ooooooKay then. I suppose you'd prefer that everybody in research positions stop using their imaginations and coming up with new ideas?
Seriously- what qualifies this person to question some MIT professors' qualifications to talk about the future of space ANYTHING?
Look, they're doing real research, and if you RTFA (the rest of it), you'd know they're planning on prototyping and making it. Is it guaranteed that they'll use this stuff? No. But none of these people who envisioned nuclear cars, jetpacks, tube elevators, practically sentient computers, and ray guns were promising anything. Except, well, we've got ray guns, practically sentient computers are still possible (the time-frame was just wrong), and cars or planes with quantum nucleonic reactors are feasible.
Right, because, uh, we can't work on any other problems at all until we solve that one. Look, that's a serious issue to consider, but to say we should forget about others, like bulky space suits?
Don't you think it probably makes some sense to work on multiple problems simultaneously if you've got a large number of people to do research? Maybe?
Little or no conceivable payoffs? Do you have any idea how much our economy depends on and has been enhanced by space-based assets? Elon Musk has stepped in with really cheap ground-to-orbit launch capability which is likely to make him a lot of money as he fairly quickly gains market dominance. He's gone from concept to near-launch in a very short amount of time, less than 3 years, where typically it's ten years or more.
Paypal is only mentioned because Musk happened to get his money from it. He has no real association with it anymore, and Paypal has nothing to do with SpaceX.
Anyway, yes, they are building on NASA's (Boeing's, Lockheed's, Ariane's) successes. However, SpaceX is doing it for far less, with potential for real returns.
And NASA makes the new stuff? They've run two (or three?) scramjet tests since the start of that program, and they've already axed it. NASA is a black hole.
Okay, high speed, there's nuclear stability, and there's chemical stability. Nitrogen gas is very chemically stable. There's very little it will react with unless you give it huge amounts of heat. Cesium is very unstable, chemically, and will readily react with many things, particularly water.
So this is NOT what the article meant. They're explaining that with one type of cluster, Al13, the number of iodine attachments has a lot to do with its chemical stability.
What kids need is to see physicists actually being enthusiastic about their work. Rap and bicycle flips are totally pointless to making people think physics is cool. It's a cheap marketing gimmick, and a kindergartner can see through insincere bullcrap.
It was always the real stuff, instead of beating around the bush or dulling it down, that got my attention. The real world is far more strange and exciting than any sci-fi has ever come up with.
As for the article, it's wrong.
He did so badly at school his teachers told his parents to take him out because he was "too stupid to learn" and it would be a waste of resources to invest time and energy in his education.
His teacher hated Einstein because Einstein was smarter than he was. And he didn't like Jews. That's why he "flunked" out. It's a very popular misperception that Einstein really wasn't very good at his school-work, but he had the same problem a lot of slashdotters had in school: the only people who score lower on competency tests than teachers are principals.
Because the producer of a game determines where the Army's focus is, right? Oh, wait, we've got multiple geographical commands, areas of responsibility, and so forth. Somehow at our last formation, our First Sergeant forgot to mention the new army-wide focus of combatting cheaters on some silly game.
Oh, that's right, we were too busy preparing for a FID/UW exercise for validation as a CJSOTF HQ. Take your self-righteous bullshit and blow it out your ear.
I've played the game a few times, and it's got some decent stuff to it. It was designed as a recruiting tool, and as such, hampering or interfering with that tool by hacking and ruining the game makes significant problems. So when you talk about priorities, maintaining troop strength is a priority, and AA was designed as a tool to help with just that.
Yes, the patent belongs to the company, but they should be handing over royalties to the man who created the technology. Without him, their entire foundation is crap. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars will be in this company's pockets as a result of his work, and you think his regular salary is compensation for the benefit he provided Nichia?
