Comments of the Week #32: From black hole death to cold fusion crackpots

"Out, you impostors!
Quack salving, cheating mountebanks! your skill
Is to make sound men sick, and sick men kill." -Philip Massinger

It's been a wild ride full of ups-and-downs this week, as we've covered topics from solidly-based science to the theoretically expected, all the way to physical impossibilities and unverifiable, outlandish claims. Sometimes, that's what you get here at Starts With A Bang! If you missed anything, take a look back at everything we've covered this past week, including:

• How do black holes die? (for Ask Ethan),
• Your city in fantasy (for our Weekend Diversion),
• The Omega Nebula, M17 (for Messier Monday),
• The E-cat: cold fusion or scientific fraud?, and
• The foolish fallacy of cold fusion (for Throwback Thursday).

Particularly about the first topic and the last one -- black holes and cold fusion -- you've had an awful lot to say! Some of it deserves to be highlighted, along with responses, so here we go with our latest edition of the Comments of the Week!

Illustration credit: ESA, retrieved via http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/illustrations/blackholes2.html.

From Patrick on the topic of black hole death: "Everyone (and you;) says that eventually black holes will evaporate due to Hawking radiation. Well what does evaporate mean? Does it mean that the black hole gets smaller and smaller until pffft the last bit of energy comes out and then there’s nothing?"

I want you to imagine two types of black holes: one that's the mass of our Sun, with an event horizon of just a few kilometers, and one at the center of a somewhat large galaxy like Andromeda, with an event horizon that's the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun. What do you think the major differences are between these two spacetimes, and in particular, between the two spacetimes at the event horizons?

Image credit: Hortense Ardalan, via http://hortenseardalan.com/blackholes.html.

Although both of the spacetimes look like the diagram above, the event horizon of the much smaller mass will be farther down the funnel than the much larger mass, meaning that spacetime is more severely curved at the event horizon of the smaller mass. The rate of radiation coming from the hole, and therefore the rate of "evaporation" -- which is the rate at which the black hole's mass is getting converted into energy in the form of Hawking radiation -- starts off extremely slowly at the highest masses, and then increases as time goes on.

Over time, the radiation starts off with extremely long wavelengths and low fluxes, but increases dramatically over time. A black hole as large as 10^11 kg would have already evaporated in just the age of the Universe, and one that was only 10^5 kg, or 100 tonnes, would evaporate in less than a second! But yes, when it finishes evaporating, all that's left is the radiation, and flat, empty space where the black hole once resided.

Image taken from the Wikipedia page on Hawking Radiation.

From West on the same topic: "So just doing some quick math, the peak in the spectral energy density of Hawking radiation for a 10M_sun black hole is VLF radio. And the peak wavelength only gets longer as the hole gets heavier. Is this fact and the minuscule power the reasons why Hawking radiation in astrophysical blackholes may never be observed?"

The long wavelengths aren't so much of a problem; all you need to do to detect an arbitrarily long wavelength is to build a detector -- whether it's a telescope or an antenna -- of sufficient size. The largest radio telescope arrays, including LOFAR, Australia's ASKAP, and the future Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will realistically probe frequencies down to just a few megahertz, which translates into 10-to-30 meter waves.

Image credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.

But the low power -- the extremely small energy flux -- is the prohibiting factor. Our best bet to find these will be to look for the smallest black holes out there, which are the ones that likely come from neutron star-neutron star mergers, producing black holes of just under three solar masses. But even that would be an amazing feat, and -- dare I predict -- Nobel-worthy! Stay tuned, and keep your hopes high!

Image credit: Stentor Danielson, via his Tumblr blog, Mapsbergh.

From Javier on Tolkien-style fantasy maps: "Do México City for a challenge."

After viewing Stentor's responses to the huge volume of requests he's gotten, the only thing you'll need to do if you want Mexico City (or any city, for that matter), is:

1. Place your order,
2. Pay him, and
3. Wait for him to catch up on his backlog of orders.

Do that, and the Mexico City map will be yours!

Image credit: figure 3 from the Levi et al. paper.

From Eric, the first of many, on the e-Cat and what it would take to accept it as good science: "Complete design plans so that an independent team can build an apparatus of their own, and test it without any interaction or intereference by the inventor team at all.
Without that, just forget it. No need for other criteria; you fail that one, it’s over."

The hallmark of the worst kind of bad science is results that are irreproducible, and this is one problem that has plagued all cold fusion claims. If you can't independently take an experiment, reproduce it, and get -- within reasonable error bars -- the same statistically significant results, you have nothing!

Image credit: Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.

This is why interference in the experiment from Rossi himself is so damning. This is why being presented with a "black box" and being asked to draw conclusions is so scientifically deplorable. And this is why people claiming that this could possibly be construed as something convincing are deluding themselves.

Reproducibility -- independent reproducibility -- is everything in experimental science. And like Eric said, if you don't have that, you have nothing.

Image credit: from the Levi et al. paper.

From daedalus2u, correctly identifying one (of many) flaws with the test: "The big flaw in this setup is how they did the thermal radiation calculations. Alumina is partially transparent to the thermal radiation the inconel resistors are giving off. That radiation is picked up by the IR camera. If you assume that all the radiation comes from the alumina surface with an emissivity of alumina from a table, then you will get the wrong answer."

