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It's Not Cold Fusion but It's Something
- ahazred8ta 10y agoIt's not a SciAm article, but a blog post by someone we're not familiar with. There's no new information, it's just a retrospective review.
- singularity2001 10y agoThanks for pointing that out! The last two times I dug into it, I wasted two weeks just to find that their 'phenomenon/discovery' was near the limits of measurement error (or even below). Did anything change since then? UPDATE: One of the authors is a self-proclaimed expert in cold fusion and the other one is a lawyer. I wonder why there were no physicists among the authors. They didn't have any experiment description in the article? Please change the title to "Blog:..."
- guard-of-terra 10y agoIs it just me, or they didn't have any experiment description in the article? They talk about LENR but don't mention under which conditions it would take place, even in layman terms.
- Everhusk 10y agoThey didn't. In layman terms: It is the electroysis of heavy water (D2O) on a palladium electrode.
- greglindahl 10y agoIn layman terms, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
- greglindahl 10y agop.s. I see that this comment is getting a lot of up-votes and down-votes. The reason I made it is that I have discovered that my non-scientist friends, especially my smart engineer friends, really need this important principle repeated.
- adwn 10y agoMaybe the reason is that you keep repeating this meme which – although technically true – oversimplifies things and doesn't help with resolving unexplained experimental results. Sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but now what? Should further experiments be funded in order to provide that proof, or should the unexplained results be buried, since there is no conclusive proof? Proclaiming "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is a way to immediately block this discussion.
- greglindahl 10y agoThe purpose of the phrase is to be a reminder that the results are mostly likely experimental error. It doesn't block anything, it just reminds everyone what the most likely explanation is. If you want to see a good example of this in action, look at the folks who thought they showed neutrinos went faster than light. They constantly kept in mind that the most likely explanation for the data was experimental error, and eventually showed that their experiment had an error. Nothing was "buried", nothing was "blocked", and good science was eventually done.
- est 10y agoThat's the Pd-D cold fusion from 90s Today's hype is all about Ni-H
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Everhusk 10y agoAccording to quantum mechanics, the probability of a D-D fusion reaction at 300°K is ~10^-3800. That being said, I still think it's wrong of mainstream science immediately reject Cold Fusion/LENR or even Em Drive research. Just take it for what it is, an anomaly. Which may or may not lead to a breakthrough.
- api 10y agoIt couldn't be fusion -- at least not anything like hot fusion. If it is something like fusion, it'd have to be new physics.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 10y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. When it's mostly likely experimental error, why do you think anyone should "take it for an anomaly"?
- golergka 10y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary proof to take them as truth. Less extraordinary proof can still let them be a "may be". That's all they're trying to be for now.
- greglindahl 10y agoI was responding to someone who said "it's wrong of mainstream science immediately reject Cold Fusion/LENR or even Em Drive research". In response to you, "unlikely" is not the same as "may be".
- snowwrestler 10y agoIt not good science to reject a hypothesis or anomalous result before the data makes clear what is going on. Imagine if the guys at Bell Labs had just said "eh, who knows, nevermind" when they couldn't figure out the hiss in the horn antenna.
- imaginenore 10y agoAlso let's not forget the Lugano report, an independent attempt at reproduction of Rossi's E-cat claims. It produced more heat that was put in, and the isotopes got formed. http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omv%C3%A4rld_system/filer/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omv%C3%A4rld_system/filer/Lugan... And later reproduced by the Russians, with similar results: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz7lTfqkED9Wdm1NeEtxMFJLTmM/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz7lTfqkED9Wdm1NeEtxMFJLTmM... https://geektimes.ru/post/243787/ https://geektimes.ru/post/243787/
- est 10y agoYou know what all recent LENR breakthroughs lack? Gamma rays. Gamma rays don't lie.
- imaginenore 10y agoBlack swans don't exist because you haven't seen one? The whole idea is that these are potentially breakthrough discoveries that, if true, will change our understanding of physics. I'd say "quantum eraser" is way crazier than (potential) LENR.
- lisper 10y agoQuantum erasers are a lot less impressive than they sound. They don't really "erase" anything. You can make a quantum eraser out of a few sheets of polarizing film. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc around the 15 minute mark for a demo.
- oulu2006 10y agoThe article says something to that effect: "The Widom-Larsen theory offers a plausible explanation—localized conversion of gamma radiation to infrared radiation."
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
- jcoffland 10y agoIt is a grave problem in science that humans generally insist on putting ideas in to one of two buckets. Those buckets being the almost-certainly-true and almost-certainly-false. We need to be comfortable with allowing some, if not most, ideas to remain in the we-dont-really-know bucket for extended periods of time. Only then can we reason effectively.
