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Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

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Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#61

Post by jayalpha »

magduf wrote: post #60
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.

>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…

If the lag is one hour, you still need to prick.

If you want to see "overall trend" and don't care about any "lag time", just measure in Urine.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#62

Post by ChuckMcM »

Not exactly a "cold case" as there are regular conferences on work in "LENR" (low energy nuclear reactions). Given the bulk of the work, and the results AFAICT it is slowly shedding some of the 'snake oil' reputation and developing a "definitely something here which is not explained by the current understanding" sort of vibe. As it points out in the article, this is a group effort to come up with a solid, reliably reproducible experiment, that demonstrates the effect. In that way everyone can baseline to a common phenomena and a common experimental setup for comparing notes.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#63

Post by dumbfoundded »

I'd love to learn more about the actual methods they're pursuing. One I like and related to cold fusion is muon-catalyzed fusion. Theoretically, it should be possible and dramatically lower the temperatures required for fusion. Muons are like electrons but much heavier and less stable. When a muon replaces an electron, it allows nuclei to get much closer together, lowering the energy requirement for fusion. The practical challenge is creating muons with less energy than you get from fusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#64

Post by cpeterso »

chasd00 wrote: post #21
dwighttk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sometimes it seems as if Elon thinks Iron Man is a prophesy about his life...

an ex-gf of mine use to say Elon was an alien and needs humans to help him develop the technology he needs to get back home.

Like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976):

> [Bowie's character] uses the advanced technology of his home planet to patent many inventions on Earth, and acquires tremendous wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate, World Enterprises Corporation, aided by leading patent attorney Oliver Farnsworth. His wealth is needed to construct a space vehicle with the intention of shipping water back to his home planet.

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

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#65

Post by fooker »

smt88 wrote: post #49
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

Alphabet doesn't seem to abandon moonshots as easily as it does consumer SaaS products like Reader. They still have massive, on-going investments in anti-aging and self-driving vehicles. I don't know of any moonshots they've killed yet.

> I don't know of any moonshots they've killed yet.

Project Ara?

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#66

Post by ars »

tinus_hn wrote: post #55
ars wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion it's not the same thing as cold-fusion.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#67

Post by akiselev »

olooney wrote: post #58
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…

> Some reactors JT-60 have been energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining.

Nitpick: I don't believe the JT-60 has actually gone energy positive. They achieved a point where they would be power positive if they had been able to use a 1:1 ratio of D-T fuel instead of their D-D fuel but handling D-T fuel is very complicated and the JT-60 facility doesn't have those capabilities.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#68

Post by olooney »

akiselev wrote: post #67
olooney wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Some reactors JT-60 have been energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining. Nitpick: I don't believe the JT-60 has actually gone energy positive. They achieved a point where they would be power positive if they had been able to use a 1:1 ratio of D-T fuel instead of their D-D fuel but handling D-T fuel is very complicated and the JT-60 facility doesn't have those capabilities.

Noted; I've edited the above comment to read, "have come close to being energy positive." Thank you.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#69

Post by nerpderp82 »

magduf wrote: post #59
technofiend wrote: post #54

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'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 h…

TIL, turn off autoupdates and clock sync when doing any sort of time traveling.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#70

Post by darkpuma »

lostmyoldone wrote: post #39
darkpuma wrote: post #2

> "The Google team explored three experimental set-ups that have been proposed to generate cold fusion — two involving palladium and hydrogen, and one involving metallic powders and hydrogen. None found evidence of fusion. The results have been published across 12 papers over the past 2 years: 9 in peer-reviewed journals and 3 on the arXiv preprint server." It seems obvious to me that you can't achieve fusion using a…

As far as I understand, most of the ideas concerning how fusion at low temperatures, and their relationship with eg. Pd is not because of chemical catalysis, but because it readily dissociates and dissolves hydrogen (and isotopes) into it's crystal structure. This process brings the hydrogen atoms ( at ntp ) at least as close as hydrogen molecules at roughly 2000 atmospheres, and maybe much closer, if I punched in th…

That makes a lot more sense, thanks. But if the metallic lattice is retaining the pressure of bringing hydrogen nuclei that close together, wouldn't the whole thing tear itself apart? Is that the instability they're talking about when they say "But at high concentrations the team was unable to create stable samples." ?
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