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20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success
New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. "Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. 'In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect,' says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. 'Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice ... you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,' he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of 'low-energy nuclear reactions,' and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion."
There, fixed that for ya.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
It's better than string theory.
As long as I can use this new cold fusion device to power my perpetual motion machine, I'm good.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
I wonder why every time one of these "breakthroughs" in cold fusion occurs the PI cannot seem to recreate the results after he/she gets tenure at some big name university?
Strange how that happens isn't it?
Second time lucky... right? right?!?!
As long as I can use this new cold fusion device to power my perpetual motion machine, I'm good.
Agreed. Although IANAP, TANSTAAFL.
Although, I do understand what they're trying to achieve on a simple level (fusion at sustainable temperature with a net return of energy, albeit small at first) and wish them the best of luck. My uninformed gut thinks this is a pipe dream but they will most likely discover something.
Also, why is it that everyone jumps to announcements when it would be more sensible to call up another lab somewhere else and ask them to run the experiment and verify your results independently? Another question is why are they using the label of "cold fusion" when it seems largely they are observing things that are hard to explain so they must be cold fusion at work? These two things seem imprudent to me. Interesting though, very interesting.
My work here is dung.
I know one of the guys who helped debunk the thing way back when, and there's so much disgust for the original guys that it seems to be a foregone conclusion that cold fusion can never work. For example, in the current article, the tone seems to be that people really want to prove these guys wrong, which to me seems too much of an almost religious zeal. Worse, a lot of very prominent scientists have very vocally declared the thing impossible, and it will be a very hard thing for a lot of them to even consider the possibility that they were wrong. I think a lot of people made a false logical step from "these guys haven't proven their case for cold fusion" to "cold fusion can't work".
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
It's not clear at this point that it *is* cold fusion, but the result is interesting enough that cold fusion seems to be a good possibility. Certainly it warrants investigation by other researchers who can keep an open mind. It would be funny if the biggest scientific joke of the last half of the 20th century ended up being the biggest discovery of the 21st.
Just when we thought that Orbo's outstanding success wouldn't be topped this century!
I wonder why they used, from what I can understand of the article, an unusual detection device. Did they try numerous other ones, until they came up with one that "worked"? I'd think that if an actual fusion reaction was occurring, it would produce enough radiation for noramal detection devices to pick it up.
I suspect that this will play out like the original mess.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Peter Hagelstein has an interesting background in hi-visibility technology. In the 1980s he was at the heart of trying to create an X-ray laser pumped by nukes that was to be a key component of the original Reagan Star Wars missile shield. See the writeup in the book Star Warriors.
You guys are repeating the propaganda of the high energy fusion guys, who don't want it to be seen as 'real science'.
It is, and DOE's review team was careful to discuss all of your criticisms. Cold Fusion is real, and it is science, and it is not quite repeatable yet from lab to lab, tho getting better.
Anyone who says it isn't nuclear has to explain a large amount of energy, far beyond what chemistry can explain.
New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again
Sorry, but anyone can try to achieve cold fusion, just as you can try to build a perpetual motion machine. Call me when you've actually achieved something.
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
There are lots of examples of people building tabletop fusors, but they all have one thing in common; they produce less energy than they consume. Cold fusion isn't the interesting bit, energy-positive fusion is.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now Pamela Mosier-Boss and colleagues...
Now, if all of you remember from college, ALL of the physical effects were named after folks with obscure last names. There was never the Jones effect, or the Wang principle, it was always something the like "Heisenberg Principle" or something. Now, we'll have the Mosier-Boss effect to study. See? If she was named Jones, then it would definitely have been a fake because physical and chemical phenomena are never named after common surnames.
QED.
Are they seriously basing all their conclusions on the presence of one neutron track? One during three weeks? I think someone needs to do an experiment with few of those cells, some with normal water to compare the results before everyone jumps to the conclusion it is fusion.
Thin ice means REALLY cold fusion
Can somebody explain all the discussion and discrepancies here? After all, that kind of effect does not seem to require too much effort to reproduce, compared with hot fusion or particle physics.
