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Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

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Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#51

Post by nostrademons »

tr33house wrote: post #3

Looks like research has been going on from 2015. I wonder why Google decided to keep this a secret... and I wonder how many such long-term projects exist. Maybe it's the possible upside that motivated the secrecy

They often do early research in secrecy to keep the pressure off the team. If you announce "We're going to ship cold fusion in 2020" or even "We're looking into cold fusion approaches", then suddenly everybody's interested in the research team, there's a huge amount of pressure on them, and they no longer have the freedom to tinker with different approaches and critically look at the data. If you keep it secret then it's just a bunch of really smart guys being funded to look into some intriguing idea.

In this case they got a negative result, so the secrecy was probably warranted - would they have had the courage to put out 9 peer-reviewed papers detailing a negative result if everybody had been asking them "So, when are we gonna be able to use cold fusion" since 2015? The cynic in me thinks that the project was just canceled, which is why Google is going to the press now - they have no more vested stake in the outcome, but it'd be beneficial if somebody else tried it and did manage to find an approach that works.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#52

Post by shadowtree »

microtherion wrote: post #9

This seems to be in keeping with Google's "Moon Shot" philosophy — investing in some projects with potentially high payoff, but low probability of success. If Tesla were pursuing a project like this, they'd probably announce that they were expecting all their cars to ship with cold fusion reactors by 2020 — and then start hiring a team ;-)

Which Google moonshot has paid off so far?

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#53

Post by izend »

ars wrote: post #45
mikejulietbravo wrote: post #34

Is there an ELI5 of why cold fusion is so difficult to achieve?

The simplest answer is: It's not real. There is no such thing as cold fusion. It's not a matter of "so difficult", it's not actually possible. Are you asking, why is there no such thing as cold fusion? If so then in the simplest way I can explain it: Atoms are like little magnets that repel each other. To get fusion you need to get the atoms to touch - but you can't, they repel. So you have to press them together rea…

There does appear to be fair bit of research in LENRs going on right now, note this article claims its the fusion of hydrogen atoms producing the extra heat:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/scientists-in-the-u...

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#54

Post by technofiend »

usaphp wrote: post #36
microtherion wrote: post #9

This seems to be in keeping with Google's "Moon Shot" philosophy — investing in some projects with potentially high payoff, but low probability of success. If Tesla were pursuing a project like this, they'd probably announce that they were expecting all their cars to ship with cold fusion reactors by 2020 — and then start hiring a team ;-)

I know you are joking, but unlike Google, Tesla at least tries to finish whatever they start and actually deliver stuff, while google quickly jumps the ship if the thing does not work out and abandoned all their customers

>I know you are joking, but unlike Google, Tesla at least tries to finish whatever they start and actually deliver stuff, while google quickly jumps the ship if the thing does not work out and abandoned all their customers

I'm envisioning the Mr. Fusion in Back To The Future as a Google product. Surely it would fail the second it left that narrow 5-10 year window of support. Error: 403, Forbidden; the user is not authorized for trans-time operation.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#55

Post by tinus_hn »

ars wrote: post #45
mikejulietbravo wrote: post #34

Is there an ELI5 of why cold fusion is so difficult to achieve?

The simplest answer is: It's not real. There is no such thing as cold fusion. It's not a matter of "so difficult", it's not actually possible. Are you asking, why is there no such thing as cold fusion? If so then in the simplest way I can explain it: Atoms are like little magnets that repel each other. To get fusion you need to get the atoms to touch - but you can't, they repel. So you have to press them together rea…

As far as I remember the idea is that you substitute a heavier particle for the electron which causes its orbit to be small enough for fusion to happen at room temperature. The problem is that the particles have a small but non-zero chance of disappearing and it costs a lot of energy to create them, so the process is a net energy loss.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#56

Post by CobrastanJorji »

shadowtree wrote: post #52
microtherion wrote: post #9

This seems to be in keeping with Google's "Moon Shot" philosophy — investing in some projects with potentially high payoff, but low probability of success. If Tesla were pursuing a project like this, they'd probably announce that they were expecting all their cars to ship with cold fusion reactors by 2020 — and then start hiring a team ;-)

Which Google moonshot has paid off so far?

The "Google Brain" deep learning research has probably worked out extremely well for Google. Self-driving cars seem pretty likely to make bank within a decade.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#57

Post by jayalpha »

markrages wrote: post #47
jayalpha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am excited. Worth looking into. Even if it violates (current) physical laws. Potential payoff to big. But I have also seen google projects that did not look scientific sound to me. Measuring blood glucose with contact lenses? How? Lag time is around one hour for eye liquid. Your are dead and the sensor does not know it yet. Your need to be below 10 min lag time.

