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The cold fusion horizon

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Re: The cold fusion horizon

#81

Post by ZenoArrow »

rdtsc wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #52

This article is funny. It tries to do an end-run around any criticism of the subject matter by constructing an elaborate piece of work to establish that if you don't agree with the basic premise of low energy nuclear reactions there must be something pathologically wrong with you. And you are not only suffering from a defect, no you are doubly wrong, because having LENR would be such a great thing for the world. For…

Yap. This is almost certainly a scam. As long as there are rich people, there will be scam artists selling them "cold fusion", "infinite energy machines", it is fascinating to watch these happen. This also creates an interesting market, just like scam artists look for marks that other scammers have deceived, there is probably someone taking notes which investors are buying into the story. Those people would be good t…

> ""cold fusion", "infinite energy machines""

I don't think it's fair to lump those two together. I think we all accept the energy potential in fusion is there, and it also seems possible that the most efficient way to tap that energy is one we have yet to fully understand. The most efficient method could be found under the 'cold fusion' umbrella, and even if these methods turn out to be a different process than fusion, we still may end up learning something new anyway. For example, sonoluminescence has been linked to fusion before, but even if the processes involved end up being different to fusion, it's still an interesting process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJolILUbdNw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence

The point is, it doesn't serve us to dismiss fields of scientific research that have some chance of bringing us a new understanding of the science involved, even if we end up scrambling around in the dark for a long time.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#82

Post by gweinberg »

The article claims Rossi was given a US patent. A patent is supposed to allow a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the claimed invention, so in principle it should be easy to test his claims.

Of course, if it works the tester will have to pay royalties.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#83

Post by ZenoArrow »

tim333 wrote: post #78
ScottBurson wrote: post #23

Great article. I'm not going to defend Rossi, but what happened in 1989 was a travesty. Yes, Pons and Fleischmann were premature in their annnouncement. But they didn't deserve to be made pariahs, and there were others whose careers were destroyed for so much as publicly entertaining the possibility that cold fusion might be made to work. Edward Teller, on the other hand, was old enough not to care: Around 1992, McKu…

I recall 1989 incident as Pons and Fleischmann appearing in the news saying they'd discovered cold fusion and then becoming a bit of a laughing stock when it turned out to be rubbish. I don't get how that shows that Big Science is corrupt or not. It seems a bit unrelated.

> "becoming a bit of a laughing stock when it turned out to be rubbish"

The important thing here is to separate the idea from the implementation. Is cold fusion theoretically impossible? I'm no expert, but there seems to be at least some scientists indicating it's not impossible. If that's the case, why does the failure of the first experiment matter?

It's sad that the scientific community is partly based on reputation. I'd rather see all scientific work published anonymously, the work should speak for itself.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#84

Post by Retra »

msandford wrote: post #10
mannykannot wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I have also read other sources, especially with regard to Rossi. e.g: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1306/1306.6364.pdf http://www.sott.net/article/241427-E-Cat-Cold-Fusion-Machine...

Then I hope you see the irony in your comment, and why the first reply was a little incredulous. I'm not defending Rossi, BTW. The odds are very, very, very good that it's another scam. But it's not impossible that he's on to something and that's exactly what the article's author points to, along with lamenting how tragic it would be if cold fusion turned out to be real and we wasted 20 years not pursuing it because…

It would be more tragic to have smart people investigating something that is very likely a fraud, when they could be doing something more productive.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#85

Post by sdlm »

Completely different field- but I think Charles Darwin's way of "crippling potential criticism of one’s ideas by taking charge of all conceivable counterarguments" is a great example of how important rhetoric is, especially in such 'biased' areas. Just imagine what would have happened to his idea of Evolution if he had not been such a rhetoric genius.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/11/adam-gopnik-angels-... "[...] the other great feature of Darwin’s prose, and the organization of his great book, is the welcome he provides for the opposed idea. This is, or ought to be, a standard practice, but few people have practiced it with his sincerity — and, at times, his guile. The habit of “sympathetic summary,” what philosophers now call the “principle of charity,” is essential to all the sciences."

