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Cold Fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, U.S. Navy Researchers Reopen Case
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mordymoop 6y agoI was surprised to find that there is a lot of theoretical justification for possible mechanisms of cold fusion, and a lot of experimental evidence that must either be suggestive of something interesting, or indicative of bold-faced and widespread fraud. It was also interesting the discover that the original experiment was dismissed because other experimenters failed to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons result ... despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately. For example, not meeting the same level of hydrogen loading in the metal matrix. It could all absolutely be BS, but I was surprised that it wasn’t actually proven to be BS; it was just not proven to not be BS, and was then made “embarrassing”.
- simonh 6y agoYou can’t prove a negative though, the onus was on F&S to prove their result and they couldn’t do that. They had misinterpreted some of their results (they had not detected gamma rays or fusion byproducts) and had made errors in their experimental design. Basically they were chemists, and their claims of fusion were based on misunderstandings of the physics. A way to think about this is just to eliminate fusion from their claims. Ignore that, they didn’t have any evidence for it. The bottom line was, could they reliably generate useful heat. The answer to that was also no. So really, what are you left with? Having said that room temperature fusion is a real thing. You can build a fusor in a garage with commonly available parts. It may well be possible to generate very low levels of fusion reactions in various ways, but generating useful energy that way may never be possible. Best of luck for these people for trying, you never know and maybe some useful insights will come from it.
- phkahler 6y ago>> Basically they were chemists, and their claims of fusion were based on misunderstandings of the physics. That's an interesting interpretation. My interpretation at the time was that they are chemists and ruled out chemical reactions as the heat source. They concluded it must be physics. Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment. They seemed really arrogant to me. And here we are 30 years later with it unsettled.
- gus_massa 6y agoThe problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. Compare this with high temperature superconductivity. If you get a time machine and go to 1985 and try to promote high temperature superconductivity, nobody will take you seriously. But a team discover one material and published a clear recipe to built it. Other team tried some variations, and discovered an easier recipe to build them and published it. So soon everybody and their dog was making new variants, and new variants, and new variants... A few years ago, they gave one in the physics' lab for undergraduate students, and we made a few measurements for a month carefully because they don't tolerate humidity. Until someone put it in a glass with water and ice to measure the properties at 0°C. Also, now you can also see the recipe in a video in YouTube by "Applied Science": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU , the guy has some advanced lab, but nothing too advanced. The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.
- phkahler 6y ago>> The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. That certainly seems to be the case today, but it was not the case when physicists rejected the claim outright. In other words, the rejection came before the reproducibility problems.
- gus_massa 6y agoI can tell you exactly what the editor said after reading the first paper about high temperature superconductivity: fake quote> Nah. The nice thing about physics is that it doesn't matter if the community reject the idea. If you have a nice experiment that is reproducible and has clear and easy instructions, sooner or later the community will accept it, and you may get a Nobel price. If the experiment is weird and you are unlucky, it can take a few decades. Here is another weird experiment, with another weird result, but it's reproducible and has clear and easy to follow instructions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
- lumost 6y agoDigging into the research here, there are a lot of results which indicate some form of LENR should be feasible in suitably complex environments. As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation. The experimenters researching this clearly don't have a great way to control for other factors in an experimental setting either. As an example, there are multiple reports of transmutations being observed following a hydride doping experiment... however these are all done by gas spectrometer. It's unclear from the experiments whether there happened to be random impurities in the hydride prior to doping. Similarly heat/neutron measurements are really difficult to get right and be convincing.
- kergonath 6y agoAs a materials physicist, I have no idea what you mean by this: > As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation. Screening effect from what? There is nothing surprising in the way hydrogen behaves in a metal. We can simulate that with great accuracy, in fact we do it all the time as hydrogen embrittlement is an important issue in metallurgy. This type of cold fusion would require two nuclei overcoming humongous energy barriers to get close enough to each other. No form of motion within a crystal lattice or no amount of deformation is going to provide that. The energies involved are about 6 orders of magnitude short. Heat is trivial to measure, we’ve been doing that since the 19th century. Neutrons are not particularly difficult either, we’ve been doing that since the 1940s.
- zamalek 6y agoI don't think LENR is possible, but I'd love to be wrong and I do think that some money and energy should be spent investigating it. What I find interesting is some phenomena that was clearly present in some of these demonstrations - even if it wasn't LENR. The anomalous results are worth investigating because there may be unknown physics lurking there, but anything related to CF is scientifically taboo.
