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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.
Heavier than air flight is impossible...the world will only ever need 5 computers...no home will ever need a computer...people don't need a computer with more the 16 megabytes of RAM...
Cold fusion is bollocks. Scientist knows this and summarises to create blog entry.
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.
Good luck with that. If anyone ever succeeds in LENR, the only convincing evidence will be a working industrial plant. Nobody in their right mind would release sufficient details to fully replicate before that... this would be a world-changing discovery of incalculable value. Trade secret at all costs.
I've spent years trying to pretend that Coldfusion isn't real, but somehow I keep running into it now and then.
This PSA has been brought to you by the Vulcan Science Directorate.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Argument by assertion doesn't make it with me Karl.
Read the Naturwissenschaften article by Ed Storms to which I linked to justify my claim.
Seastead this.
If it were valid, it would be reproducible.
As I recall, only some of the samples prepared by identical methods displayed superconductivity. Eventually fabrication became reliable, but it took considerable time. Granted, superconductivity is a whole lot easier to measure than excess heat on the scale that some LENR experiments claim to produce.
What does he mean by a "cold fusion period"?
Does he mean a transient reaction in the test set-up that produces the byproducts of fusion, but not long enough to generate useful power? I'm hoping he doesn't mean a period in time when the experiments work, then stop working. That would imply periodic changes in physical laws, which is a much more far-fetched scenario. The idea that some physical constants are not as constant as we think has been proposed, but AFAIK no experiment has indicated that this happens.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's not real science if it's in a journal whose name I can't pronounce.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Trade secret? Hell no. A working implementation needs to be patented. Trade secrets are exactly the wrong solution for protecting a mechanical invention. They're fine for code/algorithms and formulas, but not for anything mechanical.
The right solution is to get as much of the ambiguous detail of one working power plant complete (under the guise of a coal plant or something) and then build in the technology worth protecting immediately upon gaining Patent Pending status. Then, once the plant goes online and produces power successfully, submit evidence alongside the submission of its functionality.
bam, invention protected and secretly implemented all at once.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
> 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.
I disagree.
Anyone with enough braincells to contribute to such an important discovery would inevitably know what an important boon limitless free, clean energy would be to the world.
The weight on their conscious would compel them to leak the information.
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!
Wikipedia on Naturwissenschaften:
Seastead this.
The reproducibility of experiment is a magical belief with no basis in reality. "We have always observed the ability to reproduce an experiment thus experiments will always be reproducible" is a foolish statement.
Sure. But it does have a basis in SCIENCE.
Science makes no claims to describe all of human knowledge. Any good scientist has to admit that the tools provided by science are only capable of addressing a certain subset of questions. That is, questions that are falsifiable, etc. Reproducibility is a key property of subjects that can be addressed by science - one simply cannot use the scientific method to experimentally falsify things that aren't reproducible.
There may be other branches of human reasoning that can address such questions (natural philosophy, etc), but it ain't science. And we are talking about science here.
Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century
Sure, and astrology is a science, homeopathy works and I can do telekinesis.
Obligatory - blame your germanophobic ancestors for that!
Ezekiel 23:20
It could also mean a dependency on time-varying material properties. From what Ive heard one of the things researchers suspect is a necessary precondition is certain imperfections in the host material - impurities, microfractures, etc. Microfractures especially would be expected to vary over time as thermal stresses altered the atomic structure.
Also, is that sig supposed to be a joke? For all intensive purposes I'm focused and forceful, the rest of the time for all intents and purposes I'm pretty laid back.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wikipedia on Naturwissenschaften:
So your best claim for the nuclear physics of cold fusion is a German biology journal?
Well then...
Listen, the condition from your Ramsey quote was a VALID observation of cold fusion. I'm not sure if the claims from a nutty chemist (look him up on google) in a German biology journal really counts to most physicists.
If I were to discover it, I'd sure as hell publish how to do it before I got assassinated or something.
Ezekiel 23:20
Now with even more unreadable medium.com links!
TIL history isnt valid.
Reality proves you wrong, Storms only claims it's possible, he has not demonstrated cold fusion. Almost all nuclear chemists and physicists would agree cold fusion is pretty much like trying to crack a bank vault with a boiled noodle.
"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.
So you're saying getting positive results in cold fusion is an art, not science?
Ah yes, the old "Mr. Tesla invented a way to power cars from atmospheric electricity, but Standard Oil shut him down."
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.
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.
Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements. He does not deny that the experiments he surveys are overwhelming evidence for the fulfillment of Ramsey's criterion.
Seastead this.
Nah toor viss uhn shof ten
I think.
A patent only matters if those who you are trying to protect against are under (or cave or submit) to the jurisdiction of the region in which the patent is held. Unless you file a patent in every single industrialized nation for something as significant as this, and the idea is to make money, the better option is to keep it a trade secret so you don't need to disclose any details that those outside of the jurisdiction of the patent don't have the details handed to them.
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.
A result not consistently repeatable could be due to chicanery, or a failure to understand all factors that had bearing on the outcome.
Neither of those change the uselessness of an irreproducible result.
