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"Tabletop" Fusion Researcher Committed Scientific Misconduct
Geoffrey.landis writes "A Purdue University panel investigated allegations against nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, finding that he had in fact committed scientific misconduct in his work.
Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation — a finding that would be groundbreaking, if true, but one that apparently could not be replicated by other researchers. The allegations against Taleyarkhan were made in March of 2006. A local Indiana paper gives the full list of allegations against Taleyarkhan, and the resolution of each by the panel. The full report (PDF) is also available. Of the nine specific allegations, only two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,' but notes that this comes 'just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent.'"
We've discussed this gentleman's work and the scrutiny it has received several times, and members of the scientific community seem to have given him the benefit of the doubt in many cases.
Better late than never, this guy has been either bullshitting or been genuinely incompetent for years.
When I first heard about his whole ultrasonic bubble excitation fusion experiment, I honestly thought: WTF? This was quite a while ago, and all the evidence was against him then as well.
It is people like these who give research scientists a bad name...
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
this is ofcourse still up for heavy debate.. the conclusion is based on some statements that because other scientists can't replicate it without the help of the professor it would be misconduct.. Maybe all the other scientists just don't understand the 'problem'.. because you don't know how something works (even with full documentation) doesn't mean it is impossible.. If this guy had a trackrecord of 'misconduct' then it would propably be something else, but he hasn't...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=619841&cid=24261431/
I really want to see one of these fusion processes work. It would make a radical change in our society, by removing any reason for the US government to care what happens in the middle east.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"TableTop"-less Fusion? Count me in.
When I was in graduate school/postdoc, I wrote for the Stanford Daily a couple of times for fun as way to practice my writing skills. One of the articles I wrote was on this research. Interestingly, I interviewed Nobel winner Douglas Osheroff and he shared his thoughts with me on this research. If memory serves me, he thought it was interesting, but prematurely published.
Interesting to look back on this in light of this finding.
Do you mean no more flying cars either ? :(
Who cares about tabletop fusion?
I want my "Mr. Fusion" that I can slap into my car!
you still shouldn't out the others working on similar things:
-------------
By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[73] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals (see indices in further reading, below). In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat and articles have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy (see indices in further reading, below).
The generation of excess heat has been reported by (among others):
* Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
* Giuliano Preparata (ENEA (Italy))
* Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
* Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
* Yoshiaki Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
* T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
* T. Ohmori (Japan),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Experimental_reports
"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."
"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all#
U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue44/navy.html
""Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat.""
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312
"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design."
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_team_confirms_ucla_tabletop_fusion_10017.html
Science in Neglect - Nobel Laureate S
There was a TV programme on this guy a couple of years ago. No other scientists were able to duplicate his work so as part of the investigation the TV production company gathered together the finest fusion scientists they could find and they tried one last time to duplicate the experiment. Although Rusi Taleyarkhan agreed to interviews he refused point-blank to take part in the on camera experiment and (surprise surprise) there was no evidence of fusion.
Ganty
I call B.S. Taleyarkhan is being railroaded. They are trying to discredit him on the basis of mis-representative claims of reproduction and authorship, rather then refuting his work experimentally, as is proper science.
This whole thing has the bad smell. Why is Congress so involved in this... writing letters pressuring Purdue to discredit Taleyarkhan? How can two other schools be involved and not share any of the blame? See...
http://www.physorg.com/news10336.html
If there's any chance this type of fusion might work, there should be plenty of people and $ involved in research. That kind of research will discredit or accredit Taleyarkhan. Anything else is politics. And I for one and sick of it.
:T:R:A:N:S:
It's amazing how many tabletop cold fusion experiments have attracted public attention, and all turned out to be fraudulent when they claimed to have started nuclear reactions. The worldwide large-scale not-so-cold fusion project ITER has just started, with an estimated cost of 5bn EUR, and there are still guys out there trying to outsmart them on a tabletop and some cookbook chemistry.
There we go.
"Look, the bubble is interesting" = "LOL"
"I think it can be tabletop fusion" = "WTF?"
I had completely different expectations when I clicked on the article. The RSS feed read: " "Tabletop" Fusion Researcher Committed S..."
