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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I was under the impression that announcing cold fusion was more likely to destroy your career than launch it to new heights. Besides, tenure comes with a much improved budget and more money means better equipment and more thorough experiments. It makes sense that results that were marginal before are shown to be incorrect when more time and effort is invested into them.
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. If you wanted to fake the results of your research, why would you pick a topic that is guaranteed to be either laughed out of the room or scrutinized like no other topic would?
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.
Nuclear laptop battery explosions? And that wasn't in the Slashdot summary? You're slipping!
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."
So it's more like alchemy than science.
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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Here you go.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Maybe they were talking about nuclear power plants.
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One is testable, the other not.
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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.
Which is precisely why the Department of Energy unanimously recommended further study on an individual-case basis for well-designed experiments (Charge Element 3). Which this one would definitely seem to qualify as.
One thing that occurred to me a while back was wondering whether there could be any influence from phonons on the fusion process. Phonons are the virtual particles associated with crystal lattice vibrations that arise due to the wave-particle duality. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me; after all, other particles such as muons can outright catalyze fusion reactions, and phonon effects might play a significant role even there (in the solid state). Yet most of the basic "disproofs" of fusion in the cell act as though there's no lattice at all and only focus on the Dt density (which on its own is way too low for fusion at a relevant rate). I just thought to google for it, and what do you know... others have been considering that very idea and think that it has merit.
I'm also particularly interested in the possibility of surface reactions due to localized quantum effects. Palladium electrodes can form dendtritic palladium hydride spines on their surfaces in some circumstances, and most of the direct evidence of cold-fusion reactions, such as hot spots with associated pitting, occur at microscopic features on the surface of the electrodes. If it were such a surface effect, that could also go a long way toward explaining the inconsistency of results.
Now, this is all the money Niska gave us in advance...
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 smells like chicken, and tastes like chicken then yes, it could very-well BE chicken... but it could also just be grilled frog.
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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.
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?
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
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.
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,... ;-)