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Suppression of cold fusion research?
Dylan Greene wrote to us with
a story talking about the possible suppresion of cold fusion research from those whom you would expect to. It might be inflamatory, but it's also interesting.
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how long it will be until we create cold fusion?
They were ruined by their pre-mature publication of results that were later determined to be bogus, not due to fraud, but to their own shoddy practice. This article is obviously BS because it predicates that there was something noteworthy in Pons & Fleischman's work beyond the lesson to be learned in how to look silly doing science badly.
Publish or perish ? Tough choice.
Nope. OS is well understood and works reliably. Not to mention, the cost of entry for "cold fusion" is rather high.
...that Stan Pons, one of the original "cold-fusion" researchers, was funded by a large Japanese corporation (Toyota?, IIRC) to carry on his cold-fusion research in France. Pons was quite well funded for a nearly a decade (once again, IIRC). Then recently, the plug was pulled on the research.
To my knowledge, no "cold-fusion" publications were generated -- nothing substantial came out of Pons' corporate-funded research.
The "Occam's razor" conclusion is that there's nothing to "cold fusion", and that the funding was cut for lack of progress.
A conspiracy theorist might come to other conclusions.
Of course the gov't would want to suppress this kind on information. It would give every lunatic fringe group the ability to produce home-rolled nukes. Forget crypto and digital communications, really hi-tech scares the crap out of governments because it puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of people which they cannot fully control.
Think about transporters in Star Trek. If someone invented such a device, he would be killed by the black helicopters, his lab incinerated, and his research locked away in the NSA's dusty basement of cool tech that's too dangerous for anyone to have. With a transporter you could assassinate people over vast distances, anonymously with ease. Ther'd be no defense againse such a device, you could beam bombs into anywhere, beam money out of banks, beam people you don't like into space on wide dispersion, or just beam their brain out. You bet the gov't will act to supress certain research that it deems dangerous were it to become common knowledge. It's not paranoia. It's common sense. Who will say I'm totally wrong?
Fact: There are unexplainable results in *many* CF tests.
Insted of continuing on this problem in the name of understanding the behavior, we ignore it and shun anyone who looks into it..
I dont think that 'Cold Fusion' will ever be a real energey source, but we *MUST* undstand what is going on here.
Well, the fact that there were thousands of attempts and they all failed, does not necessarily prove that cold fusion cannot be achieved. However
controlling hot fusion is tremendously difficult, maybe cold fusion is not any easier to achieve and control.
Your reaction is the perfect demonstration of the mind of the current scientific community. Insted of trying to understand, you come off with a knee-jerk "It's not possible responce".
:P We dont know what it is, and good scientific research into it will do nothing worse then advance our knoweldge.
No one denies that this expirment yealds some weird results (Hydrogen 4 production) but everyone just ignores that squacks about the lack of other byproducts.
Perhaps it's not fusion in the normal sence, it's very arrogant to assume we understand everything and I think it's unacceptiable to call yourself a scientist when you willingly ignore unexplainable results. Just because our understanding of physics doesn't yet explain it doesn't make it false.
You attitude prevents real scientists from looking into this. Perhaps if you looked into this not with the question "How is this not possible?" but with "Why dont I get all the results I expected?", you might actually learn something.
Did it ever cross your mind that the atomic structure of the palladium might somehow contain and recycle your neutrons with such effencicy that none are ever detected? Quantum fusion through superstring exchange?
Sure, I dont believe it's 'fusion' myself either, but I would never dissmiss it offhand, nor discredit people who study CF just because it doesn't snap in nicely with my understanding of the universe.
The scientific community will not be suppressing anything for grant money. The article is shurly wrong and probable irresponcible is claiming so. The funding people probable are suppressing research by being biassed to not believe the results of well preformed experements, but remember that they are not researchers themselves and they don't really understand what is going on. They just thiknk that because it is not explained by our current theory it is probable a mistake. It is possible that the fossile fules people are doing stuff to discurage the funding people.
It is also importent to say that this really should be called the anomolus heat effect instead of cold fussion and the original researches made a maistake is claiming that is was cold fussion when all they had was evidence for was some unexplained heat. The MIT studdy was a looking for fussion not heat, as it said in the article.
These anomolous effects are discovered every once in a while.. it could be real and out theory could be wrong or it could be experemental error. It taskes a while to find out.
Well the whole story sounds nice but I have a hard time believing it. I've read about this stuff before and it was a lot more inflammatory. Supposedly scientists were disappearing, labs being destroyed, experiments sabotaged (maybe that's why it doesn't work all the time, hehehe), people being strong-armed by Mobil and Exxon, etc.
Personally I think this is the same crackpot writing without all the crackpot stories.
Yeesh, what's next, alien abductions? An interview with Whitley Strieber, Respected Academic and Noted Publisher? How about an article about chupacabras tracking goats with a GPS running Linux?
Hey, I have an old 90 mpg carburetor in the garage. Bidding starts at $1K.
The monsters at the edge could not very well be at the edge if there were no edge!
Ummm...oops, wrong topic.
Come on, if the US government *were* dumping billions of dollars into cold-fusion research, every '60 minutes' show in the country would be yelling about how they were wasting taxpayer's money on silly and fruitless research.
Yes, the potential upside of "cold fusion" is huge. But that's a very weak logical argument for huge funding, rather like saying "I'd better give my life savings to this cult, because if the guy who calls himself Jesus Reborn is right, it's the only way to save my eternal soul".
Personally, I'd like to see Cold Fusion added to 'Physics 101' lab courses. It would be a great way to teach students about the scientific method and about how easy it is for small experimental errors to lead you to incorrect conclusions. Plus, with that many people observing and repeating the experiment, there's a much better chance of discovering any real effects which might be present.
[left my login cookie in my other pants]
This can't be a fusion reaction! There is no residual radiation!
He sees a few bubbles in a glass of water.
WTF? It was sprite! This guys no scientist. He didn't convince me of anything.
>There were thousands maybe millions attemps of flights by humans that failed. We didn't cut off the studies, and look what happened..
Didn't remember the Wright Brothers as having a University or Government grant... thought they were just a couple of guys who invested their own time and effort, then came up with *undeniable, reproducible, witnessed* evidence of the phenomenon they were seeking.
Methinks there might actually be something to this conspiracy theory. I've been kind of reading about it for a couple of years now...How they've put billions and billions each YEAR into hot fusion research, and they've never gotten a SINGLE WATT of excess energy. Whereas "cold fusion" (or whatever it might be) has been giving excess energy since day 1. Something is quite screwy here... I remember reading that you could rent a small demonstration "cold fusion reactor" for as little as $1000 a year or so. There's plenty of evidence to suggest this really works. So where's the bloody funding???
First of all, I am not a physicist (and I got passed up for the TV role... bummer :-)
If the cold fusion setup generates the excess heat that they claim, that should be enough reason to justify the research funds.
Either the setup generates heat or it doesn't.
If it doesn't... Oh well, it won't be the first time money is tossed away.
If it does generate heat, what's causing it? Either a chemical reaction, or a nuclear one.
If the reaction is chemical, there may be some industrial uses, which would eventually pay back the research investment.
But if the heat source is nuclear, the rewards of research could be astronomical. Consider a fossil fuel power plant being replaced by a cold fusion plant. Suddenly, there are no emissions to control. Power generation is not saddled with the environmental protection taxes anymore. Suddenly, the need for costly air scubbers and purifiers is gone. Merely removing the cost of dealing with the waste means higher profits. And this is assuming that the cost of the fuel is the same.
Our understanding of nuclear physics comes primarily from high energy atom smashers. This is a hot environment. But, there is nuclear fission happening right now, all around us (can anyone say carbon decay?). These nuclear reactions are happening in a cold environment. Who's to say that fusion couldn't happen at low temperatures? After all, all we know is hot nuclear physics.
Perhaps, the atoms in platinum surface align the deuterium atoms in such a way as to make fusion more likely. Take a box of Lego pieces and shake it. It is unlikely that any will join. Now take the Lego pieces and put them in small rectangular tubes with all the bumps facing one way. Now shake the tubes. It is much more likely that pieces will join.
I'm starting to ramble. My points are these:
-We don't know nearly as much as we think we know about cold nuclear reactions.
-We shouldn't be so quick to summarily dismiss this, because the potential rewards are so high. We need a definitive, unbiassed study.
-There should be more than enough funds available. Darth Gates probably has enough money lost in his seat cusions to pay for this, for crying out loud. {Shudder: MS-FUSION, from the makers of Windows 2000}
...and lack of knowledge on the facts that is holding this thing down. Go do some research on it, and come back with something useful.
"The problem is that it is difficult to measure accurately
just how much electricity was pumped into the electrode to begin
with!!"
Unlike the electro-chemical phenomenon commonly known as "cold fusion" measurment of electricity is well understood. While "cold fusion" may not be anything like fusion as we know it, there are definitely things that can be learned from its study. For example: better ways of measuring heat and electricity.
I might be wrong, but I don't think the stuff they're doing now could be directly made into a bomb. Sure, you could presumably come up with *something* that worked on the same principles... But this is an entirely different monster than fission.
It's incredibly apparent that you read the article without an open mind, and without having ever done any research on this. You wrote it off before you read it. And it's EXACTLY THAT that is screwing this search to figure out what's happening in these "cold fusion" experiments. Look, maybe it's not cold fusion. Maybe there's little tiny aliens that are beaming microwaves into the water, but we can't see them because of their advanced cloaking devices. Does it freaking matter? No. There's something happening (extra energy in these reactions) and we need to know what it is.
Since they're using heavy water, isn't it possible that the only fusion process which takes place is two heavy-hydrogen combining into one He-4? That would release only energy. Although you'd expect to detect that energy as gamma rays, I suppose it might be slightly possible for some unknown process to convert all that energy to heat within the apparatus.
Now, I'm far from convinced that they actually do get an excess of energy, long-term (as opposed to just storing electro-chemical energy, then releasing it later in the experiment when you've turned the recorders on). Many of these 'free energy' methods rely on using high-voltage or high-frequency energy sources, then measuring voltage and current on a $20 automotive-grade multimeter. Even if you do use the proper measuring equipment, it's still tricky to perform these experiments accurately.
Excess energy in a self-sustaining reaction is excess energy in a self-sustaining reaction. Call it what you want, and let someone else come up with it. Narrow mindedness doesn't get people anywhere. How do you know what a cold fusion reaction should be like? We don't know SQUAT about the Universe. There's a type of motor (forget who it's named after) that according to our "laws of physics" is an impossible device. And yet it spins. So is it a hoax? No. It's just that our pathetic "laws of physics" aren't laws at all: They're OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THEM. And we have VERY LITTLE understanding, my friend. Physicist or no, you know JACK compared to what's out there.
When Pons and Fleishman got encouraging results, they got so exceited their objectivity was compromised. That is something that could happen to any scientist, since cold fusion is the holy grail of applied science. If I were an NSF higher up I would also breathe down the neck of any cold fusion researcher just to keep them from jumping the gun the way Pons and Fleishman did.
But an oil-company conspiracy? Give me a break.
Those scientists are just trying in vain to defend a hypothesis that would even be too absurd for most SciFi series.
:-)
Why not pop down to your local video store and pick up a copy of "Chain Reaction"? While you're there, pick up some "Planet of the Apes" episodes, maybe some "Dr. Who" and "Space 1999".
After watching these, you'll realize that almost NO pseudo-scientific babbling would be too absurd for an SF series.
Well, first off, why should you care whether I "reveal myself"? I don't have any particular reason to wish to have an id registered with this site.
Second, the fact that I posted under the ubiquitous "anonymous coward" is irrelevant to whether or not my comment was accurate. It is a historical fact that the cold fusion press release of a decade ago was extreme foolishness on the part of Pons & Fleischman. Their reputations have not recovered. When the smoke cleared, two careers were trashed and zero progress had been made by them toward cold fusion. I criticized the article that gave rise to this discussion because it suggests that somehow Pons & Fleischman had produced something of value that was then suppressed by the scientific community and other evil powers. In reality, the scientific community was enthusiastic ten years ago when the story broke, and many, many people were deeply disappointed when it turned out that Pons & Fleischman had done nothing but make an embarrassing and incorrect press release.
