Lots of points for effort. But he is working from no more than junior high school understanding of the physics he is trying to explain.
It is typically not worth the effort pursuing things, but there are a huge number of experiments that he has clearly never heard of, and even for those experiments he has heard of, he has little more than handwaving understanding and explanations. I remember when I was a kid of about 8 thinking about stuff like that. All seemed logical to me back then. It went downhill from there
In a way it is a bit of a shame. He has put a lot of effort into this.
Friends and neighbors, we’re witnessing the next Time Cube crank in his formative moments (while he’s still slightly coherent and before his website turns into something Geocities would think is tacky).
-It’s me, the person who did the demonstration. Why yes, I eagerly read what was going on in this group. Very impressive set of replies. That did directly affect some of what I had to say in my talk, so thanks for the ideas. Now that I’m done preparing for that talk, I can directly answer some of the questions in this group. It is correct that no matter what I do, it won’t be enough. After all, I’m just a crackpot and nobody is going to listen to anything I have to say.
-But, I will do what I can to promote this idea of low energy fusion reaction however I can. In the end, my only hope is that my video will go viral and others will pick up on this and several universities will replicate the results until there is an undeniable body of evidence. Short of that, it would be useless for me to improve this experiment beyond what I have already done. Besides there are already 2 good replications in the literature anyways:
American Nuclear Society http://www.ans.org/store/article-30331/
Verification of the George Oshawa Experiment for Anomalous Production of Iron from Carbon Arc in Water
-There’s no way I’m going to be able to do better than what these papers describe. If anybody wants to plunk down the $25 to get the full articles or already has access, I’d appreciate if someone could send me a copy.
-My main contribution to this experiment is how easily the experiment can be done with commonly available materials and to show that the results can happen from simply sparking carbon in air. No complex water setup is required.
-Yes, to radically make fusion easier, you have to eliminate the tiny proton packed nucleus and eliminate the need for the strong force. Here a link to my short 10 page paper which completely rewrites the atomic model as child’s play - literally - as in Legos.
-A couple of other links to see how really crazy I am.
If you search for my name “Franklin Hu” in the sci.physics forums, you will find reams of replies on every topic imaginable from several years of posting. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sci.physics
Now, I don’t take myself too seriously and I had a lot of fun at the meeting and answering questions. This is what I do for fun and I enjoy challenging dogma and 100 years of failed physics. So take your best shot, this looks like a lively group, just be nice … and try to keep an open mind.
The host of the meeting showed a funny Peanut’s cartoon slide with Charlie Brown saying the stars were something like souls shining down upon us. While Snoopy is thinking “This guy is just F***ing stupid, the sun is a giant ball a plasma, idiot!”. This was brought up because a lot of skeptics act like this and it isn’t pretty, it just makes them seem arrogant, mean and petty. Does this remind you of anyone?
Well, I am always up for enlightenment. So, if there is such a huge number of experiments, then name 5 which you do not think I understand or have not heard of. I put this challenge forth because when people put such broad claims of many this or that, they can barely come up with a single response, so if there are so many experiments, then list a few and I’ll check my understanding of those.
Now it is funny that you mention how as a kid, you might have thought of that because that is the overall basis of my philosophy which to understand science in a way that even a child could understand. Now this is usually stated as science that a barmaid could understand, but I just created an atomic model out of LEGO bricks and you can’t get much more child understandable than that.
I think there is a deep sense that physics has somehow run off the rails and that there is something deeply wrong about what we think about physics. To make progress, I think we need to be like that 8 year child who has no preconceived notions and is free to apply logic and intuition to its best effect.
This particular forum is for factual answers to actual questions that have them, so at some point a mod is going to want to shift the discussion. But that is fine. Be prepared.
My comments and questions still haven’t really been addressed.
Why are you not dead?
The experimental evidence, and the evidence from our studies of astronomy, the stellar life cycle and the observed abundances of the elements all support a model of nucleogenesis from which very large amounts of energy are released by fusion. The sun, and on earth, thermonuclear weapons support this for fusing hydrogen. There is no way of avoiding the fact that oxygen + carbon -> iron must release prodigious amounts of energy. Enough that if you produced even the most minuscule observable amount of iron by fusion you would be not just a little bit dead, but an unrecognisable film coating the inside of the room.
Your theories would need to be able to account for exactly the observed elemental abundances in the universe, the physics of observed super-nova (ie the precise timeline of their demise and the observed elemental abundances seen in the results.) The standard model does this nicely. And it does so with not a great deal of complexity in its foundations.
I didn’t think it was so complicated. So, you run a computer backwards and it presents its state in a reverse direction appearing to go back in time. Of course this is assuming the world is a machine and there is no actual going back in time, only the ability to “look” like you are going back in time. Time as defined as state change can only move forward.
Although I would be curious that out of all the papers I have on gravity, magnetism, atomic models, etc. you pick my most speculative paper on time. I had at least 10 different hits on this paper when I normally expect none.
There is some value in this. String theory worries a lot of people - but that is because it is not predictive.