Why, uh, yes, you just found information leading to the return of my kidnapped daughter, who is very VALUABLE to me. Here's a couple hundred bucks. Now go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, everybody and their atheistic dogs like to jump on Occam's Razor and use that as their own little cop out. Unfortunately, the whole thing relies entirely on constructing complex arguments for the opposition and simple ones for yourself, which both sides can do. But I've seen no "simple" non-revelation-based explanation for why murals in ancient Catholic cathedrals depict ordinances not even the Catholics know about or use, but are had exactly in other places by people who never saw those cathedrals. Nor have I seen such things for why the path described by travelers in the first part of the Book of Mormon fits exactly with a trail extending out of Jerusalem and through sites in the Arabian Peninsula... sites only uncovered in archaeological digs after the printing of the Book of Mormon. The same Mormon theology describes the creation of the solar system almost perfectly, also from a time when scientific ideas about the creation of the solar system were rather sketchy compared to what we know now.
Every anti-God argument I've ever seen has operated off the basis that, "we can explain it, therefore God didn't do it." Were our historically religiously based explanations and understandings often mistaken? Yes. But often what the problem has been was that people farther down the line took things from symbolic cultures (Hebrews, for instance) and interpereted them literally. I often find it amazing when people in my faith take a scripture that basically says a day in heaven is a thousand years on earth, therefore the earth is 13,000 years old (7,000 years of creation, 6,000 years since then). For me, it doesn't make sense that God would alter the properties of the physical matter he organized, or add dinosaur and other fossils at varying levels beneath the earth. To deceive us? Of course not, nor would the devil have the power to place these things. He's not the creator. So what does it mean? It means that what things we have had revealed to us, such as the "time in heaven" relation to "time here," are symbolic.
In many schools of thought, we're having to revise what we understand to be true. Many things that used to be taught as true scientific things are now not-so-sure, and things we understood religiously, we very likely haven't understood correctly.
A lot of the gist of the article was about being comfortable with uncertainty. That's the whole point. Absolute certainty in religious thought is just as fool-hardy as absolute certainty in scientific thought. I've done a lot of research in various things (currently working for an energy storage company... electrolytic capacitors, but have previously done university research in low energy nuclear reactions, and I've spent a lot of my own time digging into ZPF theory), and what I've found is that Occam's Razor really has little utility in trying to describe the world around us. All that matters is whether or not theory fits with observation, and if multiple theories fit with observation, then the only reasonable course of action is to devise a crucial test that will find more observations to narrow the range of "theories we think fit."
I am quite certain that there are many things you believe in without proof, and it's still rational. The combination of people being convincing and having a system of these scientific models that are consistent with your own observation probably provides your belief structure. If you believe in the Big Bang, have you observed it or even the redshift for yourself? I haven't dug up any fossils, but I believe in evolution. I believe there's no oxygen in the glove-box I test electrolytic capacitors in, but I can't really prove it, even with the oxygen sensors I've got in there. There are very few things you believe without the testimony of others, in books you read, classes you take, even instruments you build based on principles discovered by others.
So, here's the entire foundation: We believe things because other people say they've seen the evidence. If the evidence is consistent with your own experience, then it's rational to trust it. I've never seen God, but there is enough evidence from honest people about concrete things to believe in God. I'm Mormon, and there were people in the early days of this church who swore by oath that they had, together, seen an angel who showed them the plates the Book of Mormon was translated from. A couple of them even left the church, but they never denied the truth of what they had seen. In fact, they vehemently defended it. They were honorable and well-respected people. I trust the testimony of those honest men just as I trust the testimony of honest scientists who've discovered all sorts of principles.
The foundations of religious belief are not so different or irrational as those of any other belief. The mentality that religiousness = stupidity is absolutely arrogant and condescending bullshit. The majority of people are more intelligent than most elitists here on slashdot would ever give them credit for, and to sit there constructing your own contorted intellectual edifices while patting yourselves on the back is blinding you as much as atheists have ever claimed religion blinds its followers.
I do also believe that most of the people spouting that kind of arrogant stuff are intelligent themselves. But I find it rather amusing that the foundations of logical thought that they use to say that religious people are irrational were developed by religious people. No, belief in God or a lack of belief in God are rational only by way of their foundations, foundations which all must rely on the testimony of others. We're all in the same boat together.
