Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American Column: 'It's Not Cold Fusion...But It's Something' (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American magazine has published a guest column on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) [putting] into context the history of what was mistakenly referred to as cold fusion and what happened. The bottom line is that there is compelling cumulative evidence for nuclear reactions taking place, including shifts in the abundance of isotopes, element transmutations, and localized melting of metals. Furthermore, those reactions do not have the characteristics of either nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Despite sharp criticism from much of the scientific community after the 1989 announcement by Fleischmann and Pons, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and other reputable organizations continued the research and published many papers.
The article reports that "to the surprise of many people, a new field of nuclear research has emerged," adding that even in the early 20th century, atomic scientists were already reporting "inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations."
Back in the 80's when my physics chops were far better I was sure they were on to something.
Just goes to show, that even in the scientific community, bias can play a part in what gets to the public. Just because they are scientists, doesn't mean they aren't human.
I hope those two guys get their due. They deserve it, and they took a ration of grief which damaged their careers. Fleischmann is dead- but someone should wrote Pons a check since he's still kicking around..
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
"Perhaps most surprising is that, in the formative years of atomic science in the early 20th century, some scientists reported inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations. In the 1910s and 1920s, this research was reported in popular newspapers and magazines, and papers were published in the top scientific journals of the day, including Physical Review, Science and Nature."
If that's about Rossi's e-cat, then I go back reading Mickey Mouse...
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
LENR is great for scammers. It's like free energy but with better sounding "science" behind it.
Scammers with the necessary scientific background and a good sense of misdirection can easily fool scientists. Scientists are good at finding natural causes for surprising results. However, if the result comes from deliberate trickery and that the trickster did enough research to avoid breaking all the laws of physics, scientists can be fooled like kids at a magic show.
So I thing that many of the results for LENR are poisoned by such scams and any attempt at meta-analysis is doomed.
Notice how in this article he name-drops Chandrasekhar to bolster the reputation of Lewis Larsen and thus the so-called "Widom-Larsen theory" without explicitly endorsing it or claiming it explains the purported experimental evidence.
Stephan
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle.
I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Alchemy is ... real? I'm not talking about turning stuff into gold but turning some elements into others using certain ... what-looks-to-be chemical reactions?
By definition you can't change one element into another using chemistry. Nuclear reactions on the other hand always produce different elements or different isotopes. Making gold is not economical and I read somewhere that it's actually easier to turn gold into lead than vice-versa, but in theory one could turn a profit by transmuting iridium (around $30 per kg) into rhenium (~$6,000 per kg) and optionally then turn the rhenium into osmium (~$10,000 per kg). That is if one happened to have a slow neutron source lying around and a lot of time on one's hands. The trick, I imagine, would be separating the stock material into its isotopes. This is an exercise left to the reader, as the saying goes.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
In nulcear engineering they are also called "thermal" neutrons because they have about the same kinetic energy as the surrounding material (thermal energy). Basically just neutrons that move too slow to easily pass out of the material they are formed in without reacting. They are the same neutrons that a fission chain reaction depends on in a reactor.
Someone takes a blog article with no cited evidence as gospel truth, then crows about how it validates their personal beliefs. Particularly ironic in this case, as said personal beliefs are about scientists always jumping to biased conclusions. You don't say.
A) when scientists turn out to be wrong, who is it that proves them wrong - is it blog authors or slashdot posters? No, it's other scientists with stronger evidence.
B) there may be interesting accumulated evidence in the LENR field, but this guest blog does not cite any, so does not prove or disprove anything.
C) Many labs tried to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's work, and couldn't. The public backlash was heightened by them having gone to the press before peer review, but the real fault lay with the media over-blowing the hype prematurely - and people accepting unquestioningly everything the media said.