- greglindahl 10y agoHuh, the scientists that I know and studied with don't generally insist on putting ideas into one of two buckets. There are a bunch of buckets. Go ask an astronomer what a "two tooth fairy" theory is: a one tooth fairy theory is almost certainly false, but a two tooth fairy theory is that squared. And yes, this is how people theorize about what cold dark matter is.
- jcoffland 10y agoDoesn't the two tooth fairy theory fall neatly into the almost-certainly-false bucket?
- easuter 10y agoWhat he is saying is that there aren't two buckets, more of a gradient of what's likely and unlikely.
- dmichulke 10y agoI think he just wants to say that people still see the difference between a one-tooth-fairy and a two-tooth-fairy where the latter lies closer to false on the spectrum of "falsity" So, yes both fairies still fit in the bucket but now it's you who put them there and not them :P
- greglindahl 10y agoThe buckets are labeled "one tooth fairy" and "two tooth fairies". Two tooth fairies are much less likely than one. The way this works is that you've got some experimental result which appears to violate the laws of physics. After working hard to make sure that it's not experimental error and the measurement means what you think it means, then you consider a change in the laws of physics. This is a tooth fairy. Is your proposed change ruled out by other experiments? Is there a new experiment you can do which will have an unusual result thanks to the tooth fairy? And so on. If, during this process, you find yourself needing a SECOND change in the laws of physics in order to explain something, then that's a second tooth fairy. You don't want that, because that's even less likely to be real then the first one.
- sean_patel 10y agoWho else came here thinking this was about Cold Fusion, the Markup Language from the 90s? I once met an 'Old Timer' at a Startup Interview here who had it in his resume. He felt threatened by my mere presence and kept referring to me as 'You Millenials' lol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion_Markup_Language
- harshaw 10y agoerm, no, not when the source was scientificamerican.com
- PeCaN 10y agoThe title would work just as well on TheDailyWTF.
- frogfuzion 10y agoYou should seek to understand the importance of older technology and the problems it solved rather than judging the individual for feeling pride in knowing it. If more people did this we wouldn't be solving the same problems over and over again.
- lostapathy 10y agoSadly there's more ColdFusion running around to this day than you'd like to think, managing more important data than it should be. It's frightening.
- frogfuzion 10y agoWhy is that frightening as opposed to any other older web server code/api that is out there? Or even newer code for that matter?
- lostapathy 10y agoAll the ColdFusion code I've ran into still exists because it's too rotten of a mess to be replaced. It tends to be very procedural code with lots of "libraries" that rely on side-effects rather than abstraction. The kind of thing where nobody understands how core concerns (like security) work, they just "know" it seems to work. Except those in the know, know that it doesn't always work, but it's all too fragile to fix it, either. I know I've been extremely unlucky with the CF code I've had to deal with, but I've also never heard of anybody with a healthy CF codebase they aren't eager to replace.
- dekhn 10y agoI think it's already been fairly well understood by a subset of physicists that F&P probably had demonstrated a legitimate, previously unexplained phenomenon and that the primary mistake was in overinterpreting the results and allowing the U's PR department run too far with it. What I find interesting is that when confronted with that idea, many physcists just get stuck at the original claims and don't understand that there is likely a novel phenomenon of some sort, deserving of study.
- bdrool 10y agoWell said. As far as I could see the whole thing was a huge scandal and black eye on the scientific community. The way Robert Park of the American Physical Society acted was particularly bad (he outright accused scientists of fraud without any evidence to back it up). Much of it probably came from competition for funding, as quite a few people got their feathers ruffled once the Dept. of Energy announced it would put funding into Cold Fusion research, thus diverting it from their own projects. Without absolving them of any responsibility for overstating their claims (which they absolutely should shoulder), it is truly a shame Pons & Fleischmann's findings could not be processed more rationally than they were at the time.
- mysterypie 10y agoI was struck by the viciousness of attacks against Fleischmann and Pons in the months after their cold fusion announcement. A few physicists even went out of their way to call them frauds and charlatans -- it wasn't enough to say that Fleischmann and Pons were mistaken. As if two quiet, humble, respected PhD's in electrochemistry were crackpots orchestrating some kind of scam. I feel sorry for the decades of shaming they had to endure (Fleischmann died 4 years ago; Pons is still alive). The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum. When some of the results were turning out to be negative, it seemed that almost no physicist was willing to say, hey wait a minute, it's not cold fusion but maybe there's a new interesting unknown phenomenon there.
- myowncrapulence 10y agoThe attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum. You're describing every internet forum I've ever encountered.
- dzdt 10y agoThis is pseudo-scientific crap. There is a small echo chamber of LENR researchers, egged on by outright swindlers and dreamers whose desire to believe outweighs whatever scientific ability they had. Mainstream physics mostly ignores this sideshow. But articles like this keep popping up, selling the fringe crap to the public as reality.