- fsh 6y agoFleischmann and Pons had a lab sponsored by IMRA (the research division of Toyota) where they were supposed to repeat their experiment. They spent 12 million dollars without getting any believable results. The idea that their research was somehow suppressed is laughably wrong.
- jostmey 6y agoIf cold fusion exists that produces more energy than it consumes, it would take some extreme conditions. If cold fusion could appear under normal-ish conditions, we would have already observed it and tapped into it
- kosievdmerwe 6y agoGiven that we only discovered and built dead downwind faster than the wind vehicles in the 2000s I wouldn't be so sure. And for being relatively simple classical physics it was very controversial, with even some physics professors denying it was possible.
- roflc0ptic 6y agoWe did that? That sounds awesome. Source?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kosievdmerwe 6y agoSome sources: https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/museum/ddwfttw.htm https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/museum/ddwfttw.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_%28land_yacht%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_%28land_yacht%29 The search term to use is "DDWFTTW" It's a bit confusing, but some important points are: * It only works if you're on land, you can't have a flying device that does this. * Boats can sail faster than the wind speed, but have do so at an angle to the wind. (Just to convince yourself that this isn't completely strange). * The wheels rotation on the ground is what drives the propeller, not the other way around.
- ratsforhorses 6y agoJust thought I'd add a relevant link as the phrase "dead downwind" caught my eye https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht)#:~:text=On%20July%202%2C%202010%2C%20Blackbird,the%20speed%20of%20the%20wind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht)#:~:te....
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoYeah, I always heard it was complete BS, but when you look into it there have been some weird phenomena reported. Unfortunately no one seems to be able to reliably produce them.
- sdenton4 6y agoWeird phenomena are a great way to justify a large investment of time and effort for yourself... But what the world wants is BORING phenomena.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI would say the science world wants weird phenomena, boringly reproducible.
- Robotbeat 6y agoOne thing that is an indispensable lesson of graduate research: actually trying to make a cutting edge measurement and pick signal from noise is INCREDIBLY hard. It's easy to underestimate just how noisy frakking everything is. Every thing looks complex and uncertain and it's only through extremely hard work and careful measurement that you can know ANYTHING. So complexity is actually the norm. The irreducible complexity of noise.
- jdkee 6y agoThe weak SNR ratio would lead one to believe that the results are bullshit, no?
- Robotbeat 6y agoYup.
- XorNot 6y agoThe real tell tale is when the effect starts diminishing as SNR improves. The giveaway that the EM drive is junk is that the effect has gotten smaller everytime the apparatus has removed a source of error. Nothing is ever conclusive, but it points to something which should violate the known laws of physics really just being a pile of systematic error.
- mxcrossb 6y ago> despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately I’ve been seeing this claim in another field: about hydroxychloquinine. Every time a study comes out which doesn’t show a benefit, people rush in saying “that’s because they forgot X, didn’t dose the right amount of Y, etc” I’m actually not sure what to make of this phenomenon in general. I will say though that when you’re trying to test a hypothesis, completely replicating another experiment isn’t necessary. You should test it under a variety of conditions. That makes it easier to avoid the same hidden mistakes that the original experiment might have included.
- andrewflnr 6y agoYou should definitely also try the exact original conditions. Think about reducing a tricky bug: you start with the exact input and code that first caused the problem, then try removing constraints to see what preserves the bug. Ed; I should clarify: you start with whatever big nasty test scenario you need to make sure you can reproduce the effect at all, and only then can you start changing the conditions and be confident you're still measuring the same thing.
- mxcrossb 6y agoYes but science and computer programming are fundamentally different activities. The programmer tries to reproduce the bug because his main fear is that he can’t see its effect. But the scientist’s main fear is that the experimental setup does not robustly test the underlying hypothesis. If you reproduce exactly the conditions (and remember you will always be criticized for missing X), the best you can learn is whether the previous result was not completely fabricated (or statistical noise). It’s much more productive to subject a result to a wide battery of tests.
- andrewflnr 6y agoIf you're dealing with an unknown, confusing phenomenon, you don't know what the underlying hypothesis is. You don't know yet what constitutes rigorous testing and what is just wandering off into the weeds. So you need to start with seeing if the thing happens at all. You do in fact need to know whether the previous result was garbage before it can be productive to do a wide battery of tests. And "wide" depends on how sensitive to conditions your effect is, which you also don't know yet. Your closest thing to an anchor is the initial claimed setup, so start there.