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#86

Post by disbelief »

marshray wrote: post #41
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is, what I think is Rossi's biggest problem. Very showy, very secretive. The explanation I've heard is that he has something which works (for some definition of works) but doesn't know how it works or why. And because of that he is walking around afraid that if too many details get out about how it works then someone smarter then him will jump in and patent/publish the why and then be forever known as the pe…

Another possible explanation is: He is really not very good at measuring energy input and heat output. He built something and confused himself into thinking it was producing more energy than it consumes. He took some money from investors to develop the technology. He spent much of the research money, eventually to realize that his device does not, in fact, produce energy. His investors now want their money back and h…

The article mentions two independent groups of physicists who both had access to his device and both reported the same results. That would mean that both groups were in on it, or he's become so good at faking his results that they withstand a month of scrutiny.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#87

Post by ars »

marshray wrote: post #41
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is, what I think is Rossi's biggest problem. Very showy, very secretive. The explanation I've heard is that he has something which works (for some definition of works) but doesn't know how it works or why. And because of that he is walking around afraid that if too many details get out about how it works then someone smarter then him will jump in and patent/publish the why and then be forever known as the pe…

Another possible explanation is: He is really not very good at measuring energy input and heat output. He built something and confused himself into thinking it was producing more energy than it consumes. He took some money from investors to develop the technology. He spent much of the research money, eventually to realize that his device does not, in fact, produce energy. His investors now want their money back and h…

> He is really not very good at measuring energy input and heat output.

Calorimetry is actually extremely hard to do right. VERY hard. I stopped following this field a few years ago, but back then EVERY single positive result was due to faulty calorimetry.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#88

Post by [deleted] »

mizzao wrote: post #4

I understand the argument about the sociological reputation trap, but a little more reading about Rossi's research turns up some very fishy evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer In particular, the copper supposedly generated by the fusion of hydrogen and nickel has an isotopic composition very similar to that of natural copper, rather than what one would expect from byproducts of nuclear reactions.…

[deleted]

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#89

Post by ars »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #34
mizzao wrote: post #4

I understand the argument about the sociological reputation trap, but a little more reading about Rossi's research turns up some very fishy evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer In particular, the copper supposedly generated by the fusion of hydrogen and nickel has an isotopic composition very similar to that of natural copper, rather than what one would expect from byproducts of nuclear reactions.…

And that is, what I think is Rossi's biggest problem. Very showy, very secretive. The explanation I've heard is that he has something which works (for some definition of works) but doesn't know how it works or why. And because of that he is walking around afraid that if too many details get out about how it works then someone smarter then him will jump in and patent/publish the why and then be forever known as the pe…

> The explanation I've heard is that he has something which works (for some definition of works) but doesn't know how it works or why.

This happened to someone - one batch worked, one did not.

Turns out that palladium can be refined from spent nuclear fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#P... and his first batch was "contaminated" in this way, and worked. His second batch was traditional mined from the ground and did not work.

Caveat: This is a story I heard, I have no direct evidence for it.

Re: The cold fusion horizon

#90

Post by gnufx »

MCRed wrote: post #65
ScottBurson wrote: post #23

Great article. I'm not going to defend Rossi, but what happened in 1989 was a travesty. Yes, Pons and Fleischmann were premature in their annnouncement. But they didn't deserve to be made pariahs, and there were others whose careers were destroyed for so much as publicly entertaining the possibility that cold fusion might be made to work. Edward Teller, on the other hand, was old enough not to care: Around 1992, McKu…

I was around, and read the Pons & Flieshman paper before it was released (when the pre-prints were carefully guarded and numbered... do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?) IIRC it was the university that jumped the gun at least as much as them. I worked for a very well respected lab for physicists, the head of which should have gotten the nobel prize…

> do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?)

I don't know, but the publicity machine at the time didn't inspire confidence in any science.

> We didn't disprove it, we didn't show evidence that P&F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time.

I'm surprised that a nuclear physicist would regard it as anything other than bollocks (to use the British technical term). It had the look of pathological science from the off in my eye. While I might have been willing to demonstrate the lack of fision products from an F&P apparatus brought to our detectors, it wasn't worth any significant effort/resources, and clearly nuclear physics expertise was the last thing that was wanted by proponents.

Some of us were doing actual fusion experiments with things like platinum and palladium at the time. Their important property for nuclear physics, apart from the right atomic number, was ability to hang together in intense heavy ion beams, so that data-taking was just limited by the data acquisition interfaces, not the target. [Ob-hacker: the data acquisition and analysis systems were quite interesting, especially for the time.]

For the record, I did get results published from such measurements which overturned widely- (universally-?) held belief in the field.

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