12 ms·

So, you must think one of two things, then: 1. Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money

by darawk 7y ago

So, you must think one of two things, then: 1. Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money on this research that has no hope of success. 2. It'd be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion, but Google made some money off of it. Is that right?

danShumway 7y ago
It would be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion and Google controlled the entire stack, yes. This is because in the long, long term, allowing a company to dictate how a technology this important is used could hamper our ability to build on it or improve it. Over a long enough timescale, it would be better if we delayed getting cold fusion so that we could get the same technology later in a less encumbered form. If cold fusion is possible, and Google stops working on it, we can still get it through other means. Other people can pick up Google's slack. If Google manages to crack it, and as a result is able to put legally enforceable restrictions on how it's used, then that's it. There's nowhere to go from there.
- natechols 7y ago
  Those legally enforceable restrictions last for less than two decades; it's already been 30 years since the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    It's also assuming they would do something untoward with the monopoly, rather than just building a thousand new power plants and then making ten trillion dollars by being the lowest cost provider of zero carbon power generation for twenty years.
    - dTal 7y ago
      I don't know how the math works out exactly, but it seems not unlikely that the optimal rollout for curbing carbon emissions as rapidly as possible is not the same as the optimal rollout for maximizing value to shareholders.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        Why not? If someone is buying power from coal instead of you when you have lower costs, that's money you're leaving on the table.
        dTal 7y ago
        I'm sure there's lots of ways it could happen. Off the top of my head - you can't just snap your fingers and start selling power, you need to build the reactors, scale out infrastructure, etc etc. There's huge expenditure involved. If you have a giant pile of money in the bank, earning interest, it might not be worth your while to spend it on that. Another point - how much do you charge for the power? If your goal is to get people to switch, the answer is "as little as you can". If your goal is to make money, the answer is "as much as you can".
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > If you have a giant pile of money in the bank, earning interest, it might not be worth your while to spend it on that. But that's the case either way. If the technology was public domain, somebody would still have to pay to build the reactors, and then it's even harder to raise capital because with more competition there is less profit. > If your goal is to make money, the answer is "as much as you can". But "as much as you can" really means "just under what existing alternatives cost" -- because getting people to switch is how you make money. You don't make money by losing customers to competitors.
- greedo 7y ago
  I have a feeling that if Google is successful at something along the lines of cold fusion, most governments will ignore any patents. The genie will be out of the bottle.
olooney 7y ago
Google can do what they like, of course. Perhaps they'll even make some money off it and create some useful device. I doubt Google has any greater access to SMEs - which in this case would be academic physicists - than ITER or CERN. I do believe that a dollar invested in tokamak research is more wisely spent than a dollar invested in cold fusion.
alach11 7y ago
To me it sounded like olooney was arguing a third option: 3. Google will fail to achieve cold fusion but possibly get some patents which will make them money, but do little to advance overall scientific progress towards economic fusion.
imglorp 7y ago
This tabletop research is orders of magnitudes cheaper than hot fusion. It's a huge reward for tiny risk.
- olooney 7y ago
  Ah, yes, the good old Pascal's mugging[1]. I am aware that cold fusion experiments are both much cheaper, and if successful, considerably safer and cheaper than hot fusion. Yet, there is no plausible mechanism for fusion to occur at room temperature. For two protons (hydrogen ions) to fuse, they must be brought to within 10e-15 m of one another. This requires overcoming the Coulomb repulsion between the two positively charged protons. This in turn requires a great deal of energy, roughly 6 KeV even once quantum tunneling is taken into effect. This corresponds to velocities of roughly 10e6 m/s, or roughly 0.5% the speed of light. This is is called the Gamow energy or the Gamow peak[2]. In hot fusion, this is accomplished by heating a gas to something like 10e7 K, at which point the average energy of any given proton in the plasma is roughly 6 KeV. Not coincidentally, this is also roughly the interior temperature of stars. It has been shown time and again that fusion does occur in a tokamak reactor... just not quite fast enough to overcome the cost of creating and containing the plasma. At room temperature, the fraction of protons traveling at 0.5% of the speed of light is zero for all intents and purposes. Thus, spontaneous does not normally occur at room temperature, which we can all agree on. For cold fusion to proceed, there needs to be some other mechanism capable of making up this difference, either by somehow accelerating protons to an extremely high velocity, or otherwise encouraging them to fuse, perhaps by lowering the Coulomb barrier by some unknown mechanism. For the Fleischmann–Pons experiment (the original "cold fusion" experiment in the 1980s) this was hypothesized to be achieved by the crystal structure of palladium[3]. However, after the failure to replicate the original experiment, this hypotheses appears to have been falsified. In fact, no experiment has ever shown a measurable rate of fusion occurring at low temperatures. And yet, there is the precedent of the Gamow factor. The classical potential for the Coloumb barrier is 3.4 MeV. Therefore, in a purely classical model, it is literally impossible to get two protons to fuse unless they collide at close to the speed of light. Yet Gamow showed that fusion could occur, with some probability, at much lower energies, thanks to a well known phenomenon called quantum tunneling. Why could there not be some other way taking this further? Furthermore, there is the precedent with fission. In the 1930's, many notable scientists were fission could ever be used as a power source. They were aware that fission could be effected by alpha particle bombardment, but this did not seem "energy positive." Sound familiar? And yet, when Hahn and Meitner[5] discovered spontaneous nuclear fission occuring due to a chain reaction in uranium in 1938, it immediately became apparent it could be used as a massive source of energy, and Einstein immediately warned FDR and the Manhattan project began.[4] Why could not a similar story play out for fusion? Cold fusion is tantalizingly plausible and the experiments, as you say, can be conducted on a tabletop. Why not try? My answer, which is of course a subjective judgement, is that good science happens by searching where the light is, exploring the implications and edges of existing theories, not out in the dark, trying things completely at random. Rutherford wasn't bombarding gold foil for the hell of it. Randomly trying things in an atheoretic way in the hopes that a previously undiscovered and unsuspected piece of new physics will drop out is closer to alchemy, and just about as likely to be successful. More than 2,000 years of randomly combining urine and lead resulted in not one ounce of gold. (I grant you that tabletop cold fusion experiments may very well find a new bit of chemistry.) But the argument against is simply this: 6 KeV. It's simply too much. No chemical or electrical process is going to get you that, unless it first turns your experiment into plasma, in which case you're back to hot fusion! It's like throwing pebbles at the moon and calling it the Apollo program. It's not a matter of just getting the right pebble. You can try quartz and obsidian, rough and smooth, for as long as you like, but you're not even beginning to address the invariant in the room, which is that you just can't impart enough kinetic energy to your pebbles to even get them out of Earth's gravity well, much less to the moon. That is why I believe that a dollar spent on cold fusion actually has lower expected payoff than a dollar spent on hot fusion. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamow_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamow_factor [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_exper... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn#Discovery_of_nuclear_fission_(1938) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn#Discovery_of_nuclear...
Barrin92 7y ago
>Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money on this research that has no hope of success. This isn't actually as silly as it sounds. There's a certain culture around self-absorbed futurism alive and kicking within these companies that produces weird and nonsensical projects. One only has to look at Ray Kurzweil who turned from genuine inventor into some sort of nutrition supplement cyber guru and apparently still is employed by Google. There's also a lot of general silliness in the 'smart city' space, or cryogenics and lifespan enhancement. What all of those projects usually have in common is that they predominantly sound like something out of science fiction novels that the people would read who go on and found tech companies.