So -- is there some disagreement about whether the effect is there and measurable or is the disagreement just about how to explain the effect? Is there some agreement on what the energy source *could* be? Obviously if there is an effect but you reject the hypothesis that cold fusion is the cause, something else must cause the effect -- and some material must chemically react or similar.
It is a bit weird in my opinion that there is still so much disagreement about this after 20 years.
Ah, sweet recursivity.
Posterity, my posterior.
Nuclear laptop battery explosions? And that wasn't in the Slashdot summary? You're slipping!
... it was just the conference that's in Utah. THe authors are based in San Diego. Am I expecting too much from Slashdot?
Ok, which one of you clowns added the !adobe tag there? I'm laughing my ass off.
adobe who?
I remember a real idiot 20 years ago -- Jeremy Rifkin, if my memory hasn't failed me completely -- claiming that Cold Fusion would be the very worst thing possible. How would cheap clean abundant energy be the worst thing possible? Because it would allow for further population increases.
I expect nothing less this time around if there's even a glimmer of a spark of something like that happening here again.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
was under the impression that announcing cold fusion was more likely to destroy your career than launch it to new heights
Ahem, Ahem... could I have everyone's attention. I would like to announce that today, March 23 2009, I have discovered evidence for cold fusion on the popular web blog called "Slashdot" ...oh yeah, also...I think I'm coming down with a "cold", so in effect, it's cold fusion.
I infused my HTTP "GET" requests with Palladium and every 772 requests I receive a "Nothing to see here, move along"... this reply is the web version of the Neutrino particle and when combine with the Deuterium that seems to be leaking out from my chair...this has caused my cellphone and iPod to FUSE.
So it's more like alchemy than science.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Seriously, anyone who skips this "news" completely will have missed nothing. I have not read the FA, I have not read the /. story summary or any of the 8 comments thus far. There's literally nothing to see here except BS.
So, in other words, dogma trumps the scientific method? I'm pretty skeptical of cold fusion, but that's no reason to dismiss the results without bothering to read them.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
A lot of kooky stuff seems to come out of Utah, it might be worth looking at environmental causes.
Damn text based communication! I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not! How am I supposed to know whether to laugh or get angry?!
I read something a while back that absolutely seemed like it had to be wrong. Someone casually mentioned how plants transmute elements into different elements naturally. As far as I am aware, there are only two ways elements transmute in nature:
1.a) Inside a normal star, fusing merrily from hydrogen on up to iron
2.b) Inside super-nova, still a matter of stellar fusion but this is how we get anything heavier than lead.
3. Radioactive decay, heavier elements decaying into stabler lighter elements, no star required.
Disregarding the claims of this article for the moment, the above is true and leaves nothing out, right?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
If you're into this sort of thing and other scientific anomalies check out 13 Things That Don't Make Sense. Looks at a variety of scientific topics that scientists can't explain or are deeply divided on. Good book.
http://www.amazon.com/Things-That-Dont-Make-Sense/dp/0385520689
They're really skating around the weakness of their evidence. They are bound to be given the cold shoulder from the scientific community. They may need to cool their heels for a bit.
Getting past breakeven is likely to require first discovering and understanding a fusion mechanism that makes it possible, followed by a LOT of engineering to make it happen.
The successful path will likely start with something that produces a handfull of reactions - just enough to leave an identifiable signature - just as it did with nuclear fission bombs and reactors.
Unlike nitroglycerine, nuclear fission bombs didn't start with a lab explosion. Simalarly, nuclear fission power plants didn't start with a lab fire or a flask boilover (though there WERE a few such incidents along the way during the manufacturing-engineering phase, once they knew what they were doing but had some issues with knowing how to avoid doing it accidentally). Don't expect novel-mechanism nuclear fusion power plants to be any different.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hey, look who Dr. Mosier-Boss authored a paper with!
According to the article, the team is based at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California. The announcement was made at a conference in Utah.
Got a link?