Well I dont buy 'Cold Fusion', but I think a controlled fusion reactor is possible.. See
http://www.jet.uk
The A-Bomb (atom bomb) works on fission. Slam a couple of chunks of uranium together to form a supercritical mass, a chain reaction starts, and a city gets levelled.
The H-Bomb (hydrogen bomb) works on fusion. Slam some hydrogen atoms together hard enough, and you get helium and energy. Unfortunately, the way they slam the atoms together is to surround them with miniature A-bombs to generate a shaped nuclear charge. The trigger is fission, but the main power comes from fusion.
Just a note about the "prestige" of the centennial APS meeting. This meeting was open to anyone who wished to speak. No abstracts were turned away. I should know...I spoke...
First, I only took one materials science course so don't flame me too bad :)
m l
Months ago when I read:
www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion_pr.ht
...I was interested in the details of how the microscopic flaws in the Pd (ie: regularity of its latice) affected the energy output and how the addition of carbon acted as a catalyst.
I thought, "Gee, that sounds a lot like steel". The strength of steel (ie: the regularity of its latice structures) is greatly determined by the annealing process. The addition of carbon turns iron into steel (ie: makes the latice more regular still). Cold fusion seems to depend on hydrogen atoms being squeezed into a latice, which depends on regular latice structures, which might benefit greatly from the annealing technology developed over the last 100 years or so.
Throughout my readings on cold fusion different materials and alloys are discussed but I have never seen anyone investigating the annealing process used to create the materials. Can anyone shed some light on this?
This is the classic engineering vs. science debate. As an engineer I don't need a 100% understanding of the underlying physics, I just see a huge source of cheap energy.
> I remember reading that you could rent a small demonstration "cold fusion reactor" for as little as $1000 a year or so
.008 out) variety rather than the "boil a lobster with an AA cell" variety.
I'll rent you one for $999. If it doesn't work when it arrives, it's 'cause the department of energy forced the post office to open the package and tamper with the karmic alignment of the harmonious palladium crystals. It worked when it left the factory, honest.
I suspect that more energy has been expended acoustically talking about CF than has ever been produced by the process, worldwide. Remember, the claims are of the (100W in, 100.01 +/-
If you're so convinced that CF is real, why not get some friends together, mortgage your houses, and fund one of these research teams. Surround your research facility with 24x7 webcams so that the black helicopters can't come and get you without the whole Internet seeing it. When your team perfects CF, you will be rich.
The level of arrogance it astonishing (not really, most humans are full of shit AKA ego AKA greed/selfish/fuck humanity I got mine syndrome).
I will break this down simple.
1. Particles are being produced. FACT
2. Heat is being produced. FACT
3. Science cannot explain it. FACT
Remember when everyone thought the world was flat and to say anything different is heresy? Did you know gallileo (spelling?) had to publicly say he lied be or put to death even thought he was right?
The question should be "what is it?". If the fact that science does not provide all answers is unacceptable for you egotists then find out "what is it?" to shut us up.
This sentance is false. Prove that.
If there were a working device. I find it highly likely that certain parties (gov, corp) would want it crushed period. It is all about money and power.
Am I the only one find the ferengi on ST to be what we are? The very idea that humanity could "get over itself" long enough to become what ST shows I find laughable. Fact, is we will kill oursleves.
Cool experiment, and a hilarious quote from the
Chicago Tribune article:
A neutrino bomb would be the perfect pacifist
weapon [...] It would be very expensive and
would preserve both lives and property.
This article is either a hoax or poorly researched, see MIT's response in 1990.
>the fundemental difference between a nuculear reactor and a nuculear bomb is the speed of the reaction.
I'd say that the fundamental difference is that a reactor employs an active feedback system that maintains a constant reaction rate, while a bomb creates conditions where the reaction rate increases rapidly.
However, existing fission and fusion reactions are sustained because the particles emitted by one reaction initiate others. Since CF doesn't release any particles or energetic photons (*cough*), it can't be made into a bomb. There's no convenient way to feed its excess heat energy back into the electrical energy to drive the reaction.
Our current theories of nuclear fusion and QM are completely up the creek. These theories have correctly predicted just about every phenomena observed in High Energy Physics over the last 50 years, from the atomic bomb to the transistor. Never mind, its all wrong.
Although I agree with your point that option 2 is by far much more likely, I would like to point out a few things.
1 - Science works on the basis that theories are never proven, only disproven. Experiments are designed to disprove a theory. The most you can say about a theory is "I can't prove that it's wrong". Newton, Bohr, and many others could have made exactly the same type of statement about their theories before quantum mechanics and relativity came around.
2 - This may not be a "high energy" phenomenon. Most, if not all, of our current knowledge about atomic and sub-atomic physics comes from observations made by smashing atoms apart in particle accelerators. There may be things we will never learn because all we see is the shrapnel.
3 - Let's forget about the energy for the moment. Where is the helium-4 coming from?
I don't do research physics but I have been following 'cold fusion' (or 'new hydrogen energy' as it is called in Japan) since it's inception.
Cold fusion research is quite underground but there is quite a broad, international group of researchers who are trying to get a handle on what is really happening here.
Why aren't governments persuing this? Well they are. The Los Alamos guys have discretely gone to ground apparently due to fears that this same phenomena could be used to build weapons because to the very high concentrations of hydrogen (deturium, tritinum) that are acheived in some of these experiments.
Actually, the very high packing in these lattices can be very dangerous. One researcher was killed when one of the early electolytic cells exploded after the packed lattice became unstable. The early experiments used solid bulk electrodes and could pack a quite a bang.
Apparently this is why Pons & Fleischman claim they released their results early since people were attempting to dulplicate their results due to rumours they had heard about the original experiments without taking proper precautions.
There are a number of ways of creating anomalous effects aside from the original (and somewhat primitive) electolysis experiments. Aside from various plasma discharge experiments (something the Russians seem to focus on) they all focus on trying to pack hydrogen or deuterium tightly into some type of lattice structre. And yes some do produce neutrons as I recall.
The major problem with this phenomena is that it is primarily a material sciences problem. Firstly, this phenomena only occurs in an electrolytic process when they get close to one hydrogen atom for each paladim atom in the latice. The slightest flaw will result in hydrogen escaping the lattice and preventing the required concentration. Impurities such as carbon on the surface would apparently poison the whole process.
Only one out of a hundred of the early transistors worked until people got a handle on how impurities were affecting the germanium and silicone lattice structure and the resulting electron flows. It is believed that the same issues are affecting these experiments.
Another major problem with the field is that _whatever_ is happening does not follow classic hot fusion physics which is well understood. There may be some type of fusion catalyitic process going on but frankly no one really knows what is happening. Other than this is something probably much more sophisticated than banging a couple of hydrogen nuclei together.
This is a very strange phemnomena. People get better results from hydrogen than deturium. There is tons of experimental evidence of some form of transmutation occurring. A new theoretical framework will be required to deal with the empirical evidence.
Conventional Fusion
FAQ
by Robert F. Heeter of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Scientific American "Ask the Experts"
Q&A
The FAQ is rather long, but the Q&A summarises various viewpoints of fusion scientists and is worth reading.
The president of our local university went in for this in a big way. He had articles in the local newspaper an' everthing. He was a respected metallurgist and did good things to boost enrollment.
After everybody was done laughing at him, he was asked to retire and was replaced.
You can't affect a nucleus with a chemical reaction. The energy difference between the two processes is just too great.
0) You can't win
1) You can't break even.
2) You can't even quit the game.
--
Some might say the world might end in fire,
I say the world will end in heat death.
The experiment could not be repeated, that means it wasn't science. End of story.
Since it has no electons, Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction that it comes in contact with. According to discoverers, a minute amount of Administratium caused one reacton to take nearly a month to complete, when it would normally occur in less than one second.
Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately 3 years, at which time it does not actually decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which the assistant neutrons, vice neutrons, and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic weight actually increases after such reorganizations.
Research at other laboratories indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to accumulate in certain places such as government agencies, large corporations and universities, and can often be found in the newest, best ventilated buildings.
Scientists point out that Administratium is known to be toxic at extremely low levels of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reactions where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but the results to date are not promising.
Many people have there opions about the subject of cold fusion, which is fine. But one thing we need to remeber is that nothing is really true in science. Science is basically an explination of event. That explination holds until something better comes along. There are many examples of this throughout the history of science. People who come up with the better idea are not always excepted and some times punished for what they feel is right. A good example of the is Galleleo. He was sentenced to house arrest, and only recently the Catholic Church admitted he was right (circa 1997).
So before you go bashing cold fusion, relise that something weird is happening in these experiments, and that it should be investigated.
Read you dips! :)
They say it's producing He4. There was no He4 in there to start with.. As far as science knows, He4 could only be produced as a result of fusion.
IMNSSO, The pladdium is forming some sort of latice (hence working better with added carbon) which causes some sort of weird quantum tunneling effect. It's not fusion as we would normally call it (hence no partical byproducts).
It probably wont ever be useful for energy production, but it is something we dont understand.
Do you have any REFERENCES for your claims that the University of Arizona has blatantly violated the tenets of academic freedom, or are you just parrotting someone's line and maintaining the conspiracy theorists' weltanschauung?
Hi David-
Is it possible that you're confusing neutrons with neutrinos? Neutrons are subatomic particles that, together with protons, make up the nucleus, and they have a mass which is nearly the same as that of the proton. Neutrinos, on the other hand, are massless (or nearly massless, neutrino being Italian for "little massless one"). They are produced in certain kinds of nuclear decays (such as the decay of a free neutron) and current theory holds that they are a fundamental part of the weak force.
Neutrinos are very difficult to detect. Neutrons, however, are relatively easy to detect given a properly expensive detector.
The solar neutrino problem (I am not aware of any solar neutron problem) refers to how many neutrinos we expect to see produced by the sun. Experiments have shown that we observe about 1/3 of the neutrinos expected. One possible explanation for this is that the neutrinos have a small mass.
The solar neutrino problem should have nothing to do with cold fusion.
Cheers,
Anton
>Okay troll, point out a single other instance of any other fuel source creating more energy than is put into it.
.01 Watts would quickly add up, it's just not realistic. A power plant with a net generation capacity of 1 megawatt could not be economically viable if it took in 1000 megawatts of electrical energy and put out 1001. If CF was real, but was ultimately limited to this sort of efficiency, then it would be a laboratory curiosity only.
m l
How about a block of natural uranium encased in lead? If you shoot a beam of neutrons into it, it will get warm. The heat energy generated will be slightly greater than the energy of the neutron beam going in (though not necessarily greater than the energy it took to *produce* that beam of neutrons), due to induced fission of the uranium.
If and only if CF can do the same thing, then there is a real effect worthy of study. However, when the gain is such a small fraction of the input energy, it becomes very difficult to design and conduct an experiment such that you can *prove* that the measured gain can not be due to experimental error. You don't always think of all the ways that energy can sneak into your experiment; I've been in low-temperature labs where experiments had to be conducted inside a Faraday cage because the local radio stations caused excessive heating of the samples.
When you have weak evidence for an effect, it takes a long time and many iterations of experiments before you can conclude that the effect is real. Often it isn't.
As for your assertion that the extra
I while ago I heard some stuff about muon-catalyzed fusion that sounded promising... anyone have any followup information? However, by far the most practical form of fusion power production at the moment is solar energy collection. If you're looking for a conspiracy, ask why the government isn't funding research on making photovoltaic cells with the same roll-to-roll processing methods that create potato chip bags (deposit semiconductor films rather than aluminum...).
But then, why do nuclear stuff and wet chemistry when you can just build an 800% efficient electric motor/generator? See "The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman".