What worries everyone else is that the Standard model is so damn good. It matches everything we throw at it. But we also know it isn’t complete. You need to match every prediction the standard model makes to at least as good accuracy. That is a very very high bar. Your model needs to account for the existence of mesons, their mass. half-life and decay products for instance. Indeed you need to be able to predict, with numbers, things like the half-lives of all the unstable isotopes, their decay products and observed energies. The standard model does so.
Your theory also needs to account for the observed conservation laws. Spin and colour for instance.
Ditto for general relativity. Your theory needs to address the experimentally verified predictions of GR. Not just in spirit, but actually in numbers. Frame dragging for instance.
You can’t do this with any Turning machine equivalent computer. It is trivial to write a computer program that cannot run backwards, as computation destroys state as it executes forwards. This is pretty fundamental from basic computation theory.
It is possible to write programs that can run backwards, but they are specially crafted, not general purpose, and they have constraints that are not good.
There has been some theoretical research done on reversible computers, mostly directed at determining the limits of the speed of computation. In general, the only way a computation is reversible is a record is made of every state change, creating a log by which the computation can be undone. This requires storage space that continues to grow at the rate the execution proceeds. What this has effectively done is made a system that can recreate the state of the computation from a log. Given the entire universe is effectively executing parallel, you will need storage that essentially duplicates the entire state of the universe every time cycle, ie we make a copy of the universe. The bottom line is that your executing computer cannot exist in our universe.
Why am I not dead from performing fusion experiments? Well, I can only speculate. I would say that whatever the mechanism that is involved it must be radically different from the hot fusion we see in conventional experiments. So my first answer is that you cannot compare this “hot” fusion with some other completely different process which is “cold” fusion. I would further speculate that the energy/mass balance must be maintained, but that the energy that comes out of these reactions is primarily near the visible spectrum. I speculated that the brilliant white light from a carbon arc lamp may actually partially come from the release of the fusion energy. If true, this would be an exceptionally clean form of radiation without any of those nasty gamma or x-rays or beta particles. I also measure no radiation during these experiments with my Geiger counter, which would explain why I’m not dead and why these types of experiments are not dangerous.
This did an analysis of the isotope concentrations and found them to be similar to that of natural iron found on Earth. This would indicate that whatever process formed the iron on the Earth, may be very similar to what we observe in these carbon to iron experiments. How do you explain that iron is the 5th most common element on the Earth, but nearly non-existent in the universe? How does mainstream explain that fact? It would seem there must be some process which favors the creation of iron to be so much more abundant than just about any other element.
So far as the impressive predictions made by science, I would say that any atomic model would have very little impact on the bulk nature of atoms. At those temperatures and pressures and chaotic environments, the differences between a planetary Bohr model and my own models may make no difference. Atoms will still have the same observed charge/mass/diameter as we observe. So I would speculate that whatever calculations you have, I could just as easily claim them for my model. I don’t know if I could, but I’d be interested in any part of those calculations relying on either the small size of the nucleus or the strong force.
So you are claiming new science here. Do you have an explanation from your theories that covers both hot and cold fusion?
This can be measured. It isn’t hard to do the efficiency calculations and look for any energy imbalance.
Or, Occam’s’ Razor would suggest that there is no fusion.
There is a huge body of work on this subject. That you don’t know about it is what I am talking about. Start with Fred Hoyle and nucloegenesis. Heck, just Google it, read the wikipedia page. It is all there. Hoyle worked out the answers to your question half a century ago, and they predict not just the exact abundances of iron, but pretty much all the other elements as well.
Nobody uses the Bohr model of the atom past high school. It doesn’t work. OTOH, the Shrodinger/Dirac models work brilliantly. When you get to QED, the theory predicts the answers to such accuracy it is ridiculous.
QED exactly predicts known chemistry. All the good stuff, bond angles, resonant frequencies, energies.
You need to come up with calculations that say, predict, from your model the precise observed nature of a water molecule. Resonant frequencies would be a good start.
That only changes the question to ‘why are you not blind/cooked?’
Gamma radiation is greatly more energetic (per photon) than visible light - so if the energy released by the fusion was being emitted as visible light, there would have to be be a hell of a lot more of it. You’d have been vaporised by that instead.
Frankly, the claim you’ve just made right here about the light vs gamma demonstrates you don’t have sufficient knowledge of the topic to be making claims.
Also, if you were right, then your discovery isn’t ‘clean’, it’s useless. The reason for attempting fusion is because we want a lot of emitted radiation.
The original experimenters suggested that a helium atom is also created to take away the extra protons, so there would be much less mass to convert to energy.
It has been mentioned that it is also improbable that 4 atoms would collide to form an iron atom. I would agree that there just isn’t any way there is enough kinetic energy generated by a spark to have any kind of collision. I would speculate that the way “cold” fusion works is that the electric current somehow breaks down the electrostatic atomic binding mechanism so that the atoms form a kind of soup. As the current is turned off, this soup forms back into atoms. Iron may be favored since it sits on the border between fusion and fission. Just about any atom is possible when the soup condenses back into ordinary matter and the experiments have long lists of other elements that have been found to have been produced in these experiments.
