Fleischmann to Work on Commercial Fusion Heater 245
deeptrace writes "California company D2Fusion has announced they are hiring Dr. Martin Fleischmann (of 'Pons and Fleischmann' fame). The company belives that they can produce a commercial fusion based home heating prototype within a year. They are also looking at other applications, such as using it as a heat source for a commercially available Stirling electrical generator."
Is that company publicly traded? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmm...come to think about it... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Within a year" (Score:5, Insightful)
But never "now", or "in the stores next week", or "come, see this working!"
What a load of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.
Heh: Probably be available before.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:...Fusion in a ... year? (Score:5, Insightful)
What has he got to lose? Work out the possible scenarios
1. Fleischman is a crank and...
1.1 He succeeds by accident.
Success through monumental incompetence is indistinguishable from briliance to the general public.
See Christopher Columbus. Fleischman will spend the rest of his life unjustly rubbing his
detractors' noses in their public humiliation.
1.2 He fails.
Nobody's opinion of him changes. The only people who profess to believe him are credulous people
and those who would exploit them. The people who've been saying he was a crank will be vindicated.
The wait and see people will also feel vindicated, and continue to wait and see, as it's no skin of
their proverbial noses.
2. Fleischman is a misunderstood genius and
2.1 He succeeds by dint of preserverence.
Vindication is sweet. Fleischman will spend the rest of his life justly rubbing his
detractors' noses in their public humiliation.
2.2 He fails through no fault of his own.
Nobody's opinion of him changes. The only people who profess to believe him are credulous people
and those who would exploit them. The people who've been saying he was a crank will be vindicated.
The wait and see people will also feel vindicated, and continue to wait and see, as it's no skin of
their proverbial noses.
The moral of the story will either way: it never pays to give up. The only thing at stake is whether future generations of school children will be forced to produced earnest essays drawing this conclusion from the story.
Re:What a load of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
But it doesn't have to be -fusion-. Palladium is past iron, so -in theory- you can gain energy by transmuting it downward, and some of them are claiming that they're seeing elements after the cell was run that weren't there before.
I'm not saying they're right, of course. It's still physics that would break with standard nuclear physics, but I'm always surprised that they keep pushing it as -fusion-, when they clearly don't understand (and admit that they don't understand!) what (if anything) is going on.
Note, incidentally, that if you read, for instance, the DOE report on anomalous heat from D-Pd cells, that both sides of the discussion are at fault here. A fair number of the criticisms ("your explanation doesn't agree with current theory, so it must be wrong!" even when the explanation is essentially "it must be nuclear, but we have no idea how") and arguments on both sides are pretty crappy.
Re:neutrons (Score:5, Insightful)
By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.
Ray Davis built the first neutrino detection experiment [bnl.gov] and found that there was only about a third of the neutrinos coming from the Sun that you would expect.
We now know that he was right - the Standard Model was (slightly) wrong, although in hindsight it should've been relatively obvious.
Saying "their experiment doesn't work because it doesn't agree with the Standard Model" is horrible science. The Standard Model is a theory. It doesn't describe reality. It's a -guess- for how the world works - a well founded, well supported guess, and the best one we have, but still a guess. If you find that the world works in a different way, that doesn't mean your experiment must be wrong.
There are plenty of other reasons to criticize cold fusion (the lack of repeatability being the main one) but "it doesn't agree with current theory" is about the worst criticism you can give.
FTC? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that I have much faith in the Federal Trade Commission (after all, Sunday morning TV is still peppered with those infomercials for the handy-dandy Quattro (or whatever they're) called 'healing magnetic bracelets'), but someone is going to be mighty pissed when they find out that they've forked out 5 or 10 grand for what is effectively just a bunch of clever heat exchangers (i.e. Stirling engines) that they could have bought for a less than a thousand bucks. Probably pissed enough that they complain to the feds. Methinks that this unit will be available 'any day now' until Fleischman takes the money and skips off to the Bahamas...
Re:Here's their SEC filing (Score:2, Insightful)
> to billions of watts of energy.
If they think that energy is measured in watts, I don't think there's much chance that their other physics will hold up.
Re:Back in 1945 someone was saying the same thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't these cold fusion devices supposedly require electrical input to initiate fusion? If you run current through a resistor, it will generate heat, and how many people hook their space heaters up to calorimeters and multimeters to see if power out exceeds power in?
Re:Fleishman found something, but what? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the basic principles of science is parsimony: choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. I don't know what happened in the lab because I wasn't there, but if I'm offered a choice between assuming (A) some previously unknown phenomena, which nobody has been able to reliably reproduce, or (B)malfunctioning equipment or outright fraud, (B) seems a lot more parsimonious. Scientific experiements go wrong all the time, and scientists commit fraud more often than we'd like to think (the Korean cloning guy comes to mind).
A contradiction (Score:2, Insightful)
Science is all about getting reproducible results, and a scientist who fails to do so is, by definition, not a good one.
Re:Fleishman found something, but what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, Fleischmann was definitely a real and successful scientist at least up until 1989. He's a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was head of the chemistry department at Southhampton University. Not someone you would expect to turn crackpot.
But this doesn't mean that Cold Fusion isn't bunk. The point is that even serious scientists like Fleischmann can go fringe.
Re:What a load of crap (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The test tubes containing the D2O were open to the air. Diffusion thus removed very quickly the deuterium. Hence the claim that they had Deuterium in their "fusion" is wrong.
2) The calorimetry was done poorly. Again, the system wasn't closed. The electrical power input was measured as if it was DC, but my measurements of such cells show that the signal has significant frequency components in it - probably due to bubbling.
3) The test tube temperature was measured in a way that could be sensitive to local hot spors.
4) Because the calorimeter was not a closed system, the amount of heat loss due to evaporation, and the energy carried off by the liberated hydrogen and oxygen were calculated, not measured. Furthermore, the energy calculations used the D2O hydrolysis energy rather than the H2O energy, even though the D had diffused away very early in the experiment.
5) The calculation of excess power involved a denominator that was the difference between two large quantities that were very close in value and had significant error bars. This is a classic mistake that greatly inflates the apparent effect, and also the error.
6) The calculations that showed that the "pressure" in the palladium on the adsorbed deuterium was very high were meaningless, because the quantity calculated was not a true pressure.
In other words, the original experiments and the backing theory were meaningless - rather surprising given the good qualifications of Pons and Fleishman.
It would be one heck of a coincidence if the same people who made this large number of experimental mistakes now happened to produce a valid result.
Re:Fleishman found something, but what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, assuming (which I doubt) that all they can do is heat water, there are a whole lot of industrial uses for heated water for "process heat", or for home water heaters, or just plain home heating, for that matter.
If they can build some alamagoosa which takes cold water in, and puts hot water out, that puts out a lot more than 3.4 BTU per watt-hour of input power, then who cares how it happens?
(Well, the aliens whose broadcast-power network they're tapping, they might care. A lot.
The problem is, I've heard all this before. In January of 1996, someone by the name of Patterson had a hot water heater that supposedly worked on this principle, little resin beads plated with layers of nickle and palladium. There was an item on the ABC news magazine program. (20-20?) They were supposedly going to have home hot water heaters on the market "Real Soon Now."
Obviously, it didn't happen.
I expect it to "not happen" this time, too.
But I'd love to be surprised.