Excess Heat 103
| Excess Heat | |
| author | Charles G. Beaudette |
| pages | 365 |
| publisher | Oak Grove Press, LLC |
| rating | 8.5 |
| reviewer | Jim Driggers |
| ISBN | 0967854814 |
| summary | A book that casts new light on the possibilities and implications of cold fusion, and assails the too-quick rejection of that concept by the scientific community a decade ago. |
Drs. Fleischmann and Pons between them had decades of academic and laboratory experience in the field of electrochemistry. Among other positions and awards, Dr. Fleischmann is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Dr. Pons was Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Utah.
When they announced the discovery of 'cold fusion' in 1989, a scientific travesty occurred. Nuclear physicists declared that because no nuclear products could be demonstrated, the measurement of excess heat was flawed. This is completely irrational. The measurement of excess heat stands on it's own merit. If any assault is to be made, it must be upon the methodology used to measure the heat. The quantity of heat measured was in fact too large to be accounted for by mechanical or chemical means.
The Pons and Fleischmann experiment was never a simple 'kitchen chemistry' endeavor. The calorimetry measurements and heat accounting is difficult to master. Electrochemical knowledge and experience is an absolute must. The electrochemical cell represents a complex environment and there were unknowns associated with the palladium cathodes. As a result, early attempts at replication failed.
The nuclear physicists in question did not possess the knowledge or experience in electrochemistry and calorimetry to demonstrate any problem with the heat measurement. They did not enter the laboratory and, hands-on, find the alleged error in heat measurement. Instead, they resorted to the irrational argument above and to ridicule. They prevailed due to their prominent position in the federal government and the esteem of them held by publishers of the scientific publications. Unfortunately, they managed to derail an exciting turn in the history of science.
All of the above and more is to be found in the Charles G. Beaudette book, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed. With the forward penned by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and introduction by David J. Nagel, Ph D, the book runs 365 pages cover to cover and is replete with references.
The book covers the initial discovery and the quick dismissal by the DOE Energy Research Advisory Board. The board issued it's final, negative report in a mere 8 months. Contrast that to the time period between the discovery of superconductivity and the decades taken to elucidate the theoretical underpinnings. Most of the points refuted by the author can be found at www.ncas.org/erab/sec1.htm.
The role of particular nuclear physicists is clearly described and dissected. The part played by the major, popular science journals, such as Nature, is elucidated.
Six cold fusion type experiments are presented, all of which produced excess power under mild conditions. Pertinent details are presented, such as a description of the apparatus and/or graphs of the measurements/results. The results of some of these experiments have been published in peer reviewed journals.
The measurement of "nuclear ash" is reported from other cold fusion experiments expressly set up for the purpose. Again, some of these results have been published in peer reviewed journals.
Other chapters consider scientific protocol, more on the role of the skeptics, and premature attempts at commercialization.
It is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research. If they believe the calorimetry is flawed, they will have to present evidence, preferably from their own experiments, but at least from participation in a cold fusion experiment. They should have any critique peer reviewed by scientists well versed in the practice of calorimetry and/or electrochemistry, then published. Same goes for criticism of evidence of nuclear products, although this is an area where some of the skeptics could actually do some science.
The author presents detailed arguments. This is mostly good, but I found it difficult to attend to some of the more lengthy passages.
All in all, I very much enjoyed the book. If you find the neutrino problem, the Big Bang, the steady state theory, the double-slit experiment wiih only one photon in the apparatus, dark matter, more than four dimensions of space-time, or the modification of the laws of gravity to get rid of dark matter facinating, then you will enjoy this book also. It is a light directed to a partially opened door that connects what we think we know with what we don't.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek. And for a taste of what's up in cold fusion research, take a look at the May, 2000 ICCF.
Re:Reviewer needed some real science know-how (Score:1)
The Evidence Behind the Effect (Score:1)
This is more than any hot fusion experiment has ever produced.
Check out Russ George's Saturna Technologies site which has all the graphs. Probably the most enlightening cold fusion link you will find.
Saturna Technologies Web Site [rsrch.com]
Good luck! jim burnes
Some review. (Score:1)
Much as we all love conspiracy theories, in all reality if there was that much merit to something as huge as cold fusion SOMEONE would have replicated it empirically. The burden of proof lies on the cold fusion side.
It seems to me that the Slashdot folks are awfully fond of jumping whatever trendy opposition bandwagon they can find no matter how ridiculous.
Why don't we get more articles on studies proving ESP? Or intercessory prayer? Or proofs that P = NP? (Oh, we already had that one.)
(I don't read Slashdot much so I don't have an account, sorry.)
University courses on cold fusion (Score:1)
cold fusion is still ridiculous (Score:1)
We have a very good understanding of fusion, what happens, what fundamental particles are involved, how much energy is required, how much momentum there is and how it should be conserved, etc.... The truth is, none of the cold fusion experiments can satisfy any the energy requirements. However, it is possible for there to be a fusion reaction in a "cold fusion" experiment. You may be asking, how is this? Well this is where I think most of the meat is. Most of these people suggesting cold fusion probably know very little of relativistic quantum mechanics. However, most Nuclear physicists know it like the back of their hand. Anyway, if one takes into account relativistic quantum mechanics, then upon the phase of the uncertainty principle, there will be fusion. One must remember what temperature is. It's nothing more than a average relationship standardized by the triple point of water directly related to the kinetic energy. Now if you take this fact, and you take into account qmech, the it's pretty obvious that there will be a SMALL probability of fusion. However, it will be so small that it's not worth talking about and not worth using for any practical use. Now one may say, we can do this and that to increase the probability. Well you can't. The uncertainty phase is dead set. You can only increase that by increasing your potentials which will require raising the average temp, increasing pressure, or decreasing volume. Even then, it would no longer be "cold fusion" to produce practical results. Personally, more money needs to be spent on fundamental nuclear physics instead of this "alice in wonderland" applied bullshit.
A lesson in collaborative science (Score:1)
When you make a discovery of some sort, you submit it to a reputable journal. In your article, you clearly explain what you measured, what definitely happened to bring about that result, and limit your speculation to a few paragraphs at the end, labelled very clearly as speculation. You then invite peer review. You do not instantly call a press conference, you do not make dramatic claims which have very tenuous experimental backing. By waiting through the process of peer review, you lose nothing unless you're peddling snake oil in the first place. Finally, you follow the very simple mandate that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This sounds like a horrible double standard and is the sort of thing that makes people cry foul about modern science's "closed" nature. Bullshit. What makes a claim extraordinary is that it contradicts a very large body of evidence to the contrary. Newtonian mechanics was accepted because it had a huge body of evidence to back it up. Relativistic mechanics, in order to trump Newton, had to provide a substantial body of evidence proving that Newtonian was insufficient.
