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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.
1. Powered Flight
2. Bending Light
3. Traveling Greater than 300mph
4. Transparent Aluminum
5. Artificial Diamonds
All of these "Feats" of human ingenuity were once thought to be impossible by the physics standards of the day.
Physics and our understanding of it, continues to evolve every moment we live.
To say the words "It Cannot Be Done" after seeing all we have done already... Is kind of foolish.
We will learn how to accomplish this feat, or one very similar that accomplishes the same goal, Eventually...
That, is the power of Consciousness My Friends.
All hail the thinking, reasoning, Problem Solving, Human Consciousness!
Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements.
There is an excellent theory to explain the "excess heat" measurements: the people doing the research are some mixture of dishonest and incompetent. This theory also has the nice features that:
a) it is consistent with the spectacularly incompetent work we see whenever anyone attempts to carefully document an experiment, such as the one on the Rossi device we have seen recently
b) it is consistent with the litany of results that require well-established phenomenology to be turned off, for example the need to magically suppress neutrons and gamma rays that would otherwise be produced in any nuclear reaction or its aftermath, regardless of its origin.
After a quarter of a century with no reproducible results and no "positive" experiments that do not require the magical suppression of other laws of physics to account for the lack of radiation, no other theory is close to as plausible as this one.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It's not so much a natural law as the fact that palladium especially tends to soak up hydrogen. People, including, apparently, some scientists, seem to ignore that there's a lot of chemical energy in hydrogen, and so keep falling for cold fusion. Pretty much every cold fusion experiment has eventually been shown to involve palladium's natural sponginess towards hydrogen to act as a natural chemical battery, if you will.