14 ms·

Lessons from cold fusion, 30 years on

73 points by okket 7y ago

Causality1 7y ago
Cold fusion eventually being demonstrated wouldn't surprise me, since it's not terribly hard to create fusion in relatively mild environments such as a fusor. What's difficult is getting more energy out of it than you put in to generate the reaction.
- short_sells_poo 7y ago
  I'm not an expert but my impression was that a fusor isn't cold fusion at all. The device itself does not heat up too much perhaps, but it literally accelerates ions to fusion temperatures of >45 million Kelvin.
  - sfasfsafd 7y ago
    It's a partly a problem of semantics, really. You can't really say it's a fusor runs at >45K because you're not in thermodynamic eq. (and therefore, there is no T). Likewise a laser runs at "negative" T, but which is hotter than infinity T (pop inversion happens at T<0). There's no contradiction because T is again defined in eq., so we're just abusing terms. So if we got net energy out of a fusor it would, for all practical purposes, be "cold" fusion. In fact, it doesn't have a T at all ;)
octocode 7y ago
For some reason I was expecting this to be about Adobe ColdFusion
- octocode 7y ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted? I honestly expected an article about ColdFusion when I opened it. Someone else even posted the same thing half an hour later...
- TwelveNights 7y ago
  Same. It took me a second to piece together the fact that the link directs to nature.com and that it's the other type of cold fusion.
- perilunar 7y ago
  Adobe ColdFusion. Nothing to do with adobe, temperature, or nuclear fusion.
sunkenvicar 7y ago
In other news, humans being human.
raverbashing 7y ago
I think one of the main issues with the F&P experiment was that the Nobel committee was too quick to award them the Nobel Prize If they had waited a year or two then everything would have calmed down by then (and no award, of course) and less hype about the experiments. > We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make controversial claims. The ridicule that was sometimes directed at Fleischmann and Pons was bound to make them double down. When researchers turn out to have been mistaken, they must be allowed a way back without disgrace. Great quote
- simonh 7y ago
  I don't believe a Nobel Prize was awarded for that research, and can't find any mention of it. Which award are you referring to?
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    I stand corrected! I think it was some kind of Mandela effect of my part Nevertheless, the hype was very high at the time.
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      Pons, Fleischman and their university were responsible for creating a bunch of media hype and releasing the information to the press before publishing (Jones too). The author of the nature article kinda forgot to mention that somehow; that should be the real lesson of this -the media sucks at reporting anything relevant in the sciences (and everything else). People in our physics department had tested it and dismissed the claims almost immediately. It wasn't rocket science.
      - kbutler 7y ago
        Pons, Fleischman and the university blew it, on both the science (didn't measure neutrons, which are the signature of fusion) and the press (pumped the hype without the science). Jones was much more reserved, and discussed with the press only as a result of the media attention https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-PHYSICS-RESEARCHER-BREAKS-SILENCE-ON-A-SIMILAR-NUCLEAR-BREAKTHROUGH.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-PHYSI... """ But Jones downplays any comparison to his work with such historical breakthroughs as the invention of the light bulb or the hydrogen bomb. "We have a lot more work ahead of us," he said. "We need to have some patience and do the scientific groundwork before we jump to too many conclusions." """
winrid 7y ago
Oh gosh. Thought this would be about Adobe Coldfusion.
- dorkwood 7y ago
  What lessons were there to be learned from Adobe ColdFusion?
  - Semiapies 7y ago
    Tag-based code is a PITA to work with. However, it was nice to just run a semi-complex SQL query inside a cfQuery tag, at least compared to building queries in ASP and the like at the time...so long as you remember that you have to explicitly sanitize your inputs. An easy way to view the contents of a data structure is nice. And most importantly: there's much better stuff now than even up-to-date ColdFusion.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    As someone who still uses CFML today (not Adobe ColdFusion but rather a fully open source workalike called Lucee, which runs in the JVM and is licensed as LGPL) I can say that there's a lot I have learned. I learned that having a poor reputation among the influential opinionists is not a strong indicator of a language's inherent worth. As a language designed to achieve a specific purpose I think it is equal (or superior) to many options with a better reputation, e.g. PHP, Ruby, Python, Jython, Groovy. I also learned that a language can be substantially improved with small, incremental improvements. Modern CFML has an JavaScript-inspired syntax, objects, closures, lambda, and countless benefits that come from running directly on the JVM.
    - jsgo 7y ago