An idea that violates physical laws is just wishful thinking, no matter how big the potential payoff.

You should study the scientific method. Nothing is set in stone, science is an evolutionary process. Even the scientific method itself.

If experiments violate CURRENT laws of physics, the laws have to be revised. Guess how we came to our current atomic model from the plum pudding atom model?

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#58

Post by olooney »

peterlk wrote: post #46

The cynicism in this threads hurts. > “This is not just a chase for cold fusion,” says Matthew Trevithick, a research programme manager at Google in Mountain View, California. “If it were, I don’t think we would have maintained an interest of this calibre of team for so long.” Here's what I see: fusion power would be a step function in human civilization. Such step functions are pathologically hard to achieve, becaus…

The skepticism is not about fusion power, it's about cold fusion specifically, as well role of proprietary IP and patents in scientific research.

Tokamak[1] (and other magnetic confinement) reactors seem much more promising and have seen slow but non-zero improvements for decades[2]. Some reactors like JT-60 have come close to being energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining. Large ongoing projects like like ITER[4] have the potential to break past limits and provide invaluable data. There are also advances in plasma physics which improve our ability to run computer simulations[5] of Tokamaks and suggest new hypotheses for how they can be improved[6].

If Google were serious about fusion, they would invest in this kind of mainstream research. Unfortunately, that's too big for them to own end-to-end; the most they could do would be to participate in the international process. But that wouldn't result in proprietary, patent-able technology, so they instead they put resources behind fringe science that they can control. This is reminiscent of the Lockheed-Martin CFR[7], which also chose an approach which was extremely unlikely to result in a scientific breakthrough but which did yield a few patents for Lockheed-Martin.

Frankly, behavior which is only one step removed from straight-up patent trolling justifies a certain degree of cynicism.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60

[4]: https://www.iter.org/

[5]: http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/topics/plasma-fusion-theory...

[6]: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-stabilizes-fusion-p...

[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion...

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#59

Post by magduf »

technofiend wrote: post #54
usaphp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you are joking, but unlike Google, Tesla at least tries to finish whatever they start and actually deliver stuff, while google quickly jumps the ship if the thing does not work out and abandoned all their customers

>I know you are joking, but unlike Google, Tesla at least tries to finish whatever they start and actually deliver stuff, while google quickly jumps the ship if the thing does not work out and abandoned all their customers I'm envisioning the Mr. Fusion in Back To The Future as a Google product. Surely it would fail the second it left that narrow 5-10 year window of support. Error: 403, Forbidden; the user is not aut…

Sorry for the pedantry, but you're confused. Mr. Fusion had little to do with time travel: it was a commercial device which Doc got in the future, and which simply generated power from whatever you wanted to pour into it. Doc's flux capacitor is what allowed time-travel, and it needed a lot of power. So before, he had to either use uranium or lightning, but after installing Mr. Fusion he didn't need either of those hard-to-get things.

So, if Mr. Fusion was a Google product, as soon as McFly transported the DeLorean to the future (outside Google's window of support) and the onboard computer synced the time over-the-air and the Mr. Fusion updated its clock, McFly would be stuck in the future, though presumably in that time he should be able to find some competitor to Mr. Fusion which he could replace it with (with Doc's help; McFly never seemed to be very good with technical things).

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#60

Post by magduf »

jayalpha wrote: post #44
microtherion wrote: post #9

This seems to be in keeping with Google's "Moon Shot" philosophy — investing in some projects with potentially high payoff, but low probability of success. If Tesla were pursuing a project like this, they'd probably announce that they were expecting all their cars to ship with cold fusion reactors by 2020 — and then start hiring a team ;-)

I am excited. Worth looking into. Even if it violates (current) physical laws. Potential payoff to big. But I have also seen google projects that did not look scientific sound to me. Measuring blood glucose with contact lenses? How? Lag time is around one hour for eye liquid. Your are dead and the sensor does not know it yet. Your need to be below 10 min lag time.

>Measuring blood glucose with contact lenses? How? Lag time is around one hour for eye liquid. Your are dead and the sensor does not know it yet. Your need to be below 10 min lag time.

Why? What if you don't care about having your blood glucose data that quickly, and just want to see the overall trend, even if it is delayed an hour? This won't help people who really need to be able to see what their glucose level is right this second, but for others it's a lot more convenient than having to prick yourself every morning.

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