You will never reach the denialists with facts and logic.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You are pointing out the lack of repeatable instructions, which is a good objection to cold fusion. I always had problems with the basic physics of could fusion that nobody has been able to explain away.
Pressure is equivalent to temperature, one begets the other. Since all cases of observable fusion requires high pressure, explain to me how you are going to get the pressure without the temperature? Are you going to crazy glue the atoms together?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If you find it necessary to compare Rossi to Tesla to support your point, I think Rossi is the clear winner of the exchange.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Yes, it's a joke.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The paper is a statistical survey of experiments allegedly reporting excess heat.
A paper based on discredited experiments is not valid science.
There is no conspiracy in science. Facts rule. The fact is cold fusion is myth that needs to die. You cannot over come the columb barrier without sufficient energy. Fusion is an inherently thermal process.
So, ah, the electrons say, "Does these slacks make my ass look fat?" or what?
Springer is a rather serious publishing company. Springer journals carry very real weight.
I find it amusing how people continuously claim to "know" what is and isn't possible based on our infinitesimally short stint into the sciences. We have had electricity in any meaningful fashion for what, 120 years? I'm not saying that cold fusion is possible, and even if it is it may take a society that has been advancing technologically for over a million years to achieve it. But we aren't even children when it comes to knowing the intricacies of the universe, we're a few cells dividing. Claiming what is or isn't possible is premature to say the least.
Only the sun you say?
A hydrogen bomb yields more energy than was put it, by a large margin.
We can do fusion, we just cannot control it yet.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
"I" may not be able to paint it but A) many people can copy it - to the point it is indistinguishable from the original B) I can take a picture of it, print it and have an near duplicate of it. In other words your strawman is as stupid as you are.
Good thing you've invested in Lockheed! They're going to build a fusion reactor soon!
Nikola Tesla made just as many wild assed claims but we don't shit all over him do we?
Hey don't forget about Alchemy. It was a real science too!
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.
Does he mean a transient reaction in the test set-up that produces the byproducts of fusion, but not long enough to generate useful power?
A transient reaction that can't be reliably reproduced despite recreating the same conditions to the best of our ability. Which might be because the conditions necessary are so extremely specific that they only got them right once by accident or because of some contamination or malfunction that somehow produced the necessary conditions yet attempts to recreate them fail. Or the results of the initial experiment were wrong, but here they've clearly put their desire to believe it was real over their good judgement.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is no conspiracy in science. Facts rule. The fact is cold fusion is myth that needs to die.
Proving a negative is a foolish enterprise.
You cannot over come the columb barrier without sufficient energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Let's make a bet then. You pay me $1 if there is no credible commercially utilized cold fusion by 2024. I'll pay you $10,000 if there is. And please don't bother me until then.
Bruce Perens.
see muon-catalyzed fusion (Wikipedia). This is a very real example of peer-reviewed and repeatable cold-fusion. Is this the only way to overcome the coulomb barrier and accomplish cold-fusion? Probably not...
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
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.
No it exists because I can observe it. I can observe it again and again. Other people can observe it too. That's why it exists.
Cold fusion does not exist because you cannot observe it unless you perform a bad experiment. Other people that do the experiment correctly cannot observe it.
Thanks for proving why Evolution doesn't exist.
Storms claims that there is no good theory to explain the excess heat measurements. He does not deny that the experiments he surveys are overwhelming evidence for the fulfillment of Ramsey's criterion.
I took three toenail clippings, wrapped them in aluminum foil and added three drops of rosemary oil. I then placed a fiberoptic inside the foil, connected to a photomultiplier tube, and recorded the optical emission. There was excess light emission, that I couldn't otherwise account for.
I have no good theory to explain why toenails and rosemary oil should produce light. But, since I applied no energy source to produce this light, it should be considered as one of the most astounding scientific experiments of all time, because if true, it would solve our lighting problems for all of time until we run out of toenails (which I did last week, so if you have some clipping to donate, please email me...)
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
The article seems to contradict itself:
While perpetual motion machines would violate known physical phenomena—like the conservation of energy—cold fusion is possible in principle.
Oh, so it's possible!
The combination of the energy barrier of normal matter, the Coulomb barrier of individual nuclei, the negligibly low probability of quantum tunneling at all but the shortest distances, and the fact that the physics of nuclear reactions is so incredibly well-understood (and verified) all tells us that low-energy cold fusion should be impossible.
Oh, so it's impossible. But even here, don't you mean it's just unlikely?
Even though I’m a theoretical physicist myself, I’m open to the possibility that physics has it wrong, and that cold fusion could be possible
Wait, you said it was possible in principle. Now you're saying that cold fusion contradicts theory.
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.
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.
And don't forget the crow NY-Times had to eat in an apology to R. Goddard after claiming rockets wouldn't work in the vacuum of space.
http://www.popsci.com/military...
Table-ized A.I.
See Los Alamos nuclear chemist Ed Storms's peer reviewed paper published in the German counterpart of the British "Nature":
Status of Cold-Fusion (2010)
Seastead this.
...Warm Fusion anyone?
Table-ized A.I.