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/Newman/section1.ht
(take with a shaker of salt).
It works just fine. (Background: the size of a hydrogen molecule depends on the size of the orbit required for an electron to maintain the minimum amount of angular momentum it is allowed to have by the laws of QM.) A heavier particle is allowed to have a much smaller orbit, so if you drop a muon into a hydrogen molecule the two protons are pulled very close together, and they fuse into a deuteron. The problem is that the muon often remains bound to the deuteron until it decays, and it takes more energy to make a muon than you can extract from the fusions you can perform with that muon.
A truckload of salt. A hint for the cognoscienti: RMS measurement error.
The funding for basic sciences, particularly physics is low. The military budget is huge and that is only the money that is "above the board".
"whatyoutalkinboutwillis"
Am I the only one into RPG here?
(not offtopic; in Mage you see the same thinking supression we are seeing or at least trying to see here)
Actually, what would happen is that the money would flow to new research based on improving or using CF. In fact, there'd probably be a *huge* influx of research dollars, from both public and private sources. Venture capital would be all over CF.
2) Prestige/pride - all those who dismissed CF as the product of quacks would suddenly find themselves in a rather uncomfortable situation.
But there'd still be thousands of people who don't have their pride wrapped up in it. It's been a relatively long time since P&F screwed up.
Sorry, but neither of these reasons would be enough to keep CF down *if it worked*.
Cold fusion people have been proved wrong time and time again because an evil group of mages want to avoid people discovering what _really_ happens in cold fusion (any alchemist here?).
Seems that now you're wrong :-)
Of course, the reaction chain you propose would release gamma rays along the way. No gamma rays have been detected.
Are you nuts? It's way too risky to do even in a normal lab! If it works, you are DOOMED!
No they weren't, they did find upon something and if their procedures were followed properly you could produce energy, and many did. However, more scientists did not follow the procedures properly and did not produce results.
It may not be cold fusion though...might be something else. Maybe you should do some reading first before speculating.
The difference is that we didn't keep trying to do it the same way, so we didn't keep following dead ends. If you don't throw away the mistakes, you don't get anywhere.
This type of research is generally much cheaper as you can produce it in a normal lab, you don't need the big expensive reactor that you need for hot fusion.
and you'll realize that many experiments DO work and have been producing energy. If I remember correctly from the RESEARCH that I did for a paper on it, some labs have had "cold" fusion reactors producing energy for months at a time. I'm just not sure it's cold fusion...there's a lot of speculation that it might be some other phenomenon.
Wrong!
If it produces a significant amount of excess heat, then it is NOT necessarily a viable energy source.
It's possible it could be a complicated, low quality heat pump.
A standard residential heat pump produces lots of "excess heat" by the standards of Cold Fusion: X watts of electricity in, 1.3 * X watts of heat out. You can buy them at Sears.
The thermodynamics of all these cold-fusion setups are very complicated.
You need to make *excess* *work*.
I agree with the previous physicist who asked "where are the neutrons?" (I'm a professional physicist as well).
You can even assume that lots of laws of nuclear physics are somehow wrong. The problem is that the reaction rate necessary to produce even milliwatts of excess heat is ENORMOUS. You would have to invent new nuclear physics which somehow suppressed ALL the pathways which make ionizing radiation by a ridiculous factor. We have detectors capable of measuring single particles, neutrons, xrays, electrons, whatever---with rather high efficiency, e.g. 30 or 40%. And yet the reaction rate has to be something like 10^buttloads per second. There just is NO way to transfer energy from MeV energies out of the nucleus into milli-eV thermal energies of phonons (i.e. heat) without making kEV energies along the way, and "whatever" the nuclear process will be there will be SOME sign of it by x-ray excitation of the substrate or whatever.
These detectors have been put near all sorts of supposedly "Cold Fusion" apparatus. Nada. Nothing above background. They've done it in deep caves to eliminate cosmic rays. Zippo.
Sorry, there aint much of squat there. It's worth at most a modest effort, and only for those experiments which make anomalous nuclear reactions, not heat.
There is indeed a fusion crisis, but it's in hot fusion. All sorts of good ideas, beyond the tokamak, aren't being funded.
All this cold fusion crap has been debated _to_death_ on sci.physics.fusion. It was old when Dejanews started.
And anyway, for the purposes of powering the planet without wrecking the environment, nuclear fission is actually pretty good. Instead of dispersing the waste up a smokestack it's all concentrated in one place. You let it sit there. And no carbon dioxide. If you care about your planet, it's stupid to wait for fusion---climate change is already upon us. The shit hasn't even begun to hit the fan.
There have been experiments that failed, but there are also many that have worked and have produced energy...for months at a time. Go do some research next time.
Neutrons are easy to detect. They have been detected and well understood for decades. There are perhaps thousands of neutron dectors. Neutrons are a neccessary byproduct of fusion. The lack of neutrons alone is enough to kill cold fusion.
Neutrinos are extremely difficult to detect and are not well understood. Only a few expensive large scale experiments exist to detect neutrinos. The reference to solar neutrinos in the article is a red herring. It has no logical connection with the question of cold fusion-- it has no bearing on the question.
Cold fusion labs are relatively cheap and easy to set up. You don't need lots of funding to try it out. Hundreds of competent people tried very hard to get it to work. The results were 100% negative. Conspiracy has nothing to do with it. If you want to look for conspiracy, find something potentially viable that requires a lot of funding, such as solar power. You'd have much more luck finding people burying findings in this case. There is such a thing as conspiracy and collusion by powerful people; there is also such a thing as crack-pot pseudo-science. To understand the difference, try reading some books about cold fusion and the culture of science.
Take as a counter-expample Bucky-balls. It was announced that a cheap and easy method for producing a radically new form of solid carbon was available. Many people tried to reproduce the results with great sucess. So we believe in Bucky-balls. An enormous amount of energy was spent worldwide trying to confirm CF. Many people, many organizations. No one had any luck at all. A few deluded people have held on for years, but they have never produced any verifyable results.
John Lapyre (physicist)
First Echelon, now "cold fusion" - sounds like
"make conspiracy nuts look silly" was on the
scavenger hunt list. Next they'll be claiming
that "MS-Linux" will be released real soon now...
I'm curious, have other researchers during this past decade observed the production of He4 in their CF experiments? If He4 was produced, then it seem that this would be an important discovery.
OTOH, I'll play the role of the skeptical scientist. How much He4 was produced? How was it measured? What were the measurement errors? Is there a possibility that this was an experimental error?
That's what I hate about these types of article. I have no way of figuring out whether the measurement of He4 is valid or not. Instead we are suppose to believe whatever the writer reports.
AFIK almost every CF expirment that looked for He4 found it, plenty of it (I belive the amount of He4 was about correct for the excess energy)..
I dont know the details, there is more in the wired article they reference.
What BS.
Let's, for a moment, say cold fusion does exist. Let's try to answer a simple question:
Why hasn't any country started using it? Like China for example, or Japan which is heavily dependant on western oil? Why do they have to loose in exploiting this abundant energy source? Has the oil industry "gotten to them" too?
It would take a massive cover up to hide this, if it did work, or was at least practical as an energy source.
The most powerful country in the world couldn't hide the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was a flaming homosexual. Given that fact, I kinda doubt they were able to cover up one of the most important discoveres ever, especially since if it were true, physics will reveal it at some point.
Now repeat after me: "The X Files is a television show, the X Files is a television show, the X Files is a television show..."
If so, then why did most experiments report complete failure? Scientists wouldn't be so dumb to report complete failure without looking for He4.
No. The experiment *was* not repeated. What's the difference between that and *could* not be repeated?
Everything.
My uncle is in the house of representatives. First of all, how effectively do committees of people, from the same background and with the same opinions, generally function? Now, make your committee have a few hundred people, all with *completely* different opinions of everything, who often can't stand each other but have to pretend they do, different intellegence levels, different religions, everything. Now, try to get a conspiracy going by a majority. Hell, a minority of the members. When just one could further his career immensely by turning to any of the tv cameras there during a recess and saying whats going on.
I hear every time he gets home, as little as that is, his newest headaches recieved from other people. Some woman always convinced that everyone is out to oppress her people. Some guy trying to channel money from a bill into his district. And the lack of half a brain some of the people we elect into office have.
BTW, people - I always hear, everyone in the media, talking about how much congressmen get paid and how little they work. That is complete b***s***. Do you know how late into the night they usually spend debating, how early in the morning they have to get up, how they're always hounded for interviews during their 15 minute recesses? How even on breaks they're not on break. I was shocked recently to learn my uncle had a nap during one of his breaks. Its probably been years since he's done that. The last movie he saw in a theater was the original star wars (no the re-release). These people work hard, give them some respect!
And, then, the oil-industry conspiracy. There is no big "council of oil barons" or whatever you think is making these conspiracy decisions. My father is a high ranking executive in a major oil company. How much does a gallon of milk cost in the stores, anyone know? Couple bucks? The oil industry has people calculate and hope for good odds of hitting a spot, usually in the ocean, where there might be oil, send a team halfway around the world, drill, usually miss on the first few attempts, suck this oil out from layers of rock it doesn't want to leave, ship it halfway around the world, run it through some of the largest scale chemical reactions in the world, making a few cents a barrel, has it taxed every step of the way, its cost trippled at the pumb by taxes, and all for half the cost of milk. Each company is selling.. lets face it, the same thing, so competition is quite fierce. A large corporate overhead is needed to decide where to ship these millions of gallons of crude, gasoline, diesel, to squeeze as much profit out of them and minimize the costs as much as possible.
Now, you're claiming that the industry gets together, and pays off congressmen and people in power to in turn pay off executives of companies that want to do cold-fusion research not to do it? Even if that were feasable, which it isn't, let me tell you something, the oil industry knows their days are numbered. Do you know who does the research into alternative fuel sources? Its the oil industry itself. Methanol, Ethanol, High energy alcohols, who do you think makes them? Does the oil industry attempt to stop the auto industries from making fuel cells, hybrids, electic cars, could they even remotely give the industry more than they'd make from a successful new technology? They can't, and they know they have to adapt. To think that they expect to be finding much oil 200 years in the future is ridiculous. They're not a bunch of idiots.
- Rob
> No. The experiment *was* not repeated. What's
> the difference between that and *could* not be
> repeated?
Really? The fact that after the announcement, everyone and their dog _tried_ to repeat it, and failed miserably, speaks for itself.
Oh wait - the elite DoE gremlin teams were simply really busy sneaking into every physics department across the world (not just in the US, for you Americentric conspiracy buffs) carefully sabatoging all the experiments. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Getting something for nothing is harder than it looks. Cold Fusion is the physics equivalent of MMF spam, only people are more ready to believe that our wonderfully incompetant government is actually a real whiz when it comes to complicated conspiracies.
These failings, of course, aren't limited to Americans; it just looks that way. But Slashdot's readership is especially abd from this PoV: they will mouth off about any subject, within their field of expertise or not, and witter endlessly and without result.
Aaaarrrrrggghhh!!!
I'm infected with &ersands!!!
Heeelllppp...
the experiment could not be repeated because cold fusion doesn't work. It wasn't just American scientists trying to reproduce it, but Japanese, Chinese, and Soviet and it did not work.
To say that no experiment has measured neutron production is to practice the "big lie".
4He contains 2 neutrons. Russ George is
measuring production of 4He nuclei. People who
fail to find neutrons because they only look for
free neutrons fail profoundly to produce any sort
of useful information regarding the fusile/non-fusile nature of the excess heat produced in such experiments.
Besides, who cares whether fusion is occurring?
The immediate practical significance of such
experiments is excess heat production, and that
has been verified thousands of times over.
Free neutrons are a red herring, and anyone
using them as a big stick needs a lesson or two
in intellectual honesty
Peer reviews might work. If the damn scientific Journals would publish any research on Cold Fusion. But they won't, in fact there are only 3 scientific journals that will publish cold fusion research. Until the journals start showing some open mindness, then you will have all cold fusion papers publish in mainstream media. And mainstrean media don't give a stuff about how scientifily accurate they are. Of course this could all be solved if they could get funding to explain where the heat comes from.
