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Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion?
Haffner quotes physorg which says "Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W....when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20C water into dry steam at about 101C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31."
Call me when it's repeatable in more than 2 other labs please.
Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism. They say their paper was rejected because they lack a theory for how the reaction works. According to a press release in Google translate, the scientists say they cannot explain how the cold fusion is triggered, “but the presence of copper and the release of energy are witnesses.”
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
...is that they don't understand why it works, just that their magic box makes more energy than they put in.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Also, the site on which this report was published is owned by the authors.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/24/italian-scientists-claim-cold-fusion-breakthrough/?test=faces
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Heh it's from Bologna. Where are the baloney jokes?
"Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism."
Everything about this seems like a scam.
They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.
Assuming the device actually works, of course.
Those guys fell from the fraud tree and hit every single branch on the way down:
- Created their own, "serious sounding" journal for publication
- Do not disclose the actual device they claim to have been running
- Do not allow independent observation of the experiment
- Experiment is an open system (making it SO easy to fake)
- Making totally implausible claims that would be too much even if it DID work.
Not only have they yet to prove they did any kind of fusion, they also would not produce energy with the process they claim to do even if they were doing it (trans-iron fusion is not exothermic).
And the really stupid thing is that there will be tons of "sceptics" that have no fucking clue about science that will eat up their claims just because they are "anti-established science". Wankers.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
More out than in = no
Use a lighter for a split second on a piece of paper, then turn it off. Bam. More out than you put in.
Don't we hear a claim like this every few years, just have to it turn out to be false?
The truth is out there! I saw them do this in Russia in an old Val Kilmer/Elisabeth Shue movie about how the cold fusion problem was solved.
It was romantic^n.
Home of The Suki Series
I remember (vaguely) some similar claim being made in Utah back in the 1980's (or was 1990s? I forget).
Anyrate, it was hailed with a big amount of hoopla... until no one else could replicate the results. Then the questions came, and the original scientists couldn't provide a single answer.
Last I checked, Mr. Newton still has the last laugh. There was a bit of 'cold fusion' research awhile back that involved chasing bubble cavitation as a source of energy, but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.
Now if a third party can replicate the results, then maybe it's worth looking into, but until then, I think it can be safely filed under "yeah, right - now pull the other one".
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Finally someone figured out a way to synthesize copper, so people can stop stealing it from the plumbing of abandoned buildings in Detroit.
The question is how to get rid of all that extra waste energy it releases... Maybe we can shunt it into space somehow?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Did they weigh the copper wires to the electrodes before and after?
More out than in = no
It's called rest energy...and they're certainly not getting out more than they put in.
;)
That said, I'm more than a wee bit skeptical that this works. But if it does...well, I'm gonna go long in nickel and short the copper market
Io, per esempio, il benvenuto ai nostri signori fusion italiana
They later found that a stopwatch placed inside the box ran for about 1300 times longer than the time elapsed outside the box.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Fusion is the Duke Nukem Forever of the physics community.
What's your reasoning? Hydrogen is energy-packed so it should be exothermic. Anyway it's easy to find out. I chose the most stable compatible isotopes:
mass(H-1) + mass(Ni-62) - mass(Cu-63) =
1.00782503207 + 61.9283451 - 62.9295975 = 0.0065726
mass(H-1) + mass(Ni-64) - mass(Cu-65) =
1.00782503207 + 63.9279660 - 64.9277895 = 0.0080015
The left side is heavier than the right side, so the reaction is exothermic.
If the mass of the hydrogen plus nickel atoms is more than the mass of the resulting copper, the fusion will release energy. Let's check some values (source: Wikipedia).
So start with Ni-58 (the most abundant), mass 57.9353429 amu.
Add hydrogen: 1.00794 amu.
Total: 58.943283 amu.
Get Cu-59, mass 58.9394980 amu.
And you just lost 0.003785 amu - mass which has become energy. That's how you get the exothermic fusion.