You don't need future tech to give the middle finger to the Middle East - you can do it now.
One way you can reduce the Middle East's influence is to drive down the value of oil and you can do that by switching your car to natural gas. There are several companies like this one that will sell you a kit to make the switch. Googling "cng conversion kits gas" brings up a host of sources.
Since natural gas is not taxed as heavily and demand is lower, a gallon-equivalent of natural gas costs about half what gasoline costs. The conversion kits allow you to choose between natural gas and gasoline so if you're somewhere you can't find a natural gas station, you can switch back to gasoline. If you there isn't a natural gas station near where you live, you can install a natural gas compressor in your garage that'll fill your car overnight. The downsides are you lose some trunk space to the extra tank, natural gas stations aren't as numerous as gasoline stations and since methane doesn't store as many calories as gasoline, you lose about 10% of your engine's power. For me, the later issue isn't a big deal since my car has more power than it needs to get me around.
Natural gas is domestically produced and there's enough of it to last 100 years and that's not counting the undersea hydrate fields. I'd rather burn domestic gas than give Al-Qaeda a cut of every dollar I spend on gasoline.
The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments,
I see two possibilities there...
First, he could have made up numbers. Absolutely unforgivable, and we should all break out the tar and feathers.
However, if reputable scientists have reproduced his work, even with his direct involvement, then he has accomplished something interesting (even if not necessarily what he believes).
It's really frustrating. When Pons and Fleischman originally announced "cold fusion", there was an immediate attempt at Stanford to replicate the result. The researchers gave a talk, which drew hundreds of people. In their first attempts, they had the apparatus surrounded with radiation detectors and alarms, in case there was a sudden burst of radiation. After a while, they realized that wasn't going to happen. The effect, if any, resulted in a few extra neutrons per hour over background.
They saw some variations in neutron flux, but discovered that people standing around the apparatus affected the result. Humans have lots of water and are neutron reflectors. So they moved the apparatus into a cube of lead blocks. No more neutron emissions.
Somebody may eventually get fusion this way, but probably won't get out more power than they put in. If you can figure out some way to put a macroscopic amount of energy into a microscopic volume, you can get a little fusion. It's been done with big capacitor banks, with lasers, with explosive compression, and with the Farnsworth Fusor. But far more energy goes in than comes out.
The perpetuum mobile machines of the present.
Now, I don't want to discount it as snakeoil altogether, but it's one of the fields where a lot of money is pumped into questionable "research". It saddens me that some self proclaimed scientists manage to siphon money away from honest, hard working researchers by producing spectacular (if only ... ok, I don't find a better word, fraudulent) results that surprisingly nobody can reproduce.
Partly at least this can be blamed on our society that wants immediate return of investment. I gave you money, so dammit, produce something! I can't wait the years it takes to produce meaningful results, I want results NOW!
Fusion is a decade or two (maybe three) away. Always has been, and as long as this way of funding remains, always will be. Fusion (and hey, maybe antigravity, who knows?) requires a lot of fundamental research for years with no immediate results, nothing to show off to VC, nothing to patent and nothing to milk for money. And unless we're willing to do that kind of research, nothing will change.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The committee 'could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments'
The fix for this is very simple. Rename the entire process to the "Taleyarkhan Effect." Taleyarkhan will then be directly involved in every experiment, and the results will be reliably reproducible.
This guy claims he did something and no one else can repeat the experiments. Chalk it up that he's wrong and move on. WTF is the big deal about this? Is the physics department at Purdue going to put a "Rusi has been naughty" note on his permanent record and beat him with a wet noodle? If he's been using funds improperly, fire his ass.
"If we didn't need oil, we wouldn't have troops in the ME. If we didn't have troops in the ME to begin with, 9/11 would never have happened."
As long as Israel continues to exist, and receives funding from the United States, Al-Qaeda would have reason to attack the United States.
Read Bin Laden's letter to America, it explains all of this.
You don't even need to go far in the letter:
"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine: "
Even if you weren't burning gasoline in your cars, you'd still be consuming oil for plastics, lubrication, vasoline, and any other petroleum based product or process.
