least 1,000,000 times more energy than can be produced by any known chemical reaction. As a control experiment, exposed CR-39 detectors in a lithium solution without palladium in it resulted in only a sprinkling of tracks, randomly distributed and so few in number that they could be accounted for by background radiation.
The only surrounding energy sources were a few volts from the current applied through electrolysis; the second is an applied external electric field of about 6,000 volts. The particle tracks look identical to tracks made by nuclear particles that have at least 2 million electron-volts.
The really nice thing is is that you can almost see the tracks with your naked eye. Take the detectors elsewhere, to conferences etc, show others later; the tracks are permently etched evidence of nuclear reactions occuring in a Palladium-Deuterium benchtop setup.
The evidence here for Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion is now getting to the point where the scientific community has to seriously consider that Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion DOES exist under the right conditions, whether people want to accept it or not. Hard to replicate is not the same as impossible to replicate.
Well... not necessarily. You refer to Todd Rider's papers. Rider's general analysis is on quasineutral, isotropic nonequilibrium systems. For example, Farnsworth-Hirsh fusors are not quasineutral; they strive for only protons in the plasma. Polywell (Bussard's variant) is anisotropic. Rider addresses some exceptions in very general terms. For example, he discusses a plasma of protons (non-neutral), but only under pure magnetic confinement, and then decides that the Brillouin Limit rules it out for feasible magnetic field strengths. It's all quite applicable, but not a general critique of non-neutral plasmas.
Most of what Rider's papers discuss deals with the nonequilibrium aspect. That is, some fusion systems, fusion is attempted to be conducted at a lower energy by having a non-Maxwellian energy distribution in the plasma. That is, a Maxwellian plasma has most of the particles at a lower energy than the temperature would suggest, with the few high temperature outliers causing most of the fusion reactions. If you can only spend your energy accelerating particles to energies that stand a significant chance of fusing (without wasting it on bulk material that will still be too low energy), you can get a much higher rate of fusion. Rider goes on to show that, barring heavy use of selective removal of low energy particles for reacceleration, non-Maxwellian distributions of ion energies will rapidly decay to a Maxwellian equilibrium distribution. He also discusses energy loss mechanisms, and how formidable they are. In a later paper, he discusses more specific fusion systems and the problems inherent in them, and then proposes several possible systems that use resonant excitation or filtering of low energy ions for reacceleration to bypass the limitations his paper sets on fusion systems.
Anyways, back to sonofusion. The idea with sonofusion is not, to the best of my understanding, to get a non-equilibrium energy distribution. Rather, it is to get extremely high temperatures in a very small region of space, and then have A) the resultant neutrons seed cavities in the opposite nodes, and B) have energy from the reaction feed back into the wave, helping compress the opposite nodes at the same time that the input accoustic waves normally would. In short, Taleyarkan hopes to achieve a kind of sonofusion chain reaction in which accoustic waves self-maintain a strong degree of anisotropy due to the fusion reactions that they cause. Even if a chain reaction is shown to be impossible, the hope is to at least make a good neutron source.
At least, this is my understanding of what I've read; admittedly, it's been a while.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Well, I am that "other scientist." It is nice to see good press for bubble fusion reach slashdot (no, I didn't submit it.)
First, I agree with the previous posters that this is not "cold fusion." The centers of the collapsing bubbles are very hot. Apparently hot enough to cause fusion.
The research I published was based on experiments conducted at Purdue University using a setup provided by Dr. Taleyarkhan. All equipment calibration, measurements, and data analysis were preformed by me and my students. We had full access to the equipment and we were very careful to make sure that there was nothing to contaminate our data.
People who have read the actual paper (Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, vol 95, p 736) would agree that the results published leave no room for doubt that the neutrons are caused by the collapsing bubbles in a deuterated fluid - the appropriate control experiments were performed - the statistics are significant.
The controversy comes because several well respected and talented physicists have not been able to reproduce Dr. Taleyarkhan's results in their own labs. This has led several people (including an editor from Nature Magazine) to conclude that Dr. Taleyarkhan must be faking his data.
I cannot explain why it has been so hard to reproduce the results in another lab except to say that null results are pretty easy to get in any sensitive experiment and it originally took Dr. Taleyarkhan several years to perfect his methods.
I suspect that all that is needed is a little more time and we will hear about several labs who have confirmed this work completely independently. Of course we are working on that very thing here at LeTourneau University.
Even if it takes some time to reproduce the results at another lab, having independent researchers come to Purdue and reproduce the experiments should be a big step in moving past the controversy.
Respectfully,
Dr. Ted Forringer
Assistant Professor of Physics
LeTourneau University
Perhaps he has been "vindicated", but I'm not at all sure that the results are valid. Just because he was cleared of misconduct by the investigative board, that does not mean there isn't still some caveat to his experiments that muddles a clear interpretation of the results. What is more promising, however, is the fact that another colleague managed to get similar results. The conditions are just too difficult to recreate however (and there was some debate as to whether Taleyarkhan actually helped the colleague out significantly, so as to make the second run not really an "independent" experiment), so until more truly independent labs can reproduce the results, I'll still be taking this with a grain of salt.
This is my list of 10 key discoveries that were initially rejected by scientific peers, or at least not easily accepted:
t es/1921/press.html
1. Theory of Relativity wasn't well received at the time. In fact, Einstein didn't actually get a Nobel Prize for it. Instead, he received the prize for other work he did dealing with quanta. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laurea
2. Quantum Mechanics - Even Einstein didn't particularly like Quantum Mechanics and the search for the unified model. It was the home of the quote "God doesn't play dice with the universe."
3. Darwin's Theory of Evolution - This was hotly debated at the time, and still is. On-going debates in school boards still occur.
4. String Theory - Hotly contested, mostly because no one can show if it is actually correct.
5. Newtonian Calculus - The notation sucked. Most of the calculus done today uses Leibniz's or Euler's notation, however all of Euler's, Newton's, Lagrange's and Leibniz's notations are still in use.
6. Periodic Table - This was a key chemical discovery, and initially not accepted. It was a big change to the understanding at the time.
7. Freud - The father of psychoanalysis. Many of his notions were not widely accepted, correctly perhaps. Nevertheless, he founded psychiatry.
8. Armstrong and the FM Radio. He also designed the double-heterodyne tuner, which is the primary tuner type in use today. He died poor after leading a controversial life, and butting heads with Sarnoff at RCA.
9. AC Power - Edison was firmly behind DC power. AC power can be sent long distances efficiently by using a transformer. DC power cannot. AC power is in use in almost all homes throughout the world, and Edison lost this technology debate.
10. Transatlantic Radio - At first, it was not at all decided if transatlantic radio was technically feasible, and even then if it was commercially feasible. Times have changed.
It turns out that most scientific discoveries are highly controversial initially. This controversy is a sign that they are new ground-breaking research.