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Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

nature.com

21–30 of 162 posts

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an Iron Man story arc lone from a few years ago where Tony Stark starts a car company using his repulsor batteries as the energy supply..

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.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#23
post #19

While LENR and CANR research has seen a significant amount of charlatans, there's a large body of papers available and there's yearly meetings. More details here: https://lenr-canr.org/ I've yet to make up my mind about 'cold fusion' but since there are interesting results and research is still being funded, there's clearly something we don't understand yet.

I invested two weeks with in-depth analysis of the available papers and came to the conclusion that there is no good evidence. Usually the produced quantities where below the error margins of the background noise, or they put in so much energy that the measured effects could have come from any reaction, or it was not reproducible by others.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#25
post #7
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…

It's not a chemical catalyst, but the idea of muon-catalysed cold fusion has been around since the late 50s. I think I first read about it as a child in the appendix of Arthur C Clarke's "2061" novel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion Is that an open mind or parallel thinking? It's an interesting idea anyway, but seems no way to efficiently create enough muons / u- mesons.

Muon catalysed fusion is not comparable to chemical catalysts for one thing. Secondly, although enough muons can actually be created, too many are lost for the reaction to work out.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#26

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 ;-)

Even if nothing comes from LENR, there were other interesting (probably not nuclear) things going on that have since been ignored because of the scientific taboo. The quintessential electrolysis experiment wasn't entirely inert, supposedly, even if nothing nuclear was happening.

Google could stumble into something very profitable.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#27
post #10

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 ;-)

There's an Iron Man story arc lone from a few years ago where Tony Stark starts a car company using his repulsor batteries as the energy supply..

Seems like a good example of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsIsUs... .

No one ever thought cheap energy might be helpful before a few years ago? It's still not useful outside of cars?

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#28
post #24

Fine with me. Maybe this will put an end to the conspiracy theories about suppression of of cold fusion experiments.

You may be underestimating the thought processes of conspiracy theorists.

Google have admitted to spending multiple millions over a number of years on a cold fusion team yet the team are still only publishing negative results? No one does that unless there are results they're not publishing...etc etc.

Re: Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments

#29
post #21

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.

"They are already here among us – they just call themselves Hungarians."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

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