I've seen a documentary on these guys. In the documentary they had several, highly sceptical, well respected physicists review their work - as in a couple of days, not weeks and weeks of peer review. All of them walked away saying stuff like, "I don't know what is going on but they are observing something. It may be a new phenomenon or an existing, well understood reaction created in an unconventional manner. I've not seen enough to say it is cold fusion - but more study is clearly indicated."
The people who have performed critical peer reviews have been equally stymied. Given the stigma associated with cold-fusion no one wants to stamp it accordingly. Just the same, just about everyone who critically reviews the available data and experiments walk away unable to explain the experiment. Furthermore, the more vocal saying its impossible and assuring everyone they have not created cold fusion have never even seen the data or talked with the group.
So to summarize:
o Everyone is seeing an effect which can easily be characterized as "cold fusion"-like.
o No one is willing to call it "cold fusion" because of the stigma. Saying it is cold fusion can be a career ending position - even if they are right - because of the stigma.
o All of the data thus far validates this is not fraud and clearly indicates something worthwhile is being observed in recreatable experiments.
o The people saying its impossible look like idiots because they refuse to consider the possibility, participate in a peer review, or even attempt to better understand and/or learn more about the experiment.
It may not be cold fusion but thus far, it smells and tastes like it. Regardless of what you call it, more research is clearly indicated.
cold fusion is nothing but fiction. they should stop wasting time and energy on it (pun intended.)
Besides I think a ZPM will bring us far more satisfying results, or even the OMEGA particle research will be more fruitful.
I spent the better part of a 17 year Navy career testing and working with atomic weapons and follow on technology. In 1941 the notion of an atomic bomb was science fiction. It took a war to make the thing work. I can't to this day discuss many of the things I know but when I left the service in 1963 I was inspecting little light 1 kiloton tank killers and rumors had an atomic rifle grenade... Lord only knows how far things have come in 40 plus years. My experience has been that is you can envision something it has a basis in fact. Can you even imagine how devastating cold fusion would be to the oil industry? I wouldn't be a bit surprised to discover that cold fusion is already a reality. It - like many other related things - never see the light of day for many reasons. Developing Fat Man and Little Boy took a war. So folks - don't write it off as a pipe dream/
Not necessarily. Back in the day people had no idea how beer was made (and it wasn't always directly repeatable) but somehow the fermenting process started and beer was formed. Only later did scientists realize it was free flying yeast that got into the vats of mash that were out in the open.
I'm not saying this new CF is real, but looking for the yeast is how discoveries are made.
Just when I get the hang of Cold Fusion V1 they come out with Cold Fusion V2. And of course it's not backwards compatible.
Here you go.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
whoosh
We have Steorn, and Blacklight Power!!
It seems the universe is plump with energy and needs only a little squeeze to send it gushing forth.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Give a child great power, and you get ruin.
One is testable, the other not.
Deleted
Somethingis going on, but no one has an adequate grasp of what it is. It is a mystery, but a well-documented one.
I wish /. readers would spend some time researching their prejudices before attempting to spread them around.
I have followed this story since the original Utah experiment (I was a radio journalist at the time) and I live near Stanford U, in Palo Alto, CA, where, several years after the first announcement, a team of researchers set up a similar experiment, which, after a time, set off a fire in the lab to which the Palo Alto Fire Department was one of the responders.
Pons and Fleishman's discovery was intitiated by an unexplained fire in their lab. It was the cold fusion experiment, stored, forgotten, in a closet.
Strangely, reports of the event in the official PA city logs were found to be missing.
Not many serious researchers doubt there is a reaction happening which releases neutrons. There are "theories" to explain the effect away, but there is no refutation, any more, of the results.
Let it so be noted, /.ers.
That is true. It is also true that many folks have continued working on it in various forms ever since the original "debacle".
I couldn't find the site I stumbled across a while back, but it had dozens of papers and conference transcripts of the people working on it still.
"Something" weird is going on. Whether it turns out to be useful remains to be seen.
TFA says the paper was presented at a conference in Utah. Researchers are from San Diego.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Everything you just described is a variant on the broken window fallacy.