I'd like to know how elemental hydrogen is a renewable source of energy. Sure you could rip apart the more complex elements that are the product of said fusion to make more hydrogen, but that's hardly what I consider "renewable".
As for the viability of cold fusion, it's a great software tool, but I don't think it's got much of a future as a solution for any energy crisis.
Lastly, you can't ever extract more energy than you put in. The fact we get energy out of fusion is because that energy is already packed in the element itself. All the elements have this capability, it's just that some elements are more ready to release the energy. Eventually you use up all the hydrogen and the other elements become progressively more difficult to extract the energy from. There is no miracle solution, except to be conservative with our use of energy.
It's not the hydrogen, it is everything else that is wrong about it.
The US Navy had these Zeppelin clones, and they crashed every one save the Los Angeles from flying into bad weather, which for a rigid airship, appears to be anything other than a perfect sunny day.
A patent will just be violated, and completely ignored. Keeping it secret is the way to go, similar to Heinlein's Shipstones. Place a tamper-resistant box at the client's location, set a meter to charge by the watt-hour, and be done with it. Someone tries breaking into the box, it completely obliterates anything inside showing how it works, or just does a big kaboom, Outer Limits, "Final Exam" style.
On a large scale, build it right on top of a natural gas well. Even though the well is completely empty, nobody will know that and power is power. Done right, one can just use an electric resistance heater to blow hot air out a smokestack so it looks like some combustion is happening. Another option is to use a decommissioned nuclear reactor, pump out some heat to make it look like something is going on, and nobody would even know or care that the electricity came from atoms squeezed together as opposed to blown apart.
How will it be leaked, is the question. Usable energy is money, pure and simple, and a disruption will get people with trillions of dollars at their disposal to hide the info, especially anyone in any energy industry. Someone who doesn't get it out far and wide will be 86-ed quickly, similar to the guy back in the Roman times who discovered aluminum, and was promptly killed for it, making a metal too good for mankind to have.
I'd probably say, it would be impossible, once the device gets past the first person. Someone comes up with a working free energy [1] source, as soon as they show it to someone, the inventor is pretty much dead.
[1]: Realistically working... like in the kilowatt to megawatt range. Some gewgaw powering a millivolt LED for a few seconds doesn't count.
Nature came up with transparent aluminum a long time ago. Most people just call it white sapphire. Now you can argue that sapphire, (aka aluminum oxide) is not aluminum, just like wrought iron, cast iron and iron oxide are not iron. There are several other iron alloys we still call iron, we just add qualifiers like "wrought", "cast", "gray", "white", etc. to indicate which alloy. Just like "transparent" is a qualifier to the aluminum alloy of aluminum oxide. So, while Star Trek made it famous and maybe gave it a new name, it is an accurate name. It is transparent and it is mostly aluminum by weight, and hence is an aluminum alloy now sometimes called "transparent aluminum". It was not invented by man, you can dig it out of the ground.
I hereby award you the Nobel Prize in skepticism.
Actually I can show you limitless, free, clean energy. At 9PM tomorrow eveneing go outside, drive out to the country. Pull up next to any farm. Get out of your vehicle and ...
look up. It's called the Universe. We don't actually know if it is limitless.
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.
Bollocks. The break-even point was passed this year. Sure it's not reached a point of economy-of-scale, but it was a critical change in the fusion story.
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/news/story/1.2534140
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Sure. Just call them "muons."
Well, it was real science when performed by Isaac Newton, not so much when performed by most of the practitioners.
What's that all about then? Are you telling me that their IS no ColdFusion? That Adobe is the name of a garden gnome? That CFML is just a crazy rant?
I think you're being a bit facetious; but what if it only works when 50% of the grains in the metal are a certain size, the initial temperature is 80.523C, +/- 0.3C, and the electrode is machined to a very high tolerance?
This leads to an interesting question: What's the most "finicky" chemical reaction, for lack of a better expression? I'm thinking of a starting point as seed germination. When you get a seed packet, you routinely expect some percentage of seeds to not germinate. What if the experiment were like germinating a single seed? Of course seeds are more complex than physics experiments are supposed to be... but what if each setup is like a seed? What if the "germination" is 10%? It wouldn't be useful for power generation; but it would still be interesting science.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Utterly non-responsive to the challenge posed.
Unfortunately since about 1989 or 1990, the US Patent Office has refused to consider anything dealing with cold fusion, probably because the high energy physics mafia convinced them it was akin to perpetual motion.
Rather surprising, considering some of the things the USPTO has issued patents for.
-- Alastair
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.
Similar assertions have been made by proponents of perpetual motion machines.
They do tend to keep going on and on about that. It never ends.
How many attempts did it take to first clone a mammal? How many more attempts did it take before some other lab repeated the process?
Clearly they didn't do good science.
Repeating 19th century experiments with 21st century equipment is pretty easy. Doing 21st century experiments (or, okay, very late 20th century) is hard.
And even at that, back in high school physics when we were replicating Millikan's oil drop experiment (only with latex microspheres rather than oil drops) some people came up with a charge only 1/3 that of what's accepted for the electron. Were all those people who claim you can't have an isolated quark wrong, or is it just a trickier experiment than it sounds from a written description?