      My supervisor and one of my coworkers are coldfusion (can’t remember which version number) developers. I’ve never worked in it, but I could easily see someone with experience in ASP.NET or one of the Java web technologies JSPs being able to understand at a high level coldfusion code and vice versa. It seems to prefer code being in the same page as the presentation (at least, from what I’ve seen them do), which may go against others, but seems to work out fine there. Also, they can hammer out a solution to things pretty quickly with it. I don’t know if this is so much the language or the developer, but at a minimum it doesn’t appear to be a hindrance to development.
raesene9 7y ago
There's an active community of companies and individuals still working on what gets called LENR (cold fusion being a bit of a tainted term). However it seems to be an area that's rife with the potentials for scams, with some participants claiming to be "almost at the point of commercial LENR setups" for many years now (e.g. Andrea Rossi and his E-Cat work) Sites like https://www.lenr-forum.com/ https://www.lenr-forum.com/ and https://e-catworld.com/ https://e-catworld.com/ have more info. on it. I'd like to see one or more of the companies get there, but having followed it on and off for some years, I'm not holding out a lot of hope...
- hannob 7y ago
  It's not an area with the potential for scams. It's just scam. When someone tries to sell you a product that goes against the accepted laws of physics, because some flawed experiment decades ago indicated that they might be wrong, you can be certain that it's a scam.
  - mrfusion 7y ago
    When did we finalize physics? From my point of view, if they show the evidence then I’ll believe them.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      Physics isn't finalized, but changing its accepted laws takes consistent experiments violating the existing ones.
    - hannob 7y ago
      Sure, there's always the potential for new physics. But honestly... I wouldn't look for it in some crackpot internet forums. I mean click on the link. The first thing I saw there was people speculating that the latest nature paper is part of some military plot, because they all know LENR works, yet they want to hide the fact from the public as long as possible.
  - snarfy 7y ago
sytelus 7y ago
TLDR; In 1989 couple of scientist claimed success in cold fusion and tried publishing paper in Nature. No one can reproduce the experiments so Nature didn't published and authors withdrew paper anyway. In coming years, those scientists tried suing and name calling instead of accepting that they were wrong. There is nothing insightful in this article apart from above tldr.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  "We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make controversial claims." Once Pons and Fleischman doubled-down on their position, they became their own worst enemies, but is seemed to me that they were initially just naive about the reception such an announcement would get. This was not a Rossi-style scam, or something that could have harmful consequences in the way that, for example, anti-vaccination pseudo-science does.
ansible 7y ago
Cold Fusion, for me, was the first time I felt I was living in the future. I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups. Then a guy was attending the press conference, and posting what was announced. (The 1989 version of live blogging.) And then I was able to download the Pons & Fleischmann paper (as opposed to waiting months for it to be published), and print it out. Though I didn't have the correct set of troff macros... That was pretty frickin' cool. That showed what living in the Information Age was all about. As for CF itself, I was a bit skeptical, and followed the news closely for a while on others trying to reproduce the results.
- at-fates-hands 7y ago
  > I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups. I remember my Physics teacher in Jr High talking about this development. He took a week of classes to debunk their claims and ended the week with the phrase, "They will have their 15 minutes of fame and then quietly retire and disappear from the scientific community." Which is pretty much what happened.
mrfusion 7y ago
Here’s an often missed topic in this discussion. A method for lenr already exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion Sure it’s not over unity right now but it is fusion at room temperature. And it’s always possible we might find lower energy ways to make muons at some point.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gnufx 7y ago
Really, this stuff had the characteristics of pathological science even if you didn't have the perspective of actually doing nuclear physics with palladium, and barrier penetration on other systems. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790. It was clearly nonsense, on which I'd have put substantial money. I'd also have put money on the apparently superliminal neutrinos of a while back being due to the sort of issue that was eventually found; in contrast, those experimenters deserve credit over their handling of the result. Contrary to the article, you really shouldn't be so open minded that your brains fall out, as they say. Competent experimentalists doubt their own anomalous results, just as the bug is most likely in your code, not the compiler.