Producing an inferior product with excessive resources is basically never the right choice economically.
As for the population explosion, I don't see any reason to believe cheap energy causes people to have more babies. If anything, cheap, clean energy raises the worldwide level of wealth, and wealthier nations have lower birth rates.
Even if the answer they get from their experiments is 'NO' it's still useful science. Any investigation at the edges of our understanding is automaticly worthwhile. The lay-person does not get this.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Aspects of it are interesting enough for this list to exist. I would assume that there is enough repeatability for the below well respected institutes to take it seriously.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/fusionaries.html
MIT, DOE, Navy, lots of people are still researching it. They are just careful to not cry wolf anymore.
Lack of lab-to-lab reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean it's a hoax, although it can be a warning. I'd be a little more concerned about reproducibility on the original apparatus, but even that isn't a deal-breaker.
I recall sitting in a seminar on ultrafast laser pulses during my undergrad days and hearing about how some of the top labs in the world couldn't reproduce a particular piece of work. Eventually they discovered that some of the optical elements in the original test setup had a particular property that made it work (negative dispersion I think, but I don't remember for sure). No one, including the original researchers, realised it was important until everyone else's attempts failed and they started really looking at what the differences were between their test setups.
IANAP, but something that bothers me, did they do controls with pure water or acetone for example? Could the results seen in their detector be the result of something like sololuminescence rather than genuine fusion products?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Its science fiction OR
Using much more obtainable engineering infrastructure, it is much cheaper and therefore, you will kill my HOT fusion budget and my lifes work.
Mmmmm...I keep hearing throughout the years that it is not practicle but Universities continue to make progress to the point it is now meassurable output, and standard model guys on the side of HOT fusion are scrambling to come up with OTHER ways to explain it...while, of course, knowing very little about it.
Too me it sounds like the same people in favor of carbon taxes, as long as of course, they get the lucrative contracts to build the multi TRILLION dollar bunkers to store the worlds carbon emissions underground...
Sorry, I just find the scientific community keeps chasing this and it is because it is all poppy cock.
Sounds...
ODD?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Yeah, mid-2013, after the enormity of the GOP's second defeat by Obama starts to sink in, you guys are gonna be so schadenfreudelcious to watch I'll almost feel bad for you.
Almost.
It seems to be more of a manufactured coincidence than synchronicity that Obama announces major push for new funding for science and alternative power sources and this snake oil pops up again. I wish I was a self deluded fourth rate physicist with a sociopathic business partner - there are so many ignorant people out there to scam. I'm sure a low cost, high temperature super-conductor is soon to be announced by a scientist associated with some of the executives from AIG. Hey, it's more plausible than the $10 laptop computer project (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/indian-planning.html) the Indian government is burning the tax payers' money on.
If it isn't repeatable, it isn't science.
Anybody who says it is nuclear has to explain a large amount of energy, far beyond what physics, nuclear science, or chemistry can explain.
Fission bombs and fission reactor both started with something cold fusion notably lacks - physics and a sound theoretical basis.
To put it another way - it sounds like you are invoking the "they laughed at Christopher Columbus" defense, to which I reply "they laughed at Bozo the Clown too".
If it smells like chicken, and tastes like chicken then yes, it could very-well BE chicken... but it could also just be grilled frog.
Karma: NaN
I've seen a whole bunch of ignorance here with /. readers about what Cold Fusion actually can bring.
Yeah, I suppose if the fundamental mechanism is discovered and perfected, it could used for some semi-useful devices. I guess the best example to compare this to is super-conduction that happens in materials at very cold temperatures. Even "high temperature super-conductors" are pretty damn cold for most practical application like a superconducting CPU in a home PC. Don't expect to see one soon.
This is an interesting physical science phenomena and certainly deserves scientific research. Something is happening with cold fusion, and it certainly is producing some of the by-products (including neutron emission) of nuclear fusion.
The oil companies have nothing to fear either, as just with the example of super-conductors (especially when they were first discovered), this doesn't produce quantities of energy large enough to be useful for practical energy production. If you want a "Mr. Fusion" device, it is likely to be more along the lines of an Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC... aka the "Farnsworth-Hurch Fusor") or the Polywell approaches.