Part II--the example. I have knocking around here a preprint from a research team I participated in. In this paper, we set forth some radio astronomy observations which indicate the existence of wakes in the rings of Saturn (think bunching-together along the lines of ripples on a pond). Now, this is actually more important than it sounds--we focus on Saturn because it's somthing of a microcosm of the Solar System, and can answer lots of cool questions on planetary formation. We know there are wakes there--it's the absolute best explanation for our evidence, and really the only reasonable one. On top of that, this wake formation has been suspected for some time. So, does our paper trumpet the confirmed existence of wakes in Saturn's rings? Heck no. I don't have much of a reputation to stake on this, but even I'm leery of going out on a limb like that. And my project head has even more to lose. No, we stated "E-W asymmetries indicate the existence of wakes" yadda yadda. And now we're sitting on our hands (well, not exactly--we are repeating the results, getting more details) until the data start to come back from Cassini. I'm sure they will confirm our findings, but they aren't fact until that confirmation's in. We're talking a process of years for a relatively simply claim.
P&F didn't even wait months for a far more dramatic claim.
Re:According the CF guys it's not the neutrons (Score:1)
There are three D + D reactions:
D + d -> excited 4He -> { products }
where the { products} are one of the following:
3He + n
T + p
4He + gamma
The gamma producing reaction is several orders of magnitude less likely than the first two. I don't believe the branching ratio has anything to do with which "phase" a material is in; it has to do with the excited Helium's decay. I believe the delay event should be independent of the fusion event so it should not differ depending on how the fusion was accomplished.
P & F originally claimed to have detected neutrons.
Re:Another good book (Score:1)
Covers the original P&F incident. It's not up to date on the current happenings in the "field". Obvious from the title that Huizenga's not a believer.
The difference between Science and politics (Score:2)
For a true scientist, there should have been only one issue worth discussing in all of this mess, and that was the fact that a number of experiments (but not all) found an unattributed heat excess. To solve that mystery and hence attribute the heat to something old or something new would have been Science. Everything else was bollocks.
Hooray, a blow against uncertainty in Science! (Score:2)
It's so refreshing to know that we'll no longer be troubled with all this terrible uncertainty about the future, since scientific investigation in nuclear issues is now closed. I guess there's no point talking about quarks and superstrings and other such balony, since who knows, it could one day lead towards understanding how to fuse nuclei without emitting neutrons, which we know is impossible, so any such fundamental research must be bad science too. Well done!
Those pesky F&P, I bet they were descendents of Galileo, the blighters!
Why thought experiments are bull (Score:2)
Your item knocks down a straw man. F&P and everybody else on the proponent's side knew damn well that even if this was indeed fusion, no way was it fusion of the ordinary kind. Indeed, in many ways they brought their problems upon themselves by calling it any kind of fusion at all, rather than inventing a new name.
Unfortunately, as a result of that bad move and others, even if there was a new physical effect of some sort present (which is likely, given that knowledge in that area is far from complete), we'll now not discover it in this generation because nobody with a reputation worth preserving dares touch the subject with a barge pole anymore. That sucks.
Re:The difference between Science and politics (Score:2)
Nobody said that that's what they found, if anything. Unfortunately, now we'll never know what they did find, if anything, just because of the political dimension that this acquired.
Whether or not F&P did wrong or right, the real scientists in the world did themselves (and us) a disservice here.
The only thing that mattered was uncovering what was actually happening in those tests where excess heat was reported, nothing else. You can't prejudge the new on the basis of the old.
not fusion, but... (Score:1)
It's unfortunate that pseudo science frequently uses the "they're shutting us out" argument, because there is some truth to it. Mainstream Science *is* an old-boy club (despite having women involved), and you don't always get very far with radical new items. Of course being unwilling to have your work peer reviewed doesn't help, and P&F were stupid to release their info via press release rather than reviewed journals--I never got the impression that the journals would have flat turned them down if they hadn't made such outrageous claims so publically.
What's really interesting are the companies (such as http://www.new-energy.com/) doing further research and claiming results. One guy interviewed in Wired (unfortunately I can't find the reference because he didn't call his processes "cold fusion") has a process which is related that not only produces excess heat, but also interesting chemical bondings to create metals with some organic properties.
Overall, both sides have plenty of blame--P&F and their rabid supporters shouldn't be surprised that by breaking the process they got into hot water with the establishment, and the establishment should not be so quick to dismiss people as quacks until they are definitively proven so.
cold fusion magazine "Infinite Energy" (Score:2)
I don't read it, but it tells what is still going on.
In the end, if you cant repeat it, it ain't so... (Score:1)
Many many people attempted to reproduce Pon's and Fleishmann's work. Most everyone who did obtained the null result, that is, no differences observed from normal chemical phenomenon that were expected. Those who obtained a signal, went on to refine their measurements, only to discover later on that there was no signal.
So we have a problem. A massive PR campaign, and a money/intellectual property grab. And no observable effects. This is what Irving Langmuir once called Pathological Science in that it cannot be reproduced, and there are a few believers who will not give up their belief structure (for whatever reason).
So this brings us to today, and Bob Park's book. Bob goes through the long sad history of Cold Fusion. While there are those whom would like to see a redemption of the ideas, the fact remains that the experiments are not repeatable, and when looked at with the appropriate level of skepticism and review, the signals that are observed appear to fade into the background.
There is no bias against CF, there is a bias against bad science.
Re:Excess Heat (Score:1)
Let's just say, if it produced any less heat, you could put in your computer to cool your CPU.
--
Science by Press Release (Score:3)
--
Re:A lesson in collaborative science (Score:2)
What the hell happened to science education? (Score:2)
What a crock. Cold fusion has the same status as alien abduction, Loch Ness and the Yeti in scientific circles. Or maybe the Piltdown man and von Danaken's theories.
Well, the fact is that nobody has ever shown that cold fusion exists. All we have is an experiment with anamolous results that have been reproduced. A thorough investigation of the anamoly turns out to have identified the source of heat as being a thermocouple power supply. Yet even today we find this crap on systems like slashodot. Systmes that purport to cater to some sort of intellectual elite.
The interesting question is do memes like this persist, especially in places like this.
My guess is that is a failure of a general education to instill a capacity of rational thought and scientific skepticism in vast majority of the populace. We still have the need to debunk urban legends about organ harvesting, so why not similar legends about cold fusion?
Fleischmann and Pons blew it. Get over it.
Re:RTFM (Score:2)
Caractacus Potts wrote:
Unfortunately for your argument, most of the really bad jornalism and fossilized public opinion was pro-P&F. They had a very seductive argument (which you are, largely, now repeating) and an awfully attractive carrot if you bought their claims.
Relying on the likes of USA Today and Newsweek (and even Discover) for your news about hard science is like relying on Slashdot for news of international politics: you may hear of some things, but don't expect accuracy or precision.
For the record, at the time that Pons' and Fleischmann's first claims were reported in the press, I did some back of the envelope calculations on the probable reduction of the electrostatic force between deuterium nucleii 'disolved' in the surface of a platinum crystal. My calculations showed that, within an order of magnitude, their claims for room temperature fusion were believable.