by darawk 7y ago

danShumway 7y ago

It would be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion and Google controlled the entire stack, yes. This is because in the long, long term, allowing a company to dictate how a technology this important is used could hamper our ability to build on it or improve it. Over a long enough timescale, it would be better if we delayed getting cold fusion so that we could get the same technology later in a less encumbered form. If cold fusion is possible, and Google stops working on it, we can still get it through other means. Other people can pick up Google's slack. If Google manages to crack it, and as a result is able to put legally enforceable restrictions on how it's used, then that's it. There's nowhere to go from there.

natechols 7y ago
Those legally enforceable restrictions last for less than two decades; it's already been 30 years since the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  It's also assuming they would do something untoward with the monopoly, rather than just building a thousand new power plants and then making ten trillion dollars by being the lowest cost provider of zero carbon power generation for twenty years.
  - dTal 7y ago
    I don't know how the math works out exactly, but it seems not unlikely that the optimal rollout for curbing carbon emissions as rapidly as possible is not the same as the optimal rollout for maximizing value to shareholders.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      Why not? If someone is buying power from coal instead of you when you have lower costs, that's money you're leaving on the table.
      - dTal 7y ago
        I'm sure there's lots of ways it could happen. Off the top of my head - you can't just snap your fingers and start selling power, you need to build the reactors, scale out infrastructure, etc etc. There's huge expenditure involved. If you have a giant pile of money in the bank, earning interest, it might not be worth your while to spend it on that. Another point - how much do you charge for the power? If your goal is to get people to switch, the answer is "as little as you can". If your goal is to make money, the answer is "as much as you can".
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > If you have a giant pile of money in the bank, earning interest, it might not be worth your while to spend it on that. But that's the case either way. If the technology was public domain, somebody would still have to pay to build the reactors, and then it's even harder to raise capital because with more competition there is less profit. > If your goal is to make money, the answer is "as much as you can". But "as much as you can" really means "just under what existing alternatives cost" -- because getting people to switch is how you make money. You don't make money by losing customers to competitors.
greedo 7y ago
I have a feeling that if Google is successful at something along the lines of cold fusion, most governments will ignore any patents. The genie will be out of the bottle.

olooney 7y ago

Google can do what they like, of course. Perhaps they'll even make some money off it and create some useful device. I doubt Google has any greater access to SMEs - which in this case would be academic physicists - than ITER or CERN. I do believe that a dollar invested in tokamak research is more wisely spent than a dollar invested in cold fusion.