Fusion radiation isn't to bad ( compared to fission.)
You just need adaquate shielding.
No all of them failed, but most of them did.
can someone email info on th z-machine to landivar2@geocities.com
Q) How do you make a fuel cell?
A) Burn fossil fuels to produce electricity that is used to produce the fuel cell.
That's efficeint! That makes sense!
I'm waiting for the hybrid car.
Not off topic at all!
Very interesting thanks.
Sorry about the "Anonymous Coward" bit. I'm just to lazy to create an account. My email address is jguthrie@brokersys.com.
I've read a number of popular articles on Cold Fusion and my attitudes with respect to the reported phenomena are definitely ambivalent.
There are a number of mischaracterizations made by both sides. A presentation at a conference is NOT what happens if the establishment is trying to bury a science. On the other hand, if the current physical model for fusion says that a cold fusion phenomenon isn't possibly real, you cannot use the current physical model as a guide for the likely characteristics of the phenomenon. That means that if a Cold Fusion cell has a smaller neutron flux than is predicted by the current nuclear physics, that would necessarily invalidate current nuclear physics, not the observed phenonena.
On the other hand, the fact that there haven't been any significant results in 10 years makes it look, to me, like the phenomenon, even if it's real, may not go anywhere.
Look, I'm an engineer, not a physicist. From my perspective, the whole point behind a fusion reactor is to generate electricity. If they're generating substantial amounts of heat, they can use it to boil water. If you can boil water, you can generate electricity. There is real money to be made in generators of 5-50kW capacity, (I'm in the market for a 20kW generator right now,) so a small generator with a manufacturing yield of 30% is a commercially viable product. "Manufacturing yield" is the ratio of functional devices to total devices manufactured. To extend the transistor metaphor, in the early days of microprocessors, the manfacturing yield was often well under 10%. Therefore, if you can generate enough heat to boil water, you have a product.
If you have a product, you can go get a few million in venture capital (through a process that is eerily similar to getting a research grant) and go into production selling into a large market with no competition. After that point, the market will pay for the development costs and no government funding is required!
So, if you can get 30% of the CF cells to work and the cells generate 50kW or so heat at a temperature high enough to boil water, then you don't NEED government funding.
Since that obviously hasn't happened, it looks like CF is a chimera. Go ahead, prove me wrong. Please.
Hi Ben-
This wasn't made very clear in my original comments, but the results of Pons & Fleischmann can be accounted for by a simple explanation: BAD CALORIMETRY. Calorimetry is the process of measuring how much heat/light (energy) you put into your experimental setup, and then measuring how much heat/light (energy) comes out. If there is a difference between the input heat and the output heat, you can attribute the difference to your experimental error, or to something new and exciting and unwarranted.....like cold fusion. If you're careful, you'll understand your experimental errors, and take care to minimize them.
The input energy tends to be very large, and the output energy tends to be very large as well. What is interesting is the difference between these two rather large numbers, and this difference has proven to be rather small. In fact, this difference has usually been small enough to be consistent with zero.
What about the case where the energy difference is not zero? Well, Stan Pons was extremely careless with his experimental setup, and you're welcome to read any multitude of available books. Nate Lewis, a chemistry professor at CalTech, was very careful with his experimental setup when he attempted to reproduce Pons' results. Lewis did not observe any excess heat--within his experimental error. Many, many, many other chemists attempted to reproduce Pons' results, and the only few who claimed to see appreciable energy difference were the ones who had reputations for being careless. And, as previously mentioned, no one ever reported seeing any radiation.
Had there been ANYTHING to cold fusion, all of the scientists who specialized in electrochemical calorimetry would have trumpeted it to the high heavens. They would have won Nobel Prizes. They would have received guaranteed federal research funding for them and their field for eternity. This is why they all took Pons & Fleischmann so seriously when they first announced their results, and why they were so angry with these two for wasting months and years of their time and research dollars.
The energy differences that are now claimed by those to still pursue the subject are extremely small, so small as to preclude any commercially viable production of energy.
Cheers,
Anton Eppich
As a practicing high-energy physicist, I feel compelled to point out that this article is patently ridiculous.
All nuclear reaction chains release some combination of so-called exotic particles: gamma-rays, neutrons, neutrinos, high-energy protons, positrons, and the like. Any reaction that does not emit such particles is NOT a nuclear reaction.
In particular, the fusion chain that produces helium--the very reaction Pons & Fleischmann claimed to observe--releases neutrons. Neutrons are very easy to see with the right kind of detector, and any observation of neutrons would dramatically confirm the existence of fusion at the nuclear level.
No cold fusion experiment has ever seen any neutrons. None. Ever.
No cold fusion experiment has ever seen any gamma rays, which would also be released by the fusion reaction chain. Pons & Fleischmann at one time claimed to observe gamma rays, but it turned out that these rays were in fact produced by the radioactive source they were using to calibrate their gamma ray detector.
In fact, the severe radiation--produced by any real fusion process producing as much heat as has been claimed to observe--would kill anyone working in the unshielded lab within a few days, or less.
But there has never been any evidence of radiation by any of the labs studying cold fusion: not Utah, not Texas A&M, not MIT, not Caltech, not Portland State, not anyone.
What has been observed is so-called "unaccounted heat". The problem with "unaccounted heat" is that it is extremely difficult to account for all the heat in the cold fusion experimental setup. One dips a palladium electrode in a solution of heavy water, and pumps a high voltage through the electrode. This vaporizes some of the water, producing bubbles (water vapor, hydrogen gas, and
oxygen) and light and heat, and one can measure how much heat is produced. The problem is that it is difficult to measure accurately just how much electricity was pumped into the electrode to begin with!! So you don't know how much energy you started with, and because you don't know how much energy you started it is impossible to determine accurately whether there is any energy missing.
Thus the surefire, absolute, undeniable way to prove that fusion is actually there is to observe neutrons and/or gamma rays. But no one has ever observed neutrons or gamma rays from a cold fusion apparatus.
This is why cold fusion is not taken seriously by the scientific community.
On a side note, I must object to the use of Einstein as a symbol for this discussion. Einstein would never have allowed himself to be associated with the poor quality of research exhibited by Pons, Fleischmann, and others.
Cheers,
Anton Eppich
Wilson Synchrotron Lab, Cornell University
eppich@NoSpam.lns.cornell.edu
--
The opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
imp wrote:
The problem is that you cannot easily measure the amount of current flowing into the experiment with an anmeter. There will be slight losses associated with this measurement.
They are saying that they get more energy out than they put into it. It seems to me that all the sources of error on measuring how much energy goes into the system are losses on the way to the electrode. Wouldn't this mean that they are getting at least as much energy as they are claiming?
Regardless of whether it's fusion or some obscure electrochemical process, I think we should be investigating potential energy sources. If the scientific community is detecting energy there, and trying to hide it, that's unforgivable.
Also, your reply didn't address the fundamental question of where are the nuclear by products. If it is a nuclear reaction, like Pons and Fleischmann originally claimed, then there should be by-products. Nobody to date has measured them.
According to the article, they have detected excess helium (they didn't say whether it's helium-3 or helium-4). I'd say that's a likely fusion byproduct. I'd say that's somebody. It's not conclusive unless it can be reproduced, so why aren't people trying to reproduce the results?
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I cant' see how McKubre could expect a technical physics talk to be teeming with journalists?
Apart from that - from what little the article describes about his findings - they don't seem to be anything of consequence. In physics - it's often not the measurments that are important - they are just a step towards an understanding of the phenomenon. While he may have measurements, unless they are reproducable - they can't even further ou runderstanding of what's going on.
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
/dev/null.
Pons and Fleichman were fools.
If you don't like that, feel free to send me email. Flames will be directed to
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Funding for this sort of thing is based on potential returns. I have a friend who is a physics Postdoc at McGill University (Montreal, CA) and is very bright. He has no stake in this research, and has told me that the amount of money required for this research does not even come close to making sense in terms of reward, considering that even if they were getting results, it would take on the order of at least 100 to 120 years to make it feasable for general use. There is more promising and rewarding energy research going on (although he didn't say what). I will be sure to ask.
IIRC, the book was Broca's Brain(though I just read both of them one after the other, so I could be wrong).
And Sagan actually did show some equations to show how wrong Velikovsky was very wrong(his ideas seemed to be trying to scientifically prove Biblical stories).
But, point is, yes. Sagan was very against the treatment Velikovsky got. I think Sagan actually got a confrence or something set up just so both sides could present their arguements.
Maybe we should just have "Cold fusion reactor" added to the list for the next University of Chicago scavanger hunt...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
I worked for a few years at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and know that two people died in a chemical explosion while working on this subject about 8 years ago. The researchers at SRI are brilliant and determined people whose results should be viewed with excitement. I only wish the cost weren't so high.
Chris
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
SRI has contributed much to science and the world. In fact, without the contributions of SRI I would not be posting this right now to slashdot. A small list of things SRI invented that make this post possible: the IP protocol, mouse and hypertext/multimedia.
I am biased though, I worked there for two years.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
" ... get enough
minds together, and eventually good stuff comes out. "
Yeah, like the collected works of Shakespeare. . .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Mmmm.... You aren't an electrical engineer are you? Doing precision measurement in electronics is a major PAIN in the ass.
I am an electrical engineer (by trade, not by degree) and it is not a pain in the ass to get accurate measurement of voltage, current and power. The fact that you spent a quarter in lab indicates to me that you were following a cirriculum designed to teach you how not to measure it, then teaches you how to properly do it.
Measuring thousands of volts accurately (to an accuracy of a volt or less) is not difficult. Measuring current is not difficult, either. You don't need equipment which has a range of 0-10kV in 0.01V steps. You don't need equipment which can measure fA to MA in fA steps. The trick is to pick your range and measure accurately in that range. Use equipment which is designed to give you what you need.
Measuring power is a little trickier. You must ALWAYS take instantaneous voltage and current measurements or you will fall short of the true measurement. Taking your peak and multiplying by 0.707 to get RMS only works for sine waves. Most meters are average responding RMS reading, meaning that they actually measure average voltage/current but the meter (digital or analog) does the *0.707 to show an RMS value. Start measuring with pulse waveforms and that number starts to give you horrendously wrong results. Fluke 87 meters are great for measuring nonsinusoidal waveforms, but even they have a certain crest value past which they start to measure incorrectly.
I'm speaking with over eight years of industrial power electronics design and development experience. I design analog and digital systems, from concept to final software candy. Saying that it's difficult to measure electicity is just plain wrong.
However, in the university where they work, nobody would be able to do Cold Fusion research there, even if they paid for it themselves. There is such a bad stigma attached, that it would be just impossible.
Sad huh...
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
The main problem is that Fleischmann and Pons went to press far to early and didn't go through due process in checking there results. They also had done this on a number of other occasions. So, maybe they had something and maybe they didn't. In the mean time all the press that quickly published their results in the first place looked awfully bad when it looked like the scientists were overstating their results.
Was cold fusion total bunk? I don't know, but now to get any press at all for it the results are going to have to be pretty darned conclusive. Reporting excess energy that may or may not be the result of a nuclear reaction probably won't get a nod in the mainstream scientific media anymore.
This is why normally when you read a scientific press release there are a lot of caveats added by any interviewed scientists, even when the main stream press adds on a more sensationalistic headline. The fact that something happened takes the back seat to a plausible explanation of why that something happened.
As I sat reading the article, and the comments, I kept wishing to myself someone with knowledge would comment ...
... get enough minds together, and eventually good stuff comes out.
Thanks for doing so. This is truly the value of Slashdot (and probably OSS as well)
(Well, maybe that's reaching, but thanks for the comment!)
David
Share data. Share code. Share ideas. Share the wealth.
http://stockfilter.org
/. continues its fascination with junk science. The article was crap.