Siegel makes the arrogant mistake that all he needs is "the proper equipment" to replicate an experiment. If it's not in a field he has a few thouand hours of experience in -- say, electrochemistry or calorimetry for a high-energy physicist -- he needs more than the proper equipment, he needs somebody skilled in the particular field in question. Put another way, how long would it take a physicist to clone a mammal?
-- Alastair
You cannot over come the columb barrier without sufficient energy. Fusion is an inherently thermal process.
Tell it to the muons.
-- Alastair
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.
No idea bout your anecdote.
However if you would read a bit about the topic you would know that cold fusion is possible. In fact physicists do that since roughly 1890!
"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?"
That is nonsense. Where the heck should a neutron come from in such a case? From nowhere?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You keep asserting failure to reproduce the results. I can understand that, you're from Caltech.
However, that turns out not to be the case.
I would recommend to you and to everyone here Charles Beuadette's thoroughly researched and easy to read study of the field, including the mistakes, including the shameful errors of scientific protocol, on both sides. (Basically, the hot-fusionistas ignored the excess heat claims and put their hands over their ears chanting "la la la where are the neutrons?"; P&F erred by claiming a mechanism instead of just presenting their excess heat measurements and saying "this is weird, we're highly experienced electrochemists but can't come up with a chemical explanation for this. Any ideas?")
Anyway, the book is Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed by Charles G. Beaudette. It's not up on the latest work (copyright 2002 unless there's a later edition) but it's a very worthwhile read -- a lot of the questions raised by various slashdotters are answered here -- and documents well the first few months and years of both the controversy and various lab results.
-- Alastair
I think a better summery is "blogger creates click-bait post by sowing acute ancetodes about mechanical turk, etc. and a few technical looking graphs together to form a article that appears interesting, but really is just a bunch of waffle."
Pretty much this. Especially considering that OP contradicts the best scientific information we so far have about it.
True, the researchers didn't use an immersion calorimeter, but they gave excellent reasons for not (so far) having done so. Further, someone right here on Slashdot was good enough to look them up, and it turns out they are about as reputable as it gets.
OP also fails to acknowledge that the same basic technology (i.e., LENR using nickel as the primary fuel) has been under active study by both NASA and the U.S. Navy for many years. Suggesting that it's probably not as "crackpot" as it sounds.
There are actually some pretty good physical theories about how this could work. No violations of thermodynamics needed.
So there can be no such thing as climate science then?
If reproducibility is a criterion of science in one field, then you must apply it to every other "scientific" field. So you would be wise to evaluate the semantics of your statements.
Cold fusion seems improbable. But to say it is impossible is to step beyond the limitations of science.
Will
When I read this, I remember "the humors" and imagine someone ranting about the lack validity of a competing theory because they can't account of the lack of black bile in the solution.
Cold fusion is magic. It doesn't work and has been debunked over and over again. I suspect that some cold fusion researchers are great salesmen that sell the dream of an eventual big payday and historical fame to investors. Instead of cold fusion nonsense, nuclear engineers should be working on improving existing small fission reactors, like Toshiba's 4S. That's something mankind can use. Not never ending "ten years from now" promises of cold fusion.
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.
The problem is that they realize they are electrons and not so massive way too soon.
A patent will just be violated, and completely ignored. Keeping it secret is the way to go, similar to Heinlein's Shipstones. Place a tamper-resistant box at the client's location, set a meter to charge by the watt-hour, and be done with it. Someone tries breaking into the box, it completely obliterates anything inside showing how it works, or just does a big kaboom, Outer Limits, "Final Exam" style.
Ah, yes. One of Heinlein's most unrealistic, least believable premises ever, and that's saying a lot.
Meanwhile, in the real world, your invention will be reverse-engineered in a matter of months if not sooner.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
...And, by the way, in less than one day some smart guys pointed out some small matters in measurements as reported in TPR2.
in case you miss, this is what one (that once, before TPR2, was a Rossi's follower) wrote:
pce-830
That's not all - there are also skeptics analysis, like the ones from M.Massa and Giancarlo from GSVIT, but I am reporting the (ex?) believer one as he should be taken in better account among other believers - the writer of that disamiba cannot be accused to be a "patoskeptic" that would deny a miracle if it would occur...
And no, miracle did not occur.
It's possible there are as yet unknown natural laws. It's even possible that there are natural laws our species is just too dumb to discover, ever. But the chance of undiscoverable laws is lower than the more general chance of as yet undiscovered laws.
In the same way, the chance that there's an as yet undiscovered law which applies to this particular technology, and which has certain properties making it at all likely it gets inadvertently followed sometimes is possible, but is an accumulation of low probablility circumstances, and so has very low overall likelyhood. It's generally more likely that any undicovered laws will be ones where they consistently block getting the technological configuration right. For a simplified example, if there's some undiscovered property of, say, Tungsten, then it's likely to become apparent when people note that all the claims for success come from experiments where tungsten was used for a particular stage of the process in a particular way. There's much less chance that simply having a certain mass of Tungsten within a certain number of feet of the device, whether it's made into a part of the apparatus or light bulb filaments, will make the experiment very likely to succeed in either case.