I was 'guardedly optimistic' about cold fusion at the time, but I had failed to take into account the necessary by-products of a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction (neutron radiation) and the effect it would have had on nearby people (lethal dosage in a few hours). Had I considered the radiation problem, it would have been obvious that Pons' and Fleischmann were either liars or concealing one or more dead bodies. (and probably suffering from massive radiation burns themselves)
In retrospect, it is hard to understand why more scientists didn't bring up the problem of neutron radiation at the time that Pons Fleischmann made their initial claims. All the fuss about calorimetry and vacuuming helium out of the cieling tiles seems just silly if you don't see lethal doses of neutron radiation from an unshielded fusion reaction.
Re:Why thought experiments are bull (Score:2)
The Tipler problem isn't purely an exercise in observed phenomena: the two fusion reaction paths result from first principles rather than a catalog of observed conditions. As for the accusation that Tipler is knocking down a staw man: that may be true, but the staw man was constructed by Pons and Fleischmann, not Tipler or his editors. It was Pons and Fleischmann who insisted on the presence of Deuteron fusion and who also insisted that the correct method of verifying their experiment was to find the products thereof.
I am not, and I don't think anyone else is, suggesting that something interesting wasn't happening in Pons' and Fleischmann's aparatus. Maybe it deserves to be investigated, but not under the fraudulent auspices of 'cold fusion' or any other miraculous new source of free energy. Anyone suggesting that such research is called for is either an outright crank or has some kind of ulterior motive that should clearly be distrusted.
Pons and Fleischmann made outrageous and unsupported claims about their scientific investigations. The scientific community responded in the proper manner by trying to verify those claims. After many attempts it became clear that the claims could not be verified, that the experiment was not repeatable. The proper response to unverifiable claims and unrepeatable experiments is to toss them on the rubish heap of history and move on, which is exactly what has been done. Tipler's probelm set is just an amusing footnote to the affair, but instructive never the less.
Why Cold Fusion is Bull (Score:5)
Even a second year undergraduate physics student can see that Pons' and Flieschmann's claims for cold fusion where severly overstated, if not simply fraudulent. Their obsession with inaccurate and difficult measurements suggests that they were, indeed, attempting a cover-up, but the cover-up was for the obvious fallacies in their own experiments.
The suggestion to persue either more accurate calorimetry (an error prone process even under the best conditions) or the search for 'nuclear ash' (better known as helium) are straw men to distract researchers from the easier to measure (and patently missing) by-products of a fusion reaction: neutrons! (and the dead lab workers caused by the neutron flux near the aparatus)
The following homework problem, taken from Physics for Scientists and Engineers, volume 2 third edition, by Paul A. Tipler, Worth Publishers, chapter 40 Nuclei, page 1336:
and with 50 percent of the reactions going down each branch, how many neutrons per second would we expect to be emitted in the generation of 4 W of power?If one-tenth of these neutrons were absorbed by the body of an 80.0-kg worker near the device, and if each absorbed neutron carries an average energy of 0.5 MeV with an RBE of 4, to what radiation dose rate in rems per hour would this correspond?
How long would it take for a person to receive a total dose of 500 rems? (This is the dose that is usually lethal to half of those receiving it.)
The answers are:
Without the most obvious by-product, neutrons, of the most likely nuclear reaction, the one suggested by Pons and Flieschmann themselves, as measured by an easily obtainable metric, dead or dying lab workers (or graduate students), the searches for any of the more esoteric by-products is a pointless waste of time.
Re:According the CF guys it's not the neutrons (Score:2)
One: they didn't have the equipment to detect neutrons. They claimed it because they knew they had to.
Two: Someone right friggin' beside them in the physics department with a running neutron detector at the time when their experiment was running didn't see any excess neutrons.
The smoking gun, IMHO, is the fact that P&F aren't dead. Regardless of what reaction is occurring, you're going to produce high energy reactants that are going to do severe genetic damage. They're not dead - therefore, they didn't produce squat.
Re:A lesson in collaborative science (Score:2)
Go fig, this is exactly what all of us reading the NYT's article from last Tuesday are wondering re: "we have demonstrated the existence of a repulsive dark energy via supernovae observations."
What the hell were they thinking making such a bold claim? I definitely agree with you. You never - ever - ever claim something until you have one hell of a mountain of data behind you.
Otherwise you end up looking like an ass, just like P&F, the Weber bar experiment, and California's monopole - all great examples of why physics works best as a peer reviewed process.
I could be wrong, you know. If I am, I'll join you over in California tomorrow using a maglev utilizing monopoles where we can solve their power problems using cold fusion and worry about how we're going to survive in a few days when the black hole at the center of the galaxy finishes consuming all the stars in the known universe. Of course, the cosmological constant will come and fix all of our problems. No tongue in cheek here...
Re:A lesson in collaborative science (Score:1)
IIRC, there was a substantial body of evidence suggesting that Newtonian mechanics was insufficient -- most significantly the Michelson-Morley experiment -- which relativistic mechanics was subsequently introduced to explain. (Different experiments were subsequently performed to test RM.)
(This erratum doesn't mean I disagree with the substance of the foregoing -- if anything the correction supports the points jnik makes.)
Re:Dead Man Walking (Score:2)
There are lots of examples of this phenomenon:
- 1950s: Electronic "calculators" are invented; the invention is squashed by the pencil and paper industry.
- 1960s: "Tang," an inexpensive artificial orange-flavored breakfast drink is invented; the citrus industry keeps the invention a secret.
- 1970s: Computer scientists develop a protocol for connecting computers for exchange of information; the post office and Ma Bell join forces to strangle this so-called "Internet" in its cradle.
Indeed, most readers are probably mystified by the previous post's reference to the tobacco industry. It turns out that smoking tobacco doesn't ease breathing and prevent colds; in fact, it can cause some nasty diseases. But because the tobacco industry put the kibosh on all that research, none of you knew that.Remember, kids, there's no such thing as "pseudoscience": big corporations only want you to think that. In my next post I will explain how big corporations really don't need to use animal testing but continue to do it because they hate fluffy bunnies.
Re:On the subject of "cold fusion"... (Score:2)
This link [lanl.gov] takes you to web pages describing (and showing nice color photos of) an ongoing Penning trap fusion experiment being conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory [lanl.gov]. The main drawback to devices of this type for power production is that one is limited in the number of ions that can be confined (the Brillouin limit) due to space-charge effects. Even without achieving breakeven, these devices are still very interesting, however, as enough fusion reactions take place in a small enough package to make the Penning trap devices attractive neutron sources: unlike radionucleides, you have both an on-off switch (making them easier and safer to handle and operate), and you can dial the flux of neutrons you want (making them more flexible).