No, the correct scientific response would be to try to reproduce it under laboratory conditions. You can't do science on things you can't reproduce. Anything else would just be speculation.
fish and pipes
and just look where that got us :-)
Our current theories of nuclear fusion and QM are completely up the creek. These theories have correctly predicted just about every phenomena observed in High Energy Physics over the last 50 years, from the atomic bomb to the transistor. Never mind, its all wrong
Of course, if we think back to when Newton formulated his laws, they were accepted by the scientific community, and correctly predicted just about every phenomena observed in the motion of moving objects.
Of course, there were things that didn't fit in. That's where General Relativity comes in. It fixes the flaws in Newtonian math. Perhaps there are flaws in the current theories of Quantum Mechanics and Nuclear Fusion?
No! Never! Of course not.
How about controlled hot fusion?
Artificial Intelligence?
MHD?
EM weapons?
Ten years is not a long time. Look at all the technologies that were developed from initially slight, but unexplained phenomena. Most scientists, though typically human, aren't stupid. Scientific process is designed, among other things, to make sure that the successes outweigh the wild-goose chases.
Sure, there was a campaign to suppress the little gadget that turned water into gasoline, we heard all about that 20 years ago.
We can't suppress real things, like atomic bombs. Although there is a lot of applied science to do, the basics are understandable by every high-school science student.
I think slashdot editors need to switch from reading Popular Science Magazine to something a bit more sophisticated.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
in addition to what the guy from cornell said, the way pons and fleischmann announced their results pissed everyone off. instead of publishing what they had done in a scientific paper (and hence subject to peer review, duplication of the experiment, etc) they held a press conference.
it was sketchy on details but long on speculating about future possibilities, and it attracted a lot of public attention. but pons and fleishchmann refused to tell anyone what their setup was, so guys at mit et al had to try reproducing the setup from what they saw on tv.
it was clearly ridiculous. they never had any real evidence; why wouldnt they have gone through the conventional channels? and dont say it was so they could make money- they couldve patented it, and still published what they did. and if, as conspiracy theorists claim, it was because big gov't and big industry shut them up, then why didnt they start out by telling everyone EXACTLY what they had done, instead of trying to keep it to themselves?
nobody has ever gotten their experiment to work. they never showed anyone any credible data. they couldn't possibly have accurately measured the heat/energy production in their setup, there was no significant radiation, and the amount of helium they claimed to have produced was within statistical bounds of what is already found in the atmosphere.
i cant believe that anyone is still looking at this crap. theyre wasting their time.
unc_
I used to doubt that conspiracies actually existed in many cases. However more and more evidance of smaller one surface... I think I might start takeing the smaller conspiracy theories seriosly... Not the larger ones (too many logistic problems..).
On anouther note... I can't wait to put a cold fusion cell in my Motorcycle! No more stopping for GAS!!!
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
"The fact that researchers from Los Alamos are presently researching this (10 years later) may serve as an indicator that there may be some substance to these claims, and that it may be worthy of future research."
Uh, no. I work at Los Alamos and we have a great deal of personal freedom here. While we all have programmatic requirements, most of us have little side projects going on that (if successful) we push for funding and what not for. The CF researchers here are free to look into it. They would also be free to look into perpetual motion or superluminal travel. Just because an employee of LANL is studying something, you shouldn't attach the Lab's prestige to it.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
The late Dr. Carl Sagan, in his Cosmos series, talked about this same kind of thing happening when Immanuel Velikovsky published the first compilation of his astronomical views in Worlds in Collision in 1950. He came up with some wonderful ideas about Venus being a rogue planet that was captured by the Sun's gravitation, the Moon being ejected from Jupiter, an explanation for the sun standing still in Biblical times, and much more.
Sure, the man was completely wrong about many things. He was also right in his theories that in the past, mankind has witnessed global catastrophes of cosmic origin. But rather than prove him wrong, Worlds in Collision was instead banned from numerous academic institutions, and his works suppressed. He is still to this day looked on as a kook more than a scientist who was wrong.
"Do not destroy that which you do not understand."
Even if it takes 100-120 years to get the technology working well enough to be a viable source of energy, it could very well be worth the time (and money). Consider:
1. Fossil fuels don't last forever ( I don't know if they'll even last that 120 years...if someone has numbers please post them). Hydrogen, OTOH, is the most abundant element in the universe. In the long-term, fusion makes a lot of sense.
2. Fusion as an energy source is better by far than anything we've got. Tremendous amounts of energy for what you put in, and it doesn't pollute like fossil fuels or fission reactions.
3. If you can do *cold* fusion (which is obviously a subject of debate at the moment), then you may have found a way to make it a practical energy source.
So what if we sink a century of work into something that could be a useful power source for millennia?
I'd also note that while funding is limited, funding a little cold fusion research doesn't mean we have to drop everything else. And somehow I don't see fossil fuel research as having a whole lot of relevance compared to fusion, since we're well on our way to using up those fossil fuels. If we needed to cut money from somewhere to fund fusion, why not that (political lobbying aside)?
Things some people in academia have to lose if cold fusion works:
1) Federal research grants - if CF becomes the new "hot" technology, then it stands to reason that the "old" technology isn't going to get as much funding. There's only so much $$ to go around.
2) Prestige/pride - all those who dismissed CF as the product of quacks would suddenly find themselves in a rather uncomfortable situation. Most people just hate being proven wrong - especially if they've been very vocal about it. It would be kinda like going on national television back in the 40s to claim an atomic bomb was impossible, and then the next day the US drops the bomb on Japan... people would have a hard time taking you all that seriously afterwards.
This doesn't require any sort of conspiracy, just people looking after their own self-interests. I doubt the oil companies are conspiring with the hot fusion folks, but it's quite possible that each tries to dismiss CF because if it were to be developed/researched, it could pose a threat to them.
Any troubles the University of Utah may have with giving away the rights to that research is not evidence against cold fusion. It is just as likely that researchers have founded better processes. Or perhaps they saw how P&F were labeled as quacks and would rather try to avoid a repeat by avoiding that process (due more to politics than science). Or it could be as you say. But there is no obvious way to distinguish which is the case. Which, I think, is why we need further research into these areas.
In order for you to maintain these theories of government cover-ups, government conspiracies, black helicopters, etc...
... you would have to have a really incorrect perception of the capabilities of the individuals working for the US government.
I find them all to be so completely incompetent, that I find it implausible that they could exhibit such control over the US.
-- If you met me, you probably wouldn't remember me. I'm pretty hard to remember.
>right up there with polywater
:-)
Ah, a man after my own heart.
For an excellent book on the subject of Cold fusion and another on the pseudoscience check out:
Science and Unreason by Radner and Radner (isbn 0-534-01153-5) and Cold Fusion, The Scientific Fiasco of the Century by John R. Huizenga (isbn 0-19-855817-1).
The latter provides a complete and thorough study of cold fusion, the experiments performed, the financial motivations, etc. It draws parallels to other cases of 'Pathological Science'.
The former was used in a course on Pseduo Science I took in college. There is another book that went with this course as well, but cannot find it right now.
Read Huizenga's book. If there are any doubts about the huge amounts of $$$ that have been wasted by this fiasco, they will be dispelled.
>Voltmeter measures voltage. Ammeter measures >current. power = voltage x current.
> energy = power x time.
>Where is the problem?
The problem is that you cannot easily measure the
amount of current flowing into the experiment with
an anmeter. There will be slight losses associated with this measurement. You can account for most of them, but not all of them. You will wind up with a figure for energy put into the system, but it won't necessaryly do you any good. The energy could be stored in the form of chemical bonds or in the form of heat. The heat you can mesaure, but it is very hard to measure how much of the energy went into the creation of new chemical compounds.
There are also small, but measurable losses due to the resistance of the wires used, the connectors used in the setup, etc.
It is a very hard problem to measure accurately all these factors at the same time.
Also, your reply didn't address the fundamental question of where are the nuclear by products. If it is a nuclear reaction, like Pons and Fleischmann originally claimed, then there should be by-products. Nobody to date has measured them.
People reading and posting should take some time to study the parallels between Cold Fusion and other scientific fiascos of the past. There are many many many parallels. Again, Huizenga's book that I posted in another message goes into this.
Peer review??
Get real, the "hot" guys want the money!!
History repeats again. Does anyone remember what the IA guys did to the neural network guys in the 60s?
The military belived the IA lies, and neural network was underdeveloped until the 80s.
Moreover, where are the IA miracles??
I talked to someone once about cold fusion, and he had a relatively interesting explanation for the occational positive result. It is widely known that palladium, and some other metals, can contain within their crystal lattice an extraordinary amount of hydrogen (including deuterium). So far, nothing new. He *also* claimed that when there is a crack in the metal, electrostatic charges in the tens of kV can built up on the opposing edges of the crack. If so, that would be sufficient to ionize some hydrogen atoms, and accelerate them at higher speeds than the Coulomb barrier of hydrogen nuclei. The result would be a *very small* amount of fusion. If this indeed is the cause for the occational positive result, cold fusion is definitely doomed to remain a scientific curiosity.
I find it amusing that the article claims to have found traces of He-4. However, most cold fusion experiments I have read of are pure H-2 (deuterium), which would result in He-3 and n. Admittely, He-3 can in turn fuse with H-2 to form He-4 and H-1, but that would be a secondary reaction, and it would still not be a neutron-free reaction. There are a few aneutronic fusion reactions known -- mostly involving various isotopes of Li -- but even fewer which wouldn't result in parasitic neutronics (He-3 + H-2 for example; at conditions suitable for this reaction you will also have H-2 + H-2 -> He-3 + n).
Then your high school physics course was truly pathetic. My regular non-AP physics course in HS, using a standard textbook, had extensive coverage of basic particle physics and subatomic theory.
Mind you I flunked it. Happens when you sleep through every class.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Click here for the proof
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
... I would classify as being perfect for an "open source" web community to discuss, expand and develop in a public forum.
---
Joseph Foley
InCert Software Corp.
Considering that nobody's able to get funding for cold fusion research, I suspect the next step would be to continue work on it without any funding. This would only be possible if people were willing to pursue it as a hobby. Heck, if we're getting any kind of results, then hobby-level research could be cheap.
Or, assuming that the cold fusion phenomenon is for real, why not build a small power plant on the principle?
Granted, it's not the same as peer review. But if this stuff is even remotely for real then the worst we could do is waste our time, our money, instead of taxpayer money.
Fun fact: If infinitely many rednecks shoot infinitely many highway signs with buckshot, they will eventually produce Hamlet in Braille.
Finding God in a Dog
Neutrons don't have to be such an issue. If we consider a fuel source of deuterium and He3, we will get hydrogen, He4 (which has been observed) and no neutrons. This does beg the question of where the He3 came from, which is very rare in nature, but I would not be so quick to discard this phenomenon.
cya
It seems as if both parties are to blame. First, the original scientists who first discovered the effect, dubbed it cold fusion, right away. This was a fatal mistake. They didn't understand enough about what they were looking at before they dubbed it with such a weighty moniker. The word "fusion" means something very specific, and until they were sure that what they were looking at was in fact, a form of fusion, they should have chosen a name with fewer strings attached. The "Pons-Fleischmann Effect" would be a good choice. Instead they chose a name for which they had no theoretical basis.
This was blatantly irresponsible.
Pity. It is unfortunate that the scientific community has siezed on this obviously incredulous moniker, and rejected whatever science may lie behind it.
Is cold "The Pons-Fleischmann Effect" fusion? No. Almost certainly not.
It it "real." Possibly. Although it will take some time to sort through the calemetry data, and some new theory, before we can say for sure. What we really need are minds open to the possibilities.
Afterall, isn't that why we got into science in the first place?
cya
For a point of argument, let's take the stand that these experiments actually did produce an excess of heat, as claimed.
There are still some serious shortcomings (IMHO) with the conclusions reached by the experimenters.