Try to describe a hypothetical law that works in such a way it is very hard to spot a pattern or regularity that will lead the researchers to really formally formulating that law, but makes a big enough difference that it determines general success or failure much more than many other variables. Try to craft such a genuinely new law for explaining anything, from apiary colony collapse disorder to zebra camoflage evolution*. I'll bet this results in a very long, convoluted law to explain all the conditions. That's what usually happens with novel approaches - sure every once in a while one pays off big time, but not every discovery is Special Relativity. If you end up with a long formulation, full of various clauses which make it fit all the observations, then what you have is a chain of things, and if any link of that chain is wrong, the whole formulation collapses. If a chain is really only as strong as its weakest link, then a very lengthy chain of logical inferences is a chain with a very low probability of being right.
* why do Zebras have stripes when one of their predators in roughly the same size range has polka-dots (Leopards)?, and another one even closer to Zebras in size is solidly colored (Lions)? Try to develop a new law relating to natural selection that rules out any possibilitys that this is simply happenstance, and yet that doesn't predict what sorts of camoflage any other species should display in case some of the facts don't fit that case.
Who is John Cabal?
Not at all. His message is, if you think it's real, then start doing science! He doubts it's real because the people who claim it is refuse to even try actual science -- you know, that thing where you document experiments and publish with sufficient levels of detail that allow the results to be independently verified.
Even if you think it's real, you have to admit that what they're doing is not science. Or at least, you have to admit that if you're honest and know what "science" is. It might be invention, but it absolutely isn't science.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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."
People have been wrong about things in the past, so clearly they are wrong about this thing!
"People in the past were wrong about what is possible, so clearly the naysayers are wrong about my thing!" See how stupid that logic looks? Trying to argue that cold fusion must be possible because people have been wrong about things in the past is arguing crosseyed badger spit. It is a nonsensical argument used by con men to deflect from their BS.
Here's the thing: With all these technologies that actually exist (#4 doesn't) you see two important things:
1) They are actually available to look at, in a non-controlled environment. You can verify them yourself, without some "researchers" standing over your shoulder, telling you what you can and can't see, what you can and can't touch. They are easy to verify they are real.
2) You can have the theoretical basis for how they operate explained to you, and that is consistent with our understanding of physics, chemistry, and so on. There's no hand waving, there's just science.
So when cold fusion hits that point, call me. When someone can say "Here is how this device works on an atomic/quantum level and why it is actually a fusion process," and when these claims are examined and confirmed by reputable labs at universities, where the researchers are given a device and allowed to do what they please with it, then I'm interested. Until then, STFU.
probably because the high energy physics mafia convinced them it was akin to perpetual motion.
Ah yes, the notorious high-energy physics mafia. I read about them breaking kneecaps all the time.
What other conspiracies do you believe in? Are you a Truther? Still searching for the truth about JFK? Or the Real Killers? Time to take the tinfoil hat off and move out of your mom's basement.
> A working implementation needs to be patented.
And he tried that. The patent was refused because people said it was physically impossible. So he has to rely on trade secrets.
If the naysayers weren't so adamant about this being impossible, there would be a patent. And a patent is supposed to contain sufficient information to replicate and validate a technology. Everybody with sufficient knowledge and cash could easily proof or disproof the claims.
Who would be harmed by awarding Rossi a patent on what he claimed? If it is a fake, he would own a patent on something that does not work. If anybody falls for that, tough luck, but there are always people who buy bridges from someone.
If Rossi has something real, sticking with the trade secret is a smart move, regardless of the naysayers claims.
Yes, over the past few decades skeptics have accept dark matter and reject cold fusion because one has evidence that fits ALL observations and the other has anecdotes that ignore most observations.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Earth sciences such as climate science are what is known as a "systems science", the aim is to model the behaviour of a system using accepted physics, chemistry, economic behaviour, etc. That's why technically a climate model produces a "forecast" not a "prediction". Also although we don't have a replica Earth, we do have Venus and Mars, planetary science has taught us a lot about our own planet. Some people complain that it's "just statistics" but they don't seem to mind that temperature and pressure are also "just statistics".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> 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
Total BS.
Consider NIF, for instance. They're about 1/3rd of the way to ignition - which is way beyond breakeven. According to them, they're actually at breakeven already, although their definition is bologna.
The fuel capsule costs about $1 million. The value of the energy it releases is about 5 cents. Over the 40 years they've been actively working on ICF, the energy levels continue to climb, while the economics continue to decline.
Breakeven is like getting a lead balloon to fly - doing it is cool, but it doesn't mean you'll be catching the 6PM Led Zeppelin to London.
"assume two identical perfectly spherical cows"
about three seconds.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
But to say it is impossible is to step beyond the limitations of science.
I didn't say it was impossible. Neither did the article referred to. All I implied was that so far all claimed examples of cold fusion demonstrably fall into 2 buckets: 1) poorly-designed experiments which have been discredited by the attempts to reproduce them, 2) outright frauds.
