Well, it’s not April 1’st, but I haven’t heard about this in the general news. Is this credible? Is this significant? Is it something that would tend to vindicate Pons and Fleischmann, or is it something more akin to the previously known “warm” (as opposed to hot) fusion?
There’s been somewhat of a peak in cold fusion related activity recently, started with (as far as I know so far unverified) claims of a Japanese team to have achieved a positive heat output last year.
I should think that, recalling the Pons/Fleischmann mess, any scientist would be extremely careful in claiming successful cold fusion, and not so much as say a word outside of the laboratory until their results are absolutely rock solid; yet, so far, I haven’t seen anything truly convincing. One is probably best advised to maintain a position of healthy scepticism on the issue.
One theory I’ve heard put forward in regards to why cold fusion appears so elusive and difficult to reproduce is that the conditions under which fusion occurs are extremely specific and depend critically on the palladium electrode used and especially some form of impurity within it, but that sounds a bit like the experimenter’s version of a ‘no true Scotsman’-type argument, and it puts the whole thing precariously close to unfalsifiability.
If it is what it purports to be, though, it would be the genuine Pons-Fleischmann style cold fusion – deuterium in a palladium electrode (palladium has the interesting ability to absorb hydrogen or its heavier isotopes, and the idea is to have it accumulate deuterium to such a high density that fusion starts, basically).
I doubt it will amount to anything. There are some things in science that we don’t understand, and there are other things that we understand should be impossible. So far as I know cold fusion is more in the latter category, which means the burden of proof should be quite high. At the very least, we should wait until results like this one are shown to be consistently reproducible.
>Is this credible? Is this significant? Is it something that would tend to vindicate Pons and Fleischmann
Until scientists all over the world are able to replicate the results, then no. We’ll just have to wait and see how well replication works. When youre dealing with such small changes in energy its easy to get a false positive.
Assuming something resembling what the OP’s article discusses is proven to exist, it would be a fantastic source of energy, applicable to anything that required electricity or heat or any other form of energy.
This is unclear.
All the current cold fusion devices use large amounts of (expensive) Palladium. If this were determined to work, there might not be enough Palladium in the world to make cold fusion a viable power source.
There is no doubt that people are taking cold fusion a little bit more seriously these days. I was extremely supprised in 2005 when an invited professor actually claimed to have evidence of cold fusion and people took it seriously. I’m not certain, but I think he was Prof. James Gimzewski from UCLA. I notice his faculty page makes no mention of it despite that it was published in Nature. I think he may have only been periferally involved. I do remember that the experiment he described was pyroelectric fusion, which is not the same as the Ponns and Fleischmann experiment.
It is also true that the ACS has held symposia on cold fusion at their national meetings on occasion. This is not the same as acknowledging it as fact, but providing a forum for a controversial topic to be discussed openly. It is unfortunate that the way Ponns and Fleishcmann released their results to the general public, resulted in a huge backlash against researching this field. They may or may not have discovered something interesting, but it’s taken nearly twenty years for the research to be taken seriously again.
I could drive my Expedition during the week, too! We could all have electrically-powered Escalades and Navigators without having to compromise on tiny little vehicles. Well, yeah, disparity in size and safety would still matter, so we could outlaw all of the little econoboxes.
Really, I’m not trolling… I think the point is clear despite the exaggeration involved.
If you want to consider some distopian ramifications of a future where cold fusion worked as advertised try S M Stiring’s short story Roachstompers. (Available in the anthology Ice, Iron, and Gold).
The availability of cold fusion power sources has made petroleum essentially valueless and totally disrupted the US and world economy. The result is a depression to make our present unpleasantness look like a mild downturn.
Distinctly underwhelming when you remember enough to see the context.
This particular San Diego group have been noodling away on the subject since the original 1989 controversy and every couple of years there’s a minor blip of media interest in them. They publish a paper making some marginal claim, someone writes a story about it, some people briefly get excited online and then they sink back into obscurity until the next round. Rinse and repeat. Their highest profile blip was probably the New Scientist article about them back in 2003.
In this round, the timing and venue are obviously symbolically relevant. It would actually have been surprising were the 20th anniversary to have passed without such a flurry of media interest in the remaining believers.
(1) They presented their announcement at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting (significant because it implies that the researchers were chemists themselves).
(2) (from the IEEE piece): “Now, the Naval researchers claim that the problem was instrumentation, which was not up to the task of detecting such small numbers of neutrons.”
(3) They only claimed to be able to detect “such small numbers of neutrons.”
Why do I find those related points worrying? Because the postmortem of the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco determined that a huge part of what went wrong was that P & F and those that came after them were chemists (as it appears this new group are as well). As such, they were simply too naive: too far out of their depth in the world of physics, particularly laboratory physics.
Combine that with the fact that, as chemists, they were simply too unfamiliar with all the subtle little goofs, gotchas, and glitches and other idiosyncrasies of nuclear physics instrumentation. Such equipment is notoriously difficult to calibrate properly and then “exorcise the poltergeists”, i.e., track down and eliminate often-intermittent electronic, EM, and nuclear background noise.
That’s especially true in a scenario in which only a “small number of neutrons” are alleged to have been detected.
Finally, although I have indeed heard of many previous post-P&F claims of successful cold fusion that when nowhere, I never saw any of these claims rise to the level of confidence of this new IEEE claim that cold fusion had been “confirmed”. So I thought this time it was worth bringing this particular announcement to GQ for comments…
The claim is that neutrons are detected by the triplets of pits or tracks, supposedly caused by a neutron stiking a Carbon atom, splitting it into three Heliums. NewScentist’s article has an image that gives a good quick description and a picture of three adjacent pits. Is this a standard way of detecting neutrons?