Re:It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons (Score:3)
Sorry to pick nits, but your claim that every fusion reaction involving deuterium leads to neutron production is not true. The following are the most obvious examples:
D + D -> T (1.01 MeV) + p (3.02 MeV)
D + He3 -> He4 (3.5 Mev) + p (14.7 MeV)
D + Li6 -> 2 He4 + 22.4 Mev
All of these reactions are exothermic, so they could, at least in principle, be candidates for anomalous energy production. However, upon closer examination, they each have problems explaining the data, so your original point--that one has no business calling something fusion without being able to measure any of the fusion products--still stands. Take the first reaction: it produces tritium, which could then react with the deuterium and make 14 MeV neutrons. Moreover, about half the time the D + D reaction branches instead into an He3 and a neutron, so neutrons seem to be inextricably linked with the first candidate reaction. The third, D + Li6, is not a good candidate if one has no lithium in the system to begin with, and if one doesn't produce any measurable He4 at the end of the day. Regarding the second candidate reaction, a drawback to explaining the Pons and Fleischmann results as being this reaction chain is that, given He3's relative paucity on Earth, one finds it difficult to imagine how He3 got into the experiment by accident.
On the subject of "cold fusion"... (Score:2)
http://fus.x0r.com/
http://songs.com/philo/ind
http://www.farnovision.com/
There seems to be very little information available about this man - Tesla is downright famous compared to him.
For a little background, supposedly Farnsworth (Philo T. Farnsworth - true inventor of electronic television) invented a method of creating a possible fusion reactor of sorts using a strange form of vacuum tube device that contains and accelerates electrons in a magnetic "cage" of some sort (like a mini tokamak, I guess), causing the possible end result of fusion to happen (ok, my description is probably all botched to hell, but look up and read the sites for more info)...
Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
It's true that it's a common argument of pseudoscience apolosgists. However, that doesn't mean it's not true. I think it was Bohr who said something to the effect that new theories largely take hold only because the defenders of old paradigms die off.
I don't mean to imply that such is the case here, just a general observation.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Anyone know what happened to CETI? (Score:1)
According the CF guys it's not the neutrons (Score:2)
Re:this sounds weak (Score:1)
What I've been reading so far around here is that F&P were twits and they definitely didn't discover cold fusion. Yeah, that's been pretty well established, debunkers... thanks for the heads-up. So now, my question is, did F&P discover anything interesting at all, or were they entirely mistaken or fraudulent about everything? Has anybody else in the poorly-named "cold fusion" field discovered anything of note? If they have, how might this information be disseminated?
Re:a GOOD book on cold fusion (Score:1)
The book also has chapters on other so-called scientific studies: SETI and Biosphere 2. Written for the layman by a scientist.
Re:What the hell happened to science education? (Score:2)
That is that "healthy" skepticism (if such a thing is scientifically measurable) does not entail believing all things to be untrue until satisfactorily proven. It should, instead, allow for trust or mistrust of the persons involved in the claims and margins of error in assumption.
At a grade 3 level, being told that light moves in a straight line by one's teacher is probably sufficient for it to be believed even though the education of grade 3 teachers in the actual nature of light is minimal.
As a professional scientist, someone's "word" that something is true may be sufficient as well, if they are a revered collegue and one does not have the time or interest to delve into the details. This is where the following of peer review comes in.
However, there are always the few who wish everything they find interesting to be true, whether it be true or not. These are also useful since the sum of everyone's assumptions and presuppositions is sometimes (although quite rarely) very wrong (like the roundness of the earth). They bring back up old issues so they can be confronted by new minds
OT: tagline response (Score:2)
I just felt like responding to your tagline:
I find it interesting that you would blame the courts and not the half of the populace who didn't bother to vote at all.
Re:OT: tagline response (Score:2)
I would say that he's saying that he feels the voters who didn't want Bush got the short end of the stick. That number of people, no matter how you count it, is almost equal to the number who did want Bush. That is to say, the 40 or 50% of the country that bothered to vote is divided.
If the people who didn't bother to vote had voted, there might not (almost surely would not) have been any contest as to who got elected.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
One of my lecturers described to my class several good methods of generating references.
Two favourites were:
"Article title that sounds roughly to do with subject" by (eg) Smith and Stryzikovich. No-one can easily disprove that the article exists because the first author has a common name and the second could be easily misspelled.
or
Gabriel, A., Personal Comm. (Where A = Archangel)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
Is it remotely possible that some fusion reactions DON'T involve neutron emissions?
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
I take your point though.
RTFM (Score:1)
If you read "Excess Heat", or even just some of it, you will realize that there are more facts and theories to consider than what was thoroughly covered by the likes of Discover, USA Today, and Newsweek. If you realize anything from this book, it should be that all of your armchair chemistry and physics knowledge hasn't prepared you for the world of surface chemistry, catalysis, or electrochemistry. I'm glad that none of you nay-sayers ever worked on developing lasers, semiconductors, or superconductors. You may have the intellect and education to understand knowledge, but you don't have the imagination that leads to creating new knowledge, or in this case, evaluating potential knowledge. You can rattle off a dozen reasons why it can't work, but can't think of one reason why it might.
For the record, I don't claim that P&F cold fusion exists, but I haven't dismissed it either.
Pons & Fleishmann Experiment very flawed (Score:4)
In summary, the Pons & Fleishmann experiments were significantly flawed.
Of interest to Slashdotters, the cold fusion episode was probably the first major episode of pathological science which had active internet participation by many of the principals (except for P&F). This led to rapid replication of experiments, and many far more careful experiments including those with closed calorimeters (using catalysts to recombine the D2 and H2 products). Although there were occasional reports of excess heat or nuclear products, there were no consistent findings. Furthermore, as is typical in pathological science, the more careful the experiment, the lower the statistical significance of any results found.
Another interesting aspect of this whole affair is that a physicist, Dr. Steven Jones, also in Utah (at BYU, not UU), was about to publish his own cold fusion results using electrolysis (and did publish about the same time). This empending publication may have stampeded P&F into their actions.
However, Jones was operating on a different theory. He was trying to explain the (still unexplained AFAIK) excess amount of He3 released by volcanic eruptions. His theory was that a small amount of fusion was taking place deep in the earth, producing the He3. He tried to duplicate this with a "soup" of chemicals, and to generate the "pressure" using electroylysis in a palladium (I believe) electrode.
In contrast to P&F, Jones was very careful in his experiments. He kept seeing slighly significant excess neutron emissions. However, whenever he tooks steps to refine the experiments by reducing the neutron background (going into deep mines, and a tunnel under the Alps), the neutron emissions followed suit... the excess was a slight excess over the background, no matter the background. This ultimately led to a "no effect" conclusion. This is also characteristic of pathological science.
Another good book (Score:1)
Having read it, I concluded that it is debatable whether outright fraud was involved, but claims for cold fusion should be grouped with claims about a pertpetual motion machine or an anti-gravity device.
Re:Cold Fusion Research (Score:1)
Is this a joke? (Score:2)
What's next? How the powers that be are suppressing the existence of the Loch Ness monster?
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
Cold Fusion was rejected because its proponents made dramatic claims that were unable to be replicated (and, as one person pointed out, clearly was not any form of fusion). As the NCAS report cite by the reviewer notes, millions of dollars was spent trying to replicate these experiments, and the bottom line that there's no there there.
