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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.
Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.
The first condition hasn't happened once much less hundreds of times, hence there is no "crime" for which the American Physical Society need acknowledge.
> Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.
Where's the proof that it happened even once? Similar assertions have been made by proponents of perpetual motion machines.
Heavier than air flight is impossible
No scientist ever said that since it is quite self-evidently untrue. Birds are heavier than air and they fly. If someone actually said it, they were retarded.
Apparently, you don't fully understand the difference between physics and engineering. Technological barriers can often be overcome with advances in materials and design. Declaring them to be insurmountable has been shown to be foolish, many times. Barriers imposed by the properties of matter, on the other hand, are much more durable. Declaring them to be insurmountable is rarely a mistake.
"Here's why, most likely, they always will."
That's a pretty busted up analogy. The closest I can come to fixing it for you is if you provide me with a series of instructions for painting the Mona Lisa but following them produces a picture of American Gothic every time anybody tries to follow them, it is unlikely that you used those instructions to create the Mona Lisa.
Things aren't that simple. The early transistors weren't reproducible...not predictably. And nobody knew why. It eventually turned out that they could be poisoned by trace amount of materials below the amounts chemically detectable at the time. IIRC it took over a decade of very careful work to figure that our, or it may just have been to figure out how to prevent the poisoning. And that had significant money behind it. (I think it was pre-breakup AT&T.)
Now I haven't seen anything convincing that indicates that cold fusion will work, but I also haven't heard of any significant investigation. Merely various spot checks by people who say either they can't get it to work or "I'll sell you this black box.". I'm dubious about its actually working, but not convinced, and don't see any reason that anyone else is convinced...either way.
To me this seems like "this is a low probability proposal which has some claimed marginal evidence and no reasonable theoretical justification and no convincing evidence". Remember just how difficult it is to actually prove that something is false, where you don't know care what mechanism that might be causing it. Were I investing, I don't think I'd invest in it, because even though the potential payoff is astronomical, the probability is extremely small, and the difficulty in reaching a definite negative proof is extreme. And other people have already failed to reach a positive proof. And only a positive proof has a reasonable payoff. (Buying Lockheed stock seems like a better use of the money.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You will never reach the denialists with facts and logic.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
guess this needs to be said again
"Apparently, you don't fully understand the difference between physics and engineering. Technological barriers can often be overcome with advances in materials and design. Declaring them to be insurmountable has been shown to be foolish, many times. Barriers imposed by the properties of matter, on the other hand, are much more durable. Declaring them to be insurmountable is rarely a mistake"
He said heavier than air flying machines were not possible. A difference. He knew good and well that birds flew. So he was not at all arguing that physics prevented flight, it was just his knowledge of mechanics that prevented him from imagining that a machine could.
You two can argue semantics all day long. Doesn't matter one bit. He was WRONG :D
We do shit over him when he was being a ding bat. He also backed up some of his claims with science. We applaud him for those.
Now I haven't seen anything convincing that indicates that cold fusion will work, but I also haven't heard of any significant investigation.
Cold fusion has been heavily investigated. There is one striking thing about all of the supposed "positive" results: they are physically impossible.
Suppose I said I had invented a car that ran on water, and that my claimed proof was that I had driven this car along the streets of a distant city. I give a talk on my results and show a map of the route.
A person in the audience interrupts and says, "Hey, I know that city! That's my home town! The route you've shown is impossible: you say you drove it between 4:30 and 5:30 PM on Tuesday June the 6th, which is in the middle of rush-hour, and you've shown yourself going the wrong way on half-a-dozen one-way streets! Why didn't you collide with anything?"
I reply: "This car runs on water! Weren't you listening? It doesn't collide with other cars, because it is propelled by water!"
You would be correct to suspect that you need not take my claims very seriously after that, and this kind of exchange is typical of cold fusion talks.
I saw Pons give a talk at Caltech, where one of my colleagues interrupted with the question, "Where are the neutrons? You say you don't see any radiation because all the energy comes out in high-energy alpha particles, but if you make alpha particles move with that energy through the palladium lattice you will get neutrons? Where are they?"
Pons answered: "New physics."
But alpha particles don't care what made them move, and more than a car cares what fuel it runs on. You can't just invoke "new physics" and say that the lack of neutrons or gamma rays doesn't matter, because you aren't really invoking new physics, you are throwing out old physics: you are saying that high energy alphas don't produce neutrons, even though that would require all of nuclear physics to be wrong.
So while I agree that new phenomena are often difficult to reproduce and we should be cautious about dismissing them on that basis, cold fusion, after twenty-five years of testing, has proven to be:
a) impossible to reproduce (there is no reliably reproducible experimental setup)
and
b) what experiments that have claimed positive results have always (to the best of my knowledge) required almost all of nuclear physics to be wrong to explain the absence of radiation.