The problem here is that Cu-59 is unstable with a half-life of just 81 seconds; pretty hard to detect. Though skimming through their research paper I found that they say that the decay results in other isotopes of copper, or even decaying back into nickel. Anyway if this fusion takes place, there will be copper left, and energy is set to be released.
Now whether this whole reaction takes place, that's for other researchers to figure out - "all" they have to do is "just" try to reproduce the results, which may not be easy. It seems something happens, and it may be interesting to figure out what it is. The amounts of energy they claim to have produced are significant, too much to be simply systemic errors. But what is going on - well that's nothing I can speculate on from here.
More out than in = no
If they're really starting a fusion reaction, then it's totally plausible. For a practical demonstration, go outside right now and look at that bright thing in the sky.
All the other cold fusion schemes turned out to be bogus, and this one probably will, too, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen.
Cu-59, IIRC, produces about 5MeV per decay. Thats MORE then the energy of fusion you calculated. And at 81S half-life, with enough power the boil a significant amount of water, the reactor would be a complete hot-zone, radioactively speaking.
You should see the Cerenkov radiation of all those gammas in the watertank...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"More out than in" is actually not a bad definition of an exothermic reaction. Of course, you're ignoring the whole "converting energy from one form to another" aspect.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Er, I live in Vancouver, BC you insensitive clod. What is this strange bright thing in the sky you are talking about?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Correct. Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility, like perpetual motion - it can, in princible, be done. So far though, no scientist or engineer has worked out how to do it. The field is plagued with both deliberate frauds and overeager misinterpretations of results, and so far very little in the way of success.
It hardly matters how it works. It only matters that is does work. Smarter people can then go about figuring out how it works. Let these people make the investment in a factory to build these machines. The DoE can buy one can test it. If it takes nickel and hydrogen and energy and makes copper and 31*energy, then we can all retire or join the United Federation of Planets. Otherwise we are just out a few thousand dollars; money that otherwise would have been spent to kill brown people for Jesus in a foreign land. We are all better off no matter what how it turns out!
but if they are getting more power out than they are putting in, does it really matter if it is truly a fusion reaction or just a complex chemical one? especially if the byproducts of the reaction are not hazardous.
...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.
That market is too highly regulated. Now if they start squirting out refined aluminum for less than what other companies pay for their electric bill... Also "free energy" means infinite ammonium based fertilizers, watch that market too.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's his point. You're getting out more energy than you're putting in electricity in this reaction, but it's combining nuclei into ones at a lower energy level, so it's not magic energy from nothing any more than setting fire to paper is.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fortunately, they say that they'll be shipping commercial devices within three months
Yep. The first delivery is already booked for April 1st.
Paid Q&A/Research
Bologna invented universities before sausages.
From WP:
"The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars" in Latin countries such as France. The term was coined by the Italian University of Bologna, which, with a traditional founding date of 1088, is considered the first university."
The University of Bologna is the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088, and one of the few good universities left in Italy, specializing in engineering, history and medicine.
However, from what I understand these people are not part of any research group at the University; one of them, Focardi, is just a (now often absent) professor of physics there. He was also a member of a research group in Siena which also claimed they had had a "breakthrough" 15 years ago; and they claimed then that commercial exploitation was 6 months away...
The other "businessman" involved was previously convicted for (unrelated) fraud. To me, it sounds like yet another scam.
-- Let's go Viridian.
until no one else could replicate the results. ... but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.
This is simply not true. There are many scientists who were able to get similar results -- Navy researchers got a paper published in Naturwissenschaften in 2007, and reported further significant results in 2009 .
As a matter of fact, the American Chemical Society hosted a 2-day conference on the subject at their 239th meeting last year in San Francisco.
What happened is that to avoid the seemingly near-religious 'skepticism' displayed yourself and others, the actual scientists working on the subject had to refer to their results as "anomalous heat" and refer to the field as "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (LENR) to avoid controversy.
So while you are busy deciding if anyone is replicating the results or if the field is worth looking into, a great deal of serious scientific effort has gone into the field for the last 20 years.