*Sigh* (Score:1)
No, all attempts at replication failed. A couple of researchers reported results that looked promising, but the experiment was *never* replicated. As far as the experience factor and the complaint that nuclear researchers didn't have the requisite knowledge of the field--who cares? The fact remains that no one in any field has been able to replicate the original "results." Bad science is bad science.
It is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research. If they believe the calorimetry is flawed, they will have to present evidence, preferably from their own experiments, but at least from participation in a cold fusion experiment.
This is hilarious. The burden of proof is on the "scientists" who made the original claims, not their detractors. Sorry, but that's how science works. If the results were truly conclusive we would have been able to replicate them without problems. Lack of replication implies bad science or bad instructions, not a conspiracy.
-Legion
boom-bust mentality (Score:1)
Now, all that being said, the fact is that P&F are grandstanders. They made their anouncement well before they should have because they knew of the publicity it would generate -- and, of course, if they'd been right, I mean really truly spectacularly right, then they would have deserved every bit of it. They'd rightly be hailed as heroes of science and of all humanity. But since they were, at best, maybe not quite as wrong as nuclear physicists thought they were
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
cold fusion and other "freepower" (Score:1)
This is a common dream, and, who knows, may someday come true. For those who claimed there was already such a device, I had a good reply.
At the time (and I don't know how common this still is) Ohio had a law: the local power utility had to buy power from you if you offered it to them, at some prevailing rate (I think it was the wholesale rate).
If someone has invented such a thing, I would point out, they need not look for investors. They need not reveal their device's "secret". They should take their test rig, hook it up to the power company, and feed them a kilowatt or so. If that doesn't impress them, use the profit (it's all profit, right?) to buy a bigger setup, and feed them a megawatt. Keep scaling up, until someone comes calling. I promise -- someone will come calling!
Pons and Fleischman (Score:2)
The University of Utah was a respected school in Chemistry, and Pons and Fleischman were respected researchers when the cold fusion thing was released.
I remember well the wait for someone to reproduce the experiments. Being at the James Franck Institute of the University of Chicago at the time [interdisciplinary institute for chemists and physicists], I knew that 1) chemists were pretty sure that Pons and Fleischman had seen something -- they weren't the sort to hallucinate energy; 2) physicists were sure within 24-48 hours or so that it couldn't have been fusion.
As it turned out, Cal Tech and other top schools failed to reproduce the experiments. Some schools did get something. However, the schools that could reproduce some heat were not top schools, unless you counted their football programs.
The idea that Pons and Fleischman weren't given fair treatment is pretty empty. Its just that there are enough conspiracy theorists out there that can't believe that if something sounds too good to be true -- it almost certainly is.
Science and Politics (Score:2)
In times past a "scientist" found someone that was willing to support his/her research. This usually involved convincing your new source of cash that your theory is correct. This also meant spending some time shooting down your opponents theorems. After all your sponsor was paying you to be right, so it behooved you to prove competing theorems wrong. In these times it was the court of your sponsor's opinion that swayed the science (by means of the pocket book). Sometimes when we are not careful that holds today.
People like to think of the pursuit of science as a pure ideal. You have a theory, you test and are reviewed by your peers. The truth involves a lot more money and politicking than the pure ideal, as does any human pursuit.
Re:Science and Politics (Score:2)
And your expertise is what? The psychic friends network? Please, if you going to guess my age or my experience you really need to find a better job, or start hawking a 900 number.
Let the flames begin, anonymous cowards are just that, cowards.
Re:Pons & Fleishmann Experiment very flawed (Score:2)
They, too, mentioned that this is an effect which, if it exists at all, is very close to background levels. They mentioned 2X neutron background levels as a reported level. They pointed out that people in the vicinity of the apparatus could reflect enough neutrons to cause changes of that magnitude. So they moved the experiment into a "neutron cube" of lead bricks and detectors, after which the results were uniformly negative.
They mentioned that when they first started trying to reproduce the effect, they had radiation safety precautions in place, with detectors and alarms set up around the apparatus. After a few weeks of negative results, they backed off on the radiation precautions. By then it was clear that the problem was seeing any effect at all, not shielding a big radiation source.
Reviewer needed some real science know-how (Score:5)
Hey moderators, this is NOT a troll.
Quite frankly, cold fusion, at least in the sense that Fleischmann & Pons used it, has been utterly disproven. According to the reviewer, the book says that "nuclear physicists declared that because no nuclear products could be demonstrated, the measurement of excess heat was flawed." That's not quite right. They did say that, but then nuclear physicists then went on to explain where the excess heat was probably coming from -- definitely NOT fusion. They never got a chance to prove it for sure, because Fleischmann & Pons wouldn't ever tell anyone exactly how cold fusion was supposed to work.
It is quite obvious from the review that the book makes a lot of outrageous statements that, quite frankly, amount to straight lies. For example, the reviewer has learned from the book that "it is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research." Oh my god. The whole problem with the cold fusion "discovery" was that Fleischmann & Pons refused to allow their work to be peer-reviewed! By not doing so, scientists had to slowly work to duplicate their experiment piece by piece, on the way doing a lot of speculating about what Fleischmann & Pons had done. Those two, along with some stupid members of Congress and the media, were the ones who dragged the whole thing through the mud.
There are probably any number of GOOD scientific books on the subject of this whole scientific debacle. I would direct readers in particular to "Voodoo Science" by Robert Park. It's a fairly good book anyway with an excellent long section about cold fusion.
I do not mean to insult the reviewer, but I would speculate he just isn't qualified to really judge most of the scientific statements made in the book he reviewed. I hope he explores the literature a little further to perhaps obtain a more reasonable perspective.
Re:this sounds weak (Score:2)
Sounds like a pretty damn good analogy for what seems to have happened, thinking about it. No matter what the process actually was, something interesting did happen. So despite them being (possibly) wrong about what it actually was, it's still worth investigating.
Grab.
It's the Helium (Score:1)
Go here [room103.com] for a quick rundown of how, true, Fleischmann and Pons were idiots, but that doesn't make the field idiots. I'm discouraged by the amount of FUD that's in the responses to the article today.
Links Used:
http://www.room103.com/archive/q_coldfusion.htm
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusio
Re:It's the Helium (Score:1)
It's all about the Heliums (Score:1)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
The appalling feature of the
that popular political correctness is so heavily favored,
especially if it exercises it's bigotry and
fallacy with panache. And CF bashing is very
much the long-standing vogue.
a GOOD book on cold fusion (Score:3)
There is a great book on cold fusion by Gary Taubes called Bad Science. Really a fascinating read. He details the interplay of carelessness, need for funding, fraud, and flawed science that produced cold fusion.
One point he makes is that scientists and journalists are distributed in a bell-shaped curve just like measurement errors. Therefore, he predicts, one will always be able to find kooks three or four standard deviations from the mean who will still claim that cold fusion works.
Looks like his prediction was correct...
