Weird ideas never die, they just go underground, and return with new names. "Cold Fusion" is now "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions," and was the subject of a day-long symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It's not clear how much credence to give this. It can't be entirely kookery, because this was a press release issued by the ACS, and national societies tend not to be completely wacky. Then again, though, I look at things like this:
The original cold fusion experiment in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons was dismissed by some scientists as 'bad' science due to alleged errors in calorimetric systems, or heat measurement, that could have misled the scientists into thinking that the excess heat produced was nuclear in origin. Using more precise calorimetric techniques, a new study by Fleischmann and colleague Melvin Miles reports evidence that the excess heat generated is nuclear and not the result of calorimetric errors. "Our work shows that cold fusion effects are real, but we cannot assess if this excess heat can become useful. Much more research work is needed to answer such questions," says co-author Miles, a chemist at the University of LaVerne in Calif.
And, well... Continued re-analysis of dubious old experiments to make them look better always makes me a little twitchy.
Anyway, the press release kind of leaped out at me from EurekAlert. Blogdom surely contains at least one person who is at the ACS meeting, so maybe a report of what went on will turn up.
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They have had almost two decades to make it work. I wish they would hurry up with this cold fusion stuff so we could dump all of our other nasty old energy sources.
I thought the best evidence that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong were the fact that they were still alive, that the neutrons that should come out should have killed them......
Like any highly unlikely, but would be revolutionary if true idea, I think it makes sense to have a small continuing effort. This seems to be about what is happening. For the rest of us, we can comfortably choose to ignore it.
This is a week late. CF had its 18th birthday a week ago, which means we are deep into the tail of the distribution for the P&F prediction of a commercial hot water heater in "six months".
When someone shows that they know how to scale an experiment up without scaling the signal down, then there might be something worth trying to reproduce.
The University of LaVerne? Is that where the Department of Louise is located?
A while ago I talked to a prof about the sort of crackpost who do this stuff. And apparently at one of these physics organisations (I think aps), it is quite easy to get memberships, and at certain meetings, they will let anyone who signs up for a talk give one.
As a result, it attracts a huge number of crazies, and there is a code word in the category their talk gets put into, so normal physicists sort of know to stay away. I think he had said that the code word was "General Physics". Apparently they all just get put together in a room and discuss loony theories to their hearts content, while all the real physics gets done in some other building.
"The University of LaVerne? Is that where the Department of Louise is located?"
I'll have you know that Dr. Isaac Asimov's favorite TV show was, no kidding:
"Laverne & Shirley" (1976)
I've been to the campus of The University of LaVerne. Don't tell them I said so...
I always get Laverne & Shirley mixed up with Thelma & Louise.
Cold Fusion is the pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow.
I followed the early reports eagerly, but after a while it became more and more difficult to believe that the pot o' gold would be found, so I moved on with my life. Still, I wish the "researchers" all the best, and I hope that next time the magic works.
Re: "They have had almost two decades to make it work. "
True. If they keep on promising results "Any Day Now", they'll be just as bad hot fusion!
The problem with the public reaction to cold fusion is that it's billed as a possible energy source, whereas apparently it exists but produces only a very small amount of energy.
According to Wikipedia, it appears to consistently produce only the 4He form of helium, despite this having a very low physical probability. Since this is a severe violation of the Born Rule, it presumably cannot be sustained very long.
Cold fusion cells have supposedly been submitted for patents as machines, and rejected (most times). This was not, as people seem to think, because the Patent Office denied that they were doing anything. It was because the submitters don't seem to know what a machine is. A machine is supposed to do useful work; a cold fusion cell clearly doesn't.
Of course, admitting that cold fusion is just one of those small deviations from the otherwise accurate physical theories, worth investigating simply out of scientific curiosity, is a non-starter at the desks of media editors!