Of course cold fusion was to be expected any time soon now Duke Nukem Forever will be released...
let's be honest. Einstein gave us a very nice theory, but (so far) nobody can fit his theory with quantum physics. and quantum physics works. and unless you fit your gravity theory with quantum physics, you can't claim to truly understand gravity.
new sig
You're correct about the Cerenkov radiation, but for the wrong reason. Cerenkov radiation is the result of a particle which is traveling faster than whatever speed a light impulse is traveling through the medium. Cu-59 decays via positron emission, which means a positron is emitted which will travel 99%+ c. The positron will quickly annihilate into a gamma ray. The positron is what will cause the Cerenkov radiation, not the gamma ray.
Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.
IANAP
If one really wanted to keep the technology secret, but still make a profit from it, one could just create an oil "refinery" that makes and sells gasoline. Yes, it might have incoming pipes from an upstream source, but those pipes never have been turned on. The oil is paid for but the upstream seller has never bothered to deliver on it. In reality, the gasoline being sold from the "refinery" would be CO2 pulled out of the air, dumped through a ton of energy expensive chemical processes, and then dumped in the semis ready to haul to the local 7-11 pump. It doesn't matter how expensive energy-wise the reactions would be.
Result: A decent profit, nobody ever the wiser (except the oil seller upstream who has to keep it secret why they sell oil to someone, but in reality they have not even opened the pipeline to deliver a gallon), and definitely nobody would suspect a cheap energy source. Combine it with the energy source powering up the reactor, and one has a carbon-negative business.
According to this website nickle has a spot price of ~ USD 11.8 per pound and copper has a spot price of ~ USD 4.36 / pound. http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/nickel_historical_large.html http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html So _if_ this works, it is a type of anti-philosopher's stone: converting an expensive metal into a less expensive one.
What about the energy that was stored in the fibers of the paper? It certainly took a lot more energy to grow the trees used in making the paper, hence you are not getting more energy out that you put in.
Um, yeah, you are getting more any than you put in, unless you personally spent the energy to grow the trees instead of, oh I don't know, letting the sun do it!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Dude. Seriously. How can you be so close to a working fiendish scheme and yet so far? It's like Dr Evil has resurfaced on the web...
While your scheme is feasible won't it be more straightforward to open a power station, import gas/coal/whatever, sell your free power and then resell the fuel through a subsidiary?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
If you throw a match into the powder room of a pirate ship, the energy output is far more than your energy input. That's because there's a secondary energy input- the powder. The match works as a catalyst to a reaction, much as I assume the 400 W here would (if it works, which I'm guessing it doesn't, but more because it's simply too good to be true, and the guys have been rejected by publications.)
no scientist or engineer has worked out how to do it.
I have, you get a chip with small channels and voids through which you pass hydrogen. On that chip are pulsed semiconductor lasers that create 'hot' fusion, on a very small scale. Doing it on a microscopic scale makes the energies manageable.
I am currently working on the funding to build a lab and hire some eggheads to implement the trivial details of my genius idea. I have already identified an ideal site for the laboratory inside an extinct volcano.
Its a great investment opportunity. Want to be on board with the first round of funding?
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
It's not more out than in. The fusion reaction produces the big out.
A cold-fusion breakthrough is one where you generate more from the reaction, than it takes to maintain the furnace.
The problem with fusion is that it has taken more power to get to reacting temperatures, than can be produced, and the Italians are claiming that this can be achieved.
I suspect that this is done by siphoning heat from the flames that erupt from Silvio Berlusconi.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
She decides what's hot and what's not.
the one hazardous byproduct: incredulity
Better take some lessons in maniacal laughing, so your volcanic lair doesn't seem out-of-place.
...I just want to point out that the scaled up industrial process must work as well. Getting a full sized reactor running is as important as solving a problem in the lab.