Your parent poster obviously has a better grasp of numbers than you do. Any "philosophy" that ignores the basic principles of mathematics is rather illogical, don't you think?
Given an infinite number of universes, the probability that there is at least one universe out there with a flat curvature is 1. However, the probability that THIS one would have the exactly needed density to be flat is still 1 in 10^50.
Before you go launching a tirade about stupid people, take a look at yourself. And the idea that the universe being logical somehow disproves God is rather backwards.
My hiccup here comes with, "as long as your parents provide for your welfare and don't abuse you, they have the right to control your life in pretty much any way they wish."
That's true only to a small degree. If a teenager turns rebellious and says, "I'm going to watch rated R movies and play rated M games anyway," the parents can't *STOP* providing for the welfare of their children. Maybe they can confiscate the games and movies, but controlling their lives "any way they wish" is laughable at best.
Ah, but if you've used the weapons and know the typcial tactics, requirements, and so forth (I'm enlisted in an SF unit), you know the difference between a realistic simulation and Unreal II. I have a hard time with most FPS's because they have you running in, standing up, guns blazing, as if you're Rambo or something.
Sure, that's/fun/, but compare that to a situation where it makes sense to set up a reverse slope defense, to recon an area before returning to your rally point and moving out, or to run a fast-paced but measured assault against a target. To have that all with visibility and weapons behavior you find with real-world equipment, I'd be willing to call it "life-like."
Why does "total extinction (at worst)" get modded +5 insightful? What sort of an insight is it that suggests a species like ours that has managed to survive and thrive from Ethiopia to Siberia to the Amazon to New Jersey would be WIPED out by burning fossil fuels?
Oh, and uh, on the electrolysis question, it's pretty simple. Let's say you're running electrolysis as 2.5 volts. Now, that isn't a lot, but it'll serve our purposes. Electrons accelerated under an electrical potential of 2.5 volts are said to have an energy of 2.5 electron-volts. We measure a lot of energy in electron-volts. And we even measure mass in electron-volts/c^2. It's really cool, that you can describe the mass of an object in terms of its energy divided by the c^2 constant.
So we're put-putting along, breaking the H20 chemical bonds with our little electrolysis set-up, a constant 2.5 volts. (Eh, I'm not sure if that's enough to really do it, I don't think so, but we'll just stick with it for an order of magnitude comparison). The electrons are getting excited, and things are even heating up a bit.
We then collect the hydrogen atoms, and we fuse them together. Each fusion produces 2.5 mega-electron-volts (MeV). Well, really, that's D+D -> He4 + 2.5 MeV (gammas). But this little exercise helps us get in the right ballpark/order-of-magnitude. And we see that the amount of energy required to break those chemical bonds in water is about a million times smaller than the energy put out by fusing hydrogen.
The only problem is that it requires so much energy to get them to fuse.:) Not so much energy as it releases, but you're dealing with all sorts of loss, containment issues, etc., that make break-even difficult.
It is E=mc^2 as everybody else has pointed out, but it might be more helpful to address the thermodynamics argument directly.
All energy comes from taking something at a higher energy state and going to a lower one. Like water falling in a hydroelectric dam, or fossil fuels giving up the energy in their chemical bonds in combustion and consequently releasing a lot of heat.
That's the same idea with fusion. The mass-energy of two deuterium atoms is greater than the mass-energy of a helium atom. It's similar to the chemical stuff, in that the nuclear configuration/separation of nucleons (protons, neutrons) is just in a lower state. E=mc^2 comes in right there, as the difference in mass comes off as energy (two gamma-rays, which are high energy photons).
Those end up bumping into other atoms, which makes them a lot hotter. And then we can use straight thermodynamics as those particles are cooled by water to turn turbines.
So, yes, you're technically right that it isn't free energy or a perpetual motion machine. Thermodynamics still have to be taken into account. It's just that, considering the universe is *almost* 100% hydrogen, worrying about running out of fuel is kind of silly.