- kergonath 6y ago> despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately They (Fleischmann & Pons) did not prove anything in the first place, so after that the “not the true experiment” thing is a fallacy. There will always be too much of something or not enough of anything. You can never replicate exactly an experiment, but this does not prevent all of science from progressing and reproducing results. Physics does not care about who operates the experiment. So if something works only when specific people try it, it does not give any confidence in the results. In other words, it does set the bullshit alarm ringing. There is no theoretical foundation for cold fusion, and no known mechanism for it to work. So even if it does exist, their stance of “just trust us, and let us move the goalposts about replicability” is just voodoo and, yes, bullshit.
- lenkite 6y agoI thought Japanese researchers had already replicated the "anomalous heat generation" in LENR. https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/cold-fusion-japan-takes-the-lead/ https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/cold-fusion-japan-takes-the-le... Why is this still considered BS if independent research teams have reproduced this ?
- simonh 6y agoIt's important to distinguish between current actual results from labs working very carefully and methodically and turning up interesting anomalous results, and the original claims made by F&P. Yes there is interesting physics here and there's a lot we don't know about the behaviour of hydrogen and deuterium in dense metallic crystal lattices. Who knows, that behaviour might even have something to do with fusion. That's separate from what F&P were claiming 30 years ago. They claimed to have produced 'tremendous heat' and to have detected evidence of fusion (gamma rays and fusion products). They couldn't replicate the heat measurements, there were experimental errors that mean we can't know if they had generated excess heat at all, and they were simply mistaken that the evidence they had gathered indicated fusion. Two things can both be true at the same time. These new experiments might indicate heat generation and might indicate fusion, and the F&P experiments demonstrated none of those things. Those are not contradictory statements. Heck, F&P might even have stimulated fusion in their experiments. It's impossible to prove a negative. The point is they didn't demonstrate that at all.
- deepstack 6y agoThis is interesting development. Back then when Pons and Fleischmann first came out with this in 89, they were heavily ridiculed ( or smeared) by main stream academics like MIT. It also turns out MIT has received a lot of money to do hot fusion research. Wouldn't be the first time that interests of funding interfered with science.
- geocrasher 6y agoI thought for a moment this was going to be an article about Cold Fusion (Markup Language) making a comeback. NOOOOOOoooooooo Oh, it's just that scientific physics stuff again. I can breathe easily now!
- endisneigh 6y agoWould nuclear fusion open up new avenues to reverse climate change?
- aqme28 6y agoIt would, but would likely be too late for most of the impacts of climate change
- CapitalistCartr 6y agoIf it proves to be cheap enough, yes. We could eliminate all fossil fuel use, and use electricity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
- chromaton 6y agoAnd if it's too cheap, waste heat from all the electricity we'll be using will heat up the earth again.
- raziel2701 6y agoBut if we're using this clean energy and the levels of green house gases is lowered then the excess heat will simply leave the planet. Total non-issue.
- ch4s3 6y agoIt depends on price. If it proves to be more expensive then fusion, no. However if it's much cheaper than wind, we could use it to pull CO2 directly out of the air on a massive scale. One might imagine a sort of lo-fi global thermostat, an interesting and somewhat scary thought.
- jodrellblank 6y agoWe do that on a small scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal#Direct_air_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal#Direct_... - "a pilot plant in British Columbia, Canada that has been in use since 2015[51] and is able to extract about a tonne of CO2 a day.". CO2 is in the atmosphere at 400 parts per million, i.e. to get 400Kg of CO2 out you need to suck 1,000,000Kg of air through (at minimum, assuming you can get every single CO2 molecule out), which sounds like a lot of matter to move and a power-hungry approach. The world emits about 37 billion tons of CO2 per year which is 33.5 billion Kg, so we need 90 million of those pilot plants to remove a year of CO2 in 365 days of operation, at a cost of $0.3T to $0.6T per year.
- zackees 6y ago> “Quite frankly, [to] other folks who have tried this over the years, it was considered a career ender,” An astounding indictment across the whole scientific community that attempting to investigate an energy source that would advance human kind to essentially free energy would be... a career ender. There is simply no reason for this. Think how many resources has been put into anti-carbon messaging to transform the economies and the promotion of a global tax. Meanwhile a technology that can make the whole CO2 problem obsolete is taken to the back alley like this and figuratively murdered. Why?