alach11 7y ago

To me it sounded like olooney was arguing a third option: 3. Google will fail to achieve cold fusion but possibly get some patents which will make them money, but do little to advance overall scientific progress towards economic fusion.

imglorp 7y ago

This tabletop research is orders of magnitudes cheaper than hot fusion. It's a huge reward for tiny risk.

olooney 7y ago
Ah, yes, the good old Pascal's mugging[1]. I am aware that cold fusion experiments are both much cheaper, and if successful, considerably safer and cheaper than hot fusion. Yet, there is no plausible mechanism for fusion to occur at room temperature. For two protons (hydrogen ions) to fuse, they must be brought to within 10e-15 m of one another. This requires overcoming the Coulomb repulsion between the two positively charged protons. This in turn requires a great deal of energy, roughly 6 KeV even once quantum tunneling is taken into effect. This corresponds to velocities of roughly 10e6 m/s, or roughly 0.5% the speed of light. This is is called the Gamow energy or the Gamow peak[2]. In hot fusion, this is accomplished by heating a gas to something like 10e7 K, at which point the average energy of any given proton in the plasma is roughly 6 KeV. Not coincidentally, this is also roughly the interior temperature of stars. It has been shown time and again that fusion does occur in a tokamak reactor... just not quite fast enough to overcome the cost of creating and containing the plasma. At room temperature, the fraction of protons traveling at 0.5% of the speed of light is zero for all intents and purposes. Thus, spontaneous does not normally occur at room temperature, which we can all agree on. For cold fusion to proceed, there needs to be some other mechanism capable of making up this difference, either by somehow accelerating protons to an extremely high velocity, or otherwise encouraging them to fuse, perhaps by lowering the Coulomb barrier by some unknown mechanism. For the Fleischmann–Pons experiment (the original "cold fusion" experiment in the 1980s) this was hypothesized to be achieved by the crystal structure of palladium[3]. However, after the failure to replicate the original experiment, this hypotheses appears to have been falsified. In fact, no experiment has ever shown a measurable rate of fusion occurring at low temperatures. And yet, there is the precedent of the Gamow factor. The classical potential for the Coloumb barrier is 3.4 MeV. Therefore, in a purely classical model, it is literally impossible to get two protons to fuse unless they collide at close to the speed of light. Yet Gamow showed that fusion could occur, with some probability, at much lower energies, thanks to a well known phenomenon called quantum tunneling. Why could there not be some other way taking this further? Furthermore, there is the precedent with fission. In the 1930's, many notable scientists were fission could ever be used as a power source. They were aware that fission could be effected by alpha particle bombardment, but this did not seem "energy positive." Sound familiar? And yet, when Hahn and Meitner[5] discovered spontaneous nuclear fission occuring due to a chain reaction in uranium in 1938, it immediately became apparent it could be used as a massive source of energy, and Einstein immediately warned FDR and the Manhattan project began.[4] Why could not a similar story play out for fusion? Cold fusion is tantalizingly plausible and the experiments, as you say, can be conducted on a tabletop. Why not try? My answer, which is of course a subjective judgement, is that good science happens by searching where the light is, exploring the implications and edges of existing theories, not out in the dark, trying things completely at random. Rutherford wasn't bombarding gold foil for the hell of it. Randomly trying things in an atheoretic way in the hopes that a previously undiscovered and unsuspected piece of new physics will drop out is closer to alchemy, and just about as likely to be successful. More than 2,000 years of randomly combining urine and lead resulted in not one ounce of gold. (I grant you that tabletop cold fusion experiments may very well find a new bit of chemistry.) But the argument against is simply this: 6 KeV. It's simply too much. No chemical or electrical process is going to get you that, unless it first turns your experiment into plasma, in which case you're back to hot fusion! It's like throwing pebbles at the moon and calling it the Apollo program. It's not a matter of just getting the right pebble. You can try quartz and obsidian, rough and smooth, for as long as you like, but you're not even beginning to address the invariant in the room, which is that you just can't impart enough kinetic energy to your pebbles to even get them out of Earth's gravity well, much less to the moon. That is why I believe that a dollar spent on cold fusion actually has lower expected payoff than a dollar spent on hot fusion. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamow_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamow_factor [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_exper... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn#Discovery_of_nuclear_fission_(1938) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn#Discovery_of_nuclear...

Barrin92 7y ago

>Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money on this research that has no hope of success. This isn't actually as silly as it sounds. There's a certain culture around self-absorbed futurism alive and kicking within these companies that produces weird and nonsensical projects. One only has to look at Ray Kurzweil who turned from genuine inventor into some sort of nutrition supplement cyber guru and apparently still is employed by Google. There's also a lot of general silliness in the 'smart city' space, or cryogenics and lifespan enhancement. What all of those projects usually have in common is that they predominantly sound like something out of science fiction novels that the people would read who go on and found tech companies.