Does anybody else find it interesting that here on slashdot, this post was moderated flamebait? And that if it had been anti-Christian and pro-whatever-the-majority-of-you-godless-but-fello w-geeks-are-for then it would have been moderated insightful? It has nothing to do with the logic or structure here: it's entirely a function of what point of view somebody's espousing.
And it never occurred to you that the dark ages were caused by the fall of Rome?
Sheesh. It was the collapse of society that brought about isolationism, and subsequent knowledge was lost such that Christianity and everybody else in the region descended into that same superstition and fear of the unknown. The germanic barbarian tribes weren't any more advanced for their lack of Christianity.
Don't let the name fool you. They're one of the best newspapers in the country (with an excellent reputation), and unlike the New York Times, their news is actually news as opposed to a big opinion page.
Isn't it interesting, though, how flat screens did come about without any major concerted effort to force them along? I think it's rather telling that the economics and technology came into their own without the "vital" support of the public.
The basic mechanisms for bare nuclei are known, but keep in mind that we aren't dealing with plasmas or bare nuclei. There are still unknowns, and even recent research such as Ikegami's that cast into doubt our basic assumptions about what's happening at low energies. So, at least the report is a step in the right direction. But anybody who's going to be truly honest with themselves is going to have to realize that d+Z transmutation is definitely nuclear. It has to be, because that's the very defintion of it.
As for saying, "whoever comes first in actually demonstrating cold fusion will probably set the new record for the quickest Nobel prize ever," you have no idea how the politics of this work, do you? Nor do you understand the stigma associated with CF that prevents people from getting into the field. That's why people aren't jumping into it. It can cause a lot of problems career-wise, regardless of how believable it is.
I don't really believe Pons and Fleischmann should really be given "sainthood." They broke an agreement to publish simultaneously, made a press conference, ignored established protocols, readjusted data when it turned out their charts were in error, and in the end had to withdraw a lot of their claims. As for Jones, he never withdrew his claims of neutron detection in 89, and he and colleagues had been referring to experiments along these lines as "cold fusion" since 86. Their research group meeting minutes are pretty clear on that. Anyway, sloppiness and arrogance on the parts of Pons and Fleischmann were the cause of the entire debacle. If they had gone the normal route, there wouldn't have been a 15 year exile of the entire field.
What, do you think they're using liquid nitrogen? Sheesh. You can use liquid lithium at several hundred C, and you're still dealing with "cold" fusion. It'll melt your beer cans, but it's not a million or two K, therefore it's cold.
They agreed to review it, and the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.
Whether or not there is enough excess heat to be useful is one question. Whether there is nuclear transmutation is yet another. I've spent the past year doing research with Steven Jones at BYU, and in surveying the literature and conducting our own experiments, we've seen some very intriguing results. Sr + d -> Y, Zr, Mo. If you look at Japanese research, Iwamura has had Cs -> Pr, which is a rare earth and you DON'T get Cesium dropping in proportion to Pr's increase by any sort of environmental contamination. Especially not when it's in a sealed vacuum chamber with d2 gas permeation through the metal complex (Pa, CaO) the Cs is deposited on.
There's data from a Japanese researcher (Ikegami) in Sweden (University of Uppsala) who has found that with deuterium ion beams at various target metals, the nuclear cross sectional area for capture increases dramatically at 10 keV and just gets larger the lower you get. He wasn't even doing CF research, but it's quite interesting to see that you don't require enormous energies in order to achieve d+Z transmutation.
Perhaps at this point it would be smart to realize that foreign researcher are leaving us in the dust. Myself, I have real doubts about the usefulness of any supposed excess heat, but low energy nuclear transmutation has a lot of intriguing stuff. At the very least, we need to look at the effect of electronic structures in metal lattices on the coulomb barrier for d+Z reactions. In Iwamura's experiments, for example, he got null results when he did it without CaO, when he used H2 instead of D2, etc. What did the addition (in thin film deposition) of an impurity like CaO do to enable a reaction that straight palladium couldn't do?