First and foremost is the assumption that the excess heat generated must be the result of a nuclear interaction of some sort. As a previous poster stated, there is no evidence of the expected byproducts of a nuclear interaction. As far as I know, there is no model for (or evidence of) any kind of nuclear level interactions that do not produce some amount of these byproducts (neutrons, gamma radiation, etc.).
Second, even if we assume that it is possible (however unlikely) to have nuclear interactions without particle emission, where is the description of the mechanism of this type of interaction? It is not enough to label this process a nuclear process, one must also hypothesise the mechanism (at the nuclear level) that would produce this effect. Science is not just about trying to repeat (or test) some observed phenomena, it is even more about hypothesizing the mechanism of that phenomena, and then testing that hypothesis. Without the test of a hypothesis, all you are doing is demonstrating an effect, but not explaining it.
That being said, there is still also the fact that it must also be verified that the phenomena being examined is truly an extant phenomena, and not an artifact of the experiment itself. The numbers usually provided as evidence of the cold fusion phenomena are extremely small. It is not enough to say that the experimenter has the ability to measure a temperature change with an accuracy of one-thousandth of a degree, the experimenter must also be able to account for *all* of the energies used in the experiment to at least that level of accuracy (including incipient environmental conditions).
I think if the cold fusion experimenters cannot meet these criteria, it's no wonder that they get little consideration from the mainstream science community.
I'm not a physicist, just an EE with a good knowledge of physics, and I have not examined every bit of information about the cold fusion experiments, so take my comments above in that context. However, what I have seen does not meet the criteria I state above.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
Really hate to break this to you, but the jet engine is fully understood in our current knowledge of physics and aerodynamics.
Also, there are only **TWO** types of mechanisms that can be categorized as thermodynamically impossible, those that claim to generate more energy than the system contains, and those that claim to generate energy from a single potential level.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
And, if we're not, let's figure out where this heat is coming from. It might not be fusion, but maybe we can use it anyway.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It doesn't make sense to say that the fossil fuel industry would have a vested interest in suppressing cold fusion research. In fact, with their huge accumulated wealth and equity, they would be the very first to jump in the foray and fund it, since being the greedy sons of a bitches they are, they'd surely be glad to get rid of their expensive raffining plants, their cumbersome transportation network, and the politically uncertain stability of their sources of raw material and replace it with something that will essentially almost give you something for nothing...
Naaah, if I were (insert your favourite oil tycoon here), I'd hugely fund cold fusion research, and also plain old fusion research, too...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
Okay troll, point out a single other instance of any other fuel source creating more energy than is put into it. Even if it is .01 per 100W, a city-sized power plant isn't going to be interested in creating power 100W at a time. They are going to be creating huge amounts of power and those extra .01W will quickly add up to free, useful, clean power.
Also, I don't know enough about it, but perhaps the effect is more potent/more stable on a larger scale?
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
First of all, it's too bad Pons & Fleishmann called it cold "fusion" because that's really got the physicists pissed off that two chemists would dare to infringe on their turf. Maybe they should have named it better. Something like "energy boiler" or "paladium fuel cell".
A few years back, I saw a "where are they now" item on P & F. They're in France, quietly plugging away in a lab funded by Toyota. Hmmmm...
They also showed a university lab that tried to repeat the experiment and had their setup blow up on them, killing one of the technicians. There's got to be something to this. I only hope that someday science matures enough to explain it.
Finally, it really saddens me to see this research dismissed outrightly. Good grief, have an open mind! Have we really become so arrogant to think that science knows everything about everything? Did you read the bit about the first transistors failing? Where would we be today if those researches simply gave up on the idea?
Thanks, Slashdot, for permitting this kind of discussion! This is why I come back again and again.
Look up "Lawson Criterion" in your physics text.
Fusion reactions of any kind would still produce gamma rays, as this is one of the ways that nuclei shed excess energy after fusion. These should be easily detected, as the original poster stated.
Interesting. You just repeated exactly what you said before. What specifically do you have to say that will offer some substance to what is, in terms of how you've described it, nothing more than an unsubstantiated opinion? EVERYONE has opinions.
> all true scientific breakthroughs have been
> fought against (non geocentric universe,
> relativity)
Two things -
1) Browsing the rest of the threads here, you're in good company. "Galileo was right and persecuted, so therefore all people who are persecuted are right".
2) The way the scientific method _works_ is for there to be conflict between old ideas and new. In a Darwinian sort of processes, the bad new ideas get discarded, and the good new ideas replace the old, less good ideas.
CF was a really attractive idea. In the form it was proposed, it was proven wrong with far more certainty than most new ideas, simply because if it worked, the rewards would be enormous, so everybody took a look at it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be interested in understanding weird electrochemical reactions. But journalists invoking government conspiracies or the ghost of Galileo to cover their own ignorance is pretty annoying.
It reads like a hoax. Sure it was not written on April 1.
I just love a web page from a "web-based" magazine without a $&*%&&)&) DATE. Get with it. Put a date on the damn thing.
Hey, put some dates in the Article, too, while you are at it.
How about a nice like to a few articles other than WIRED, and other atilces.
PEER REVIEW. There is a reason for this. They make sure that you follow some standards. The original artilces got published. The reports are not peer reviewed. The original reports have errors. The peer reviewers caught the errors, and they were corrected before they got published. This is not a conspiracy. This is science.
I guarentee that's the way it works. In reports you write things that you really cannot back up with evidence. When confronted with your own facts, you generally back off, and say somewhat less grandious claims in an article.
Then there are those who got he way of belief. "Believe me," becasue I failed statistics. Run a lot of things you are bound to find some anomalies. Life is a bell curve, Things will occasionally fall outside of the expected norm, becasue that is the norm. The real question is "is it real, or is it statistics" If you run an experient at the 95 % confidence interval, and 5% of your results fall outside of the expected, then it's not unexpected. If 25% of your results are outisde the unexpected, then you've got a phemonemnon.
When will a person who has something oposing to say about something learn to reveal themselves?
This is nothing but sniping from the side lines. Either that or your another person who's best interest is to cast extream doubt on anything or everything associated with the article commented on....
I suspect that you either don't understand the current situation or you understand it so well that you wish it to be burried much like most of the corperations who know they would loose all cash supplies if such a product was produced.
it's nice to know that no matter what. Freedom of speach even extends to them that would try to destroy it.
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
actually they found something rather interesting... the experiment was repeated several times and out of thoes tries, several of the did actualy work. the difference was that the ones that DID work lacked one important thing. Microfractures in the main paladium rod. and in fact it was found that there were several other replacement rods that could be used instead of an excruciatingly expensive paladium rod. a nickle alloy rod could also work.....
How do I know.... I will not say.
Thanks anyways.
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
I wouldnt say that all the sources of error are losses. There should be several effects on the energy passing through the water which may have ot be measures real-time.
The conductivity may change with temperature of the water. Anything sitting in the water might be dissolving and changing the conductivity as well. The boiling itself may have an effect on the energy passing through the system.
The problem is that it is difficult to measure accurately just how much electricity was pumped into the electrode to begin with!!
Really? They should know exactly what voltage they are putting across it, why would it be at all hard to meausure the current? The power company does a fine job of measuring the amount of current they send into my appartment at relatively high voltage. And once they have the voltage and the current it should not be hard to multiply.
If it produces a significant ammount of excess heat, an ammount that brings in the possibility of using it for power generation, then it is a VIABLE ENERGY SOURCE WHATEVER IT MAY BE.
I am sick of all the Yes/No Cold Fusion BS.
-- The BS
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Actually, the Takomak reactor here in Canada was nearing the break-even point. The scientests & engeneers involved had, and still have, world recognitian in the field. Our "honorable" elected officials have canceled the project.
Believe in them! But also in the small ones. And the big one's don't have that many logistic problems... They just aren't that all inclusive, and are mainly constructed of lots of small conspiracies SOME MEMBERS of which work in sync with SOME members of another. Another word for this is chaos. How do you know which conspiracies you are a member of, when seen from outside? The FSF, perhaps, conspiring to overthrow Microsoft?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm a grad student in physics (doing astronomy) at the university of Chicago. Many people here (slashdot) know more about cold fusion than I so I will let there comments stand
BUT, he does talk about the solar neutrino problem. It is true that for 30 years we have measured less neutrinos from the sun than calculations predict. There are two explanations, possibly not understanding the physics of the sun (possibly cold fusion) or not understanding neutronos. The evidence has been piling up recently to suggest veyr clearly that we didn't understand neutrinos. That they have mass. This completely explains the problem. I wouldn't call it a known physics fact as yet but it would explain many problems (especially as we have no reason to believe that neutrinos need be massless).
Anyway one more reason not to believe this. Off course, don't believe any science an newspaper publishes, its always slightly wrong.
There is no evidence supporting that the sun is short of neutrinos. What is clear is that we don't see as many neutronis coming from the sun as we would expect.
Two possibilities
1) some new process in the sun is occurring
2) we don't understand neutrinos
For 30 years we have been looking into this. As time has gone by we have tested our models of the sun and found them to work better and netter with many different measurements. While, at the same time, we have had no evidence to understand the neutrino better.
Guess which theory we favored, we don't understand neutrinos! Anyway last year the Japanese Super kamiokande experiement found evidence that neutrinos have mass. Giving them mass would cause type oscialltions which would make it impossible to detect these neutrinos. This would explain why we didn't see neutrinos easily. And, as we have no evidence to support massless neutrinos astrophysicists have been very excited about this new piece of fundamental physics!
PS I'm a grad student in physics at the University of Chicago
PPS Physicists would love to see a new cheap energy source, fossil fuels kill the environment, but the cold fusion people have been proved wrong time and time again (unquivocally). Something might be going on, thats recognized, why do you think they get any funding, but in the meantime methods which have better track records and more promise will get more money. If you want to see more funding go to your congressman and get him to increase the science allotments (alternate forms of energy have been hit harder than they sould have been)
The CF article mentions the neutrino deficit as supporting evidence that we don't understand how many neutrinos should be produced in a reaction, therefore we shouldn't worry so much about them missing from CF experiments. They also claim
that "we just can't measure them accurately enough". This is a half truth.
Current theory is that neutrinos have mass and oscillate from one type to another. In some ways this would be as significant a discovery as CF. It changes the standard model and introduces a lot of information into our understanding of the world. If you check http://www.hep.anl.gov/NDK/Hypertext/numi.html you can find information about the MINOS (2.1.3 of the project paper talks about the solar deficit, BTW). More on neutrino mass at http://www.ps.uci.edu/~superk/ which is doc about the Super-K project published last year. MINOS is cool because the neutrinos will be created at Fermilab of a known flavor, so if the composition has changed by this time they hit the detector in Minnesota then we'll know the nature of the change quite precisely.
rw2
If you could co cold fusion in your garage, the smart paranoids would send exactly how they did it over the net, ham radio, to news agencies, and various other organizations around the world. It would be impossible to shut every one up. This has not happened, I don't believe it. Cold fusion might exist, but not in the way current conspiracy theory buff's understand it.
Wait! Wait! Cold fusion does exist! It's called Bose-Einstein condensation. It's just not the nuclear physics definition of fusion.
This thread proves, once and for all, that our half-assed science education produces a society filled with people who couldn't calculate the speed a ball rolls down a ramp, let alone the intricacies of nuclear reactions. Instead, we get people who place great faith and fervor in conspiracy theories, where the Man is everywhere, all powerful and crushes everything that is Good.
Yes, you same people who flooded John Katz's mailbox a month ago screaming how high school was hell apparently got nothing out of your science classes and rely just as much on superstition and irrationality as those who believed that the Black Plague was a curse from God (they were wrong--The Spice Girls are a curse from God). Yes, instead of utilizing that which would make you a nerd, namely logical, rational thinking, you sit here and argue that the Bavarian Illuminati, with help from the CIA, the NSA, the Cycle Gangs, and the Convenience Stores, are attacking to destroy the Cold Fusion Scientists. fnord.