Cold Fusion Research (Score:1)
To summarize a long story, no is sure exactly what happened to Pons and Fleischman. It appears that making a productive electrode is extremely difficult, and after about 10-80 days, an electrode stops being able to drive "fusion". Also, all of the measurements undertaken are far to close to the margin of error for comfort.
Even if cold fusion does work, at present, it would be a curiosity only. Producing electrodes (which appear to need to contain palladium, rhodium, and several other trace elements) would be quite expensive, and would produce only a very limited amount of energy.
With that said: Yes, inquiry into cold fusion was quite effectively quashed when the results were not immediately reproducible. The media caused a giant rush to judgement. Hopefully, one day, we'll know what cold fusion really is.
Re:Hot Fusion (Score:1)
...has produced plenty of results, i.e. the Mike test, and almost every other fusion bomb test since then.
Also JET ran at 500MW for 50 seconds at a time, 20 times a day for 3 months during the 1997 D-T campaign, I know because I was working with cameras damaged by the radiation from that last summer. Imperial College, London has sucessfully produced neutron and He yield by passing masssive currents through frozen deuterium wires to produce an implosion and inertial confinement.
These are just the experiments I've been lectured on.
See fusion.org [fusion.org]
Re:Another good book (Score:1)
Perpertual motion is fundamentally impossible under the laws of thermodynamics.
Cold Fusion on the other hand is not explained under the laws of nuclear physics, but it is not totally ruled out (the key point is that nuclear physics predicts that there should be a vanishingly small probability for the reaction to occur, not that it is impossible).
Likewise, anti-gravity devices cannot proved impossible, and with the current results showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, along with the inflationary version of the big bang model, anti-gravity is required to explain the current cosmology of the universe, making the possibility of an anti-gravity device plausible.
Re:What the hell happened to science education? (Score:2)
News For Nerds: Stuff That Matters
(Or how I learned to start caring and love the intellectual elite)
[Our story begins in the hallows of Devenshire, a small town, with lush green fields visible from the hole left by a missing stained glass window. Two workers attempt to install the window back-stage-left for the entirety of our play. Our stage is a study, filled with classic novellas and rich victorian Candelabras, various golden knick-knacks and experimental apparutus as seen in many chemistry lab or a tories. Old Mr. Flotsum sits upper-stage left, in an elegant, yet aged musty green chair, "Punks or Villinous Murderers: A novel by John Kats" laid neatly across his lap]
Mr. Flotsum: By Joe, have you read todays most fascinating article from the gentlemen of Slashdot? The manner in which it elucidates the electrical schisms of the most popular Furby toy are, to say the least, mesmerizing. In addition, the article makes reference to a hundred pound reward for any persons working alone, or in partnership whom can make the Furby cuss! Pass me my Laptop and PLC writer old Jeeves, would you?
[...]
Apologies to the intellectual elite of the United Kingdom for my misappropriation of your dialect.
Why don't we use it then? (Score:1)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
Re:Time to get rid of Einstein (Score:1)
Time to get rid of Einstein (Score:2)
Re:Dead Man Walking (Score:1)
Re:Apparent in the whole scientific community (Score:1)
--
Re:this sounds weak (Score:1)
Heck, under this way of thinking nobody would have believed Columbus...
Just remember that regardless of who Columbus managed to convince, or what the eventual outcome, he was still wrong.
Re:Another good book (Score:1)
Not exactly. Anti-gravity's best hope is the discovery of a graviton (thus implying an anti-graviton). The accelerating expansion of the universe (assuming it's genuine) is more likely caused by a previously unknown force, too weak to be measured over short distances.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
completely devoid of the fact that we truly may be a long time from cold fusion... making statements like 'pseudoscientific theories' shows a completely logical, scientifical, and moronic bias... if you don't believe in the existance of a hierarchy of rather ornery old Chemists and Archaelogists who protect their own theories as religious law and slander new ideas that challenge their life's work, guess again. it's humanistically fundamental.
it was not science (Score:1)
The so-called cold-fusion thing set science back a decade, at lease in the mind of the average person. The sad thing is that when we almost get the debacle behind us, some nitwit writes a book evidently claiming that it is the fault of a few evil scientists that we do not have an unending supply of energy.
People present at the time know what the issues are. The principles did not act like scientists but like salespersons. They did not explain their concerns, emphasize the possible errors in their experiments, or even release their full results. In fact, the only copy of the paper was an unofficial document sent around to various university email accounts. That document did not lend any credence to the validity of the claims. They deserved the beating they received.
Re:OT: tagline response (Score:1)
People have the right not to vote. Besides, this kind of situation could arise regardless of how many people voted, since the issue is about counting the votes that WERE cast.
When you say 'blame', isn't the writer blaming the court for making a decision that is not consistent with legal precedent? Or are you implying another sort of blame?
When the writer suggests that the voters were fucked, do you think he meant that ALL the voters were fucked?
Re:They did the same thing with Ulcers (Score:2)
Yeah he proved it (I believe he even drank a beaker of the bacteria just to prove his point) all right but does it make a difference? I understand that many doctors still don't believe that ulcers are caused by bacteria. Antibiotics are the cure. So his work is all for naught.
Re:In the end, if you cant repeat it, it ain't so. (Score:1)
Excess Heat (Score:1)
Re:Time to get rid of Einstein (Score:1)
"Cold Fusion" = Palladium Electrochemistry (Score:1)
There was not so much a rush to judgement as a rush to confirm. I was at Berkeley physics at the time in grad school and *alot* of people tried very hard to reproduce these results. A colleague of mine, top of the field, performed high-powered first principles calculations of hydrogen-loaded palladium. Others scattered across the country were working hard trying to reproduce the result. No careful experiment showed anything remotely like fusion. However, a literature search did reveal some interesting palladium electrochemistry done many decades ago (I unfortunately don't have the reference) which showed a possible heat gain due to electrochemical effects. Nothing one could extract useful power from.
The comparison to superconductivity given in the original writeup is spurious. Yes, it's taking many years to understand the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity. But everyone who tried could clearly reproduced the phenomenom almost immediately. That didn't happen with cold fusion.
Plenty of people with expertise in calorimetry tried to reproduce this experiment. Nothing that required fusion as an explanation was observed. Palladium has some interesting electrochemistry, but there's no evidence of fusion, unfortunately. I wish there had been- it would have been wonderful.
Re:Cold Fusion Research (Score:2)
Producing electrodes (which appear to need to contain palladium, rhodium, and several other trace elements) would be quite expensive, and would produce only a very limited amount of energy.
If this isn't complete BS then it sounds exactly like a chemical reaction which eventually uses up whatever component of the "productive" electrode is supplying the energy. This is certainly more believable than claims of fusion without neutron production.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
We know exactly why the Earth gives off more heat than it takes in -- its core is full of radioactive elements which give off energy when they decay. This energy balance is considered an important clue to the age of the Earth and the composition of its interior. No "cold fusion" is necessary to explain this phenomenon.
The comparison of cold fusion to Nessie is very apt, until someone finds neutrons being emitted from an assembly. Meanwhile, work also continues on a pill to turn water into gasoline...
