10 ms·

I don't buy this either-or headline. Either the magic trick is going to impress the audience, or there will be claims of some sort of tragic last-minute technic

I don't buy this either-or headline. Either the magic trick is going to impress the audience, or there will be claims of some sort of tragic last-minute technical difficulty that could be worked around with a bit more research. Either way, the game is likely to continue. Maybe one mark or another will drop out of the con, having endured one too many cycles of investment followed by disappointment, but there are new marks being born every day. Perpetual motion machines are a really old dream. The dream outlived Clausius, Kelvin, and Carnot and it will outlive us. Dreams are durable.

ck2 15y ago
But the claim is not that the output energy will be a "little bit more" than the input - the claim is it should be obviously much more. So there has to be a clear result, where no amount of tweaking will fix the base principle if it's erroneous?
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Oh, there is always a third option in science: "Oops, the box would have given us a definitive yes-or-no answer if only the fuse hadn't blown, and gosh darn it, the local stores have no fuses in stock. Oh, and these fuses are special and cost $750,000." You'll learn all about this phenomenon in years two through six of your seven-year Ph.D. program in experimental physics. ;)
  - thyrsus 15y ago
    I learned it in my first year physics course: to a good approximation, accuracy of results = log(log($equipment_cost)).
    - jmaygarden 15y ago
      So, 100% accuracy cost $10 billion?
      - dfranke 15y ago
        I think what he means is "systematic_error = 1/log(log(equipment_cost))"
        mikeash 15y ago
        For best results, purchase all equipment in Zimbabwean dollars.
      - swombat 15y ago
        Sounds about right! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost > With a budget of 7.5 billion euros (approx. $9bn or £6.19bn as of Jun 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built. If only they'd put in $1b more, they'd have found that Higgs boson by now.
  - jodrellblank 15y ago
    The article actually claims "it will either succeed today, or fail today and Rossi has two months to rectify any problems". So it already was avoiding a definitive answer from the start.
- ngvrnd 15y ago
  It's claimed to be producing energy via so-called "low energy nuclear reactions" involving hydrogen. You have to supply hydrogen (which you can get by electrolyzing water once the systems is up and running) and re-form the catalyst when it wears out. It's not claimed to be a perpetual motion machine, so stop attacking a straw man. I remain highly skeptical about this, but it's not a perpetual motion scam.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Yes, it's true that cold fusion isn't, itself, perpetual motion. It does indeed meet that standard. My invocation of perpetual motion is as a fencepost. If you can get people to believe in that, you can get them to believe in anything. People like clean energy sources. They have good reasons – logical and factual reasons – to desire them. They also don't understand them very well. This has been true for centuries, as illustrated by the history of perpetual-motion scams, and thus it will likely remain true for the foreseeable future. People want to believe, and they will.
  - billswift 15y ago
    He didn't. He pointed out that people still invest in perpetual motion scams as reason to believe people will keep investing in cold fusion. The fact that cold fusion is less obviously a scam than perpetual motion actually strengthens his point.
  - jmaygarden 15y ago
    Doesn't it require deuterium as opposed to normal hydrogen? If so, how are they producing deuterium?
    - SystemOut 15y ago
      Deuterium is pretty much everywhere. They generally concentrate it in water for most uses if memory serves.
    - ngvrnd 15y ago
      It doesn't require deuterium.
zipdog 15y ago
I agree it will continue. Although a true perpetual motion machine is impossible, there's no reason that a device couldn't produce seemingly unlimited energy. The total energy of a mass system is incredibly high. At some point (maybe a long way from today's tech) we may be able to extract a constant portion in a controlled fashion in a small device. That carrot will lead many people to try and fail. What's great is the empiricism of energy: we can measure the input and output precisely (given enough effort), and so its pretty easy (comparatively) to tell whether the box does what it says on the lid. Even this demo shows that: the consultants will only pay once the machine shows that the numbers add up.
redthrowaway 15y ago
>Perpetual motion machines are a really old dream. The dream outlived Clausius, Kelvin, and Carnot and it will outlive us. Dreams are durable. FWIW, it's not perpetual motion. This is not a claim of free energy, but a claim of matter being converted to energy in a way physicists deem exceedingly unlikely. I, too, would be incredulous of any positive result, but it's not claiming to violate thermodynamics.
- dlikhten 15y ago
  Its not perpetual since you put in a smaller energy than you get out, but you still consume a fuel that is extremely plentiful everywhere in the universe. Perpetual = outputs more energy than it uses while consuming no fuel, so it fuels itself + some output.
lukev 15y ago
While I don't disagree with you, I do have a nit: they're not claiming this is a perpetual motion machine, which is categorically impossible and an incontrovertible indicator of a scam. They're claiming it can derive energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms. This has not been proven to be impossible. In fact, we know it's possible (albiet at much higher temperatures.) Therefore, there is at least a logical possibility that it's legit, even if their behavior doesn't indicate that so far.
- cbr 15y ago
  I think they're actually claiming something weirder: hydrogen combining with nickel to make copper. http://daily.wired.it/news/scienza/fusione-fredda-bologna.html http://daily.wired.it/news/scienza/fusione-fredda-bologna.ht... "the hydrogen atoms penetrate into the nickel and copper turn. Or at least, this is our interpretation." (gli atomi di idrogeno penetrano nel nichel e lo trasformano in rame. --- translated by google)
  - VladRussian 15y ago
    all these cold fusion schemes use "input/output < 1" energy demonstration as a prove of the fusion. A lot of unaccounted chemical reactions can happen inside - for example, they split water into hydrogen and oxygen and the oxygen would burn with nickel - you'd have energy gain if nickel burns better than hydrogen (i just don't remember what produces better reaction though) The real scientific approach would be to demonstrate the real indicators of supposed reaction. Be it fast neutrons, alpha or some specific radiation frequency. Because when hydrogen supposedly fuses with nickel (lets forget for a moment that nickel is past the iron in the periodic table and thus isn't expected to produce much of, if at all, a fusion energy gain) the energy is released in some very specific and detectable form - either some particle like alpha or some photon of pretty specific frequency and there is nothing easier to detect than that ... much much easier than to compare input/output energy and trace the heat loses/gains through the piping, etc... I'm a firm believer in the fusion as a practical energy source. We have upper bound - 10Kt thermonuclear weapons that produce net energy gain, we have lower bound - Z machine (my personal favorite as it is just a miniaturized thermonuclear bomb process, which is well proven at Kt scale, with X-rays produced by electric discharge (at 15% efficiency of electric power to X-rays conversion!) instead of nuclear fission primary), Tokamaks, fusor, polywell, NIF with some of them reaching output levels of tens of percent of the input energy. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. It takes money and time to develop it. ITER or even order of magnitude bigger ITER will get us there. The cold fusion which is unknown (in particular it doesn't have such proven upper/lower bounds) and when presented in such unscientific fashion it just undermines the public support, ie. funding for development of proven (in the sense mentioned above) technologies.

