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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."
If it's perpetual motion, why does it need power? :)
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.
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.
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That excerpt makes it sound more like Hagelstein has an interesting background in pumping government dollars into far-fetched technologies that never bear fruit.
Breakfast served all day!
A perpetual motion machine can have a power source as long as it's a perpetual power source ;)
So it's more like alchemy than science.
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In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what. There have been anomalous neutrons detected many times by many different researchers using this basic setup, in this case they even appear to be high energy.
I agree completely with this. I think that they really should pursue research into what is going on here. It might be something useful. But what they need to do is stop labeling it as cold fusion until they actually know what is going on. As soon as people see that nowadays, it seems as if they just completely disregard the research as nonsense, regardless of how good it is.
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.
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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.
One is testable, the other not.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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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.