- kosievdmerwe 6y agoYup, I feel no field of scientific research should be off-limits (except for some immoral research like certain experiments on humans). The only career ender should be scientific dishonesty. An experiment that is rigorous and scientifically sound should always be valid.
- mrybczyn 6y agoIn theory, this is the purpose of tenure. Advancing to tenure status should make your subsequent research into LENR unassailable. In practice, I guess you still have to toe the line, and apply for grants...
- lumost 6y agoUniversities pay professors who have research topics attractive to funding agencies and students. If you saw a physics professor specializing in Bohmian mechanics and pilot-wave theory, you'd steer clear. The reputation of CF as a pseudo-science also points towards a career ender.
- jokteur 6y agoHowever, Bohmian mechanics are not pseudo-science. It is a beautiful useless interpretation of quantum mechanics that has many problems, but at least it is still science. Cold fusion I agree tends towards pseudo-science. I can understand that it makes sense to teach the most useful stuff at the university, however I do wish that I could have had the choice to follow an optional "obscure, useless topics" lecture during my years in university.
- dtgriscom 6y agoCold fusion is one of my favorite hypothetical technologies. The rationale makes so much sense, and it would be such a game-changer. (I'm guessing it doesn't actually exist, but still... lovely idea...)
- pfdietz 6y agoThe rationale makes no sense. You plug the numbers into the equation for the expected fusion rate and you get something indistinguishable from zero.
- raverbashing 6y agoYes because all new discoveries obey the known equations right? - Ultraviolet catastrophe - Solar neutrino rate - Precession of Mercury etc
- spuz 6y agoIt sounds like you're agreeing with the statement "the rationale makes no sense".
- raverbashing 6y ago"The rationale makes no sense" cannot be used to disprove something with lots of unknowns. Of course having a theory that match current understanding would be helpful.
- pfdietz 6y agoGood thing I wasn't trying to do that. What I was doing was arguing the statement "The rationale makes so much sense" is bullshit. No, the rationale made no sense. It directly contradicted what was known. Now, sometimes things that make no sense turn out to be true, but that's very rare (especially when the newly claimed thing requires not one but multiple miracles to be real), and not what I was addressing.
- nuclearwast 6y agoIt is almost certain that some unknown phenomenon is happening with palladium/nickel and hydrogen/deuterium. I first heard of the 1989 pons and fleischmann experiment in late '90 but didn't know what to think of it, I was in high-school, information was scarce. Then in 2008 or 2009' I found a memoir from a science historian about it. It spoke in great detail about the pressure to publish quickly before any rival the vested interest of the hugely influencal MIT in "hot fusion" (billions in funding). They they didn't even try to half-ass an experiment, then dragged pons and fleischmann in the mud so deeply they had to quit academic life and anyone who tried to follow their track would have their funding cut. Because most other physicist ( Pons & Fleischman were actualy electro-chemist) were not able to acheive the same results. Which was kind of to be expected: no peer review article was published they just "announced" their finding. Then everyone rush to blindly replicate months of hard work from a field they barely knew. Then it became a fraud, then fake science. Anyone trying the "forbidden" experiment would lose his reputation and any hope of a career. It doesn't get more anti science then cold fusion. Only then I realised wikipedia was full of censorship and could not be relied upon for anything remontly controversal. Then came 2011, andrea rossi and the e-cat. Andrea rossi has a ph in... philosphy, convicted frauster in italy and inventor of a new cold fusion device. Even then it sparked ton of interest in cold fusion (LENR for low energy nuclear reaction, because it's not fusion that is happening: no hard radiation, no instant huge release of energy, etc.) and the next decade is a cycle of trying to debunk rossi, him promising a "working plant" next year, mistery client and feeding crumbs of evidence, proof and information over a decade. And it's not finished yet. You can follow most of it on https://e-catworld.com/ https://e-catworld.com/ . People there are not quite QAnon level of crazy but they will mention ufo various free energy stuff of regular basis. I remember reading news about navy SPAWAR research on cold fusion there. But yeah in a nutshell huge claims, little results (but SOME result that is the annoying part).