C) If there are, as alleged, some interesting results worthy of further study, then hopefully some labs will follow them up further. LENR falls in the extraordinary-claims basket, so the proper response for most labs is to ignore it until more speculative researchers get around to producing evidence strong enough to merit a closer look. Has that happened yet? TFA thinks so, but does not make a case a reputable lab would find compelling.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle
They've also far more often been through the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, resisting it, turning out to be completely correct and still having a bunch of dimwits cherry pick a tiny number of times when that didn't happen an hold those up add some sort of proof that scientists should always listen to cranks.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You get slow neutrons by moderating them, mostly in water but sometimes in graphite.
Can an AC get a "+1 thermal" around here?
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle. I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
This is just a variant of the Galileo Gambit. Yes, over the last 200 years there have been several instances where "science" (as in the majority of scientists) has been sceptical to accept paradigm-changing new claims. Semmelweis is one example, as is Alfred Wegener with his idea of continental drift. But for every genius causing a major shift in scientific opinion, there have been legions of bozos proposing perpetuum mobiles, morphic fields, magnetic water cures, electric universes, and other crap. And on the other hand, many earth-shattering new theories like relativity (both versions) and evolution have been rather quickly accepted, because they were presented with convincing arguments and testable hypotheses. As Sagan said: they also laughed at Bozo the Clown...
Stephan
"If there are two competing theories, at least one of them is wrong."
Actually, I have a counter example to my own claim: wave-particle duality, where two contradictory theories were both proven correct. J. J. Thomson won a Nobel Prize for discovering the particle nature of the electron and his son George shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the wave nature of the electron.
But what about the gamma? No explanation there.
This isn't the only dodgy thing about this theory the whole electron-mass argument seems dubious looked at from a simple energy standpoint. They are claiming that the electrons in the metal hydride have a mass of well over an MeV for this to work. This is a HUGE amount of energy, about 6 orders of magnitude higher than any chemical energy. Basic energy conservation requires this mass to come from somewhere so where does it come from? Energies that large (by the time you have multiplied it by the number of electrons) are usually pretty obvious - it should be about 5-6 orders of magnitude higher than the energy stored in a battery of the same size.
If it comes out with reproducible results larger than the margin of error, then there's something to work with, even if their theory is snorting dried pixie feces.
I remember seeing a lot of people on those particular subjects that were mentioned yelling and screaming it's fake simply because they didn't have a theory that these people would accept. That's not good science. That's not even in the realm of science.
I seem to recall that a couple places did replicate the LENR results, one of the first was either the University of Oregon, or Oregon State University. The only difference they'd seen between a setup that succeeded and one that failed was the level of surface fractures on the platinum (catalyst, cathode, some kind of thingie made of platinum) of the one that succeeded, though their output was lower than the rate inventors were claiming.
Never forget, our physics, and all the rest of our sciences, are wrong. However, they are less wrong than they were in the past, and scientists are working all the time to make them more correct every day. Time goes on and science gets better. Old theories are replaced by better ones, and the universe continues still completely indifferent to our squabbles. So sometimes why won't know why something works, and sometimes we'll understand it good enough, but perfect knowledge is a fantasy.
These specific neutrons are supposedly created during a process of weak interaction called "electron capture" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is not pseudo-science - it is a well-known process - see the Wikipedia article.
When this happens in heavier elements/nuclei the neutron is not emitted but becomes/stays part of the original nucleus.
In TFA case the sole proton of a hydrogen atom is converted. Thereby the formerly bound proton becomes a free neutron, but with a very low kinetic energy (in fact, below thermal). Free neutrons can themselves trigger nuclear reactions in nearby atoms, thereby transmuting them.
You are right, one could do crazy things - if this theory is true it would open the door to an entirely new technological field (nuclear chemistry). It goes beyond being just another energy source.
One of the claims is that you can very effectively shield gamma radiation.
The new aspect here is that you can trigger electron capture (with a laser) for stable elements - hydrogenated metals, whereas usually electron capture is a decay channel for unstable elements.
By analogy to electricity that's like the difference between a lightning bolt (a natural force we can't control) and somebody being able to build an electric circuit.
Even if the chances were high that the whole story/theory falls apart we should devote significant resources to investigate because the potential benefits are tremendous.