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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!
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?
CR-39 is a very common detection method. It is by no means unusual. The article does make it seem that way, but that is not the case. It is just a passive detector and is fairly cheap. The plastic is typically etched after exposure and analysis is usually automated with some software that "reads" the tracks.
According to the journal article:
Advantages of CR-39 for ICF experiments include its insensitivity to electromagnetic noise; its resistance to mechanical damage; and its relative insensitivity to electrons, X-rays, and gamma-rays.
So they chose it because it would give more reliable data, less prone to interference.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
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.
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.
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,... ;-)