Read the allegations and findings first: what did this guy commit? He put a student on a paper when a student didn't do the experiment for it? Let me tell you, it happens in academic research every day, it could be formally called misconduct, but also it could be called being nice and helping the student to graduate with a better publication list. The only other allegation is that he heavily helped other people reproduce the data and then claimed that hey reproduced it. Yes, it is fishy, but, come on, does it rise to a real misconduct standard? Maybe he just was nice and helped hem a lot wih the experiment, and when they offered to put him on the paper he declined. Misconduct is when you falsify the data, like the Koreans did with the stem cells or like Jan-Hendrick Schon did. That IS misconduct.
The allegations against this guy read very prosecutorial, and some of them are a cruel joke. Give me a break, since when republishing already published data in a review paper construes misconduct? The headline on Slashdot is misleading and it makes it look like this guy lied to the scientific community. His experiments may be wrong or misinterpreted, but they don't rise to the proper standards of misconduct.
Now, why am I defending people who do fishy science? Because people by their nature make mistakes and it is important to separate mistakes from real fraud. if we start criminalizing mistakes or lapse of judgment, which is what seems to be happening with this case, then we loose the opportunity to deal harshly with the real misconduct, and we give people a huge disincentive to publish controversial findings. It is hard to get controversial research funded or published as it is now, so please, don't make it harder, and let the prosecutors concentrate on real cheats.
P.S. I have nothing to do with cold fusion research, or this guy, or Purdue for that matter.
In fact, there is no copyright in data (that is, in the facts); actually, using data published by others is a hallmark of scientific progress. That's why they published the data in the first place. If he had claimed the data as his own it would be scientific misconduct; if he failed to attribute the data to its authors it would be scientific misconduct. But there is no way for him to break copyright laws by publishing facts that were generated by others. In fact, even if he used the author's actual graphs and tables (which may be copyrighted), it is not so obvious that he actually broke copyright laws -- scientific use (with attribution) may very well come under the defense of fair use. We are seeing here the results of the propaganda campaign to extend copyright beyond all bounds.
anyone can see "evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles" but only in absolute vacuum, 0 degreesK, and zero gravity..
Obligatory Image Macro
The historical baggage of science has been that individuals or small groups did things others thought impossible, and derided them for.
Maybe physical persecution was more rare and more in the middle ages, and maybe the majority of less published scientific advancement is rather done by a larger group doing incremental research, but the contribution of individuals at least can't be denied.
In my view people making very improbable claims (cold fusion, perpetuum mobiles etc) should therefore well be viewed with a lot of caution, and especially warnings being given to those who might spend money on them, but actual trial by jury and punishment should be reserved for the most extreme and wilful cases when there is zero doubt whatsoever. If it ever happened that someone was found guilty of scientific misconduct by a peer panel, and their claims were later proven to be correct, it would hurt science for decades.
Fine lad's - let's apply the same level of scrutiny to the technical papers of Taleyarkhan's detractors -
I'm certain with enough scrutiny we can find *something*. Just like they did to Taleyarkhan.
Someone (or corporation) wants sonofusion discredited badly - just like cold fusion.
If the Arab populace on the street was not rabid, then they would not have caused the sheiks to desire US presence. If the sheiks had not desired US presence, 9/11 would never have happened. Curse the Arab street.
If God had not placed oil in the middle east, He would not have caused the US to need to be there. Curse God.
If the US population in the 1920s had not refrained from teaching their children to have fewer children, then they would not have caused a baby boom, which caused the US to need oil. Curse the US population of the 1920s.
If Muhammed Atta's dad had given him chocolate when he was a kid rather than a spanking, Muhammed Atta's dad would not have caused him to desire to listen to extreme religious rhetoric, which caused him to make 9/11 happen. Curse Muhammed Atta's dad for causing 9/11 to happen.
'Tis a funny game, causal constructions. Chomsky is especially a fan, as are many others. But also a game that can quickly turn violent.
Causality isn't the only place you can have rhetorical fun. Racialist concepts is also one.
