Remember Cold Fusion? The greatest scandal in science since the perpetual motion machines? Well, now some Italian scientists have said they achieved it.
http://www.livescience.com/13745-newest-cold-fusion-machine-impossible.html
What to make of all this debate? It is really possible to achieve Cold Fusion, at least in theory? I wonder
They won’t tell anyone how to do it, or show theirs publicly (or even to more than a couple people). They’ve had plenty of time to fill out the patent paperwork, and haven’t.
Fraud.
Next?
Yes, I suspect it is fraud.
I wonder if any “serious” scientists had taken Cold Fusion seriously…
No it isn’t.
From the linked article:
Whether or not they have had “plenty of time to fill out the patent paperwork,” most countries’ patent offices refuse to grant patents to Cold Fusion, as they feel it is no more patentable than perpetual motion. It is this lack of patentability which is engendering their reluctance to disclose the specifics of their process.
Personally, I believe this, too, will be a flash-in-the-pan, and more research will reveal a flaw in their process. But I still feel it is wrong to summarily deny patent protection to a new device or process, and thereby stymie any attempts to replicate the results and either prove or disprove the assertions of the researchers.
Well, straightforward calculations show that fusion occurring at room temperature is impossible, or more exactly, implausible to the point of practical impossibility – there’s simply not enough energy available to kickstart the process. That doesn’t mean, however, that there couldn’t be some new or unaccounted for effect that is missing from these ‘straightforward calculations’ – things like that happen all the time: essentially every physical calculation is an approximation, and sometimes, interesting effects get lost in that approximation. These may then turn up in experiments and surprise the crap out of people. Think about superconductivity: in simple accounts of solid matter, it just isn’t there, and at first it seems to be an effect contrary to much established theory, or straightforward calculation.
However, the probability that there’s something to this is extremely low, both for theoretical and empirical reasons. The effect just seems to display the same kind of publicity-shyness that’s typical for a lot of fringe claims – like all those psychic powers that cease to work in the lab because of the bad vibrations of those sceptical researchers. There seems to be a new claim made every other year, but nothing ever comes off it: one lab appears to see something promising that they can’t explain, but other labs never are able to duplicate the research. So either the effect is so subtle as to be useless – what would we do with a clean and near-limitless energy source that doesn’t work most of the time --, or just not there, and the original research was misled – there’s a margin of error in every experiment, so do enough, and you’ll get false alarms; I don’t think there’s necessarily a reason to be just that quick in alleging fraud.
On the other hand, the potential payoff is just huge, both for society and the researchers who come up with a honest-to-goodness cold fusion process – so even if I think there’s nothing to it, I can see how one might think it’s worth taking the risk. This also gives an easy metric to evaluate such claims: just monitor the researchers bank accounts, and energy prices – if the former rises to unprecedented heights, while the latter sink to virtually zero, then I’ll be prepared to accept that there’s something to it. 
(This is also known as the economic argument.)
Now, that’s not really fair of them. Perpetual motion violates the laws of thermodynamics, while cold fusion is in fact actually possible; just impractical. To put it another way, cold fusion would be a major technological breakthough, probably involving the kind of clever innovation that has scientists collectively slapping their heads and saying “Why didn’t I think of that!” But perpetual motion would violate one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the law of conservation of energy; it would be the kind of thing that gets you into the same scientific pantheon as Newton or Einstein. At least.
This is categorically false.
I don’t know about the patent office, but cold fusion of the Ponns and Fleishmann variety is not quite the joke it once was either. I still think there is yet to be anything definitive, and we aren’t talking about next generations power source for either of these things, but they are at least providing a forum for this at ACS meetings.
Has there ever been a physical phenomenon that was at first extremely poorly reproducable, until people finally figured out the “trick” to making it happen regularly?
The deuterons used in these reactions have an estimated temperature of about 10[sup]9[/sup] Kelvin – I don’t know what you have your thermostat set to, but that’s not exactly room temperature around here.
The point is that you need a certain energy to overcome the repulsion of the nuclei in ordinary fusion reactions, or else the probability of fusion occurring is simply vanishingly small. ‘Cold’ fusion is the claim that there are conditions in which that probability is significantly higher, and thus, less energy – such as is available in a solution at room temperature – is needed to ensure significant reaction rates.
Lots more with videos of the machine and interviews with scientists here
Translation (from comments section of article) of video interview.
Transcript:
This test will demonstrate that we were able to heat the water, therefore thermal energy which can be transformed into electricity with extremely low costs.
[…] You will not find it this on textbooks as many people think it’s not even possible.
Interviewer: what happens in here?