The only practical application that I've heard that would be useful to operate a cold fusion reactor for is to have a neutron source that you can turn on and off with a standard household light switch. There certainly are some people interested in something like that, but the market is pretty small and already filled by commercial IEC devices anyway. This will very likely never amount to anything other than a whole bunch of scientific papers and an interesting Wikipedia article. That is even assuming it is "proven" to be a scientifically valid phenomena.
> If it isn't repeatable, it isn't science.
Let me know when you can repeat the formation of star, or the universe. Science only uses repeatability as sufficient, not necessary condition. Just because you can't repeat something, doesn't mean it isn't worth studying.
Skip Cold Fusion for Cold Cave Diving. The topic may not be as hot, but it is as cool!
http://www.physorg.com/news10682.html
Not necessarily. Back in the day people had no idea how beer was made (and it wasn't always directly repeatable) but somehow the fermenting process started and beer was formed. Only later did scientists realize it was free flying yeast that got into the vats of mash that were out in the open.
Free flying? Ever notice that most of the beer and bread makers of old were women?
"Question 1: Prove why Cold Fusion is impossible."
See also Outer Limits episode, "Final Exam"
Any scientist saying it's impossible is making just as big an assumption as the other way around, and should be suspect. The sad fact is, scientists are people, too (well, mostly) and are as full of bias as anyone else.
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SELECT * FROM UserAccounts whe...
Ahh screw it!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Cold Fusion is real, and it is science, and it is not quite repeatable yet from lab to lab, tho getting better.
So it's more like alchemy than science.
It just means we don't understand all the factors involved in repeating it. Semiconductor-based electronics have been around almost as long as vacuum tubes, but back in the pre-forties they didn't have a good grasp of, say, what made one galena crystal or copper-oxide rectifier work and another not. It took a while before the technology was up to making pure enough germanium or silicon to produce reliable components (and even now, there's something of an art to getting a fab up and running).
It may be that cold fusion effects are dependent on the microcrystalline structure of the e.g. palladium, but without knowing exactly how to reproduce that (or what exactly to reproduce), lab results will differ from one lab to another. It's not at all uncommon for a lab attempting to "duplicate" a result to actually follow some different steps, depending on what equipment and materials they have handy, especially if nobody quite realizes yet how critical some of those steps might be.
-- Alastair
Every experiment needs a control.
So, how many more of these tracks did the experimental cell produce than the de-energized control cell? Otherwise, its just tracks from cosmic rays or something similar.
Have gnu, will travel.
Twenty Years After Cold Fusion Debut, A Second Website Was Coded With It!
Jason-Palmer.com
So it's more like alchemy than science.
Yes, because hot fusion has been repeated over and over in experiments. Don't worry, it's only 20 years away...
how long until
If it smells like chicken, and tastes like chicken then yes, it could very-well BE chicken... but it could also just be grilled frog.
And that's exactly the point. Even if it is not chicken (cold fusion) it (frog) is still edible. Should further research result in a useful product, ultimately who cares if it is frog or chicken - so long as the meal is free.
Did anyone even read down to the alternate explanation in the article. Namely that an electron may have fused with a proton to form a high energy neutron. This to me is even more intriguing than the possibility of Cold Fusion of Deuterium. It would produce energies in between those available from Chemical vs Nuclear reactions, but might be possible in "reactors" no more difficult to construct than a cathode ray tube. Imagine a car that ran off the heat produced by converting copper into zinc with an electron beam...and got 500 miles/kilogram of copper.
Last paragraph in TFA:
"Electrons and protons don't have trouble attracting," Widom told New Scientist, and he says the explanation conforms to the Standard Model of particle physics. He speculates that this theory could explain instances of exploding laptop batteries, and could be harnessed as an energy source â" something Larsen's company hopes to commercialise.
Imagine, having your home powered by exploding laptop batteries! Thank you Mr. Larsen!
