Why is Cold Fusion not posable? I have always heard that this would never be a power sourse but why? Is it to unstable a power sourse, or just theoreticly improbable?
(plz forgive the spelling i lost my MS Office 2000 disks and can’t reinstall Word to spell check.)
Remember Franklin Osis,
Father of his Clan.
Three Strengths he gave us:
The jaguar’s spring that brings an enemy down,
The jaguar’s claw’s that rend the enemy’s heart,
The jaguar’s taste for the enemy’s hot blood.
The reason it isn’t used isn’t that it’s unstable. The reason is that it doesn’t actually work. The idea is to pack a bunch of hydrogen atoms into a palladium lattice and abracadabra! out comes a crapload of fusion energy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work that way.
The fellows (for want of a better word) who first reported that they had made cold fusion work were Fleishman and Pons. If the reactions really happened the way they said they did, they would have been fried by all the leftover neutrons, and they wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale.
There may just be something to the tale they told. I don’t really know what exactly goes on in the palladium lattice, but (as I recall) some reputable scientists did report something odd happening when they tried to replicate the experiment. To my knowlege, no one has been able to extract more energy from such a system than they put in. Linus Pauling speculated that an not-fully-understood chemical reaction was happening in the lattice. That’s small fry compared to fusion.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. (Oscar Wilde)
Thanks. The ojnly way i had Cold Fusion explaned to me was in terms that made me run for the dictionary and had me thinkying they basicly mixed it in a soup bowl. LOL ( i know thats not how they did it but the explination left something to be desired)
Thanx again
HaploXL
Remember Franklin Osis,
Father of his Clan.
Three Strengths he gave us:
The jaguar’s spring that brings an enemy down,
The jaguar’s claw’s that rend the enemy’s heart,
The jaguar’s taste for the enemy’s hot blood.
There are lots and lots of sites on the web with information on cold fusion. I’ll just toss in the first two I came across that seem to have some good information.
At my neighborhood University, cold fussion was a boon for the Physics Dep’t. They convinced the powers-that-be to buy some very expensive new equipment. Oddly, most of that equipment was what they had begged for long before cold fusion.
Now on to Super-Conductors!
Helpful articles. It’s a bit of a leap saying “cold fusion is not possible.” I mean, yeah, chances are that these researchers Fleischmann and Pons either completely misinterpreted their data or had some less-than-honorable motivation. But fusion can take place no matter what the “temperature.” Fusion of hydrogen takes place whenever two hydrogen nuclei collide; but hydrogen nuclei are basically protons, and they’re positively charged, and unless they’re moving at high speed, they’ll repulse each other. The easiest way to get a bunch of hydrogen nuclei moving at high speeds is to heat them up. It’s not the only way, though. On a small scale, you could use particle accelerators. On a really small scale. In other words, it would be very difficult to sustain a fusion reaction capable of generating energy without high temperatures. So if by “cold fusion” you mean fusion of a couple of hydrogen nuclei at room temperature, yeah, that’s possible. But if “cold fusion” means a cheap, clean, non-polluting energy source that works just fine in your car in the winter, then, okay, so far that’s not been achieved and as far as anyone knows is impossible.
(Incidentally, that guy who asks the question in the Scientific American article is from my hometown. Fascinating.)
actually, there are quite a few ways of achieving cold fusion that actually work. none of them can currently exceed breakeven, but you get fusion.
for example :(and this is from memory so errors are possible) if you introduce slow muons to a hydrogen gas, it will from diatomic hydrogen with a muon replacing an electron (3h,1e,1 muon). this pulls the hydrogen close enough to fuse, the only problem is that the muons decay before they catalyze enough fusions to pay for making a muon.
Analog ran an artical about spherical convergence accelerators in dec 98 that made them sound very promising (OK, Analog is not exactly a prestigeous scholarly journal, i saw no errors in the artical).
there is no question that the Pons and Fleishman fiasco was precisely that ( i was a physics undergrad at the time), they screwed the lab work and then screwed the PR even worse. but cold fusion does not necessarily have anything to do with palladium rods (although, as a previous poster mentioned, there was something funny going on, and its always possible some alchemist could get something along those lines to work).
my 2cents
-luckie
For our old cause keeps us together,
And our hatred is so precious not death or defeat can break it.
-John Gould Fletcher
My question is, what happened to Fleischmann and Pons? Did they go to jail or anything? I shudder to think that they are still on a university faculty.
The above article was written in 1995, but I’ve found other news articles as late as 1999 that confirm this as well.
I also found this review of cold fusion on the web, dated 1996. Give it a shot if you don’t mind the extra reading; just keep in mind that the author is a strong supporter of cold fusion research.
I thought it might be interesting to resurrect this thread in light of what our pal Sir Arthur Clarke said the other day:
“Although there are lots of crooks, cranks and cowboys in this field, I believe there is now enough published evidence to prove that something strange is going on.”
Elsewhere in that article, Clarke speaks about “anomalous sources of energy” which might be worth looking into. Can anyone name some examples of these unusual energy sources?
I hope this isn’t more of the old push-just-right-on-the-gyroscope stuff.
It might be their(Pons and Fleischmann) real sin was in calling whatever they found “fusion” as their experiments HAVE been duplicated hundreds of times and so far no one really seems to know where the extra energy is coming from.
FTR many other reputable scientists have ended up with the extra energy and as far as I know no one has definitively said from where the energy came.
IMO there is more to this than meets the eye…this doesn’t seem to be like those mysterious chemicals that added to water run an automobile or the like.
Sorry for resurrecting this thread if it’s too old but I was going to post about this but after a search found this one already here.
There is a bit of jargon that you will inevitably see here, namely “cite?”.
This is used when someone makes a statement that may not be factual. The other people on the board want a citation, a link, a reference to check the reliability of the statement.
Can you provide evidence that hundreds of experiments have been performed that create extra energy, and that no one knows where it comes from? In other words, cite?
I don’t believe you’ll find support even on the friendly site for Pons’ claims. They seem to be shifting their work toward new areas where theory is less than strong and much future work remains to be done.
And Charles Platt is reporting on this for Wired with the same enthusiasm that he covered superconductivity antigravity in an article refernced in Wired in this thread . Coincidence or conspricacy?
The problem is calling the Pons and Fleishman experiment “cold fusion”.
They did “discover” some kind of phenomenon - its been reproduced and studied. In fact, I read about it being used as a possible energy source for electric cars - a type of fuel cell, as such.
Their experiment does produce energy, but not through any kind of fusion.