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I 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 y
by at_a_remove 6y ago
I 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.
- pfdietz 6y agoOr contamination, or measurement error, or fraud...
- at_a_remove 6y agoI think I adequately covered contamination when I mentioned the atmosphere and the possibility of the helium being captured in the bulk of the apparatus already. As to the last two, those are an objection you could point at, well, every experiment in the history of science and are therefore not really worthy of mention.
- pfdietz 6y agoYou wrote: "If you have some hydrogen atoms, and then you do something to them, and suddenly you have some helium atoms, that's fusion." And that's just wrong. There's a famous case from early on in the history of nuclear physics, where someone passed current through hydrogen gas and then found helium, and thought it was fusion. But what it was was helium diffusing out of the glass of the apparatus. This should be the default assumption, because supposed cold fusion making 4He is a triple miracle: first that DD fusion occurs at all, then that it makes 4He, and then that it doesn't go through the normal channels (actually a quadruple miracle, since also that the 4He fusion doesn't dump its energy in very energetic gamma photons.)
- at_a_remove 6y agoRead the original paragraph I wrote. C'mon.