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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...
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.
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.
If it were valid, it would be reproducible.
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.
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!
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."
When I actually RTFA it mentioned muon-catalyzed cold fusion, which was being bandied about at the time of the Fleischmann and Pons debacle. Twenty-five years later, still nada. Probably because muons have a half-life of just a couple microseconds. You might be able to do it to hydrogen atoms onesy twosies, but try scaling it up.
"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?
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.
You will never reach the denialists with facts and logic.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Good thing you've invested in Lockheed! They're going to build a fusion reactor soon!
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.
We were searching for "high temperature" superconductors. (where "high" was well above the 4 K of the day.) And then "room temperature" ones. -- I've made several different chemistries of liquid nitrogen superconductors. (long long ago) Then the problem was (is?) making bendable wires out of it, since it's a ceramic material.
The concept of fusion isn't new to science. We know how to induce fusion via a multitude of methods. The thing is, none of them are net positive in energy production. None. Of. Them. High energy fusion (replicating a star) takes unimaginable amounts of energy, and we've yet to create anything stable enough to run for even a few seconds. Net positive low energy fusion ("cold fusion") similarly eludes us. Yes, we can cause fusion (eg, by capture of low energy neutrons), but it's an energy consumer.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
PV=nRT only means anything in regards to thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a statistical description of the behavior of large quantities of matter. All fusion physics is about the individual behavior of the elementary particles involved. Pressure and temperature are ways to achieve the desired proximity of the nuclei, but they are not the only ways.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Maybe we should call it "cold-day-in-hell fusion".
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.
It isn't the first time that some scientific experiments were not always reproduced in independent experiments.
One particular early experiment in electricity showed how a magnetically charged needle would move when put in a field caused by a coiled wire and have that needle change orientation. You would think this is a no-brainer and even something taught in junior high schools today.
Unfortunately this experiment was done by researchers who had their labs and lecture rooms oriented so the field was oriented north and south and didn't deflect the needle yet in other places it would work... simply because they weren't taking into consideration the Earth's magnetic field and that the direction of the experiment was thus an important factor.
I could give other examples, but sometimes experiments can't be repeated simply because not all of the variables have been addressed either by the original researcher or by the subsequent follow up experiments.
I could cite examples of Muon-catalyzed fusion (something that has ample experimental evidence) where some of the principles of "cold fusion" can indeed take place. Palladium crystals are also very famous for their absorption of Hydrogen atoms.
Based upon some physical experiments I've seen myself, there seems to be some actual fusion activity taking place in these crystals that could be called "cold fusion", at least in terms of detecting neutrons and some possible secondary detections of that activity. Those who think it could provide a practical source of power on the other hand are folks that I personally think are full of BS and just hyping things up for their own funding. You can even build a more practical "hot fusion" reactor that fits on your desk for a modest amount of money to produce even more verifiable reactions by simply building a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, but I digress on that point. The main issue isn't if cold-fusion takes place (it does), but those who claim to have found a way to make it practical for power production.
You can have extremely local high density pressures where it is presumed that somehow two or more Hydrogen atoms are confined in a crystal matrix of multiple other atoms to create a state where fusion has a measurable probability of occurring. That at least is the theory behind how it works. The trick is to be able to open that door into that little pocket, just a few atoms at a time, and then close it up again to make the fusion take place. It could be Buckyballs, Palladium, or some other substance but it is some pretty wicked nanoengineering in order to get this to work. This is also why it is hard to replicate or even to make in the first place.
The problem with major physics journals is that so many frauds and perhaps just misguided fans have submitted papers that they simply don't have time to sift through them to find any real science on the topic any more.... other than perhaps minor tweaks of existing papers that were around before the Pons & Fleishman fiasco.
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"?
Snort. A particular form of aluminum oxide is no more aluminum than water is hydrogen - or ammonia is nitrogen - or rust is iron.
It's not a question of "arguing". It's a question of understanding. You should start with high school science and chemistry.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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."
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.
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
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.
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