Who does Osama bin Laden mean when he says "us"? Naturally, he means either Arabs - the Arab populace, the Arab man, the Arab race, the Arab Unity, the Arab Peoples of the World - or he means All Muslims - the United Muslim Faith, the Muslim Ummah, the Global Muslims, the Muslim Group.
A small fun can be had by comparing this with the standards that apply in Europe. If someone in Denmark had argued, "they are attacking us, the White Race, our unified group, the White Peoples of the world, in Serbia", he would have been punished for it, because a different standard and a different set of rules applies to him than what applies to Middle Easterners. But that's just a small fun, and a pretty obvious and uninspired one.
The bigger fun is to use the same concepts flexibly yourself. For example, I can define my membership of the Global Christian group. I can then define a Global Muslim group. I can then refer to the treatment of Christians in Indonesia. Suddenly it is justified for me to take a circular titanium saw to the kneecaps of Pakistanis that have emigrated to Brazil, and a blowtorch to their faces. And all because of the flexibility of racialist constructs.
I really want to see one of these fusion processes work. It would make a radical change in our society, by removing any reason for the US government to care what happens in the middle east.
Unfortunately, wanting something doesn't make it real
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Buzz off. I did not give you permission to post here.
I don't get it. Why do you use additional accounts to create the illusion that another person is contributing the to conversation? And wtf does Microsoft have to do with this? Why even bring it up?
Is this a rhetorical question?
If you look up "Bubble Fusion" on Wikipedia, you'll see that there have been replications. Perhaps not convincing enough replications to change people's minds, but there does seem to be something interesting enough going on with the collapsing bubbles to warrant further investigation. I'm concerned that everyone who makes a claim that could revolutionize energy production finds themselves facing attempts to destroy their reputations. What kind of environment is that to perform science in? If you follow the cold fusion research, you know that while cold fusion has not proved practical (it can be replicated, but not reliably), there is obviously some phenomenon at the heart of it that is certainly worth looking into. Pons and Fleishman reported a real phenomenon that - while it might never work out as an energy source - is nevertheless an aspect of nature that deserves study. However, it appears that whenever any natural phenomenon that could potentially make oil and coal obsolete, that science and anyone interested in it becomes a target. As badly as we need to get off of oil, people trying to find alternatives should be rewarded, not attacked.
Mutilating reputation of a scientist as a way of earning living is an act I consider no less repulsive then an actual act of physical mutilation. This is nothing new. Fleisher and Pons were scientifically speaking mutilated in broad daylight by Tawnsend. May be Taleyarkhan is 100% worse it is described. I would rather read a report on attempted repro, may be I will get only 10% of it, I am not a physicist. But there are key points that indicate what is found, and what is missing compare to experiment people trying to reproduce. And usually one can understand what is actually going on. And in the case of Fleisher and Pons there was actually a paper trail, which is so vivid. If you just read it they were mutilated with pompous words while not a single attempt was done to reproduce their results. And those who claimed to try to do so were merely biding time. The paper trail vividly presents absence of any try to reproduce levels of loads, appropriate treatment of materials, and blatant lack of accurately gathered data points. If anything we can discuss extremely poor track record of people criticizing this area of research.
Strikes me as odd that one one has tried to implement a plasma wakefield accelerator in a configuration that would fuse hydrogen.
All rites reversed 2010
At least he remembered to switch accounts this time.
I'm not disputing whether the US has "blood on its hands". But being perfectly innocent does *not* protect you from things like 9/11, or worse (see Sudan). In fact, the bullies of the world prefer helpless victims to ones that might fight back. If you are strong, you can either be a bully, or you can use your strength to protect those weaker than you from bullies. Of course, then there are complications like the guy you are protecting being lazy and not taking basic realistic steps for self-defense.
As a super power, the US is going to have a huge effect on other nations, intentional or not. The question to ask is, are we going to be a bully, or a watchman on the wall (or just retreat to our resource consuming paneled house and ignore the riff raff)?
This seems like the typical gut reaction of any society who doesn't understand a new theory or technology. I can't count or list how many different discoveries have had this same reaction by both the scientific community and the public. Galileo comes to mind. It is likely that only after this guys death will they really discover what his work meant. Sounds like some serious penis envy in the scientific world.