73 points by okket 7y ago

Cold fusion eventually being demonstrated wouldn't surprise me, since it's not terribly hard to create fusion in relatively mild environments such as a fusor. What's difficult is getting more energy out of it than you put in to generate the reaction.

short_sells_poo 7y ago
I'm not an expert but my impression was that a fusor isn't cold fusion at all. The device itself does not heat up too much perhaps, but it literally accelerates ions to fusion temperatures of >45 million Kelvin.
- sfasfsafd 7y ago
  It's a partly a problem of semantics, really. You can't really say it's a fusor runs at >45K because you're not in thermodynamic eq. (and therefore, there is no T). Likewise a laser runs at "negative" T, but which is hotter than infinity T (pop inversion happens at T<0). There's no contradiction because T is again defined in eq., so we're just abusing terms. So if we got net energy out of a fusor it would, for all practical purposes, be "cold" fusion. In fact, it doesn't have a T at all ;)

octocode 7y ago

For some reason I was expecting this to be about Adobe ColdFusion

octocode 7y ago
Not sure why this is getting downvoted? I honestly expected an article about ColdFusion when I opened it. Someone else even posted the same thing half an hour later...
TwelveNights 7y ago
Same. It took me a second to piece together the fact that the link directs to nature.com and that it's the other type of cold fusion.
perilunar 7y ago
Adobe ColdFusion. Nothing to do with adobe, temperature, or nuclear fusion.

sunkenvicar 7y ago

In other news, humans being human.

raverbashing 7y ago

I think one of the main issues with the F&P experiment was that the Nobel committee was too quick to award them the Nobel Prize If they had waited a year or two then everything would have calmed down by then (and no award, of course) and less hype about the experiments. > We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make controversial claims. The ridicule that was sometimes directed at Fleischmann and Pons was bound to make them double down. When researchers turn out to have been mistaken, they must be allowed a way back without disgrace. Great quote

simonh 7y ago
I don't believe a Nobel Prize was awarded for that research, and can't find any mention of it. Which award are you referring to?
- raverbashing 7y ago
  I stand corrected! I think it was some kind of Mandela effect of my part Nevertheless, the hype was very high at the time.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    Pons, Fleischman and their university were responsible for creating a bunch of media hype and releasing the information to the press before publishing (Jones too). The author of the nature article kinda forgot to mention that somehow; that should be the real lesson of this -the media sucks at reporting anything relevant in the sciences (and everything else). People in our physics department had tested it and dismissed the claims almost immediately. It wasn't rocket science.
    - kbutler 7y ago
      Pons, Fleischman and the university blew it, on both the science (didn't measure neutrons, which are the signature of fusion) and the press (pumped the hype without the science). Jones was much more reserved, and discussed with the press only as a result of the media attention https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-PHYSICS-RESEARCHER-BREAKS-SILENCE-ON-A-SIMILAR-NUCLEAR-BREAKTHROUGH.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-PHYSI... """ But Jones downplays any comparison to his work with such historical breakthroughs as the invention of the light bulb or the hydrogen bomb. "We have a lot more work ahead of us," he said. "We need to have some patience and do the scientific groundwork before we jump to too many conclusions." """

winrid 7y ago

Oh gosh. Thought this would be about Adobe Coldfusion.

dorkwood 7y ago
What lessons were there to be learned from Adobe ColdFusion?
- Semiapies 7y ago
  Tag-based code is a PITA to work with. However, it was nice to just run a semi-complex SQL query inside a cfQuery tag, at least compared to building queries in ASP and the like at the time...so long as you remember that you have to explicitly sanitize your inputs. An easy way to view the contents of a data structure is nice. And most importantly: there's much better stuff now than even up-to-date ColdFusion.
- sjwright 7y ago
  As someone who still uses CFML today (not Adobe ColdFusion but rather a fully open source workalike called Lucee, which runs in the JVM and is licensed as LGPL) I can say that there's a lot I have learned. I learned that having a poor reputation among the influential opinionists is not a strong indicator of a language's inherent worth. As a language designed to achieve a specific purpose I think it is equal (or superior) to many options with a better reputation, e.g. PHP, Ruby, Python, Jython, Groovy. I also learned that a language can be substantially improved with small, incremental improvements. Modern CFML has an JavaScript-inspired syntax, objects, closures, lambda, and countless benefits that come from running directly on the JVM.
  - jsgo 7y ago
    My supervisor and one of my coworkers are coldfusion (can’t remember which version number) developers. I’ve never worked in it, but I could easily see someone with experience in ASP.NET or one of the Java web technologies JSPs being able to understand at a high level coldfusion code and vice versa. It seems to prefer code being in the same page as the presentation (at least, from what I’ve seen them do), which may go against others, but seems to work out fine there. Also, they can hammer out a solution to things pretty quickly with it. I don’t know if this is so much the language or the developer, but at a minimum it doesn’t appear to be a hindrance to development.