Please get out of the trap of thinking of power as necessarily a multi-billion-dollar centralized utility. For many of the world's current and potential electricity users, a closet-sized user-serviceable generation plant with 3-4 kWh output (whether by solar, hydrogen, fission, or fusion) would be "full sized" for their needs, and also a step up in sustainability and reliability. To be fair, even the regulators, finance, and insurance people fall into this trap as industrial giants like Babcock & Wilcox and Toshiba keep getting railroaded on their advanced micro fission reactors.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
..unlike perpetual motion, cold fusion can be done.
It's probably a bit more accurate to say that cold fusion has not been proven to be impossible
Not so. It is the addition of alpha particles that is endothermic. You can keep going with protons for a bit. They are just not present as an available fuel in the core. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_burning_process
There are no protons available as a fuel in the core, so it is alpha particle fusion that sets the iron limit. You can keep on going for a bit with protons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_burning_process
>>Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.
What problem? It either has such a long halflife that it's barely radioactive, or it's active enough you can extract electricity from it.
The waste problem is a political one.
Professor Levi from UNIBO, that helped settle up the experiment, says that probably there is some new physics that are involved in the experience, and even them have only a theoretical explanation of what really happens inside the machine. The machine itself is under patent, that's why we don't know anything of its insides. Besides from that, at the experience attend (as an example) prof Paolo Capiluppi, member of italian institute of nuclear, director of Physics dept of Bologna, some sort of role at LHC. So we're not talking about some drunk people that pretend to have solved all our energetic problems. The fact that they aren't disclosing data is a shame, for me, but as long as they are researching on their own without money from university and stuff, they can do whatever they want with their work. Think we need an English version of videos for people to get less skeptical about this.
Actually, Einstein figured it out. It is the warping of space caused by an object.
Great. What's space?
We use it to mean a coordinating medium (everything is within "space" and so, all being contained in the same area, they interact instead of passing through each other). Why is that warpable? Does the space have an equivalent of mass or energy (volume perhaps) that would have to be conserved, and if so, where is it going? If it doesn't have any such inertial equivalent, why does space only warp in the presence of mass--if physically speaking, there is no incentive not to warp?
He gave us an idea, but it's not an explanation until certain key questions are answered.
I don't know of any chemical reactions that yield copper from nickel...
I call BS.
For every nickel atom converted to copper, you need about 4 additional neutrons to make stable copper (they state there is no left over radioactivity). Where are those coming from? Those are probably harder to get than shoving the single proton into the nucleus, which is hard enough!
Not plausible. But repeatable results by independent investigators is always plausible. And they don't have that either.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
neither do i, but i don't think we have enough info to determine if it is chemical, nuclear, or a fake. (maybe their paper which i haven't read would give some information) maybe there is a fitting somewhere that could be the source of copper and they neglected to account for it...
the problem is their paper was rejected because they themselves didn't have a proper theory as to how it worked, which is a bit troubling. and so we won't really know what is going on or if it is real until someone else can repeat their experiment and then people start analyzing what is going on.
Here's the same video with English subtitles
Click on CC mark to show subtitles.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Seems to me this is the entire point of all modern power systems, getting access to the stored potential energy in various stuff. Whether that "stuff" is dead organic matter (coal, wood, oil), light, atoms, or chemicals. In all cases we are getting more out of it than we put into it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, the energy comes from somewhere, but we don't have to produce it, just get at it. The problem we're having is that there's a limited quantity of most of the easiest and most popular "stuff" that contains a lot of potential energy. We're running out (whatever your opinion on *when* we'll run out I don't think anyone is delusional enough to think there is infinite oil in the ground). Things like nuclear (fusion or fission), solar, geothermal, wind... All of them are harder, and some much less efficient than burning stuff, but they have the advantage of being effectively infinite (yes, they are finite too, but for practical purposes we could never use all of them up).
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Be sure and read the directions carefully. The mirrors need to be polished daily. Smoke modules need to be replaced every three months, and the snake oil should not be allowed to fall below 3/4 full.
And never, ever, feed it after midnight.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
TFA mentions an accusation of tax fraud.
Cold fusion can be done, easily and reliably: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
What we don't have is any way to do it that isn't ludicrously expensive, burning through catalyst almost as fast as fuel.
