Steve calls me out for not commenting on new stories about "cold fusion":
Becky and I have been having much more regular access to the internet since the power was fixed. We check e-mail just about everyday and can even skim yahoo news. Or Professor Orzel's blog. I heard on BBC radio yesterday that there are people who have claimed to have evidence of cold fusion - which made me immediately think of a physics graduate who worked on sonoluminescence (bubble fusion) and of a talk given at Union last year about bubble fusion. Which made me immediately think of Professor Orzel and his skepticism over it all. So I checked his blog and he didn't even comment on it. A physics blog not commenting on the "proof" of cold fusion. Ouch. What's your problem with cold fusion? Give it a chance. BBC even talked about it.
Everyone's a freakin' critic...
Anyway, the impetus for the story that reached Steve in rural Uganda was a special session on cold fusion at the American Chemical Society meeting. Which is also the answer to the question about why I haven't written about it-- it's chemistry, not physics. It's right there in the name of the meeting.
Just so you get something you wouldn't've gotten from being subscribed to the right EurekAlert feed, though, I should also take this opportunity to mention a nice article on the subject by Jon Cartwright, which goes through the relevant history and sketches out some of the recent developments that are generating buzz. It's not entirely complete-- it skips right past the whole sordid Taleyarkhan affair-- but it paints a sympathetic and reasonable portrait of the field.
Personally, I remain pretty skeptical of the field, though the plastic detector thing sounds intriguing. Ultimately, though, the only thing that would be really convincing would be some version of the Built On Facts Protocol for testing free energy devices.
I'd be interested to hear from anybody who went to the ACS meeting session. Anyone? Google blog search doesn't turn up anything from the scene, just links to the press release.
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What is this, another March 23rd joke?
That story is so twenty years ago.
We know that fusion can take place in low energy reactions; this was known before Cold Fusion came along. The question has always been whether the reaction rate is high enough to pay back what it costs to make it happen.
Perhaps I'm showing my prejudice, but what leapt out at me was the Utah location for the expo. Utah is mad crazy for cold fusion to the point where the State legislature dumped millions into that black hole. Cold Fusion? Chemists? Utah? A trifecta of woo.
Perhaps I'm showing my prejudice, but what leapt out at me was the Utah location for the expo. Utah is mad crazy for cold fusion to the point where the State legislature dumped millions into that black hole. Cold Fusion? Chemists? Utah? A trifecta of woo.
This post gives me a brilliant idea, which I don't have time to execute in the next week, so I mention it here in the hope that someone else does: on April 1, someone should post an "AdS/Cold Fusion" paper to hep-th cross-listed on cond-mat. It's a logical outgrowth of AdS/nuclear physics and AdS/condensed matter dualities, isn't it?
Electrochemistry has had a long history of difficulties with reproducibility because whats happening on the electrodes is a pretty messy surface chemistry system - and it has a memory. (Nobel for polarography was given not because of its usefulness as a practical method but because it was such a neat experiment - the dropping mercury electrode made for the first time a completely reproducible, predictable from first principles, well-behaved electrochemistry.)
Here they have a simple set-up, an experiment that should be easy to control. They form the Pd sponge electrode in situ, fresh each time so they have less problem with the alchemy of surface behavior. They should be able to detect the fast neutrons by other detectors, and quantify them. Even without a practical use it would be a very interesting result if confirmed.
There's a cold fusion guy in my department. I make a point of not talking research with him. The fact that he's still working in academia rather than ruling the world tells me that he has not yet solved the world's energy problems.
There was just a Cold Fusion session at the March meeting. I thought that it seemed pretty ballsy that they still call it that given all the bad PR.
There will never be a nobel prize for cold fusion. Because if it works the neutrons will kill the researchers, and the nobel cannot be posthumous.
Taleyarkhan was fraud. Suslick spectroscopically demonstrated Hell within collapsed cavitation bubbles increases as the boiling point of the medium. Deuteroacetone boils at 55.5 C, deuterosulfuric acid at 337 C. That the screamingly obvious experiment was not conducted is definitive.
Pons and Fleishmann cold fusion is cumulative electrodeposition of a lithium rind upon a Pd cathode followed by huge alloying exotherm (e.g., Na into Hg), drastic melting point drop vs. pure palladium, and a BLEVE. Explosions due to platinum D2/O2 recombination catalyst don't count. Only lithium cation "works" in electrochemical cold fusion. The anion is OH-, further encouraging metallic lithium accumulation.
Vacuum deposit some planar palladium, set up a generous 30-50 volt gradient, beam in D+. Got neutrons? Fill a Geiger-Muller tube with D2 plus a trace of CH3Br ionization seed. Reverse the voltage bias, add beta-rays for ionization. Mammoth field divergence at the central filament reliably provides ion cascade fusion. So? It's worthless even as a tritium generator.
Aldrich once sold D2 chemisorbed in HYSTOR alloy as large contained volume, low pressure cylinders. Warm the cylinder, controllably out comes the gas. Did Milwaukee get neutronated?
Can somebody explain Uncle Al to me? I've seen him on here since I started reading science blogs, and I don't get the joke. Is he some sort of bot that posts sciency sounding jibberish? Sort of like this webpage? http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Uncle Al is best regarded as one of the ineffable mysteries of life on the Internet. Any attempt to explain him would remove his, um, charm? Something like that.
I vociferously reject the rumor that I created "Uncle Al" to make my own arcane idiosyncratic ormulu lucubrations appear rational and on-topic by comparison.
More seriously, I remind Chad's readers that physicist Dr. Stephen Koonin, just nominated by Obama to be Undersecretary of Science at DOE, was the leaders of the Caltech Physics group who carefully debunked Pons & Fleishman (the Chemists at U. Utah) about Cold Fusion. And Dr. Michael Salamon was the U. Utah physicist who debunked Pons & Flesihman with their own apparatus, and later became head of Physics at NASA HQ and as Director in the White House.
Physics can be very political!
Uncle Al means no harm. When he talks organic chemistry he has interesting things to say. His anti-political correctness invectives are balm on the soul. He is one of us
Just saw the CBS story on cold fusion with the same title as this blog entry. They took a pretty celebratory stance...Cold fusion has been vindicated. I wish they had mentioned that it seems inconsistent with quite a bit of well supported theory, and so we rightly put the bar very high for demonstrating that the observed anomaly is real. The news media seems to never take the time to explain how science really works.
Did anyone see this story on the Huffington Post about Cold Fusion and the Auto Industy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patt-cottingham/goodbyehello-6-retooling_…