raesene9 7y ago

There's an active community of companies and individuals still working on what gets called LENR (cold fusion being a bit of a tainted term). However it seems to be an area that's rife with the potentials for scams, with some participants claiming to be "almost at the point of commercial LENR setups" for many years now (e.g. Andrea Rossi and his E-Cat work) Sites like https://www.lenr-forum.com/ https://www.lenr-forum.com/ and https://e-catworld.com/ https://e-catworld.com/ have more info. on it. I'd like to see one or more of the companies get there, but having followed it on and off for some years, I'm not holding out a lot of hope...

hannob 7y ago
It's not an area with the potential for scams. It's just scam. When someone tries to sell you a product that goes against the accepted laws of physics, because some flawed experiment decades ago indicated that they might be wrong, you can be certain that it's a scam.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  When did we finalize physics? From my point of view, if they show the evidence then I’ll believe them.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    Physics isn't finalized, but changing its accepted laws takes consistent experiments violating the existing ones.
  - hannob 7y ago
    Sure, there's always the potential for new physics. But honestly... I wouldn't look for it in some crackpot internet forums. I mean click on the link. The first thing I saw there was people speculating that the latest nature paper is part of some military plot, because they all know LENR works, yet they want to hide the fact from the public as long as possible.
- snarfy 7y ago

sytelus 7y ago

TLDR; In 1989 couple of scientist claimed success in cold fusion and tried publishing paper in Nature. No one can reproduce the experiments so Nature didn't published and authors withdrew paper anyway. In coming years, those scientists tried suing and name calling instead of accepting that they were wrong. There is nothing insightful in this article apart from above tldr.

mannykannot 7y ago
"We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make controversial claims." Once Pons and Fleischman doubled-down on their position, they became their own worst enemies, but is seemed to me that they were initially just naive about the reception such an announcement would get. This was not a Rossi-style scam, or something that could have harmful consequences in the way that, for example, anti-vaccination pseudo-science does.

ansible 7y ago

Cold Fusion, for me, was the first time I felt I was living in the future. I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups. Then a guy was attending the press conference, and posting what was announced. (The 1989 version of live blogging.) And then I was able to download the Pons & Fleischmann paper (as opposed to waiting months for it to be published), and print it out. Though I didn't have the correct set of troff macros... That was pretty frickin' cool. That showed what living in the Information Age was all about. As for CF itself, I was a bit skeptical, and followed the news closely for a while on others trying to reproduce the results.

at-fates-hands 7y ago
> I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups. I remember my Physics teacher in Jr High talking about this development. He took a week of classes to debunk their claims and ended the week with the phrase, "They will have their 15 minutes of fame and then quietly retire and disappear from the scientific community." Which is pretty much what happened.

mrfusion 7y ago

Here’s an often missed topic in this discussion. A method for lenr already exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion Sure it’s not over unity right now but it is fusion at room temperature. And it’s always possible we might find lower energy ways to make muons at some point.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

gnufx 7y ago

Really, this stuff had the characteristics of pathological science even if you didn't have the perspective of actually doing nuclear physics with palladium, and barrier penetration on other systems. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790. It was clearly nonsense, on which I'd have put substantial money. I'd also have put money on the apparently superliminal neutrinos of a while back being due to the sort of issue that was eventually found; in contrast, those experimenters deserve credit over their handling of the result. Contrary to the article, you really shouldn't be so open minded that your brains fall out, as they say. Competent experimentalists doubt their own anomalous results, just as the bug is most likely in your code, not the compiler.