Physicist: hydrogen atoms are separated from their electrons and protons, but to answer I should use a simpler language [ed. I call BS at this point] let’s say that hydrogen is absorbed by the nickel and then processed [the video skips] nuclear of the nickel’s atom. at this point there’s an atomic transformation with emissions [video transition, 1:09]
[describes the tools]
[2:46]
In the graph, x is time, y is temperature in ºC, red line is room temp, blue line is input water temp, yellow line is output water temp […] you can see how it grows until it reaches 100º, where it evaporates.
[…] we approximately generated 10-12kW/h when using 600-700W
[…] The people who operated the tests are professors of the University of Bologna not involved in the project.
[…] you may call it a reactor but we like to call it energy catalyzer. Behind this process there are a few theoretical problems not yet solved. Honestly, we only hypothesized the workings but there’s a lot to study […] in my opinion we could reach a higher ratio than what we reached in these tests today as we didn’t try its best to be safe. [8:30] We’re at the Ford T, we need to reach the Formula 1.
[video skips]
These are modules, so you can put them in a series or in parallel to increase the temperature or thermal quantity to respectively.
[video skips]
We reached important international agreements […] people who are working at high level for mass production of this device. [9:40]
[Scientist X talks] it seems that there’s a slight increase (about 50%) of the instable gamma radiation, therefore it seems like there’s no cheat. Only thing is that you didn’t allow me to measure the spectrum to understand the energy of the emitted gamma because then I would understand everything. I understand that you’re concerned about anyone stealing your idea but I would have loved to see it.
[Main physicist] You’re too prepared, too smart and would understand how it worked.
[…]
[Scientist X talks] I observed a small gamma “flash” when you turned it on and when you turned it off. It’s hard to think that a small electromagnetic disturb would be able to start two independent battery-powered tools, this is interesting. What I don’t understand is why the measures given by the “beta plus”, the couple +/-, returned values near 0.
[Main physicist] I’m not able to give you an answer, my objective is “energy”. The reactor is extremely complex, don’t be fooled by its look, it could also be that the internal geometric system of the reactor hides the…
[video skips 13:13]
[Scientist Y talks] I don’t think that the absence of gamma would be a problem, I’d expect
[Main physicist] Frankly neither do I.
[Scientist Y talks] I would expect, instead, that there shouldn’t be any annihilations of positrons since, as I seem to understand, protons enter the nickel’s nuclei and move the elements rightwards on the table of nuclides through “decays which go to the copper and go back to the nickel”. On the right side of the table, the decays are beta minus, so I don’t expect, if your theoretic interpretation is correct, that there are emissions of positrons.
[Main physicist] What you say is absolutely plausible.
[end]
Female orgasm?
So I still have to wait before I can run out and buy my own Mr. Fusion garbage-fueled generator?
…wait, they figured that out?
You are right, of course, but the device itself is run on a table top at near room temperature. There is no evidence or explanation for of this type of thing in the Cold Fusion experiment.
This really doesn’t sound much different to what we were hearing 20 years ago. They are driving protons into a metal matrix with an electric current (no problem so far) and then claiming that they see excess heat (over that due to ohmic heating and chemical recombination) sometime later. The idea 20 years ago was that the metal matrix would hold the protons closer together, and thus maybe help bridge the gap (which was pretty much a vain hope.) The same problems still arise. The experimenters should be dead from the neutron flux, the whole thing needs a great deal more rigour.
The lack of patent protection is curious, but probably no big deal. If they file a patent, and it is rejected out of hand, and the idea actually works, they sue the patent office, and have the patent re-examined in the light of the now clear evidence it works. In the US and a number of other countries they can file a provisional patent one year before they need to file a full patent application. A provisional patent isn’t examined, it simply provides priority. So they have a year between nailing the discovery and getting enough proof that it really works to overturn the patent office’s lack of interest. However Europe doesn’t do provisional patents.
I have the patent.
Aaaaaannnnndddd…
Every couple of years someone announces they’ve built a machine to turn garbage into oil, it really works and they’ve got all sorts of investors lined up.
The main point of either scam being to convince the gullible to invest their money, because a> it really works, and b> see? there are other people who have already invested.
I don’t know the official term, but I dub it The Miracle Machine Scam. Perpetual Motion, Automotons way back in the day, mysterious cabinets that turned substances into Gold. All the same stuff. Today it is Cold Fusion and Stuff Into Oil.
More background: I work at the University of Bologna where these guys are from and heard about this machine last week from my colleagues. From what I can gather, they have exhibited the machine a number of times in front of Italian physicists, boiling a pot of water for a couple of hours. There’s also a power plant being built in Greece using this technology. Also, from what I gather, the inventors of the machine were categorically not searching for a way to achieve cold fusion, but were working on something completely different when they noticed their numbers didn’t add up.
Actually, being unable to get this published doesn’t surprise me. Things like P=NP and cold fusion attract so many cranks and frauds that people just assume anybody claiming a breakthrough is a fraud and reject it out of hand.