I cannot think of any other phenomenon that eventually proved to exist that shares anything like this history of failure. Maybe Lister's work on sterile technique in surgery, which had a decade or two of rough handling? But even it was frequently reproducible, even if not universally so, and it didn't contradict any well-established, empirically founded, reasonably comprehensive theories of the time.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Only after you've isolated all the contributing factors involved so you can replicate them. So long as there are unknown factors influencing the outcome positive results will appear to happen at random. So long as verifiable transmutation is occasionally occurring *something* is clearly happening, the challenge is to figure out what is different between the experiments that work and the ones that don't. And from what I've heard it seems that certain sub-microscopic imperfections in the host material are likely at least one of the necessary preconditions. And those are damnably hard to replicate intentionally.
The most likely answer is that Rossi is cheating by feeding power into the machine in such a way as to feed more power in than is being reported by the instruments. If you follow some of the links in the attached article, you'll find a wonderful description of how to fool power metering equipment. The researchers could have easily ruled this out using a little subterfuge of their own. Had they built their own custom outlet with a hidden set of power meters placed on the upstream side of the plug, they could have guaranteed an accurate reading, and would have been able to compare that with the "official" reading. A significant mismatch would have proven willful deception on Rossi's part (thus proving the entire thing to be fraud). A match in readings would have verified experimentally that they were not being swindled in this particular respect. It would have been a simple way to gain further insight into Rossis device while allowing him the latitude to believe he is strictly controlling the experiment. (Give him every opportunity to cheat and think he will get away with it, while secretly checking up on his actions).
Sadly, The most likely answer to this riddle is that all of the so called researchers are complicit. They seem to get together regularly and try to figure out ways to make the "experiments" seem more valid while still allowing them to be gamed.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
There is a very good theory known for over two centuries to explain heat meaurements, disimilar conductors in an electrolyte form a galvanic cell. Ascribing that to fusion is junk science. Storm seeks popularity and hooplah, never mind his credentials.
guess this needs to be said again
"Apparently, you don't fully understand the difference between physics and engineering. Technological barriers can often be overcome with advances in materials and design. Declaring them to be insurmountable has been shown to be foolish, many times. Barriers imposed by the properties of matter, on the other hand, are much more durable. Declaring them to be insurmountable is rarely a mistake"
Hmm, yes, let's see. Nowhere in the history of science has any fundamental "property of matter" been found to be completely in error. Nope. Never.
Oh wait...
-- According to Aristotelean physics, each "element" has its fundamental natural place of rest. So the idea that matter would continue in motion forever was impossible. The idea that the Earth could possibly be in motion was ridiculous, since "earth" (the element) was heavy and came to a state of rest. Well, until Newton and Galileo and those folks came up with the idea that inertia allows things to keep moving forever and the entire Earth (and all matter on it) were actually in motion.
-- Phlogiston was a fundamental component of matter that made combustion possible. It was ascribed increasingly bizarre properties (including negative mass) until it was shown to be a myth.
-- Waves can't propagate without a medium -- that's a fundamental property of matter. Light therefore required luminiferous ether to travel through space... until Einstein showed it didn't.
-- Atoms are fundamental indivisible parts of elements, an idea that had been around since the Greeks. Until the electron was discovered. But even then, electrons and other parts of atoms were fundamentally a kind of "plum pudding" mixed in creating solids... until Rutherford showed they were mostly empty space, with a concentrated positive nucleus. But they were immutable, until things like nuclear fission showed they could be changed. And we could go on with the various problems with all the atomic models that assumed to be the fundamental structure of matter, but which were wrong.
-- Matter is made up of particles which are definite things which are in a particular place... until theories of uncertainty and wavelike characteristics showed that things were a lot more complicated and sometimes apparently indeterminate.
-- Etc., etc.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Throughout the history of science, there have been multitudes of assumptions about the fundamental, essential, and immutable "properties of matter" which must be the case. And these theories have often been shown to be incomplete misunderstandings or sometimes utter falsehoods.
I have no idea whether cold fusion will ever be possible. I have no idea what holes or misunderstandings may still be present in our current understanding of the "properties of matter."
But I'm not so stupid as to ignore history and declare that our current understanding of the the laws of physics and fundamental "properties of matter" is so utterly complete that we could declare such a thing impossible for all time.
Given our track record for thinking we've come to a final complete understanding of nature, only to realize we were completely wrong, I'd say it's a pretty egotistical perspective to say that we actually know exactly the "barriers imposed by properties of matter" to a high degree of certainty FOR ALL TIME.
I cannot think of any other phenomenon that eventually proved to exist that shares anything like this history of failure.