He's just following a long line of scientific investigators like the guys who refused to even look through Galileo's telescope.
-- Alastair
Am I the only one that first thought about ColdFusion the language??
Best part is there is a darksucker born every minute.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Pons and Fleischmann only got attacked after the DOE talked about diverting funding away from hot fusion research. Funny that.
The hilarious thing is that the same people who will talk all day long about how scientists must as a matter of career survival spend huge amounts of time writing grant proposals, will deny up and down that they could ever become territorial about said grant money.
Watch, someone will reply to this post and call it a "conspiracy theory" (as though that were somehow synonymous with "automatically false").
Um... what's their control?
How many such pits does one expect to find in the plastic merely from background radiation in their lab? Radiation is everywhere. Finding some random, minor neutron flux is hardly proof of anything.
So it's more like alchemy than science.
It's more like that some people don't now jack shit about chemistry. Leave open jar with D2O for 15 minutes and you'll have a lot more of H2O in it than you had before. Than you can run experiments forever having no result at all and make conclusion that cold fusion is impossible..
P&F made press conference to inform about anomalous excess heat, Helium and neutrons in their DO2 electrolytic cell with Palladium cathode. It looked like fusion, but they did not know if it is fusion so they decided to inform science audience. They ended ripped apart by lobbyists.
So cold fusion is clearly powered by scientific lab coats. I'll accept that Nobel Prize now.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Cold Fusion is real
I believe the proper trademark is "ColdFusion," but we know what you mean.
What?
How else was everyone in the room bathed with and killed by suddenly liberated neutrons.
Oh wait, they weren't?
Along with cold fusion, we can throw intelligent design in there as well,... ;-)
Plus, look at the bright side: If enough Slashdotters catch on to this, it'll dilute the term "Sy Fy" enough and ruin the trademark that the network is seeking,... ;-)
For experiments of this scale, yes - repeatability is everything. If you can't repeat it, you can't study it.
We don't need to repeat the formation of a star, the equations and basic physics that define what happens are unchanging. We don't need to repeat the creation of the universe, as we can (with suitable instruments) measure the unchanging evidence of what happened in the past any time we please.
Apples and oranges.
Peter Hagelstein has been on the cold fusion bandwagon for decades. He has a stunning ability to pick and choose evidence from different studies and assemble them into a glowing report, even though the distinct studies measure different effects, and only the least convincing of the studies actually link the effects together. The result has been years of mish-mosh from the man, appearing in enough places like Analog magazine that some educated people who don't know much about physics take him seriously.
It's sad, really. His enthusiasm and claims actually interfere with real research because other people expect so much more than the cold fusion research people can actually produce.
I've certainly seen this in the hardware and software world, and the physical experimental world is rife with it. Subtle software distinctions, such as which Perl or MySQL or kernel you are using, have profound effects on system performance. And for compilers, simply switching optimization levels or the order of operations can trigger or avoid memory overflows in incredibly difficult ways to debug.
it sounds like you are invoking the "they laughed at Christopher Columbus" defense
Nope. I'm just saying that the "they haven't come up with a power plant yet" attack is unreasonable. (And could also be applied to the hot fusion research. B-) )
= = = =
I'd love to see "cold" fusion work - neutronic or otherwise. But (except for muon-catalyzed fusion) I don't see any theoretical underpinning yet. So I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
IMHO if this phenomenon is real it's at the "galena/point-contact crystal set" stage: Where a single instance of a functional device can be created using a microscopic "found" configuration on an irregular mass of material. It would be waiting for the same class of theoretical breakthrough that lead from modeling the low-power diode behavior to fabrication of diodes, the invention of first the bipolar transistor then a series of other devices, and the fabrication techniques of large-scale power devices and integrated circuitry.
If this power is really fusion and is coming from a tiny, accidentally-formed, surface structure or small volume structure that does some condensed-matter quantum-mechanical hack to catalyze fusion, understanding it can quickly lead to fabrication of devices with the rare accident systematically repeated over their whole surface or through their whole volume, by well-developed small-scale fabrication technologies [, (This would potentially be followed by a number of other condensed-matter-catalyzed nuclear processes playing off the same new understanding physical principles.)
