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The Physics of Why Cold Fusion Isn't Real
StartsWithABang writes If you can reach the fabled "breakeven point" of nuclear fusion, you'll have opened up an entire new source of clean, reliable, safe, renewable and abundant energy. You will change the world. At present, fusion is one of those things we can make happen through a variety of methods, but — unless you're the Sun — we don't have a way to ignite and sustain that reaction without needing to input more energy than we can extract in a usable fashion from the fusion that occurs. One alternative approach to the norm is, rather than try and up the energy released in a sustained, hot fusion reaction, to instead lower the energy inputted, and try to make fusion happen under "cold" conditions. If you listen in the right (wrong?) places, you'll hear periodic reports that cold fusion is happening, even though those reports have always crumbled under scrutiny. Here's why, most likely, they always will.
Actually astrology was a science. It was quite successful at predicting eclipses, and determining when to plant which crop. Also at scheduling religious festivals.
Perhaps, though, instead of saying it was a science I should say it was engineering, but it did have (several different) theoretical backstories, so science is probably better. It caused the Babylonians considerable grief when they discovered that the goddess of love was also the god of war. So it even made reliable predictions...that people were loath to accept.
Now none of this has much to do with what you see in daily newspapers, or even what professional astrologists predict. but that is really "cargo cult astrology", it copies the outward shape of the real thing, but it's missing the genuine internals. It derives more from Roman fascination with various means of prognostication than from actual living astrology.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you patent it, and the government considers it valuable enough, they can just take the patent (and classify it so that you can't reveal it).
If you patent it, and you don't have a stable of lawyers and an indefinitely large war chest, then a major corporation can just take it, rephrase the patent, and patent it themselves.
If it's a trade secret, and you can produce a working plant (wouldn't need to be more than a pilot plant) then you can sell the secret to someone who can afford to get into patent battles.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Interesting, so you think a gas compound which forms a liquid is comparable to a metal compound which forms as a polymorphous solid? See, generally metals are considered to form alloys. Some alloys have special names like brass, bronze and steel. Aluminum oxide is about 52% aluminum. Malleable Iron is about 95% Iron. Now brass, is anywhere from 50% to 90% copper. An interesting thing is an alloy called Aluminum brass, where aluminum is used in the brass. The interesting thing is, it is used where corrosion resistant brass is needed, like at sea. It seems it forms a protective coating on the brass which is aluminum oxide and is transparent and self-healing. It is something that also forms on the surface of aluminum metal and that is why aluminum doesn't rust like iron. Oh, dear. That means that aluminum metal isn't aluminum either by your definition, because it is actually an alloy of aluminum oxide. At least on the surface. Maybe you should have gone beyond high school chemistry and studied materials science engineering in college, like I did.
The latest report on Rossi's device actually contains clear evidence that the experimental set-up has been tampered with. On page 14 it says:
"Measurements performed during the dummy run with the PCE and ammeter clamps allowed us to measure an average current, for each of the three C_1 cables, of I_1 = 19.7A, and, for each C_2 cable, a current of I_1/2 = I_2 = 9.85 A."
Here, I_1 and I_2 are the line and phase currents of a set of delta-connected resistive load inside the "reactor". The ratio between these currents should therefore be sqrt(3) (approximately 1.73). Since the measured ratio is 2, the curcuit diagram cannot correspond to reality. The reactor probably contains two separate sets of star-connected resistors instead. By feeding current to the second set out of phase with the first, like I suggested in a previous slashdot comment, the current clamps are fooled into giving a too low measurement.
This document (in Swedish) explains it all in detail.
The fact that these measurements were performed and reported also implies that the authors of the report were not part of the fraud. Rossi simply fooled them all.