This is just a tiny part of how it's easy to fool yourself, and why you need truly independent -- as in, without interference or influence from the original party -- verification. The part that drives me nuts about this is that if this really were a nuclear reaction, putting out more energy than was being put into it, it should be very easy to have this reaction be self-sustaining, and not require an outside power source! Yet in every "test" or demonstration, there always has been one that's never switched off. Also, "coefficients of performance" should be hundreds or thousands of times unity for a nuclear reaction, not a suspicious same-order-of-magnitude as the energy input.

This may have been put better by another commenter, Amanitin, who said: "I saw an awesome comment on this on slashdot.
Anyone claiming to have a box that produces energy, phase sync it to the grid, hook it up, run your meter backwards and collect the checks. Then call me."

That would work, too.

Image credit: Len Rosen, via http://www.21stcentech.com/tag/andrea-rossi/.

From Stephan Pomp, who's done his own research into the e-Cat: "However, it will never help to convince the Cat-believers. It has become (or was from the beginning?) pretty much a religion. Even when Rossi admits manipulating samples his fans ask “so what?”. [...] In addition I can say that of all the responses from E-Cat fans I have received (including “TPR” authors Bo Höistad and Hanno Essén) none is concerned about the technical and scientific issues raised but rather hold that “Rossi is trustworthy” or question my motives."

In science, a trustworthy person is one who is transparent about their materials, methods, procedure and setup. A trustworthy person is open and honest about the scientific method they used to create their apparatus. Just because he's wearing a tiny American flag and has some very chic spectacles doesn't make him trustworthy.

And yet, there will be no convincing the true believers. For example...

Image credit: Phillippe Plailly of http://visualphotos.com/.

From our old commenting buddy Axil: "A great scientific breakthrough was demonstrated in the latest third party test of Rossi’s E-Cat. A polariton BEC was established for days at 1400C protecting the structure of the reactor from meltdown."

From one of my Twitter harassers, AlainCo: "first you deny the 150+peer review papers that report excess heat without much radiation, plus the one reporting tritium… (if you don’t have that tally, why do you talk about that subject ? for you naturwissenschaften, Journal of electroanalytical chemistry , JJAP are bunk journal?)
if you apply scientific method, LENr is proven, and this is just an industrial claim."

From Aubrey Cohn: "A fact-free logic-free argument as to why nobel laureates and a panel of prominent european physicists are all wrong, and Ethan Siegel is much cleverer than they. Indeed whole academic conferences are held, the collective intellectual strength of which is insufficient to disturb Ethan in his puissant majesty of intrinsic, inherent correctness about all things of which he is ignorant in fact."

From Csl: "You have to admit that physics doesn’t have all the answers. Where is the missing mass of the universe. Why do we have reality television. Maybe fleishman and pons didn’t have a clue, but there is something going in terms of excess heat with palladium and hydrogen."

From Zephir AWT: "These tricks of cold fusion are all classical physics based and now we can consider various less or more ad hoced quantum and quantum gravity effects, on which roughly sixty existing theories of cold fusion are based. You can browse them and collect another possible effects, which may or may not increase yield of cold fusion. But if you’re lazy to review them one after another, then you simply even cannot know, why the cold fusion can run while the hot one cannot and you’re predestined to oppose it for ever…."

Okay, first off, I have to get this out of my system.

Image credit: Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I know that I am incredibly obstinate, think I have all the answers and would never change my mind no matter how much quality evidence I was presented with. Never, under any circumstances, no matter what.

Now that that's out of the way, here's my challenge for all the LENR/cold fusion/e-Cat folks. Design for me one experiment, detailing the setup, materials, procedure, etc., that we can reproduce that yields more energy via the process of LENR/cold fusion than is required to be inputted into the setup to make the reaction proceed in the first place, and as soon as it is independently reproduced and verified, I will advocate that this work should win a Nobel Prize.

Sound fair? Good. Then on to our final comment this week, where we're actually going to learn something real about nuclear physics!

Image credit: J.V. Hofmann, IPP Garching, via http://physics.ucc.ie/~pjm/trachtais_macleinn/HughCallaghanPhD1999/node….

And at last, from Bill G on nuclear binding energies: "I thought the binding energy went down after you get heavier than Iron. How could going from Nickel to Copper release fusion energy?"

Binding energy does go down once you reach the peak, which is either at Fe-56 or Ni-62, depending on how you measure it. So how, then, would it be possible to fuse nickel into copper to release energy?

Because when we talk about binding energy, we talk about binding energy per nucleon, which includes the completely unbound hydrogen nucleus we're starting with, in addition to the tightly bound nickel nucleus.

Image credit: me.

So you have to ask yourself, what's more tightly bound overall: a copper-63 nucleus, or a nickel-62 nucleus plus a single proton? A copper-65 nucleus, or a nickel-64 nucleus plus a single proton? We normally talk about "mass defect," or how many AMUs (atomic mass units) are lost to binding energy. In other words, if you took all the individual free protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus, and measure the mass of the bound nucleus, what's the difference? That's the mass defect.

Well, the mass defect of nickel-62 is 0.562 AMU, but the mass defect of copper-63 is 0.569 AMU. So even though nickel-62 has a higher binding energy per nucleon than copper-63, copper-63 has more total binding energy. And that's how that fusion reaction could release energy!

Thanks for a very interesting week, and I'll see you all here in all the days to come for more wonders of the Universe!