Further, it is pretty clear that Rossi's falls into the category of outright fraud. His results were "reproduced" by people with a history of working with him, left the possibility of faking the amount of energy input, did not properly measure the energy output, and involved him putting the "fuel" in at the beginning and removing it at the end. Add it all up, and the claim that his e-Cat has been independently tested is outright laughable.
Climate science could easily be reproducible. A researcher could claim "I have this model that can accurately predict temperature changes". He could the explain the model to others, and others could accurate predict temperature changes. This hasn't happened yet, but it could. One day.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If he finds someone that is willing to invest in his project, let it happen, and when the cold fusion device turns out to be a scam, let them report it to the police and trow him back in jail where he belongs. The best way to deal with a bluff is to call it, not argue about it.
The problem is that people like this undermine the public trust in science. That is a huge problem because it opens the door to allow an entire other set of charlatans into the picture. These other people gain traction only because the name of science has been tarnished as the provider of truth. Once this other group of people have the public ear, they start pushing all kinds of counter productive BS like creationism and other idiot dogma
Our governments need to assign science and all its keywords as trademarks to a standards body and give them full right to enforce. This will help to put an end to all of those deceitful commercials that begin with "scientifically proven to xxx". Joe Sixpack doesn't even understand how they're being lied to, or even that they are, and that failure to understand is in no small part due to the behavior of people like Rossi and his associates.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Sure, Rossi's device reeks of fraud. I'm rooting for it to be real, but until I see a properly conducted calorimetric test that wouldn't embarrass a second-year chemistry student I'm not going to believe it.
But that's only one device. Lots of respected researchers in reputable labs all over the world have been measuring unreliable transmutation and anomalous heat from their own cold fusion experiments since Fleishman and Pons managed to do everything wrong in their reveal and so badly discredit the phenomena in the public mind that further research has been mostly limited to hobby projects with laboratory slush funds. The evidence suggests that there is in fact some unknown phenomena that enables solid-lattice fusion under very specific conditions, but thus far those conditions have proven impossible to reliably replicate
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
For more background on WITTS, see: http://peswiki.com/index.php/D...
Or also an open source version of one of those idea by a different group: http://peswiki.com/index.php/O...
Just pointing out the info -- making no claims about the validity of any of it. In general, the peswiki is a big collection of similar claims. Of course, only one of them needs to be true to change the world significantly.
Here is something posted to the peswiki myself, previously sent to Rossi about why he should open source his eCat rather than try to make money off it (assuming it actually works as suggested):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/O...
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioeconomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
The most likely answer to this riddle is that all of the so called researchers are complicit.
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
The researchers did make a measurement that reveals the hidden circuit. They just didn't realize it themselves. (They measured currents in order to estimate heat loss in the cables.) Details here.
Human understanding of physics is shallow and what we tend to see as laws may not be laws at all. It wasn't long ago that engineers insisted that the ability to fly did not exist in bumble bees although they all knew that the laws that they had in place were obviously inadequate as all of them could witness a bumble bee in flight. So if we observe cold fusion producing heat then it is not intelligent to go into denial. If someone can present, with formal proofs, the explanation of why cold fusion is an illusion they certainly have had decades to do so. So just why is it so difficult to offer proof of the mechanism that appears to be cold fusion? The nay sayers do have some obligation to offer up proofs or accept the work of others. Einstein had to put up with several decades of the top people in physics claiming that he was wrong. Maybe bad patterns repeat themselves from time to time.
He wrote
" For all intensive purposes I'm focused and forceful, the rest of the time for all intents and purposes I'm pretty laid back."
Try again.
Mostly random stuff.
Saltwater fuel cell isn't new, and sensational claims of company looking for investors to make a $1M car can't be taken at face value. Your tin foil hat site article about cold fusion has no credibility.
Yes, we in fact do recognize the some of Tesla's ideas were crackpot. Like the ineffecient "broadcasting" of AC power without wire as being suitable for city. Like the assertion that AC is always superior to DC for transmission of power over wires.
Lead can in fact be turned into gold, so that particular one of the many goals of alchemy wasn't unrealistic, just the means they attempted were too feeble in energy density.
"They laughed at Columbus, Einstein, and Tesla. They laughed at Rossi, so Rossi must be a genius."
either way.
Given how little posters here seem to be aware of the history of technological development and science in general though, I'm leaning towards the E-Cat being legitimate.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time a major technological breakthrough in the material sciences left academics and technicians who are wanna be researchers and experimenters befuddled and expressing frustration at their own relative lack of success and impotence.
In Colorado Springs we used to have the Tesla Conference. Tesla worked here for awhile. Anyway, some guy had what he claimed was a perpetual motion machine that looked like one of those desk toys with a hoop or ball that continuously moved. A reporter asked if it was a perpetual motion machine why the base had all those AA batteries in it. The guy's answer was they were needed to get the thing started.
There's a reason the Patent Office started rejecting perpetual motion machines decades ago.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Here's why, most likely, they always will.
Most likely? Well, that's not exactly unequivocal, is it?
"Most likely" sounds like just the right place for astonishing science to (just possibly, probably not, but who knows?) surprise us.
And I say this to point out one simple fact: there have been claims of cold fusion, but none of them have ever stood up under the scrutiny of the above definition of good science.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the article, but this bit jumped out at me.
