Slashdot Mirror
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 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
...We already know exactly how the plants do it...
I would not use the word exactly, because, for one thing, we have not duplicated this process. The advantage plants have is that they already exist, and are available all over the earth in a wide variety of configurations. They also a self reproduce repair themselves.
Whenever we burn fossil fuels, we are actually using stored solar energy. This means, that before the photosynthesis process took hold, all the carbon in every ounce of fossil fuel burned so far, as well as everything yet left underground, must have been the atmosphere. Except for nuclear fission, all energy mankind has used and is still using today originated in the sun.
The majority of scientific opinion today is that the energy of the sun is derived from thermonuclear fusion. There is however newer evidence that this may not be the case. The idea that the sun is a gigantic ball of plasma and gas dates back to Galileo in the 16th century.
Only in the past decade have we had access to technology that could verify or falsify Galileoís critical assumption that nothing solid exists beneath the photosphere, the deepest layer of the sun that he could see through his relatively primitive telescope. The evidence from the YOHKOH, TRACE and SOHO satellite programs, combined with spectral analysis compiled by the SERTS program, provides very compelling evidence to suggest that the sun has a solid, electrically conductive ferrite surface that sits beneath the visible photosphere, the layer of the sun that Galileo first observed.
Their conclusion of all this may be it is that we really don't know for sure what powers the sun, any more than Galileo did.
All theory is gray