- mromanuk 6y agoyes, finally! Andrea Rossi is right and he is winning against the snakes.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
- ajarmst 6y agoIn Atomic Adventures, James Mahaffey (who I unreservedly recommend) outlines the history, claims and problems with Cold Fusion. He was a member of one of the first teams to try to replicate the results, and points out that (from the point of view of working atomic scientists at the time) it was very clear that whatever this was, it was not fusion, as it lacked features that would have to be present if it were. Notably, the scientists pictured standing next to it weren't dead. It was also first announced in a press release, not a journal and the actual details of the experiment were initially kept secret (and not knowing the details was used as a reason that replication was failing) for commercial reasons. Whatever Pons and Fleischmann were doing, it pretty clearly wasn't science. It had none of the features of scientific enquiry, but nearly all of the features of a grift, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years.
- bagels 6y agoWhy would they necessarily be dead? Wouldn't it depend on how many neutrons were emitted?
- Robotbeat 6y ago...directly proportional to the amount of heat produced (which was a lot).
- JackFr 6y ago> Notably, the scientists pictured standing next to it weren't dead. That’s clever and snarky and not at all helpful. And if I’m to believe the comments about table top fusors below, it’s not even true.
- Robotbeat 6y agoTable top fusors do not produce the same amount of neutron flux as the cold fusion result (with huge amounts of heat production) would imply. Just a few neutrons here or there with fusors.
- 6y ago
- 8note 6y agoIf cold fusion is possible, how are there still reactants around?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoIf cold fusion is possible, it is possible under very specific conditions. Those conditions do not exist in normal environments.
- odyssey7 6y agoInteresting question, though the same could be asked for hot fusion.
- azernik 6y agoThe whole point of "cold" fusion is that it does not require immense pressures or temperatures; hot fusion hasn't consumed all of the hydrogen in the universe because those pressures and temperatures don't exist in most places.
- R0b0t1 6y agoIf combustion is possible, how are there still combustible fuels?
- at_a_remove 6y agoAneutronic fusion exists. Neutrons were expected by some because normal fusion produces them ... but if it is cold fusion, there's no reason to believe that would happen. Indeed, you should throw out as many expectations as you possibly can if you're dealing with a new process. The first and best measurement to contemplate is the presence of helium. Of course, you have to worry about how much is in the atmosphere, and then how much might somehow be trapped in the bulk material of the apparatus itself. Still, a sudden surge of helium well beyond that of what might be found in the atmosphere would be telling. We all remember calorimetry from high school and just how difficult it was to do proper measurements. And who knows what odd chemical reactions might release or subtract heat when you sit around cooking metal for a long period of time? No, calorimetry is error-prone and has too many miserable confounding factors. Still, the only way to know you have fusion is to say "I have less of this lighter element and more of this heavier element." Everything is is just hoping that the assumptions from stellar fusion carry over. I'll believe it when I see it, but I also won't believe it until the accompanying papers talk about helium, and lots of it (or lithium ...).
- jboy55 6y agoYou don't have to use assumptions just from stellar fusion. You can use the evidence from all the nuclear testing, from fusors or from cosmic ray analysis. The science behind fusion and what byproducts would come from it are also explained by the standard model.
- simonh 6y agoIf it's a new process and doesn't exhibit any of the known characteristics of fusion, how do you know it's got anything to do with fusion at all? The tragedy of this story is that the word fusion ever got attached to this phenomenon. To this day we have no evidence whatsoever that any form of fusion is associated with these experiments. What we do know is that F&P thought they had found evidence known to indicate fusion, but they were wrong and had misinterpreted it.
- at_a_remove 6y agoI said it in what I wrote, but I will say it again: there is precisely one characteristic to care about ... helium. If you have some hydrogen atoms, and then you do something to them, and suddenly you have some helium atoms, that's fusion.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoif cold fusion works, maybe we can get nuclear aircraft. The possibilities are so exciting it's sad that our discovery that huge energy can be created by splitting the atom hasn't helped humanity more. The fact that it helps prevent ww3 is a negative benefit.
- R0b0t1 6y agoThe uncomfortable truth is that any sufficiently dense energy source is a weapon.
- scythe 6y agoConfused to see so much talk of Fleischmann and Pons. The technique described in the linked article appears to be essentially neutron-catalyzed fusion. This is not too different conceptually from muon-catalyzed fusion, except instead of muons lowering the reaction energy barrier, neutrons provide the activation energy. The cold fusion claims from the '80s used an electrical process, which is not believable for quantum reasons (electron density can't get high enough to pull protons together due to Pauli exclusion). As to whether it works, who knows? It may have been conclusively disproven five years ago for all I know. Or maybe it works. But if they're generating neutrons through X-ray bremsstrahlung, that's horribly inefficient and unlikely to ever come close to net power.