ck2 15y ago

But the claim is not that the output energy will be a "little bit more" than the input - the claim is it should be obviously much more. So there has to be a clear result, where no amount of tweaking will fix the base principle if it's erroneous?

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Oh, there is always a third option in science: "Oops, the box would have given us a definitive yes-or-no answer if only the fuse hadn't blown, and gosh darn it, the local stores have no fuses in stock. Oh, and these fuses are special and cost $750,000." You'll learn all about this phenomenon in years two through six of your seven-year Ph.D. program in experimental physics. ;)
- thyrsus 15y ago
  I learned it in my first year physics course: to a good approximation, accuracy of results = log(log($equipment_cost)).
  - jmaygarden 15y ago
    So, 100% accuracy cost $10 billion?
    - dfranke 15y ago
      I think what he means is "systematic_error = 1/log(log(equipment_cost))"
      - mikeash 15y ago
        For best results, purchase all equipment in Zimbabwean dollars.
    - swombat 15y ago
      Sounds about right! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost > With a budget of 7.5 billion euros (approx. $9bn or £6.19bn as of Jun 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built. If only they'd put in $1b more, they'd have found that Higgs boson by now.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  The article actually claims "it will either succeed today, or fail today and Rossi has two months to rectify any problems". So it already was avoiding a definitive answer from the start.
ngvrnd 15y ago
It's claimed to be producing energy via so-called "low energy nuclear reactions" involving hydrogen. You have to supply hydrogen (which you can get by electrolyzing water once the systems is up and running) and re-form the catalyst when it wears out. It's not claimed to be a perpetual motion machine, so stop attacking a straw man. I remain highly skeptical about this, but it's not a perpetual motion scam.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Yes, it's true that cold fusion isn't, itself, perpetual motion. It does indeed meet that standard. My invocation of perpetual motion is as a fencepost. If you can get people to believe in that, you can get them to believe in anything. People like clean energy sources. They have good reasons – logical and factual reasons – to desire them. They also don't understand them very well. This has been true for centuries, as illustrated by the history of perpetual-motion scams, and thus it will likely remain true for the foreseeable future. People want to believe, and they will.
- billswift 15y ago
  He didn't. He pointed out that people still invest in perpetual motion scams as reason to believe people will keep investing in cold fusion. The fact that cold fusion is less obviously a scam than perpetual motion actually strengthens his point.
- jmaygarden 15y ago
  Doesn't it require deuterium as opposed to normal hydrogen? If so, how are they producing deuterium?
  - SystemOut 15y ago
    Deuterium is pretty much everywhere. They generally concentrate it in water for most uses if memory serves.
  - ngvrnd 15y ago
    It doesn't require deuterium.