Crazy claims of a particular phenomenon never stand up under scrutiny - until the first one does. Yes, cold fusion has been a long time coming, and may never, but just because no-one's got it right it yet is not a great reason to say never.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Not impossible, just a matter of knowledge. Electricity came into the vocabulary in the 17th century. In the first half of the 20th century, we came to understand the energy of the sun. 1952 the 1st hydrogen bomb. The work with accelerators and plasma is the next step, and is well on the way.
The hardest thing to master is not the science of the thing, but the morality and the ethics. How about the politics?
Hey, we could have figured it out a long time ago. Remember the tower of Babel.
"Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber. He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from , elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed. This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646." Wiki
Then explain why discovering that the morning star and the evening star were observationally the same should mean that the religion reacted by merging the god of war and the goddess of love.
Our theories don't consider religious beliefs to be scientific and effective, but they did. So it was science. And they performed experiments (observational) that caused them to revise theories.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Almost all nuclear chemists and physicists would agree cold fusion is pretty much like trying to crack a bank vault with a boiled noodle.
So long as you don't boil the noodle cracking the vault should be easy.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Or concrete for that matter. They even "lost" the way to manufacture it to reinvent it centuries later.
It means "Natural Sciences"
you should read what you link: Current techniques for creating large numbers of muons require large amounts of energy, larger than the amounts produced by the catalyzed nuclear fusion reactions.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I could tell you precisely why. It would involve the assumption that your rosemary oil was somehow contaminated with peptide aminoluciferin which causes spontaneous bioluminescence in certain epithelial keratins.
You're welcome.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
what he said. I was going to bring up the Rossi scam as well. Well played, radtea, for beating me to it.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
it's easy to fool someone with a blackbox and a claim.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You just discredited yourself when you said "facts rule". Which is simply not true in Science ... if that were the case, than we wouldn't have "theories".
This guys parrot the myth of Pomp.... it is cclear in reading his test that he simply know it is impossible by theory and just try to build a gigantic conspiracy theory and rationalization around hys myth... he assume Levi cannot be simply a scientist who see it works, that othere testers are fair, that wires were checked, that LENr is replicated, published in peer reviewed journals... it is at the level of 9/11 skepticism... it is cargo cult skepticism... he try to look skeptic but it is a believer in old theory. he is not even aware of Ed Storms 100% mainstream theory... it is not confirmed, but saying LENR breaks theory is an error. anyway I don't care, next week end I will be with serious guys at LENR-Cities project kickoff... too bad the big guys, bigger than Elforsk and Cherokee, are not yet invited, and there will be only startup, investors, and scientists... not yet the industrialists. the worst is that they conspiracy theory don't even address a real problem, raised by McKubre (a believer ah ah) which is annoyed by the calibration at only 450C (for fear to break the resistor by huge current below nominal temperature, can look strange but this resistor is said to be a doped conductor... probably to avoid runaway at 1400C)... anyway the test when power moved from 800W to 900W and temperature swinged from 1250C to 1400C, shows that the COP is not 1 and that LENr is real without any doubt... question is only about precision. too bad.
The team at the Voyager project had a problem. See, when they were gearing up for the Neptune encounter, they needed to know where to point their camera for some good shots of the planet - what were to be, the clearest images of the planet ever taken. They'd have eight minutes during the pass and that'd be it, forever. The camera would have to be pointing in the right direction.
So what did they do? They cherry picked the best meteorologists on the planet and said to them, "Right, here's what we know, we need a weather forecast for two months from now, on another planet, down to the minute, so we know where to point the camera on our probe to get some good weather shots."
They got their weather forecast two weeks before the flyby. Two days before the close approach, they turned the cameras to position, and come the flyby they got the shots exactly as predicted by the weathermen. Absolutely beautiful pictures of clouds, a huge dark storm (the GDS), and just before the cameras were turned once again for the final images of the solar system ("Goodbye Neptune"), a tenuous ring system so gossamer thin it was almost missed.
Point is, get the right people on the job they can predict the weather on a planet billions of miles away with amazing accuracy two weeks into the future. Why can't we do that here, on Earth, six HOURS into the future? It's a question asked many times at NASA, and still unanswered.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
a hunter with a double-recessive condition which means he has no teeth will starve. His brother, the one with double-dominant teeth, will thrive and reproduce. His offspring will at least be heterozygous toothy, healthy and go on to bear him grandchildren. Darwinian evolution at work.
You're welcome.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
it's easy to fool someone with a blackbox and a claim.
Oh, yes. In the late 80's there was a revolutionary video compression engine, in a black box, which attracted some significant investment, and was a complete fraud. Sorry I can't remember names.
I followed the Pons and Fleishman story fairly closely when it first came out. There were a lot of attempts to duplicate the experiment, some got heat but no neutrons, some got neutrons but no heat, some got tritium but no heat.or neutrons. A few years ago there was word from the US Navy Research Lab that they had managed to reproduce the effect fairly reliably with a couple different combinations of metals in the electrodes. I believe that they found that the purity of the electrodes was extremely important, which could be why most of the other attempts had problems.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
they are physically impossible.