- StanislavPetrov 10y agoThank you for providing a perfect example of the hubris-filled, ignorant attitude that this article has described in the "scientific community".
- dzdt 10y agoI am not surprised by the downvotes. I know I stated my position brashly. It was a conscious decision to call it like I see it even knowing it would be unpopular in this forum. But let me quibble: my attitude, as that of dismissive mainstream scientists, is based on education not ignorance.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoHmm, one of the authors is a self-proclaimed expert in cold fusion and the other one is a lawyer. I wonder why there were no physicists among the authors.
- out_of_protocol 10y agoDon't forget Muon-catalyzed fusion exists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion Which is _kinda_ cold fusion (and was labeled as such). Also, you can can make energy with it, just not enough to make it commercially viable
- ChuckMcM 10y agoIf find the discussions around this area interesting. In many ways this is exactly how science operates, people come up with new things, either through observation or theory, they think about them and write about them and everyone else gets to decide if they are right or wrong. And there is never all right, or all wrong, but really just more questions. So if A is true does that mean B is true? Can we test to see if B is true? How about C, D, or E? All lead to investigation which leads to experiments which leads to discussion and arguments and finally to something useful. Pons and Fleischman got a raw deal, it was perfectly reasonable for people to say "I don't believe you did your experiments correctly" or "I don't agree with the interpretation of the data you received." But it was wrong to call them fraudsters. It was also wrong to attach a stigma to people who were investigating things that were not supposed to be possible as cranks or gullible. And yet a number of scientists of various levels of skill have continued and very slowly over time there have been experiments that could be repeated that exhibited behaviors that are not easily explained by the existing rules (which mostly are "no nuclear events at these temperatures and pressures.") As the article points out the micrographs of the metal surfaces are of particular interest because even if you don't believe in these events being nuclear, it is equally challenging to come up with a chemical explanation for the features found on the electrodes. Physical scarring that does not look like either plating or erosion, and chemical constituents which are not known to have any sort of exothermic reactivity. So there is something there, not sure what it is and current theories don't explain it well or at all. That should be a source of excitement for scientists right? Doesn't seem so, instead you attacks on the people just trying to run the experiments! When I see people unable to embrace a result for what seems like it would put them in the position of having been wrong earlier, I wonder "What drew this person into science in the first place?"
- dhimes 10y agoPons and Fleischman got a raw deal Maybe in the end, but they kind of brought it on themselves. They were excoriated for going to the press before peer review. That's something that you just didn't do. Then when nobody else could get their results they were in a bad place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13130002
- snarfy 10y agoIt reminds me of the 's-process': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlBG_A4Djp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlBG_A4Djp4 Some elements were formed from slow neutron absorption. Maybe they reproduced it in the lab.
- gnufx 10y agoUnfortunately it's not clear to most people how obviously bogus the cold fusion thing was to an experimental nuclear physicist at the time -- especially if they routinely used palladium targets. (No, that's not having a closed mind or whatever -- just being clued-up.) Anyhow, it had classic characteristics of pseudo-science if you you were familiar with relevant history.
- eric_br 10y agoI looked into this a bunch earlier in the year, if anyone wants a collection of links to sources: https://curiositycontinuer.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/are-lenrs-stuck-in-a-status-trap/ https://curiositycontinuer.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/are-lenr... > Low Energy Nuclear Reactions have been, for a long time, the archetypal crackpot technology. > Huge promises. Failed replication attempts. Dismissal by the academic community. Accusations of handwavey pseudoscience. Advocates generally having low status. Associations with conspiracy theorists. > Anyone associated with it or even expressing anything less than absolute certainty that it’s an unscientific non-starter is risking not just a reputation hit, but aggressive ridicule. > Based on my understanding of the history of science, I think that the feelings I have around talking about this, that fear of that ridicule, should be a red flag. If the incentives are stacked too strongly against an idea (for good or bad reasons), it can become impossible for respectable people to entertain the idea. Often this is a correct approach, the vast majority of amateur science with big claims is nonsense. But what if something valuable was stuck in this trap? > If not for observations of current dramatic failures of the scientific process in nutrition and medicine, my priors against a demonstrable discovery of this magnitude being ignored would be very formidable. As it stands, this would still be shocking civilizational inadequacy, but I can see a process by which it could have occurred. > So I decided it was worth a couple of hours of investigation. Low chance of turning up anything of value, but low investment and in the worst case I’ll know a few more things and be able to hold up a conversation using actual understanding about why it’s bunk if someone ever tries to sell me on it, rather than simply using the “experts are probably right” heuristic. > And now.. I’m not quite sure what to think.
- lostmsu 10y agoClickbait. It's not something. If you read the article (which you shouldn't, because there's no physics), you will notice, that no new confirmed idea came out of it.