"Cold" fusion means using a low-energy input to make the fusion happen - of course the result of the fusion is output heat. Muon-catalyzed cold fusion is quite straightforward, but takes more input power (to make the muons) than you get output power. If you had some trick to prevent muon decay, cold fusion would be pretty easy (of course, there would be far more cool things you could do if you knew the trick of altering subatomic particle decay rates).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? The extra proton comes from the hydrogen. One less water proton -> one proton heavier isotope. Although that does raise the question as to what source nickel isotope(s) they're using, since the most abundant nickel isotope is Ni-58, and Cu-59 only has a half-life of 81.5 seconds. The only persistent copper would come from Ni-62 (3.5%) and Ni-64 (0.9%). Most of the nickel would form transient copper isotopes which would then spawn decay chains (I seem to have lost my nucleonica account at the moment, or I'd check to see the net result).
In general: I'm not about to declare "Cold Fusion Is Impossible!", but I think these people are a long way from passing the burden of proof.
"I can get my own men." "Yeah, you better go check your traps."
* Buy a bunch of nickle
* Short a bunch of copper
* Announce you have a device that makes electricity and copper from Nickle
* Sell your shares
* Make energy by burning stacks of $100 bills
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Heh it's from Bologna. Where are the baloney jokes?
Cold-Cut Fusion?
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt = [citation required]
No, they're describing fusion, period. Traditional hot fusion is a particular subset of that, in which the method to combine the nuclei (not atoms) involves heating them up to great temperatures in a maxwellian plasma, so that the nuclei with the highest energies (far higher than the average energy of the plasma) can fuse. There are also some less pursued hot fusion methods involving non-maxwellian plasmas.
Cold fusion is fusion in which there is no bulk plasma at all (although in some approaches it is theorized to exist at extremely small scales). More often, the idea is that you use an alternative method to overcome or reduce the coulomb barrier. For example, one hypothesized method of cold fusion is that under certain conditions, electrons are "dressed" with extra mass by quasiparticles (such as phonons), leading them to act like muons and catalyze fusion events by dramatically reducing the covalent bond length.
Just because there is no definitive explanation for a phenomenon doesn't mean that it does not exist. We still don't have a complete, definitive explanation for high temperature superconductivity, but there's no doubt that it exists -- and there are a number of competing theories. There are lots of competing theories for how cold fusion would work which cannot be ruled out at this time -- many of them no more exotic than our theories of high temperature superconductivity (or even the accepted mechanism behind low-temperature superconductivity). At the same time, the evidence is subject to many different interpretations. The DOE's viewpoint on the subject is that research should continue to explain the anomalies, but no major projects should be launched.
"I can get my own men." "Yeah, you better go check your traps."
The german consumer protection portal esowatch has already written an article about them highlighting the dubious history of Mr. Rossi and linking several articles that debunk the claims. http://esowatch.com/ge/index.php?title=Focardi-Rossi-Energiekatalysator
Most certainly no. If someone thinks I'm wrong, then the remedy is obvious. Have the machine reviewed by a lot of people. If Stephen Hawking, Phil Plait, and Paris Hilton all say it works, then I'll believe it too.
Does "Its Hot" mean "it works?"
It's the strange lighted ball that appears for much of the first week of August almost always coinciding with the Abbotsford Air Show.
Not when I went there! :) Probably 1970-71 or thereabouts. It rained most of the time, overcast 1000 feet all the time. A good part of the crowd huddled under the wings of a C-5A during much of the show, to watch the proceedings while keeping more-or-less dry. Many of the flight demos were curtailed in various ways, since the crowd couldn't see anything above 1000 ft.
The big event was supposed to be low-speed and 'high-speed' fly-by's of the SR-71 Blackbird. It did in fact show up. They announced it was leaving San Francisco, and it arrived something like 40 minutes later - not bad for 800 miles or so. The low speed fly-by was slow enough that the thing had to go by at a fairly steep angle of attack. It was thunderous. The 'high-speed' fly-by (still at parking lot speed compared to its actual capability) culminated by going vertical in front of the stand. This was extremely loud and really impressive, except that it disappeared into the clouds almost immediately.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Call me when it's repeatable in more than 2 other labs please.