The US Navy Research Laboratory disagrees, and claims to have made it work reliably with a couple different types of metals.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Springer is a rather serious publishing company. Springer journals carry very real weight.
.
Springer was a rather serious publishing company. In the last decade or so they've switched to publishing any old rubbish that they can make a fast buck off. Look at the LNCS series for examples, they're publishing proceedings of conference that look like they were held around a table in a beer hall.
I mean like a carnivore which would ordinarily require teeth to catch its prey, you pedantic fucking fool.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It is the Sun.
All we need to do is to create enough solar cells and enough batteries so as that we can always have power.
If the Sun is producing 4000000000000000000000000000 watts per second, we are, as humanity, simply fools, in that we have the absolutely best power source right above our heads and we are not using it.
If this was the case, why does he consistently reproduce it? Where are the failures? Does he only have one? Why has no one mentioned this failure rate? Or that it only works with material from a certain source? No one in science thinks these are unreasonable questions - they're usually very interesting!
There was a lot of work done finding the right source of talc for a particular medical procedure, because if they sourced it from somewhere else then it would turn out to be toxic. No one really knows why, although detailed study means we think it's now somewhat related to the -OH group concentration on the surface. Maybe.
The problem is, this isn't what's being relayed. Instead Rossi keeps details vague, because if you actually had details, you'd be able to go looking at the problem and actually do some science.
you should read what you link: Current techniques for creating large numbers of muons require large amounts of energy, larger than the amounts produced by the catalyzed nuclear fusion reactions.
What do you suppose the word "catalyzed" means in the context of muon catalyzed fusion?
what do you suppose the word "larger" means, in any context?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
what do you suppose the word "larger" means, in any context?
Parent said "You cannot over come the columb barrier without sufficient energy."
Yet Muons do it for free as many times as they want before they die or "stick" by virtue of being Muons. This is real cold fusion no crackpottery required.
The production of Muons and assorted details surrounding barriers to useful functioning fusion reactors has zip to do with parents inaccurate comment.
no, it's not. Muons require OBSCENE amounts of energy to produce.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I apologize for that. I note though that Dr. Storms baldly asserts the claim that there are hundreds of such experimental attempts, a bunch of which are alleged to be successful with "large amounts" of power/heat produced (using his own book as sole reference). I can grant the former, since the attempts are public record. The successes though? I have to see more solid evidence of these than I've seen so far.
For example, the most successful experiment to date (Andrea Rossi's nickel-based LENR fusion) involves an experimental setup with plenty of opportunity for fraud and deception.
Meanwhile the experiments that Storm details are so marginal, that they attempt to determine the presence of fusion based on trace element analysis or correlation of high noise observations (like the ratio of estimated energy production to helium production). Reproducibility remains a huge problem throughout this work.
Don't get me wrong. Cold fusion most likely happens naturally just due to quantum tunneling. The whole point of these experiments is to create contrived situations where the quantum tunneling resulting in fusion happens far more often (many orders of magnitude more often, perhaps hundreds of orders of magnitude more often). Even if we are to eventually have highly successful cold fusion widely used for energy production and other uses, we'll still transition through this murky region of uncertain experimental evidence.
And it's worth noting here that despite whatever the American Physical Society or the US Department of Energy has said about cold fusion in 1989, research continues. They aren't really in the way now. I don't expect conservative, perhaps hide-bound institutions to embrace every new concept that comes along, even if in theory, that's their job.
Khallow writes:
In the US it continues among professors emeritus that are dying off now at an epidemic rate.
A graduate student who attempts to so much as replicate an existing experiment is putting his entire career in jeopardy, starting with the Texas A&M fiasco where the APS took seriously allegations of fraud against such a graduate student's thesis of fraud. Those allegations were made by a "science journalist" whose main claim to fame is a diet book
There is a huge distance between embracing speculative theories and blanket rejection of experimental results.
It may well have been that no one ever actually refused to look through Galileo's telescope. But the behavior of the scientific establishment toward experimental results is clearly a pattern which, even if nothing of substance is behind cold fusion phenomena, is indictable. (Read "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed" by Charles Beaudette for multiple examples of such behavior.)
Theories are not experiments. Popperian falsification applies to experimental falsification of theory -- not theoretic falsification of experiment, which is impossible. Indeed, even experiments do not falsify other experiments except to the extent that they demonstrate a hypothesized explanation of experimental error is true. Here again the pattern of behavior by the true believers in fashionable interpretation of physical theory demonstrate time and time again they have made errors reckless that they make the errors of Fleischmann and Pons in their neutron measurements look trivial.
Where do you think, for example, the APS "embraced" experiments by Caltech et al sit on Fig. 3 of Storms's paper?
Clue: They're so far outside anything remotely intellectually honest that they fall way off to the left of the figure -- and _this_ is what your estemed authorities used to claim Fleischmann and Pons were guilty of fraud, incompetence and/or delusion.
Seastead this.
There has already been a lot of research into this by people who have the correct understanding. Unfortunately, palladium is really, really expensive.
http://www.psc.edu/science/Wol...