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Bubble Fusion Researcher Faces Fraud Trial
An anonymous reader writes "In 2001, Rusi P. Taleyarkhan shocked the world by claiming he had successfully produced a positive net energy bubble fusion reaction; cold fusion. The New York Times reports that a congressional hearing is now under way against Taleyarkhan, even though Purdue University has already cleared the scientist of any wrongdoing. Dr. Taleyarkhan said last night in an e-mail message that the subcommittee's report represents 'a gross travesty of justice.' He asked, 'Where are the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the Asian community during this episode that has caused this biased and openly one-sided smear campaign?' You can view the full (colorful) e-mail at Dailytech."
That's for a highly informative post. In particular, I was wondering why it was the function of Congress to investigate scientific fraud. Certainly if they pay for energy research they want to find out what the results are. One remark: any fusion will be hot in your sense. "Cold fusion" means that most of the apparatus is at room temperature (compare the device in question with a Tokamak).
Instead of modding, I had to reply.
Tokamaks and Fusors do indeed work by plasma confinement, but the methods are so different that you can't really call a Tokamak a big Fusor. Tokamaks use magnetic fields to try to force the plasma together, while Fusors use the charge of the plasma itself to keep it together. In addition, instead of inducing massive current in the plasma to heat it, Fusors simply accelerate the particles to the energies necessary, because of the favorable MeV/K conversion (for example, 15 keV = 174 megakelvins), thus making the device far simpler and easier to operate (just compare the size of a typical Tokamak to that of a typical Fusor), as well as requiring much less energy.
Again, your point is valid, but Tokamaks aren't that similar to Fusors.
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Because it was supposed to be independent verification of Taleyarkhan's claims. If he really did coauthor the paper, then his research was NOT independently verified. If his research was not independently verified, then funding may have provided on false or misleading data.
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As someone who has spent the last six years investigating controversial science, I have a good sense of the difficulties of new, poorly-understood science.
As someone who has actually done controversial science for a living, I have a good sense of how all science worth doing is new and poorly understood, and how little appreciation of that fact people on the fringe have.
In every experiment there are things that make you go, "Hmmm..." Almost all of the time they are irrelevant, and it is a matter of taste and good judgement as to when you spend the time and effort to follow up on them. People who have never done real experiments or who are very badly trained fail to appreciate this, and therefore ascribe to every anomaly a significance that it does not have.
There are several consequences of this: good scientists sometimes miss significant anomalies; bad scientists sometimes make important discoveries; good scientists spend almost all their time generating well-quantified reproducible results that accumulate to the betterment of humanity; bad scientists spend almost all their time pursuing irrelevant anomalies and telling everyone how smart they are.
Every experimental scientist knows that it is possible to prove a negative, and we do it all the time. They are called null results. The entire field of physics beyond the standard model has been generating reams of these for the past couple of decades. We know, for example, that neutrinoless double beta decay does NOT happen with a lifetime of less than some large number. The ABSENCE of a signal is the result. Likewise, we know that the 17 keV neutrino does NOT exist, and the experiments that proved it were designed in the manner of all such: they demonstrated that A=>B, and then showed !B, and therefore !A by modus tollens.
For example, if you have a working tachometer, and it reads zero, your engine is not running, because if your engine is running your working tachometer will read more than 100 RPM. Any such experiment involves a good deal of secondary experimental work to demonstrate that the tachometer really is working, and isolating it from any possible unexpected effects, but at the end of the day you are always detecting a phenomenon that is well-known, like a beta spectrum or the number of neutrons being produced, or in the case of a tachometer a spinning shaft.
Fringe scientists have a tendency to invoke "new physics" to explain why no one else measures the shaft spinning when they do. Good scientists understand that spinning is spinning, no matter what causes it, and that for the fringe scientist to be right everything we know about tachometers must be wrong, and that is simply not plausible.
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The fairly well accepted nuclear fusion cascade that produces He4 (i.e. the sun) goes a bit like this...
(1) H + H = D + positron + energy (since really H is all that is around initially)
(2) D + H = He3 + energy
(3) He3 + He3 = He4 + 2*H
From what I remember from the classes I've had covering this, there is a lot of energy considerations and collisional cross section issues that make it occur this way. 2 deuteriums would indeed make a He4 nucleus that is too unstable to last very long, so it undertakes this somewhat convoluted but more quiescent path. Also in these considerations usually H is in much better supply than D is, so the probabilities are better for (2) to happen than your way.
IIRC in certain situations (like a nuclear bomb) when you can do it there is also the possibility of
(4) Tritium + H = He4 + energy
but I'm pretty sure that you need to seed that with quite a bit of tritium to get it to work reliably.