That's because such a history of failure is often written out of the history of science -- because those failures aren't generally relevant to our narrative of discoveries in science. Or the "failures" are reinterpreted within a new framework so that they are no longer viewed as "failures" but rather as experiments that demonstrated something else, or which didn't work as expected because they were measuring the wrong thing or weren't conducted under the right conditions, etc.
Just because you don't know of them doesn't mean they don't exist... and aren't actually somewhat common in the history of science.
Take one of the standard elements of the Scientific Revolution, for example: the idea that the Earth is in motion. This required a new model of physics, since Aristotelean physics taught that normal matter came to a state of rest (as observed with all terrestrial matter). The Earth could not possibly be in motion, because what would be driving its motion?
But some astronomers and physicists became convinced that the Earth must be in motion, since the arrangement of the solar system would be much simpler in that case. So they set about trying to prove it. They started searching for stellar parallax. They started doing detailed observations of the stars. They looked for abnormalities in projectile motion (i.e., Coriolis effects). These searches began in the late 1500s and 1600s.
And they didn't find any. FOR CENTURIES.
It turned out that the "fixed stars" were farther away than anyone had imagined, so parallax was a lot smaller than expected. It turned out that Coriolis effects were hard to observe given the accuracy and range of projectiles in the 17th century.
And things that were actually observed seemed to argue AGAINST the Earth being in motion, like the fact that the stars didn't get larger and smaller as the Earth revolved around the sun. Again, we now know this is because the stars are so far away, but at the time it was yet another strong argument against the Earth's motion.
Despite all these objections, a heliocentric theory became dominant by the early 18th century because the math simply was easier -- it wasn't until a century later that most of these anomalies were eventually explained (parallax and Coriolis effects actually observed, etc.).
This is one major example in the history of science, but we tend not to be taught about it this way. It ruins our story of Galileo as a lone scientist raging against idiots in the Church who failed to respond to what they saw. Except the reality is that the Church had scientists too, and they had a LOT of scientific observations that contradicted the heliocentric model (or at least couldn't differentiate between it and the geocentric or Tychonic ones). And not just the Church -- keen non-religious scientific observers often weren't sure about the matter until Newton eventually came along and put the model on a solid mathematical footing. (By the way, I'm NOT at all defending the Church's trial of Galileo here -- but the argument here is about suppression of free speech, not what Galileo could actually prove according to the science of the time.)
Anyhow, off the top of my head, I can think of at least a half dozen other major episodes in the history of science where a new idea that contradicted current understanding of fundamental physical laws took a long time to actually be proven. But again, we tend not to talk about such episodes. We generally focus on the people who finally made the experiments that proved something, rather than multitude of failed experiments that seemed to preserve the status quo because of various flaws in their construction.
To the topic at hand: I have no idea whether cold fusion will ever be possible. If our current understanding of physics is correct, I agree with you that it seems unlikely. But humanity also has a poor track record of thinking that we know exactly how nature works only to have our models disproven or shown to be very incomplete.
Actually astrology was a science
I am going to disagree with this one. Here's how. There has been two aspects to studying the stars historically. One is the study of the movement of celestial bodies and predicting various aspects of their positions etc learned from this studying. The second one is the interpretation of those movements and how they related to events on earth. The former we now call astronomy, the latter we call astrology. Historically they were typically performed by the same person, but they were still two vastly different disciplines requiring very different tools and foundations.
The fact that the two were performed by the same person, and even at the time was called the same, doesn't mean they were the same things. The studying of the movement of celestial bodies was, and is a science. The predictions of earthly events based on these positions wasn't and isn't.
My main concern with all these cold fusion guys is how they're usually unwilling to respond to requests for more information on the experimental setups. For me that just shouts "fraud", since they have absolutely no reason to keep it under the wraps: you're never going to get it past a patent clerk anyway and if you had something that produced enough power you'd be heading for the market.
We can unequivocally, repeatedly, and successfully demonstrate evolution in software as well. It's a done deal. Period. No doubt whatsoever that evolution is a real process, and works just as advertised.
Anyone who denies the process works is either mired in denial or ignorance, no exceptions whatsoever.
As for how it applies to reproduction and the changes that occur from generation to generation ("Evolution"), once you actually know how evolution the process works, it is a lot harder to explain why it would not apply to such biological/temporal sequencing, than it is to explain how it does.
Add that to the fact that we have no other competing theory with anywhere near the repeated validation of the process for how things managed to get as they are, and it's clear that it is definitely time to apply a reasonable level of confidence to Evolution, cap E.
The (very) sad thing is how deeply a lack of basic scientific understanding pervades the citizens. Not so they could do science, just so they could learn science is a tool that actually works to directly advance our understanding of the reality around us, unlike superstition and myth, which only serve to obfuscate and delay understanding.
Our K-12 schools are terrible.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No, he'll compare the original and the dupe looking for anomalies between them, starting with the phase of the moon and working down.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."