Of course, by saying this, I must instantly be part of the Conspiracy. If so, I'll gladly take your money, crush your hopes, see your people scattered before me, and hear the lamentations of your women. It is useless to resist--after all, The Conspiracy is all-powerful, all-knowing. If you feel the need to give up, please send your material belongings to the kind co-conspirators who run slashdot. After all, without them, how would we disseminate disinformation among the disaffected nerds of the world?
Actually, the premise of "Chain Reaction" wasn't all that shabby, given the knowledge back when it was released ('96?).
The fusion experiments in that film were based on a concept called sonoluminescence. In a nutshell, it was found that when bubbles in a certain medium were exposed to certain types of sound waves, they would collapse and release visible light. One of the prevailing theories at the time is that the light was due to a fusion reaction, albeit on a very small scale.
I recall, a few months ago, reading that someone had verified experimentally that fusion does indeed take place in sonoluminescence.
My only problem with this is that it's not diffacult to measure change in current flow through a wire in real-time. I do it every day using comercial products. When you wrap a coil of wire around another wire, any change in the current going through the wrapped wire will cause a change in it's magnetic field, causing lines of force to cut through the coil, inducing a voltage in the coil, that voltage isn't hard to measure. I believe these experiments are using DC based upon the explinations I've heard, which means that calculations of the energy in the wire are as straight forward as voltage * current (as someone already pointed out). I'm not an EE, but from my (albiet limited) knowledge on this field, I see no reason they wouldn't be able to measure the energy going in. Think about it, the company that provides your electricty measures how many kWh you use, kWh is a measure of energy. They do it with about $50 worth of equipment, of course a scientific experiment would require more exact (and expensive) equipment, but measuring the energy in a circut is not hard to do. Although there will probably be energy drains that aren't part of the experiment, but if this is producing the amount of energy some people have been saying it does, all they need is a reasonable upper bound. Maybe they need to talk to their electric company... or learn to read bubble meters.
-Ted
I'm in more or less the same boat jobwise, and I'd just like to say that the Fluke meters, while they're quite good at what they do, aren't the most accurate devices for the job either, my company makes a product that does power monitoring, mainly for power quality and predictave matinence type situations, It's not really in are I'd imagine, it's more used by utilities and LARGE power consumers who either don't trust the utility or want to be able to trouble shoot problems. None of that *.707 to get RMS either, does cycle by cycle RMS calculations by actually Root Mean Squaring things.
Back to the topic, I think the CF experiments are pumping DC into a vat of water, in which case RMS doesn't apply (unless you're in marketing and need another techie term to put in the brochure). If I'm right about that, they shouldn't have much trouble measuring the power accuratly.
-Ted
Note, none of what I've said here, or anywhere, is endorced by my company. Nor am I an expert, just someone who's been around this stuff forever and has some stupid ideas of his own.
I noticed a well defined lack of focus... (hows that for an oxymoron) to the subject matters. I kept bouncing between the computational materials talks, the computational biology talks, and the computational chemistry talks.
I should have submitted something in retrospect. I had 4-5 projects that I could have written about. At least this year I will be ready with 2 or 3.
Folks, I think that there might be some substantial points that were glossed over by the article. The article makes charges of a cover up, supression, and all sorts of other nastiness. What it really doesn't cover is that the general scientific view at the moment that the experiment had fatal flaws due to very poor design/implementation, had shoddy data analysis and error identification, and a myriad of other things that need to be fixed long before the data will be acceptable by the scientific community.
Add to this an interpretation based upon a non-existant theory, and unsupportability due to missing information (e.g. where are those darned neutrons... should be streaming outta there like mad). Also add to this a non-conservation of a conserved quantity, and you get an audience with a high degree of scepticism which is properly placed.
Now go overboard, have some computer science professor from MIT patent a theory (almost unheard of) on how it works, have many others try the thing and start patenting techniques like mad, and what you have looks suspiciously like a money grab/gamble. If the thing is real, these people are rich. If it is not, it is just a reputation, which may be repaired.
This is not suppression. It was bad science. Was there some effect being witnessed? Who knows? The measurement process was sufficiently bad as to effectively nullify any data. This is what people complained about.
I remember in grad school (and after in my pseudo postdoc), I did months and months of calculations to test a theory we were putting forth. I had a nagging doubt about my results, but just wrote about it to my coworkers. Well, the referees picked it up and blasted us for it. Sure enough, my nagging doubt turned out to be problematic. Should I call up some (generalized science-illiterate) journalist type to complain bitterly of suppression or should I read their comments carefully and see why they rejected the paper?
The right answer is the latter. You know you have a crackpot when you see the former. I think this article is an example of the former. I could go off on a tangent about journalists, what you read/see on TV, and all that, but I will not. Someone claimed suppression. They missed the point, they didn't understand the peer review process. If you are going to claim something fantastic, you had better be prepared to defend your views with data, theories that explain something and match known existing observations, etc. Crying suppression is the best way to marginalize yourself.
There are several problems with the results that I see. Primarily there is no neutron flux that should be produced if fusion is actually happening. Although the researchers claim that there is another mechanism for this, they haven't proposed any mechanisms for this that are credible.
The experimental setup that they use also suggests an alternative possibility. The pallladium electrode has the ability to absorb hydrogen gas within it and then later release it. Suppose the electrode absorbs some of the hydrogen floating around in the water and then when the current's voltage is high enough it starts to release the gas which then ignites. This would give you heat and light without radiation.
I also find th researcher's suggestion about the sun using an alternative method of fusion to be shady. They seem to be suggesting that the sun is also using a mechanism similar to cold fusion. However, palladium is a heavy atom which wouldn't be present in the sun in any sizable quantities (I believe only ~100 kg of palladium is mined every year). In addition the conditions present in the sun would prevent any thing like a electrolytic cell from being present.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I saw that. The student failed his classes becuase he did some physic paper over cold fusion, then he came w/ a working aparatus in which use cold fusion to create a bomb.
The showed one of them exploding in a level 10 (or something like that) underground unit and it took out the whole underground lab plus about 1 mile around...
The cold fusion bomb center was smaller than a shoe box. I guess if cold fusion is able to be produced, that it would be so powerful in a weapon form.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
There were thousands maybe millions attemps of flights by humans that failed. We didn't cut off the studies, and look what happened.. Look at me, I can fly...... So open your eyes and let people do what they want to do, becuase they might find the key.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
I was talking about the outerlimits show.. Opps..
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Whoo Hoo!! Someone with knowledge!!
Whee!
I remember at one time meteorites were treated the same way as cold fusion is by most researchers. The commonly heard line: "Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest explanation must be that there was already a rock there and you happened to find it. It was hot and glowing because it was struck by lightning. There are no rocks in the sky, therefore rocks cannot fall from the sky."
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
it's ironic that you'd mention Phlogiston.
Phlogiston was the basis of chemistry for a long time, and a lot of people believed it true.
in fact there was a lot of resistance to the idea that it didn't exist.
all true scientific breakthroughs have been fought against (non geocentric universe, relativity)
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think the general point is that there isn't an *exsess* of heat....
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
no one ever thought the world was flat. if it was flat how could it be the center of the universe?
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
So you're saying that someone with a device against which there is no defense would be unable to use it to defend themselves? I'll wait for the movie... (Actually, to teleport things also implies technologies which would allow force fields and tractor beams, due to the nuclear forces involved)
I find it very interesting that there is still this much cold fusion reserch goin on. I was wondering if any one knew of any links, organizations, or groups that might have more infromation on the subject. Remember, if the US is the first country to attain true "cold fusion" in the classic sence, the term world power will have new meaning. Does anyone know were we might get a copy of that movie?
"To know what you know and know it, and to know what you don't know and know that. That is wisdom."
Mmmm.... You aren't an electrical engineer are you? Doing precision measurement in electronics is a major PAIN in the ass. I spent a whole quarter in measurement lab getting only slightly accurate results. Measuring electricity is liking finding the exact position and speed of an electron. The more you know about it, the more you are interfering with it (it's not quite that bad). But it is a real pain to get PRECISE measurements, and you have to continually calibrate it.
I'm skeptical of the cold fusion thing I admit. I'd really like it to be true, but I just don't find these experiments credible. I can see where the electrical energy supply would be a source of error.
Here are three links that i are worthwhile to look at, the first is Coldfusion, is oriented towards a nontechnical readership, and makes an argument for at least some funding of CF reasearch. The second Fusionaries also from wired, directs readers to some of the companies, institutes, and researchers involved in doing CF and related research. The third Review of the Cold Fusion Effect is from the Journal of Scientific Exploration. It's a review and summary of the state of CF research and is directed at a more technical audience, such as Dr. Ettrich. (Although I think most of the readership shouldn't have a great deal of difficulty with it...)
Cheers,
LetterRip
Oh, and by the way, for all you conspiracy theorists, guess who would be supplying the He4? Yep, your friendly neighborhood global oil company, which finds helium far more than it would like while looking for natural gas. (There's a huge Helium molecule monument somewhere up around Amarillo, I think...)
The idea that cold fusion would put the oils out of business could well be as silly as cold fusion itself has been to date. (I'm willing to believe, once there's something to believe in - so far, there's not...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
This is hardly the first time a researcher from SRI has generated an "irreproducible result". Anyone remember the Targ and Puthoff tests of Uri Geller's alleged psychic powers?
When the scientific community listens politely to someone's theory and then fails to dissolve in a chorus of hosannas, it's unsound to assume that they're in a conspiracy of silence. If they really wanted to suppress McKubre, why let him give his presentation at a prestigious physics conference? Did Plotkin even try to find out what criticisms exist of McKubre's work? I see no evidence of that in his article. The man positively drips indignation and credulousness; I wouldn't be surprised if McKubre is embarrassed by his partisanship.
If McKubre is on to something, he'll have some noteworthy results to report after a while. Let the media feeding frenzy begin then. Until that time, let's not lose our heads.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
I don't buy the argument that anyone is suppressing cold fusion research. It's just that nobody (in academia) really cares any more. There was no shortage of dollars and careers invested in cold fusion when it was a hot topic. But nothing ever panned out, so most people moved elsewhere. And there are relatively few grant dollars which would be in immediate jeapordy if cold fusion were to be funded -- government agencies often fund multiple competing attempts to solve the same problem. As they should.
Just use Occam's Razor: those of us in academic research don't have anything to lose if cold fusion works (and quite a lot to gain, actually). On the other hand, McKubre et al. have their entire livelihood at stake if they don't keep people believing there's something to this. And at this stage in the game, that requires claims of underhanded conspiracies.
The most compelling evidence that there's nothing to cold fusion? The University of Utah can't give away the licensing rights to Pons' and Fleischmann's process.
I would also like to point out that researchers have never seen a certain class of Neutrinos from the sun . I am fairly sure that fusion is going on in that ball of gas so I would have to point out that our current theories on fusion ( and QCD in general ) aren't quite up to snuff . The missing neutrnos may be strongly coupled under certain circumstances . And son't give me any of that " our current theory says " because the point I am trying to make is that 'our current theory ' on nuclear physics doesn't cut the mustard in a host of ways .
The Carbon Nitrogen Cycle ( carbon being used as a catalyst , in essence ) doesn't occur until 14 million degrees . Our sun , I think , is at 10 million ( at core ) . The catalytic effect of Carbon in our sun is probably insignificant .
At least that is the consensu as of 10 years ago . I have not heard of any changes to that set of stellar theories .
mailto:squireson@bigfoot.com
Thanks for contributing to the discussion, Anton.
When F&P did their experiment in the late 1980's, I and my senior class went through their results. They did find (or claim) a 1200% return on the energy they were pumping into the experiment. I don't have my papers with me...but I recall that some other chemist pointed out that palladium acts as a catalyst between free hydrogen and oxygen, releasing heat. The excess heat produced could be explained by a chemical reaction between the palladium, hydrogen liberated in the water, and oxygen at the surface of the bath.