Then you could end up with something like a chip you can dunk in heavy water or boric acid solution, apply a little excitation power and control signaling, and generate kilowatts of heat and steam, directly-converted electricity, or (perhaps modulated) floods of alpha particles at well-defined energies. Your power densities might be limited only by the temperature where the structure melts down.
So let's see whether it's real and whether someone can come up with a theoretical breakthrough corresponding to Shockley's _Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors_, or technical breakthroughs like the junction transistor, the Bardeen/Brattain point contact transistor, etc.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Instead of going to the press and calling it "cold fusion", why don't they tell everybody what's so out of the ordinary about whatever phenomenon they observed and then try to work out what really happened experimentally? Was there a chemical reaction? No? Were there some subatomic particles or gamma rays that were released? No? Is it an instrument malfunction? Pretty simple if they really want to know the truth.
... on whether Pons & Fleischmann were outright charlatans or they just accidentally deceived themselves. I mean, do we know whether they were deliberately snake oil salesmen, or did they just let their enthusiasm get the better of them?
Since the nuclear age deuterium will have a little bit of tritium in it. I once saw a 18 wheeler gas trailer of deuterium gas with radioactive markings. Yes thats a lot of D2. It was burned in big chemical laser. Use your imagination for the oxidizer. Hint-- it's next to oxygen.
So the other team would be... Ruby on Rails?
I though ColdFusion was only about 14 years old. In any case, it's dead. Those damn CFC's are probably to blame. Everybody knows that CFC's are bad.
I, for one, would mod you a (-1, Eeeeeeew!) if I could.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Pretty sure it has. It's just not been made self-sustaining with positive energy output.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Could the same quantum mechanics that exist for fusion in stars exist here?
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To be fair, just because, for once in human history, useful technology was theoretically conceived of before it was discovered, doesn't at all mean all future discoveries will follow the same path. Einstein could well have been an exception humanity will never see again.
There certainly isn't a long history of every useful effect/material/etc. being theorized of, before it was discovered. There are far too many instances which run contrary to that model.
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So they were able to produce liquid gold, therefore beer production was alchemy and the GP is correct.
I don't therefore I'm not.
No. read TFA. The are doing some good work here, trying to figure out why a particular effect is occurring so advancing our understanding of the process and making it repeatable. Science has had to do this more than once.
And even if it is alchemy, the development of gun powder started when a chinese alchemist mixed honey and sulpher and heated them over a fire in an attempt to make gold. That "experiment which should never be repeated" led to gun powder which had flow on effects for modern chemistry and calculus, just to name two fields.
Deriding this work as alchemy does nothing to further the sum of human knowledge.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Had it been 'once in human history', you'd have a point. But Einstein was just the latest in a long line, and reality he was just describing a process already known empirically. Fission bombs and reactors no more need his equations than Watt needed to understand the atomic structure of water to build his steam engines.
But there is a long history of discovering potentially useful effects and then coming up with a theoretical basis to describe them (which is what Einstein did). Cold fusion has a history of not doing so however.
It's experiments that need to be repeatable, not events. This is the crucial distinction. You can devise experiments that give logical inferences about past events. Provided the logic is sound, and the experiment is repeatable so that it can be verified and withstand scientific rigour, you can generate valid scientific knowledge about past events without physically recreating them.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I'm not quite following the parent's intended meaning above I suspect, but a lot of people don't know is that when it came to actually making the bomb they got it right the first time (Trinity). And the second (Hiroshima), and the third (Nagasaki), which was the same technique as the first.
What always astounds me is the speed at which the whole process moved. From Trinity, it took only 21 days to drop Little Boy on Hiroshima, and only 3 more days for Fat Man to fall on Nagasaki. references.
After trinity there weren't more tests. For atomic explosions on earth it was
1) Trinity
2) Hiroshima
3) Nagasaki
A net-positive and self-sustaining fusion experiment has been successfully constructed - it's called a thermonuclear bomb.