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect (Score:2)
Pot, Kettle, Black.
It's helpful to remember here exactly what cold fusion is attempting to do, and why it should be so easy to prove.
Fusion occurs when two D nuclei get close enough together for the strong nuclear interaction to take effect; they combine into a 3He nucleus, discard a neutron, and oh yeah give off about 3 MeV of energy, which is the point.
But your two D nuclei are both positively charged, so they repel each other very strongly until you get them close enough for the strong force to take over. This is why very high temperatures are necessary; you get the nuclei moving fast enough, and sheer momentum overcomes their mutual electrical repulsion until they are close enough to complete the reaction.
Now, the point behind cold fusion is to use the molecular structure of the electrode and the force of the electrical current to push the two nuclei together without relying on momentum (high temperature). I have always had trouble believing in this, but some of the math seems to say it is possible, so whatever. OTOH once you get the two nuclei together, by whatever method, guess what should happen? Yep, 3He + n + 3.07 MeV, just as if you had done the same thing with high temperatures.
Now, it's important to understand how many neutrons you are going to get. 3.07 MeV is a lot of energy from one atom, but it's not a lot of energy. You have to pop quite a few of those puppies before you start making a noticeable effect on a macroscopic thermometer. I don't know exactly what kind of temperature rise is being claimed, but if it's noticeable at all you will have thousands of neutrons per second. That is not a difficult flux to detect at all. And explaining them away is no small matter; once a free neutron is formed it tends to sail right through ordinary matter for some distance until it happens to get close to another nucleus.
We understand these reactions well enough to blow very impressive holes in the landscape, and the claim that fusion is occurring without neutrons is far, far more unbelievable than the basic premise of cold fusion itself, which is already on pretty shaky ground IMHO.
To me, with a background in physics and engineering, this is how the website reads: "We are working hard on this pill to turn water into gasoline, and we have gotten the car to consistently coast further than should be physically possible based on the energy we used to push it. Furthermore, isn't it wonderful that our tests on this new gasoline from water also show that it doesn't create greenhouse gases."
That isn't emotion speaking, it's training and experience. No chemist worth his salt would swallow the gasoline from water story, and no physicist worth his salt swallows fusion, cold or otherwise, without neutrons.
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect (Score:2)
Zero. You have to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nuclei, which is simply enormous.
It might be worth noting here that merely chemical explosions are not even powerful enough to get fusion going; you have to use the chemical explosive to set off a nuclear explosion, and use the energy from that to set off the thermonuclear (fusion) reaction.
but muon catalysed fusion also proceeds in a similar way (as far as I can tell).
Only because the muon cancels out the charge of one of the protons, so they can approach one another. Unfortunately, muons are themselves enormously difficult and expensive to make.
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect (Score:2)
Muons can catalyze fusion because of the known reaction whereby the muon cancels out the electrical charge of one of the nuclei, which allows it to approach another nucleus with the same casual ease a neutron would. None of the stuff you suggests, including "a lot of wierd shit," really promises to cancel the electrical charge of a nucleus. Muons do that. Momentum overcomes it.
You need on the order of 100 MeV to push two protons close enough together for fusion. Chemical reactions supply at most 5 eV or so per atom. That's the bottom line. How are you going to push them together? We know how muons do it, and unfortunately muons are themselves enormously expensive and difficult to make. So what other mechanism do you propose is at work here?
Not can't, didn't (Score:2)
I can rattle off one reason why it didn't work: No neutrons. (Thanks much to the guy who calculated how many would be produced. Even I did not know how bad it was.
The CF proponents are not just proposing a way to force two D nuclei together without using temperature/momentum, they are also proposing that their interaction in some magic way does not produce neutrons. Now while I certainly have an open mind for things which are "supposed" to be impossible, there are limits.
The original conception of CF, remember, is based on using an unusual method to trigger a known reaction, a reaction that will produce a whole shitload of neutrons. Today's CF proponents are adding to the first implausibility the much more implausible claim that they are getting, not these expected reactions, but some new magic kind of fusion that doesn't create neutrons.
I'm glad that none of you nay-sayers ever worked on developing lasers, semiconductors, or superconductors
When you look at those developments, almost always you will find they hinge on ONE revision of thought apiece, and that they quickly showed unambiguous results in experimental setups. CF is in no way similar.
Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect (Score:3)
The great blessing of our experiments is that so far NO energetic penetrating radiation signatures including neutrons and gammas have been observed in our unique SSDR experiments.
In other words, whatever they are doing it isn't fusion. But they do use a lot of big words:
These reactions have been profoundly demonstrated using experiments including those involving catalysis, nano-technology, electro-chemistry, glow-discharge, and ultrasonic cavitation.
Ooooh I am sooooo impressed. Actually the tipoff is "nano-technology," a buzzword sure to impress the readers of Popular Science but which has absolutely no meaningful application in research like this.
I didn't go deep enough into their claims to see if they're just deluded or running a scam, but when the first thing center top is the revelation that you have no neutrons, then it's obvious you have no fusion.
And puh-leeze don't give me the usual rap about some "mysterious new form" of fusion. These reactions are pretty well understood; there aren't that many ways a few light elements can be made to combine. If the phun pholx who gave us H-bombs were that ignorant, you can trust me, we would not have H-bombs.
A nucleus does not know what phase it is in (Score:3)
Nuclei do not know what phase of matter they are in. Solid/liquid/gas/plasma are determined by the electron shells of atoms, not nuclei. There is absolutely no difference between how a nuclear reaction will proceed just because it is in a different electrochemical state. This is why Lithium-6 Deuteride can be used in H-bombs -- the chemical bond between the Lithium and Deuterium is completely irrelevant in a nuclear reaction.
"Supposedly" there is a big dinosaur-like animal in Loch Ness, too. Take it with an equivalent grain of salt.
It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons (Score:4)
Fusion does not work by magic. There are specific reactions and side reactions which occur depending on the fuel and the manner of combination. Now, as it happens, all of the candidate reactions using deuterium as a fuel generate neutrons as a side product. It doesn't really matter how you combine the Deuteriums, whether you combine them with other Deuteriums or with Tritium, or how you manage to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nucleus. If you induce fusion in the fuels they used, you will get neutrons. A lot of neutrons.
And nobody, not Pons or Fleischmann, not any of the people who attempted to duplicate their work, detected neutrons. Ipso facto, whatever they may have been measuring, it wasn't fusion.
Perhaps there is some obscure chemical reaction which was catalyzed by their setup; if so, it is finicky and not a source of large amounts of energy, as fusion would be. The mistake Pons and Fleischmann made was announcing their finding as fusion, rather than "mysterious extra energy release." They might have been credited with discovering a new catalytic property of platinum instead of become laughing stocks of the physics community.
While the idea behind cold fusion is certainly worth investigating, claiming that it has occurred when you have no neutrons is, to a physicist, like telling a chemist you have invented a pill to turn water into gasoline. He doesn't have to hear the details of your scheme to know it won't work; he knows it won't work because it would violate a lot of well established principles if it did.