Slashdot Mirror
ooooooKay then. I suppose you'd prefer that everybody in research positions stop using their imaginations and coming up with new ideas?
Seriously- what qualifies this person to question some MIT professors' qualifications to talk about the future of space ANYTHING?
Look, they're doing real research, and if you RTFA (the rest of it), you'd know they're planning on prototyping and making it. Is it guaranteed that they'll use this stuff? No. But none of these people who envisioned nuclear cars, jetpacks, tube elevators, practically sentient computers, and ray guns were promising anything. Except, well, we've got ray guns, practically sentient computers are still possible (the time-frame was just wrong), and cars or planes with quantum nucleonic reactors are feasible.
Right, because, uh, we can't work on any other problems at all until we solve that one. Look, that's a serious issue to consider, but to say we should forget about others, like bulky space suits?
Don't you think it probably makes some sense to work on multiple problems simultaneously if you've got a large number of people to do research? Maybe?
Little or no conceivable payoffs? Do you have any idea how much our economy depends on and has been enhanced by space-based assets? Elon Musk has stepped in with really cheap ground-to-orbit launch capability which is likely to make him a lot of money as he fairly quickly gains market dominance. He's gone from concept to near-launch in a very short amount of time, less than 3 years, where typically it's ten years or more.
Paypal is only mentioned because Musk happened to get his money from it. He has no real association with it anymore, and Paypal has nothing to do with SpaceX.
Anyway, yes, they are building on NASA's (Boeing's, Lockheed's, Ariane's) successes. However, SpaceX is doing it for far less, with potential for real returns.
And NASA makes the new stuff? They've run two (or three?) scramjet tests since the start of that program, and they've already axed it. NASA is a black hole.
Okay, high speed, there's nuclear stability, and there's chemical stability. Nitrogen gas is very chemically stable. There's very little it will react with unless you give it huge amounts of heat. Cesium is very unstable, chemically, and will readily react with many things, particularly water.
So this is NOT what the article meant. They're explaining that with one type of cluster, Al13, the number of iodine attachments has a lot to do with its chemical stability.
It was always the real stuff, instead of beating around the bush or dulling it down, that got my attention. The real world is far more strange and exciting than any sci-fi has ever come up with.
As for the article, it's wrong. His teacher hated Einstein because Einstein was smarter than he was. And he didn't like Jews. That's why he "flunked" out. It's a very popular misperception that Einstein really wasn't very good at his school-work, but he had the same problem a lot of slashdotters had in school: the only people who score lower on competency tests than teachers are principals.
Oh, I dunno, the thing about the baby dino didn't give me any impressions of giant saber-toothed badgers.
Because the producer of a game determines where the Army's focus is, right? Oh, wait, we've got multiple geographical commands, areas of responsibility, and so forth. Somehow at our last formation, our First Sergeant forgot to mention the new army-wide focus of combatting cheaters on some silly game.
Oh, that's right, we were too busy preparing for a FID/UW exercise for validation as a CJSOTF HQ. Take your self-righteous bullshit and blow it out your ear.
I've played the game a few times, and it's got some decent stuff to it. It was designed as a recruiting tool, and as such, hampering or interfering with that tool by hacking and ruining the game makes significant problems. So when you talk about priorities, maintaining troop strength is a priority, and AA was designed as a tool to help with just that.
Yes, the patent belongs to the company, but they should be handing over royalties to the man who created the technology. Without him, their entire foundation is crap. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars will be in this company's pockets as a result of his work, and you think his regular salary is compensation for the benefit he provided Nichia?
Why, uh, yes, you just found information leading to the return of my kidnapped daughter, who is very VALUABLE to me. Here's a couple hundred bucks. Now go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, everybody and their atheistic dogs like to jump on Occam's Razor and use that as their own little cop out. Unfortunately, the whole thing relies entirely on constructing complex arguments for the opposition and simple ones for yourself, which both sides can do. But I've seen no "simple" non-revelation-based explanation for why murals in ancient Catholic cathedrals depict ordinances not even the Catholics know about or use, but are had exactly in other places by people who never saw those cathedrals. Nor have I seen such things for why the path described by travelers in the first part of the Book of Mormon fits exactly with a trail extending out of Jerusalem and through sites in the Arabian Peninsula... sites only uncovered in archaeological digs after the printing of the Book of Mormon. The same Mormon theology describes the creation of the solar system almost perfectly, also from a time when scientific ideas about the creation of the solar system were rather sketchy compared to what we know now.
Every anti-God argument I've ever seen has operated off the basis that, "we can explain it, therefore God didn't do it." Were our historically religiously based explanations and understandings often mistaken? Yes. But often what the problem has been was that people farther down the line took things from symbolic cultures (Hebrews, for instance) and interpereted them literally. I often find it amazing when people in my faith take a scripture that basically says a day in heaven is a thousand years on earth, therefore the earth is 13,000 years old (7,000 years of creation, 6,000 years since then). For me, it doesn't make sense that God would alter the properties of the physical matter he organized, or add dinosaur and other fossils at varying levels beneath the earth. To deceive us? Of course not, nor would the devil have the power to place these things. He's not the creator. So what does it mean? It means that what things we have had revealed to us, such as the "time in heaven" relation to "time here," are symbolic.
In many schools of thought, we're having to revise what we understand to be true. Many things that used to be taught as true scientific things are now not-so-sure, and things we understood religiously, we very likely haven't understood correctly.
A lot of the gist of the article was about being comfortable with uncertainty. That's the whole point. Absolute certainty in religious thought is just as fool-hardy as absolute certainty in scientific thought. I've done a lot of research in various things (currently working for an energy storage company... electrolytic capacitors, but have previously done university research in low energy nuclear reactions, and I've spent a lot of my own time digging into ZPF theory), and what I've found is that Occam's Razor really has little utility in trying to describe the world around us. All that matters is whether or not theory fits with observation, and if multiple theories fit with observation, then the only reasonable course of action is to devise a crucial test that will find more observations to narrow the range of "theories we think fit."
I am quite certain that there are many things you believe in without proof, and it's still rational. The combination of people being convincing and having a system of these scientific models that are consistent with your own observation probably provides your belief structure. If you believe in the Big Bang, have you observed it or even the redshift for yourself? I haven't dug up any fossils, but I believe in evolution. I believe there's no oxygen in the glove-box I test electrolytic capacitors in, but I can't really prove it, even with the oxygen sensors I've got in there. There are very few things you believe without the testimony of others, in books you read, classes you take, even instruments you build based on principles discovered by others.
So, here's the entire foundation: We believe things because other people say they've seen the evidence. If the evidence is consistent with your own experience, then it's rational to trust it. I've never seen God, but there is enough evidence from honest people about concrete things to believe in God. I'm Mormon, and there were people in the early days of this church who swore by oath that they had, together, seen an angel who showed them the plates the Book of Mormon was translated from. A couple of them even left the church, but they never denied the truth of what they had seen. In fact, they vehemently defended it. They were honorable and well-respected people. I trust the testimony of those honest men just as I trust the testimony of honest scientists who've discovered all sorts of principles.
The foundations of religious belief are not so different or irrational as those of any other belief. The mentality that religiousness = stupidity is absolutely arrogant and condescending bullshit. The majority of people are more intelligent than most elitists here on slashdot would ever give them credit for, and to sit there constructing your own contorted intellectual edifices while patting yourselves on the back is blinding you as much as atheists have ever claimed religion blinds its followers.
I do also believe that most of the people spouting that kind of arrogant stuff are intelligent themselves. But I find it rather amusing that the foundations of logical thought that they use to say that religious people are irrational were developed by religious people. No, belief in God or a lack of belief in God are rational only by way of their foundations, foundations which all must rely on the testimony of others. We're all in the same boat together.
Your parent poster obviously has a better grasp of numbers than you do. Any "philosophy" that ignores the basic principles of mathematics is rather illogical, don't you think?
Given an infinite number of universes, the probability that there is at least one universe out there with a flat curvature is 1. However, the probability that THIS one would have the exactly needed density to be flat is still 1 in 10^50.
Before you go launching a tirade about stupid people, take a look at yourself. And the idea that the universe being logical somehow disproves God is rather backwards.
My hiccup here comes with, "as long as your parents provide for your welfare and don't abuse you, they have the right to control your life in pretty much any way they wish."
That's true only to a small degree. If a teenager turns rebellious and says, "I'm going to watch rated R movies and play rated M games anyway," the parents can't *STOP* providing for the welfare of their children. Maybe they can confiscate the games and movies, but controlling their lives "any way they wish" is laughable at best.
Ah, but if you've used the weapons and know the typcial tactics, requirements, and so forth (I'm enlisted in an SF unit), you know the difference between a realistic simulation and Unreal II. I have a hard time with most FPS's because they have you running in, standing up, guns blazing, as if you're Rambo or something.
/fun/, but compare that to a situation where it makes sense to set up a reverse slope defense, to recon an area before returning to your rally point and moving out, or to run a fast-paced but measured assault against a target. To have that all with visibility and weapons behavior you find with real-world equipment, I'd be willing to call it "life-like."
Sure, that's
Why does "total extinction (at worst)" get modded +5 insightful? What sort of an insight is it that suggests a species like ours that has managed to survive and thrive from Ethiopia to Siberia to the Amazon to New Jersey would be WIPED out by burning fossil fuels?
Oh, and uh, on the electrolysis question, it's pretty simple. Let's say you're running electrolysis as 2.5 volts. Now, that isn't a lot, but it'll serve our purposes. Electrons accelerated under an electrical potential of 2.5 volts are said to have an energy of 2.5 electron-volts. We measure a lot of energy in electron-volts. And we even measure mass in electron-volts/c^2. It's really cool, that you can describe the mass of an object in terms of its energy divided by the c^2 constant.
:) Not so much energy as it releases, but you're dealing with all sorts of loss, containment issues, etc., that make break-even difficult.
So we're put-putting along, breaking the H20 chemical bonds with our little electrolysis set-up, a constant 2.5 volts. (Eh, I'm not sure if that's enough to really do it, I don't think so, but we'll just stick with it for an order of magnitude comparison). The electrons are getting excited, and things are even heating up a bit.
We then collect the hydrogen atoms, and we fuse them together. Each fusion produces 2.5 mega-electron-volts (MeV). Well, really, that's D+D -> He4 + 2.5 MeV (gammas). But this little exercise helps us get in the right ballpark/order-of-magnitude. And we see that the amount of energy required to break those chemical bonds in water is about a million times smaller than the energy put out by fusing hydrogen.
The only problem is that it requires so much energy to get them to fuse.
It is E=mc^2 as everybody else has pointed out, but it might be more helpful to address the thermodynamics argument directly.
All energy comes from taking something at a higher energy state and going to a lower one. Like water falling in a hydroelectric dam, or fossil fuels giving up the energy in their chemical bonds in combustion and consequently releasing a lot of heat.
That's the same idea with fusion. The mass-energy of two deuterium atoms is greater than the mass-energy of a helium atom. It's similar to the chemical stuff, in that the nuclear configuration/separation of nucleons (protons, neutrons) is just in a lower state. E=mc^2 comes in right there, as the difference in mass comes off as energy (two gamma-rays, which are high energy photons).
Those end up bumping into other atoms, which makes them a lot hotter. And then we can use straight thermodynamics as those particles are cooled by water to turn turbines.
So, yes, you're technically right that it isn't free energy or a perpetual motion machine. Thermodynamics still have to be taken into account. It's just that, considering the universe is *almost* 100% hydrogen, worrying about running out of fuel is kind of silly.
Does anybody else find it interesting that here on slashdot, this post was moderated flamebait? And that if it had been anti-Christian and pro-whatever-the-majority-of-you-godless-but-fello w-geeks-are-for then it would have been moderated insightful? It has nothing to do with the logic or structure here: it's entirely a function of what point of view somebody's espousing.
And it never occurred to you that the dark ages were caused by the fall of Rome?
Sheesh. It was the collapse of society that brought about isolationism, and subsequent knowledge was lost such that Christianity and everybody else in the region descended into that same superstition and fear of the unknown. The germanic barbarian tribes weren't any more advanced for their lack of Christianity.
Don't let the name fool you. They're one of the best newspapers in the country (with an excellent reputation), and unlike the New York Times, their news is actually news as opposed to a big opinion page.
But in a much smaller reactor than the sun, if you want sustainability, you DO need those temperatures.
Isn't it interesting, though, how flat screens did come about without any major concerted effort to force them along? I think it's rather telling that the economics and technology came into their own without the "vital" support of the public.
If only those graphics weren't pre-rendered, and that was all in-game stuff. Hey, you know, maybe that's what it really is, eh? Please? Please?
The basic mechanisms for bare nuclei are known, but keep in mind that we aren't dealing with plasmas or bare nuclei. There are still unknowns, and even recent research such as Ikegami's that cast into doubt our basic assumptions about what's happening at low energies. So, at least the report is a step in the right direction. But anybody who's going to be truly honest with themselves is going to have to realize that d+Z transmutation is definitely nuclear. It has to be, because that's the very defintion of it.
As for saying, "whoever comes first in actually demonstrating cold fusion will probably set the new record for the quickest Nobel prize ever," you have no idea how the politics of this work, do you? Nor do you understand the stigma associated with CF that prevents people from getting into the field. That's why people aren't jumping into it. It can cause a lot of problems career-wise, regardless of how believable it is.
I don't really believe Pons and Fleischmann should really be given "sainthood." They broke an agreement to publish simultaneously, made a press conference, ignored established protocols, readjusted data when it turned out their charts were in error, and in the end had to withdraw a lot of their claims. As for Jones, he never withdrew his claims of neutron detection in 89, and he and colleagues had been referring to experiments along these lines as "cold fusion" since 86. Their research group meeting minutes are pretty clear on that. Anyway, sloppiness and arrogance on the parts of Pons and Fleischmann were the cause of the entire debacle. If they had gone the normal route, there wouldn't have been a 15 year exile of the entire field.
What, do you think they're using liquid nitrogen? Sheesh. You can use liquid lithium at several hundred C, and you're still dealing with "cold" fusion. It'll melt your beer cans, but it's not a million or two K, therefore it's cold.
They agreed to review it, and the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.
Whether or not there is enough excess heat to be useful is one question. Whether there is nuclear transmutation is yet another. I've spent the past year doing research with Steven Jones at BYU, and in surveying the literature and conducting our own experiments, we've seen some very intriguing results. Sr + d -> Y, Zr, Mo. If you look at Japanese research, Iwamura has had Cs -> Pr, which is a rare earth and you DON'T get Cesium dropping in proportion to Pr's increase by any sort of environmental contamination. Especially not when it's in a sealed vacuum chamber with d2 gas permeation through the metal complex (Pa, CaO) the Cs is deposited on.
There's data from a Japanese researcher (Ikegami) in Sweden (University of Uppsala) who has found that with deuterium ion beams at various target metals, the nuclear cross sectional area for capture increases dramatically at 10 keV and just gets larger the lower you get. He wasn't even doing CF research, but it's quite interesting to see that you don't require enormous energies in order to achieve d+Z transmutation.
Perhaps at this point it would be smart to realize that foreign researcher are leaving us in the dust. Myself, I have real doubts about the usefulness of any supposed excess heat, but low energy nuclear transmutation has a lot of intriguing stuff. At the very least, we need to look at the effect of electronic structures in metal lattices on the coulomb barrier for d+Z reactions. In Iwamura's experiments, for example, he got null results when he did it without CaO, when he used H2 instead of D2, etc. What did the addition (in thin film deposition) of an impurity like CaO do to enable a reaction that straight palladium couldn't do?
Anyway, yeah, there's SOMETHING going on.