- corty 6y agoHow the hell would you generate neutrons from X-rays? The energy is nowhere close to neutron-antineutron pair production. Higher energy gamma rays can do that, but you need a really big accellerator to produce them. Splitting nuclei by gamma rays is a little easier, but not much. Still far away from the usual bremsstrahlung energy range, except if you have one of the few accellerators that can produce those high-energy electrons for you. Oh, and if you are really going for bremsstrahlung, prepare for lots and lots of noise from secondary reactions and lower-energy bremsstrahlung to filter out. If you want synchrotronstrahlung, good luck building a 1000km one.
- scythe 6y agoWell, I had internalized that you get neutron contamination when you treat with accelerating voltages of 10 MV or higher, and I didn't bother to look it up. It's generated in the X-ray target by the reaction of the 10 MeV electron with a tungsten nucleus: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/33/050/33050453.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... So it's more accurate to say that megavoltage X-ray beams contain neutrons by default. I might need to know this on the ABR... :p
- 100ideas 6y agoThanks for mentioning muon-catalyzed fusion, it’s an interesting phenomena that should come up more often in these discussions.
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"Fusion is typically a high temperature, high pressure phenomenon. It requires a star, or, if you’re hellbent on making it happen on Earth, massive magnets and a lot of power." Not true! Well, "true" according to the popular current day understanding of what fusion is... let me elaborate, elucidate, and explain... Fusion is a fundamental process in nature, which is relative to scale. As is fission. Which is also relative to scale. There are two great patterns expressed by the Universe at different scales, and these can basically be thought of in such simple terms as "cut" and "join". You know, what we have scissors and duct tape for... You go one way, you cut larger things into many smaller things; you go the other way, and you join many smaller things into larger things... Cutting is Fission, joining is Fusion. Now both of these patterns exist at all scales -- at all energy levels. They exist in ALL chemical reactions. In fact, I'll make a wager that future scientists will be able to prove that endothermic (absorbs heat) and exothermic (generates heat) chemical reactions -- are either Fission or Fusion. If I were to make a bet, I'd say that Fusion is the exothermic one, simply because Fusion reactions as are known popularly today (again, not relative to scale) -- are the hotter reaction of the two. So then the question is, how can an endothermic (absorbs heat) chemical reaction be fission -- if fission generates heat? Well, I don't know the answer to that (yet!). Perhaps all exothermic (heat generating) chemical reactions consist of fusion OR fission components, OR both... Perhaps there are two other complimentary opposites to fusion and fission that remove energy... But, here's a good time to talk about Implosion. Most people who have watched Hollywood movies -- know what explosions are... But, not too many people outside of the Physics community, or people who understand Brown's Gas or the works of Viktor Schauberger -- really understand implosions... See, in Physics, there is always a two-way exchange of energy, that is, if something is expanding, then something else is contracting -- even though we might not see what that thing is -- even though we might need special equipment to detect it... In an explosion, we see fire and hot gases expanding outward to fill space... But, there must be something else -- equal-and-oppositely that's contracting inward, even though Physics has yet to observe what it is... We can think about Implosions (although in a different context) -- as Black Holes. We can also think about them as vortices... Basically they remove something from something else, they act to "compress" matter, objects, information, etc. So, getting back to fusion and fission, join and cut, implosion and explosion, these phenomena exist on all scales, at all temperature ranges. A future scientist will show that all of these things are parts of the same dualistic pattern, which repeats in nature at all scales, at all temperatures... (PDS: Addendum: I almost forgot to add the obligatory "And yes, I know, I'm a Crackpot!" ending to this message! <g> So, on that note: "And yes, I know, I'm a Crackpot!" <g>)
- choeger 6y agoTo quote the late Terry Pratchett: > Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all. When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but it takes a little while for this to really be the case* – in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along. * In the case of cold fusion, this was longer than usual.
- andrewflnr 6y agoThat's almost the exact premise of Fine Structure (or is it?): https://qntm.org/structure https://qntm.org/structure Scroll down a bit to read online. Funnily enough, I first learned of this story on HN years ago.