No neutrons, no excess heat either (Score:3)
The problem with the F&P setup was that the thermocouple itself had a power supply and was adding heat to the mixture. This was conclusively demonstrated when an exact duplicate of the F&P setup was run with heavy water and a control version with light water with identical 'excess heat' measurements.
The Rutherford Appleton laboratory had a good experiment in which they could swap from light to heavy water with the same electrode and measure in both circumstances. The Rutherford Experiment took rather longer than the 'amateur' copies because Perkins and the RA management made the experimenters stack up lots of concrete bricks before they started to protect them from the neutron flux if the experiment worked.
The lack of neutrons and the fact that the control experiment behaved identically conclusively demonstrate that whatever F&P were observing was not cold fusion.
Now that does not disprove the possibility of cold fusion. It is generally accepted that muon catalysed fusion is genuine for example - albeit not a viable source of energy since muons have a short lifetime and require incredible amounts of energy to produce.
Unfortunately those working in the field will now have to deal with the assorted conspiracy theorists, cranks, astrologers and the like drawn to it by the F&P media circus. A similar thing happened when the English parliament set up the longitude prize. Amongst the whacky schemes proposed was the 'sympathetic potion' which when administered to two dogs caused one to feel any pain felt by the other. One dog was carried on the ship, the other remained at Grenwich and was cerimonially kicked at 12 noon on the Grenwich meridian, causing the dog on the ship to bark, thus allowing local time to be measured.
Similar things happen all the time without becomming media circuses. I remember a group of researchers who thought they had found a very heavy neutrino. The neutrino appeared in a duplicate of the experiment with completely different equipment at another university. It turned out that the measurement was due to a very obscure software/hardware error in the counting device they were using.
Ultimately F&P have to receive the blame for the media circus. They rushed out their press release after they discovered another experimenter (the reviewer of their paper as it turned out) had been working on the same idea and was close to publishing results. The grad student who actually did the experiments was inexcusably left of the list of authors of the paper.
If a means of achieving cold fusion is found it will be in spite of F&P. Many people will sensibly avoid the field because of the numerous cranks who attached themselves to it. The book being reviewed was likely written by one of them. Of course that may be an unfair assesment of the work. However the ultimate legacy of F&P is that they have ensured that anyone who tries to do legitimate work in the same field is likely to recieve the same response. If I had infinite time I might maybe read stuff likely to be from a crank, however the ad-hominem crank filter is indispensible for any mortal.
Dead Man Walking (Score:1)
(read on [sfgate.com])
Its like those doctors who were hired to say second hand smoke isn't all that bad [smh.com.au], there's always someone around willing to be a hired gun, scientists on the same level of education and knowledge who just don't give a fsck.
crypto/steganography [antioffline.com]
Re:It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons (Score:1)
Perhaps there is some obscure chemical reaction which was catalyzed by their setup; if so, it is finicky and not a source of large amounts of energy, as fusion would be. The mistake Pons and Fleischmann made was announcing their finding as fusion, rather than "mysterious extra energy release." They might have been credited with discovering a new catalytic property of platinum instead of become laughing stocks of the physics community.
As a matter of fact, there was a chemical reaction going on that P&F didn't take into account, which would have produced enough "excess heat" to lead them to their conclusions, given all their mistakes in measurement. This reaction was identified and described by MIT researchers about 3 months (I think) after the original P&F announcement, and verified by researchers at several other institutions.
In other words, the possibility that P&F had actually produced cold fusion was completely refuted. The author of this piece of shit book either didn't bother to find out that easily obtainable fact, or chose to ignore it in order to puff up his ridiculous claims.
Re:It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons (Score:1)
Re:Hot Fusion (Score:1)
Oh yeah, we were all told at IC that it was a "plasma experiment"....
this sounds weak (Score:1)
Heck, under this way of thinking nobody would have believed Columbus and colonized America
Re:A rush to judgement or a rush to restore sanity (Score:1)
Re:Jewish fangs suck the blood from your budget (Score:1)
Hey, if I have to pay extra for a good kosher hot dog, so be it.
If I have a ham sandwich on a bagel, does that make it OK?
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
Let's see... The Loch Ness Monster can't be proven to exist. At the same time, without draining the lake and having a look-see once and for all, the existance of the monster can't be disproven, either. If you can't prove or disprove something, it's not in the realm of science.
The process referred to as "cold fusion" produces excess heat in a reproducible reaction, and cannot be accounted for by any known processes. It can be proven to exist (or not to exist, if somebody offered a plausible explaination instead of whining about the Loch Ness Monster and what-not). Therefore, it's science.
Any questions?
"This idea that there is almost a conspiracy of scientists who are so involved in the existing paradigm that they deny our wonderful new trailblazers their proper due is a common trope of almost all pseudoscience."
So is generalization. By your logic...
Flying is a trait of almost all birds.
Bats can fly
Therefore, a bat is a bird
Emus can't fly
Therefore, an emu is not a bird
Of course, this is all besides the point, because assumptions and science shouldn't mix.
"The book being reviewed here is no different than any number of similar books you can find defending any number of pseudoscientific theories. "
I've seen some works of pseudoscience. They rarely have references, or, if they do, tend to reference to bogus works, works by the same author or publisher, or non-scientific works (like, say, the Bible).
Also, they tend not to have forwards written by Arthur C. Clarke, but that's besides the point.
"and, as one person pointed out, clearly was not any form of fusion"
So, if I mistakenly name it wrong, it doesn't exist. Got it.
Maybe it's not fusion. Maybe it's something different. Whatever it is, there is more heat than modern physics and thermodynamics seem to allow. But, because they decided to call it "cold fusion," it must be bogus, hm?
"millions of dollars was spent trying to replicate these experiments, "
Money != success. The N1 program cost the Soviet Union an arm and a leg, and yet their launch success rate was 0:5. Did they fail because it wasn't possible to build a rocket to get to the moon?
After all, relativity is mathematically wrong (Score:1)
C - C = 0 (zero).
therefore there *IS* an absolute frame of reference.
The problem remains that the "sphere" of the electron cloud is rendered oblate by te fact that individual electrons have to move with and against the absolute vector of the neucli they circle. Because this oblation *is* constant in the relative frame the idea that there is no absolute frame becomes "easy to prove". We do not have the technogolical ability to transcend our frame (as yet) so we prove there is no frame to transcend into.
The math "at the high end" (near the speed of light) is absurd so that the math at the low end looks good but still denies the absolute frame.
How much simpler than "C-C=0" does a thing have to get before you can pound it through a scientific community fraught with political bias?
We may never know.
How then can we act surprised that something as esoteric as "cold fusion" gets sidelined without proper study? Screw science, there are people out there trying to maintian their possition in the intellegencia. If the first thing that slipped out of someones mouth was a snicker, then that someone has invested ego, and as we all know, the sole absolute principle of the scientific community is the conservation of ego.
Cv - Cv = 0