The Fleischmann and Pons results were worthless, pure and simple. I think that some minimal funds should be put into cold fusion research, because it is an interesting field. But people, don't get your hopes up.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Science is about explaining facts, not denying them.
If a mug suddenly floated off your desk in apparent contradiction to the law of gravity, the correct scientific response would not be to deny it because it is impossible, but rather to explain it. Maybe the guy in the room below you is conducting a gravity blocking experimemnt...
If "cold fusion" research is giving rise to "unaccounted heat", then that should be explained. Maybe fusion is not the explanation, but maybe it is. It would be extremely foolhardly to claim that current scientific knowledge is complete and entirely correct.
Ben
A threat - any threat, no matter how remote - is enough to drive people into action.
When there's a rumor that a certain type of food could *potentially* cause you cancer, it's like a little rock in your shoe that keeps bugging you. You try to avoid that food, even though it's most likely an irrational fear. The same analogy applies to corporations and new technology.
There are only 2 things wrong with your post:
/. showed that most readers were students. Based on the language used in many posts, it can justifiably be assumed that most of these students are still in high school.
A recent poll on
Now please, o exalted one, show me a high school that covers not just introductory nuclear physics, but also Cold Fusion 101. We only got to introductory E&M in AP Phycics C in my high school. I consider myself a nerd (engineering student at Stanford), and I know jack about Cold Fusion - it's not something that I read (or research) religiously. Very few people do... proportoinal to the population of the world, there are very few nuclear physicists.
However, if the facts in the article are true, it does suggest something. I can't prove that the article is 100% factually accurate, I can't even prove if it's 50% factually accurate. But I would like it to be true (1.21 gigawatts!). There is a reason Americans (and almost every other modern culture) are suckers for conspiracy theories, and it goes hand-in-hand with increased national cynicism. Cynicism isn't something that justs randomly manifests itself in cultures - there has to be some national reason for it. Americans can no longer believe their government... it's not the responsibility of the Americans to find renewed faith in their administration, it's the responsibility of the administration to prove its honesty. If the article is true, then they've got some explaining to do.
There is another huge cover-up in the Astrophysics Community. And it's story begins in the Mid 1970s.
Most of you have probably heard of Dark Matter, it's matter that cannot be seen, and has not been observed under any sort of scientific conditions, and you have heard of The Big Bang, (or a derivative of that thoery) where the Universe is a by product of a energy to matter reaction.
In the 1970s an Astronomer nammed William Tifft, studied the Extragalactic Geography of the numerous galaxies that can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere. His team found something very unusual: The Galaxies "Clustered" in an object called "the Great Wall" which was previously thought to be the Heculies and Coma Superclusters. This Great Wall is so amazingly huge that Modern Gravitational Thoery cannot explain it, because even over the extent of over 18 billion years, an object of this magnitude cannot have this form and structure. (Outside of thise wall, there is void in both the foreground and background). Science explains this with the use of Dark Matter (saying that the Universe consists of over 99% Dark Matter.
Another view is that we do not really know how Gravity works. For that I refer you to the June 1996 Issue of Discover where the article talks about how hard it is to determine, and reproduce, "Big G" the Gravitational Constant behind Newtons Law of Gravitation.
It was later discovered in 1990, by David Moo and Kitt Peak National Observatory, that this Great Wall was only one of several "walls" that surround us, each wall is the same thickness, the same desnity of individual galaxies, and the same seperation from the other walls surrounding it. Otherwise, this is a VERY PERIODIC structure, and cannot be explained by something as chaotic as a Big Bang.
Tifft also is a trail blazer in the dispute of the age of the universe and high velocity redshift in the determination of deep extragalactic observations. Not only that, he and his colleages have the experimental data to back up what they say.
The Astrophysical Journals, the most heralded Astronomy publication in the world, has put up an incredible fight to keep Tifft's papers from being published. And they could not dispute his findings (which is the only way to refuse to publicise a scientific paper) even though they reviewd each 13 times. But the ApJ wrote a very convenient disclaimer at the begining of the individual papers saying that they do not agree with the opinions of the author and that his results should be taken with a grain of salt. (Even though the paper was scientifically proven.)
Tifft is now a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, And the UNIVERSITY has silenced him from teaching these ideas in his Extragalactic Astronomy Course.
The question that arises is, WHY? Is not science an open minded insitution, eager to learn the truth of the universe around us?
Or is there another more commercial motive?
I suspect that there has been much investment of capital into the Big Bang Theory and Dark Matter theory, and in order to protect the continuation of that funding, certain ideas need to be put on the back burner.
I feel this is wrong. And just like the Cold Fusion debate, I am sceptical of what Science Community believes is the truth, and what they believe is convenient for themselves.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
I'll be the first to suggest that it may not be Cold Fusion that's the answer to that question. But the reason for these conflicting results surely must be interesting nonetheless.
What bothers me about the anti-CF attitude is that it's against the spirit of open scientific inquiry. It's more of a technologist's attitude. We have a potentially interesting phenomenon here. Any child would want to know why the results are inconsistent. But a "reputable scientist" apparently would rather conform to the status quo and parrot the opinions of other reputable scientists.
I'm reminded of a quote from a famous Zen Master:
In the Beginner's Mind, there are many possibilities
In the Expert's, there are few
But even with more technologically interesting "research" going on, I think CF is far more interesting than H fuel cells because there may be whole new scientific principles underlying the results (inconsistent though they may be). The same cannot be said for HFCs, whose principles have been well understood for many decades.
might point out that:
(a) to state that it will take 100-120 years to make the process feasible implies that the process works and is well-understood, and...
(b) that the whole point of research is to learn something new, which may well result in a dramatically shorter time to reach a usable technology, and...
(c) that the potential reward is so huge that the expected value of a real success would be very high even with a very low probability of a quick success.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Like the title says, what about Helium 3 fusion? It isn't supposed to produce any neutrons, just charged particles. And this is by accepted "hot fusion" theory. If Cold Fusion isn't understood properly yet (and since its existence is denied for the most part, how could it be understood if it exists?), why does it have to produce neutrons?
Why not simply allow more controlled experiments? If you're so concerned about the accuracy of the measurments, do them yourself. I thought that was the way science was supposed to work.
Arithon
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
- Clarke's Law
"Any technology, distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced."
- Corollary to Clarke's Law
if you're interested in further research, try
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/weird/wcf.html
I especially liked ""Review of the 'Cold Fusion' Effect", Edmund Storms, in JSE"
It would seem there is SOMETHING strange going on. We're talking about a LOT more than a 1% gain in heat/energy.
i love it when things get weird!
Now, while I found the original comment to be ridiculous, I feel I should point out that there can still be effective government conspiracies despite the alleged idiocy of the average government employee. All it takes is intelligent, devious operatives in the right places. In fact, if I were a mastermind in a huge government conspiracy, I would make sure that the government hired lots of morons, so that the people would regard the government as inept, thus taking much possible scrutiny away from my actions.
-- $SIGNATURE
"Thus the surefire, absolute, undeniable way to prove that fusion is actually there is to observe neutrons and/or gamma rays. But no one has ever observed neutrons or gamma rays from a cold fusion apparatus. "
That's because the evil corporations are hiding them!
I'd like to say that I enjoy reading stories about great scientific concepts, rejected initially by scientists in the mainstream, which were finally vindicated after careful work. And in fact, this is true. Stories like prions ('contageous' proteins believed to cause CJD and BSE (Mad Cow Disease)) are fascinating subjects.
Cold fusion is not one of them. Like many others, I was deeply intrigued by the initial reports from the University of Utah. The informal Thursday nuclear physics colloquium that I frequently attended generated so much attention that we were forced to move it to a local auditorium. Our normal 10-15 had now grown to several hundred. Overheads were copied from only hour old faxes and displayed with hasty analysis. Those first hours were extremely exciting, but as the familiar quote goes, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' and care.
Several problems were detected in the original papers. This is not unusual in draft documents and partly explains why peer review is important in scientific communication. Firstly, given the claimed rates of reaction and without any shielding, lethal doses of radiation would be emitted. Secondly, the spectra were appearently mislabeled and looked suspiciously like ordinary background radiation. None the less, the audience, though skeptical, was hopeful.
In the next weeks, the experiments were repeated in basements in universities around the world. At the same time, the authors of the original papers were fielding many questions from the scientific community and the media.
By the end of the following month, all attempts to duplicate claims of cold fusion had failed. One of the two original papers had been withdrawn by the author and Pons and Fleishman (authors of the second) were unavailable.
Years later, I have two comments:
1) The experiment in which cold fusion was claimed to have occured is a complex system. One may very easily get a false positive unless great care is taken. If the researcher is determined to prove that cold fusion is happening, odds are he'll probably see something in the noise that can be claimed as proof.
2) If you are really interested in science, read a magazine like Scientific American, Science, or Nature. In these are stories about great discoveries, uncertain results, and battles between conflicting paradigms. Often you will find that reality is truly stranger than fiction.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Reminds me of something I saw in Outer Limits
the other day, when some weird student or other
discovered cf and blew everyone up.
Guess that's the moral of the story.
CF is BAD, keep away from it.
Added Adrenaline
There seems to be some confusion about what the physicists claim is going on in this cold fusion thing. It isn't exactly the same concept as hot fusion.
Basic hydrogen fusion occurs when two atoms of hydrogen get squeezed together very tightly. If the nuclei get close enough, they decide that hanging out together might not be such a bad idea, and it becomes deuterium - an isotope of hydrogen. Eventually another couple hydrogen come along, get squished into the mess and the whole thing becomes helium. No big surprises here, but that isn't usually what happens in the sun.
Solar fusion actually uses carbon for a leg up. Basically, a hydrogen gets pressed too close to a carbon and the carbon becomes an isotope (13). It then steps up to become nitrogen, an isotope of nitrogen, and then a carbon and a helium. Same energy release, but the reaction energy is smaller. This isn't what they are claiming is happening in Cold fusion, either.
Do you remember the old electrolysis experiments in high school? Drop two ends of a hot wire in a jar of water and watch oxygen bubble up one side and hydrogen up the other? Same thing, except on the hydrogen side we make the wire (or cube, or plate) out of palladium or platinum in which hydrogen happens to be soluble. (yes, a gas can dissolve into a solid). They use heavy water, so all of the hydrogen in the metal is deuterium. The theory goes that if you squish two deuterium together, they decide that they don't mind being a helium. No spare electrons to go flying off, no spare neutrons to go killing researchers.
Unfortunately, the concept of adding carbon making the thing work better sounds like hokum to me because cold fusion isn't supposed to be using that chain reaction.
This issue is complicated because the pro-cf contingent sounds a lot like snake-oil salesmen trying to sell us a panacea for our energy problems, and the anti-cf group just wants to protect their profits. You have to boil it down to hard evidence.
What I'm hearing is that there is an unexplained increase in temperature in this process. I'm not too terribly sure where the idea came from that we can't measure the energy going into the thing. Any report that didn't account for experimental inaccuracy of that kind of measurement would be laughed out of publication.
I won't state a hard view that Cold Fusion exists and works. The bottom line is that SOMETHING unexplained is happening here. Until someone can explain it, it is something that should be researched. Even if it doesn't provide us with a clean, safe form of limitless energy, it will still help us understand the world we live in, and possibly provide us with clues to make the hot fusion concept a little easier.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
>The problem is that it is difficult to measure
>accurately just how much electricity was pumped
>into the electrode to begin with!!
Voltmeter measures voltage. Ammeter measures current. power = voltage x current.
energy = power x time.
Where is the problem?
Darren Schlamp
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
>Heck, there are lots of chemical reactions where
>metals, once ignited, would burn underwater...
Yeah, and I would like to see you point out a single instance of palladium or any other platinum group metal exhibiting such behavior.
The alkali and alkali earth metals such as Na, Ca, Mg will burn underwater (sodium group metals are exiting to watch - evolution of hydrogen gas, and heat, common demonstration in high school chemistry), but Pd? Not bloody likely.
Darren Schlamp
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious