12 ms·

You 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

by simonh 6y ago

You 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 ago
  The 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 ago
      I 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
      - kergonath 6y ago
        This is entirely unlike high-temperature superconductivity, though. We knew superconductivity was a thing in some materials under a give material-dependent critical temperature. Looking for compounds with higher critical temperature is not a major shift, or surprising in any way. Why would any editor say no when someone writes “look, we’ve found a crystal with a high critical temperature”? Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.
        gus_massa 6y ago
        We had an explanation of superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair but it didn't apply to high temperature superconductivity. It took many years to get a good enough explanation of high temperature superconductivity, and IIRC there are a few details that are not understood. So it was surprising that someone made a high temperature superconductor. As far as I know, there is no theoretical reason to discard cold fusion. There are a few "cold fusion" method that work, like using muons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion but it's so expensive to create muons and they are short lived, so you expend more energy than the useful energy you can collect from the device. So (in 1985) both phenomena were in the same class, it was not theoretically impossible, but no one had shown a good experiment were they happened. > Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow. Perhaps we agree, the problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. (And too many scammers publishing bad experiments and trying to get investors.)
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Nate Lewis IIRC was at the press conference saying it wasn't chemical either.
- simonh 6y ago
  The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting a fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of fusion. I dont really see what’s arrogant about that.
  - drran 6y ago
    > The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting an [unknown] fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of [known] fusion reaction. See it?
    - simonh 6y ago
      No I don't, even if there is something unknown going on that has none of the known characteristics of fusion, why even say it's fusion? Why attach that label to it, especially when you have no actual theory of what is happening and why? To put it another way, why are you calling this an unknown fusion reaction? What's the basis for the claim that it was fusion of any kind? F&P thought that the evidence they had found demonstrated fusion. That it was known evidence of fusion. They were simply wrong. Saying 'well it might be some unknown form of fusion' is post-hoc rationalisation (for which you have no evidence or theory). That's not what they were saying at the time. It's so infuriating that 30 years later we're still fighting these fundamental misconceptions about what was going on.
      - drran 6y ago
        Why America was called West India? Why + is used for absence of electrons? Why atom called atom("unbreakable")? And so on. Discovery is not a science, but it is the part of science.
        simonh 6y ago
        Excellent thanks. That's very helpful as those analogies are very apt. The West Indies has nothing to do with India. Atoms are no unbreakable. Cold Fusion has nothing to do with fusion. I'm glad we got that straight.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment. No, what lots of people (many of them far more prominent chemists than P&F said, not just physicists) is that, if honest, it had to be measurement error, not only based on abstract analysis of the described setup and results, but also based on robust attempts to replicate the claimed results.
aqme28 6y ago
Fusors aren't room temperature. It looks like positive-return-on-energy fusion will almost certainly be achievable in 5-10 years, though it won't be commercializable for a lot longer than that.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Fusors are room temperature. It’s the electrical gradient which produces the reaction, not temperature.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    The ions thermalise very quickly even in a fusor; if they fused on the first collision rather than bouncing this whole thing would be much easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor#Thermalization_of_the_ion_velocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor#Thermalization_of_the_io... I do like how incredibly simple and easy fusors are compared to the other types of fusion reactor, but sadly they are still very very hot where it counts.
DennisP 6y ago
What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs. If you don't understand it, it's not surprising that you can't make it useful. That doesn't say much about what you'll be capable of, after you do understand it. While it's true that the onus was on F&P to prove their results, it's also true that if someone else is claiming to replicate the experiment, the onus is on them to do it correctly.
- simonh 6y ago
  F&P were unable to replicate their results. People have been trying for decades, with their help and the best they get is some occasional anomalies. The contention that the experiment has never been ‘properly’ replicated comes from the fact that they made some errors in their experimental design and description. How can you ‘properly’ recreate an experiment if the given design is known to be inaccurate? If you follow the known to be inaccurate description people will complain you’re not doing what the actually did. If you do what they actually did (or seem to have done as best we can tell), people will complain you didn’t follow their published description. Meanwhile F&P still couldn’t get reliable results themselves.
- willis936 6y ago
  Muon-catalyzed fusion is well understood and F&P are well known frauds. There isn’t something interesting here.
- kergonath 6y ago
  > What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs. Sometimes. Often, what you’re left with is unusable experimental results because you don’t have a clue. The proper way to resolve that is what they did with faster-than-light neutrinos: ask for collaboration with other labs and try to replicate the result. This whole thing is not science, it’s cargo-culting the way science is described in pop culture.
- prox 6y ago
  The most exiting phrase in Science is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny...”
japanuspus 6y ago
Just wanted to follow up on fusors, since the technology seems to be less known that it deserves to be. As parent says, it is a completely solid, in-your-garage demonstration of fusion. Lot's of information at fusor.net [0]. [0]: https://fusor.net/ https://fusor.net/

by simonh 6y ago

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 ago
The 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 ago
    I 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
    - kergonath 6y ago
      This is entirely unlike high-temperature superconductivity, though. We knew superconductivity was a thing in some materials under a give material-dependent critical temperature. Looking for compounds with higher critical temperature is not a major shift, or surprising in any way. Why would any editor say no when someone writes “look, we’ve found a crystal with a high critical temperature”? Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.
      - gus_massa 6y ago
        We had an explanation of superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair but it didn't apply to high temperature superconductivity. It took many years to get a good enough explanation of high temperature superconductivity, and IIRC there are a few details that are not understood. So it was surprising that someone made a high temperature superconductor. As far as I know, there is no theoretical reason to discard cold fusion. There are a few "cold fusion" method that work, like using muons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion but it's so expensive to create muons and they are short lived, so you expend more energy than the useful energy you can collect from the device. So (in 1985) both phenomena were in the same class, it was not theoretically impossible, but no one had shown a good experiment were they happened. > Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow. Perhaps we agree, the problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. (And too many scammers publishing bad experiments and trying to get investors.)
selimthegrim 6y ago
Nate Lewis IIRC was at the press conference saying it wasn't chemical either.
simonh 6y ago
The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting a fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of fusion. I dont really see what’s arrogant about that.
- drran 6y ago
  > The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting an [unknown] fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of [known] fusion reaction. See it?
  - simonh 6y ago
    No I don't, even if there is something unknown going on that has none of the known characteristics of fusion, why even say it's fusion? Why attach that label to it, especially when you have no actual theory of what is happening and why? To put it another way, why are you calling this an unknown fusion reaction? What's the basis for the claim that it was fusion of any kind? F&P thought that the evidence they had found demonstrated fusion. That it was known evidence of fusion. They were simply wrong. Saying 'well it might be some unknown form of fusion' is post-hoc rationalisation (for which you have no evidence or theory). That's not what they were saying at the time. It's so infuriating that 30 years later we're still fighting these fundamental misconceptions about what was going on.
    - drran 6y ago
      Why America was called West India? Why + is used for absence of electrons? Why atom called atom("unbreakable")? And so on. Discovery is not a science, but it is the part of science.
      - simonh 6y ago
        Excellent thanks. That's very helpful as those analogies are very apt. The West Indies has nothing to do with India. Atoms are no unbreakable. Cold Fusion has nothing to do with fusion. I'm glad we got that straight.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment. No, what lots of people (many of them far more prominent chemists than P&F said, not just physicists) is that, if honest, it had to be measurement error, not only based on abstract analysis of the described setup and results, but also based on robust attempts to replicate the claimed results.

aqme28 6y ago

Fusors aren't room temperature. It looks like positive-return-on-energy fusion will almost certainly be achievable in 5-10 years, though it won't be commercializable for a lot longer than that.

garmaine 6y ago
Fusors are room temperature. It’s the electrical gradient which produces the reaction, not temperature.
- ben_w 6y ago
  The ions thermalise very quickly even in a fusor; if they fused on the first collision rather than bouncing this whole thing would be much easier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor#Thermalization_of_the_ion_velocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor#Thermalization_of_the_io... I do like how incredibly simple and easy fusors are compared to the other types of fusion reactor, but sadly they are still very very hot where it counts.

DennisP 6y ago

What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs. If you don't understand it, it's not surprising that you can't make it useful. That doesn't say much about what you'll be capable of, after you do understand it. While it's true that the onus was on F&P to prove their results, it's also true that if someone else is claiming to replicate the experiment, the onus is on them to do it correctly.

simonh 6y ago
F&P were unable to replicate their results. People have been trying for decades, with their help and the best they get is some occasional anomalies. The contention that the experiment has never been ‘properly’ replicated comes from the fact that they made some errors in their experimental design and description. How can you ‘properly’ recreate an experiment if the given design is known to be inaccurate? If you follow the known to be inaccurate description people will complain you’re not doing what the actually did. If you do what they actually did (or seem to have done as best we can tell), people will complain you didn’t follow their published description. Meanwhile F&P still couldn’t get reliable results themselves.
willis936 6y ago
Muon-catalyzed fusion is well understood and F&P are well known frauds. There isn’t something interesting here.
kergonath 6y ago
> What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs. Sometimes. Often, what you’re left with is unusable experimental results because you don’t have a clue. The proper way to resolve that is what they did with faster-than-light neutrinos: ask for collaboration with other labs and try to replicate the result. This whole thing is not science, it’s cargo-culting the way science is described in pop culture.
prox 6y ago
The most exiting phrase in Science is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny...”

japanuspus 6y ago

Just wanted to follow up on fusors, since the technology seems to be less known that it deserves to be. As parent says, it is a completely solid, in-your-garage demonstration of fusion. Lot's of information at fusor.net [0]. [0]: https://fusor.net/ https://fusor.net/