This is exactly what is wrong with our world.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
The fact that no one has been able to replicate the work is not scientific misconduct, and the article says so flat out. The two cases of scientific misconduct that the panel found were that he published a paper under a student's name when that student was not involved in the work whatsoever, and he stated in a scientific publication that his work had been independently verified when it had only been verified by teams working directly with him, which the panel did not consider to be independent.
So basically, he was found guilty of exaggerating the independence of work that he assisted with. No evidence was found to support the claim that he intentionally and fraudulently falsified data. A scientific misdemeanor not a felony. Of course the summary and discussion will all focus on what people think he did rather than what the panel actually found.
I don't hate twitter, I just think he's a dick. Which is a shame, because he sometimes makes really good posts - but I never mod these up, because he's a dick and deserves the karma hell he exists in. I've read slashdot long enough to know the 5 main accounts he uses. And that none of the duplicate accounts ever deny being twitter.
Is this a rhetorical question?
Is it me, or does everyone that seems to make some progress involving cold fusion is accused of faking results and scientific misconduct? Is this kind of behaviour normal?
You do realize he wrote that AC post, right?
BTW, he has 12 accounts, not five.
.
This was my first thought.
Nothing of substance - if your objective is a compelling argument for room temperature fusion - has evolved from this line of research.
Holy crap dude, really? What do you do that gives you this much free time?
It doesn't matter whether attribution was there or not -- or whether in this case a fair use defense would be successful. The point is that copyright law is complicated, and a panel of academics set up to judge issues of academic misconduct is not qualified to make the statement "this guy broke copyright laws". Whether his use was fair or not (even without attribution) is a tricky issue of law on which there surely are disagreements. Non-lawyers should not be saying that this guy definitely broke copyright laws, the same way that lawyers should not be saying that his experiments definitely defied the laws of physics.
He can put that on his resume and get a job with all the other pseudo-scientists who work for the Government then.
You can run a car on tap water. You 'just' need to electrolyse the water into its component gasses and then burn them in the combustion chambers. You can even collect the exhaust steam and condense it back into the water again.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Wait - I've seen this one before, it's a bad Keanu Reeves movie called Chain Reaction, where they get a type of fusion system working (iirc was fusion), but is sabotaged because it would cause the world economy to collapse as oil wouldn't be needed...
Summary: of course it's a false claim - Keanu Reeves is supposed to do that!
That would be a perpetual motion machine. It takes more energy to electrolyze the water than you get back burning the component gasses, so you need another power input somewhere - in which case your car isn't running on water, it's running on the other input.
...is an example of "scientific misconduct" masquerading as mass hysteria.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Whoosh!
Also,how would that be perpetual motion? I never claimed that the electrolysis would be powered by the burning gases. The burning gases power the car and the recovered water can be turned into the gases. You need a power input to run the whole show, hence the quotes around the word just.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
the findings this guy was found guilty of are not terribly terrible. putting a student's name on a paper even though he didn't do the work? and stuff gets published all the time which doesn't stand up to attempts to replicate it. anybody old enough to remember the famous experiments where planaria could "learn" by being fed ground up planaria who had learned something? haven't seen much reference to those lately? that said, his research does seem to be a crock.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
If the guy is being dragged through the mud about Fusion it must work because the evil governments are trying to suppress it.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Some second-rank labs reproduced the results, but the best ones couldn't find anything.
Maybe?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Of course I do.
What's ironic about his use of multiple accounts to shill his own posts and create the illusion that many people share his views is that it's directly analogous to the behaviour of the company he professes so much hate for: Microsoft. I think most people would agree that the quality of Windows and Internet Explorer do not explain their massive presence in the market. Through use of hard-nosed business practices (most/all perfectly legal) Microsoft exploited customers to push what they wanted to push - their software.
Twitter's unethical practices push what he wants to push - his POV. He;s certainly entitled to share his POV; it's his manipulation of the system which loses him most respect and authority.
Is this a rhetorical question?