Quite cheap, as these things go, and eminently repeatable. Bit unwieldy for power generation, is all.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
There was a time the Idea of Black Holes didnt exists. then that humans could never create such a powerful thing. In steps the LHC.
Humans have a tendency for saying things are impossible but eventually someone can and will pull it off.
I congratulate these guys for their attempts and not letting the masses tell them what cannot be done
He has been trying to prove it works for 20 years without convincing too many people. So I am skeptical right away.
Peter's claim to fame was one designers of the first working Xray laser (powered by nuclear explosion). That impressed many people.
I read Sun in a Bottle a summary of the history both hot and cold fusion research. The describes four cold fusion setups, two which have been reliably reproduced by others, and to which havent. The unsuccessful ones are the Pons & Fleishman fusion batteies and sonoluminescent bubbles. The successful one include a Telsa coil (has become a science fair staple) and one using solid state electronic materials. Unfortunately these only output a tiny fraction of energy compared to the import, so arent power sources. On the other other hand these may be safe neutron source for medical therapies, material science imaging anddrillhole rock evaluation because these neutrons can be turned on and off. Conventional source use radioactive sources which are occasionally lost or stolen and require high-security licenses from the feds.
Hot fusion has it share of scams too according this book. The first was an Argentine entrepeneur who claimed hot fusion success and fleeced General Peron's treasury in the early 1950s.
self sustaining? You mean there's a thermonuclear bomb still going off somewhere after being tested? That's pretty cool! I, for one, would like to buy tickets and some heavily lead lined underpants and go see that.
Let me know when you can repeat the formation of the universe.
Ok, did that for you. Let me know if anything seems different, and I'll try again.
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I was goiung to debunk you, but it turns out you were right. At least, I think... The principle of operation of thermionic diodes was discovered by Frederick Guthrie in 1873.[1] The principle of operation of crystal diodes was discovered in 1874 by the German scientist, Karl Ferdinand Braun.[2].
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So they found three tracks? Wow, so they only need to scale it up by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to get a decent number of neutrons per second.
And oh, they need to improve the efficiency by almost that same factor, so that the energy in is not greater than the energy out.
Otherwise ok.
Which is still only theoretical at best - which is only 1/2 of knowledge.
You can read all the books you want on a topic, but you still won't truly "know" until you do.
> We don't need to repeat the formation of a star, the equations and basic physics that define what happens are unchanging
That's a fallacy due to
a) assumptions, and
b) Science is vastly incomplete;
namely time, time, and time again we see things that we don't expect.
Nice handwaving, as precisely none of those examples have anything to do with what you quoted. Even so, if (when) new discoveries relating to stellar formation are discovered, we rerun the equations and simulations again - and compare them to the abundant evidence that fills the sky. Day and night.
We don't need to form a star to validate the theory.
What I was alluding to was that the fundamental breakthrough that led to the fission bomb LED to it. It wasn't a bomb itself. Nor was it anywhere near breakeven.
The first experiments with fission were single atoms being observed to go pop on demand. This is a far cry from releasing more energy than the apparatus consumed.
Building the bombs required a lot of observation of phenomena and creation of an understanding of them, followed by lots of engineering design and construction.
(Unlike nitroglycerine - which demolished the lab and experimenter (who, fortunately, took good notes). Eventually Nobel engineered/discovered a way to make it safe to handle (soak it in kaolin or the like to create dynamite).)
Cold fusion (presuming it exists beyond muon-catalyzed fusion and has a potential for passing breakeven) is still in the "WTF is going on here?" stage. It will need either a better understanding of the process' physics or another lucky accident before a past-breakeven device is made - or the possibility of one can be evaluated.
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it's not possible to "truly know" anything at all. being present during an event may be advantageous but it certainly doesn't confer any absolute metaphysical certainty about what you perceived.
using the scientific method to physically examine evidence of past phenomena is completely different to reading books about them. You are still "doing", and are thus able to uncover previously unrecorded knowledge.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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For the time it takes to burn through the available fuel, yes, the reaction is self-sustaining.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.