So no collisions may be required for this type of fusion.
I think if you actually tried to look into a carbon arc lamp, you would have to agree, there is a hell of a lot of light coming out of that and not all of that spectrum with very nasty UV can be explained as a simple heating of carbon.
Now exactly what claim am I making about light vs gamma that demonstrates I have insufficient knowledge. The only difference between those 2 is just the frequency of the EM wave. I’m just suggesting that the cold fusion process favors visible light rather than the higher gamma or x-ray. Both are energy, both can be emitted and without knowing the exact mechanism, you can’t know how much matter is converted to energy in the process. My previous post suggested, it can be much, much less.
Yes, I mentioned in my talk that this seems pretty useless along with the other cold fusion experiments - which even if they worked as advertised could never be scaled up into anything useful. It would be spectacularly revolutionary, but not particularly useful since there much easier ways to make iron than sparking carbon rods together.
However, I did mention that they melt steel in electric arc furnaces which use huge carbon rods. When they want to heat up the reaction, what do they do? They inject large amounts of carbon and pure oxygen. Why do you suppose they do that? Maybe they are taking advantage of the fusion energy generated in the process?
I think the importance is simply to show that there is something horribly, horribly wrong with our understanding of the atom. Until people understand that, there can be no further progress in the structure of the atom.
Doesn’t work. Helium is two protons and two neutrons. There is no helium with no neutrons.
What I pointed out later is that you get rid of the extra protons via beta decay, and that gets you the needed neutrons to get a stable iron nucleus.
No matter what mix of protons and neutrons you have you have a problem If it is iron the number of protons is fixed. Even if you magically managed to directly create [sup]57[/sup]Fe, which is the nearest thing there is to balancing the mass, you violate a number of other conservation laws. And you still don’t get rid of all the mass imbalance.
Experiments in accelerators have demonstrated the conservation laws needed. You can’t manufacture a neutron out of nothing. The standard model requires the conservation of things like spin and colour, and you have no way of doing that. The standard model does however exactly predict the masses of the isotopes. The energy deficit is found in the binding energy of the quarks. And guess what? The predicted energies exactly match experiment.
Are you seriously claiming that nobody knows where the light is coming from in an arc lamp?
And as a result, the energy of the photons. X amount of energy coming out as light instead of gamma rays is still the same amount of energy - the photons of visible light are less energetic, so there would have to be more of them
But you claim that you did. You picked up the iron you claim to have made with a magnet, and showed it as visible to the naked eye. To have fused carbon and oxygen into a naked-eye measurable quantity of iron should have released enough energy to fry you, regardless whether that energy was gamma rays or visible light.
There’s a pattern emerging here. You personally don’t know why this is done, so you assert that there is a mystery, then rather than learning the perfectly adequate explanation that already exists, you invent your own.
FranklinH, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board.
I’m only peripherally following this discussion, to say I understand half the comments being made would be an exaggeration consummate with even the best Crackpots the world has ever known.
One thing that puzzles me is that you claim just running an electric current from a little battery is combining carbon and oxygen to form iron. Yet we regularly have atmospheric lightning discharges of a somewhat larger current and voltage. Can you explain why we are not observing iron being formed with each lightning strike? I still have a log from a lightning struck tree in my yard and after a year there’s still no evidence of iron on or in it, at least not in the amounts your video demonstration is showing.
Also, you’re using a ceramic material in your demonstration with well known iron contamination. What are your results using pure graphite?
Sorry for disappearing for a couple of days. It’s been busier-than-normal week for me.
In skeptic circles, it’s often brought up that one shouldn’t bother working out an explanation for a phenomenon until you’ve proven the phenomenon happened in the first place. Don’t start working out how sasquatch has avoided detection all these years until you’re sure sasquatch actually exists, for example.
I think Mr. Hu has fallen into this trap. He admits that his demonstration doesn’t prove anything unexpected actually happened. He can refer to a couple of scientific papers from 20+ years ago, but if they proved something there’d be some sort of ongoing research.
But he speculates that something strange might be happening, then goes straight to working out the explanation. That is wildly premature.
In the meeting, I asked a few questions that didn’t have answers, such as “How does this model account for the difference between a neutron and a hydrogen atom, when it says they are both made up of a proton and an electron?” and “How does the model account for radioactive nuclei?” I was told that the model doesn’t yet have answers.
So what he’s doing is replacing a model that explains every observation so far with one that is supposed to explain his unproven maybe-observation, but very few of the other facts known to physics. If science were to go chasing his ideas, we’d go from knowing almost everything to knowing just a few things. Not a step forward.
Here’s a question I didn’t ask at the meeting: “If your Cubic Atomic Model is true and subatomic particles snap together easily into larger and larger atoms, why isn’t our planet or our Solar System (or galaxy) already condensed into a single super-atom?”