zipdog 15y ago

I agree it will continue. Although a true perpetual motion machine is impossible, there's no reason that a device couldn't produce seemingly unlimited energy. The total energy of a mass system is incredibly high. At some point (maybe a long way from today's tech) we may be able to extract a constant portion in a controlled fashion in a small device. That carrot will lead many people to try and fail. What's great is the empiricism of energy: we can measure the input and output precisely (given enough effort), and so its pretty easy (comparatively) to tell whether the box does what it says on the lid. Even this demo shows that: the consultants will only pay once the machine shows that the numbers add up.

redthrowaway 15y ago

>Perpetual motion machines are a really old dream. The dream outlived Clausius, Kelvin, and Carnot and it will outlive us. Dreams are durable. FWIW, it's not perpetual motion. This is not a claim of free energy, but a claim of matter being converted to energy in a way physicists deem exceedingly unlikely. I, too, would be incredulous of any positive result, but it's not claiming to violate thermodynamics.

dlikhten 15y ago
Its not perpetual since you put in a smaller energy than you get out, but you still consume a fuel that is extremely plentiful everywhere in the universe. Perpetual = outputs more energy than it uses while consuming no fuel, so it fuels itself + some output.

lukev 15y ago

While I don't disagree with you, I do have a nit: they're not claiming this is a perpetual motion machine, which is categorically impossible and an incontrovertible indicator of a scam. They're claiming it can derive energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms. This has not been proven to be impossible. In fact, we know it's possible (albiet at much higher temperatures.) Therefore, there is at least a logical possibility that it's legit, even if their behavior doesn't indicate that so far.

cbr 15y ago
I think they're actually claiming something weirder: hydrogen combining with nickel to make copper. http://daily.wired.it/news/scienza/fusione-fredda-bologna.html http://daily.wired.it/news/scienza/fusione-fredda-bologna.ht... "the hydrogen atoms penetrate into the nickel and copper turn. Or at least, this is our interpretation." (gli atomi di idrogeno penetrano nel nichel e lo trasformano in rame. --- translated by google)
- VladRussian 15y ago
  all these cold fusion schemes use "input/output < 1" energy demonstration as a prove of the fusion. A lot of unaccounted chemical reactions can happen inside - for example, they split water into hydrogen and oxygen and the oxygen would burn with nickel - you'd have energy gain if nickel burns better than hydrogen (i just don't remember what produces better reaction though) The real scientific approach would be to demonstrate the real indicators of supposed reaction. Be it fast neutrons, alpha or some specific radiation frequency. Because when hydrogen supposedly fuses with nickel (lets forget for a moment that nickel is past the iron in the periodic table and thus isn't expected to produce much of, if at all, a fusion energy gain) the energy is released in some very specific and detectable form - either some particle like alpha or some photon of pretty specific frequency and there is nothing easier to detect than that ... much much easier than to compare input/output energy and trace the heat loses/gains through the piping, etc... I'm a firm believer in the fusion as a practical energy source. We have upper bound - 10Kt thermonuclear weapons that produce net energy gain, we have lower bound - Z machine (my personal favorite as it is just a miniaturized thermonuclear bomb process, which is well proven at Kt scale, with X-rays produced by electric discharge (at 15% efficiency of electric power to X-rays conversion!) instead of nuclear fission primary), Tokamaks, fusor, polywell, NIF with some of them reaching output levels of tens of percent of the input energy. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. It takes money and time to develop it. ITER or even order of magnitude bigger ITER will get us there. The cold fusion which is unknown (in particular it doesn't have such proven upper/lower bounds) and when presented in such unscientific fashion it just undermines the public support, ie. funding for development of proven (in the sense mentioned above) technologies.