Unlikely any time soon (even assuming it works just fine).
They applied for a patent. The Italian patent office demanded that they provide a scientific theory to support their claimed mechanism before they'd consider granting the patent (rather than just patenting the design and claims).
To get scientists to reproduce it in the lab and (if it works) come up with a plausible theory, they'd have to disclose all the engineering (including all the ingredients of the "secret sauce"), without patent protection. And the scientists will not be interested unless they can in turn publish them with their own results. So if it does work the whole world will be racing them to market with their own design but without their development and research costs.
So (they say) they're keeping their process a trade secret - to the point of shutting it down when one of the observing scientists, in violation of the agreement, switched his gamma detector from count to energy-histogram mode (which would have given him details on what was going on inside the device.)
So maybe they're crooks. Or maybe they're just some engineers who got it to work repeatably and practically without a full and correct model of the physics. But don't hold your breath waiting for somebody in a couple labs to come out with a replication. That seems unlikely unless/until some physicists reinvent it.
And with the dominant paradigm, after the original cold fusion flap, being that "there's nothing behind the curtain", efforts on reproduction will likely be few and underfunded unless/until they DO ship a working product.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm immediately skeptical because he says no hydrogen is consumed in the process. Is the hydrogen a catalyst only? And if he found a way to produce fusion with no secondary radiation production, this would be all over the news all over the world.
The equation must balance and this just doesn't seem plausible.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I posted to this to Andrea Rossi's website, and I'll post it again here in case that site ever goes down (with some added links and some typos fixed):
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
January 22nd, 2011 at 11:33 AM
Andrea-
When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book "Midas World". It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called "The Midas Plague", originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: "... in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the 'poor' are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the 'rich' can live lives of simplicity." In that imaginary world, only the "rich" get to have small homes, to eat plain food, and to work a lot both to help other people and to tend their small gardens; the "poor" are condemned to living in mansions, to eating vast amounts of fancy food, to being entertained endlessly, and they are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves -- all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy. :-)
In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor's diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work"). But instead that fictional world ended up with "a snowmobile in every driveway ... and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand".
The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind's social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.
I'd recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I'm not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan's hard sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.
In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as people want to do them; people may otherwise be prevented from doing those things well by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thi
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You're welcome. Thanks for the comment. I've been refining the message. I hope the meme continues to propagate and others adapt it for local circumstances and their own unique style. James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear is one big source of that meme for me. Marcine Quenzer was influential too: :-)
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
As was Doug Lisle:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
And others (Gerry Pournelle to an extent with his "Survival with Style" essay, lots of other writers with a bit here and there, including Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"). So I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants.
BTW, if you like Edgar Cayce, how do you feel about Herbert Shelton, Joel Fuhrman, and Blue Zones?
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.bluezones.com/
The Flexner Report (by Abraham Flexner, in conjunction with the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations) is where things really started to go wrong with US medicine, as someone with success doing hands-on stuff with K-12 education tried to apply it to medicine where it was less appropriate since prevention, infrastructure, and complex psychology/spiritual issues are more important for wellness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
Ironically, now we have hands-on treatment focused medicine, and abstraction-oriented K-12, mostly just the opposite of how it should be...
More on that from one perspective:
http://www.sntp.net/fda/piper_griffin.htm
"In the meantime, while doctors are forced to spend hundreds of hours studying the names and actions of all kinds of man-made drugs, they are lucky if they receive even a portion of a single course on basic nutrition. Many have none at all. The result is that the average doctor's wife or secretary knows more about practical nutrition than he does."
More on how medical and other research has gone wrong in the USA (another post I made to this story):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1964112&cid=34989572
If this cold fusion thing does work out (or even if it does not), these issues may help explain why it (as well as alternative medicine) encountered so much resistance. Still, I hope things may have improved somewhat from the days of Ignaz Semmelweis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.