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60 Minutes - Cold Fusion Is Hot Again
- marsianmcs 18y agonot really, who takes care of cold fusion development now? macromedia or adobe?
- jbrun 18y agoThat sounds promising, has anyone here looked at the data on more recent experiments? Do you know of any more technical reports on the current cold fusion situation? 60 Minutes is interesting, but not exactly in-depth.
- russell 18y agoSomething appears to be there. People are getting results. Mike McKubre and I were neighbors 20 years ago. I am amazed at his dedication to a field that has been called a fraud for so long. I hope for his vindication.
- dmix 18y agoTwenty years is impressive. I admit I have patted myself on the back for a few times where I stayed up all night to find a solution to a programming problem. The problems seem so small in comparison.
- sown 18y agoI dunno. Winners never quit and quitters never win but if you never win and you never quit, and furthermore, you are not convincing anyone, then you ... might want to honestly and seriously re-examine what you are doing.
- shaunxcode 18y agoI disagree and I am glad that so many great men and women before me also feel the same way. Giving your life to something you believe regardless of the reward you might see in your immediate future is what has brought any human endeavor worth caring about to where it is today. Consider newton deciding to take up apple vending (a practical and beneficial job) rather than continuing to scratch his itch.
- sown 18y agoI can see what you mean; people need passion. But Newton got repeatable, predictable, reliable results pretty early on and convinced a sizable number of people. I want cold fusion to be real, to work. I really do...
- jpcx01 18y ago60 minutes, the ultimate authority in scientific research.
- gry 18y agoAnd news.yc is the ultimate authority in [topic for topic in science]. ;) I caught the segment earlier tonight. Found it fascinating and enough to send me on procrastination adventure; not enough to speak about. I don't understand it. Sure, 60 Minutes isn't the be all end all, but hey, it's a lead on crazy good stuff.
- geuis 18y agoIts mass media. Given the subject matter, I'm quite happy with the coverage. The fact that they didn't do a one-sided piece and find a lot of scientists to debunk it out of hand is very good. More so, they researched multiple research institutes who were able to replicate the experiments, had an independent skeptical scientist thoroughly examine one of the experimental setups, and even found Pentagon researchers who have also duplicated these results. For those of us who are really, really interested we know how to do more research. For the general public who are curious but not that interested, its a great introduction to something that can very well be changing our future very quickly.
- Adam503 18y agoClearly you didn't even bother to watch the clip. The American Physical Society IS the ultimate authority this topic. 60 Minutes went to the American Physical Society to provide an impartial scientist to 60 Minutes to essentially go out to one of the lab where the work was being done and do a hand on peer review of the work being done. The impartial scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days, came back and said "something interesting is going on." and said he was shocked he's coming back to tell 60 Minutes that something was going on. So why don't those who don't even take the time to watch a few minutes of video about a subject shut up and quit annoying the people who are trying to get a little science done.
- larryfreeman 18y agoThis is a great story. SRI is an incredibly impressive research company. For my money, they have found something analogous to the photoelectric effect or brownian motion. Now, we need an Einstein to tell us what's going on.
- lisper 18y agoSRI also has a history of being flim-flammed. Look up Harold Puthoff and Russel Targ. It's very simple to tell if there's fusion going on: if there's fusion, there will be helium. No helium, no fusion. Excess energy is a red herring.
- DLWormwood 18y ago> No helium, no fusion. Excess energy is a red herring. I'm not sure whether to vote you up or down. Yes, a physical by-product is the best determinant of a nuclear reaction, but the whole point of this endeavor is the excess energy!
- lisper 18y agoNot if it's being generated from some prosaic source, like (just shooting from the hip here) oxidizing palladium for example. And not if it's not reliably reproducible.
- DannoHung 18y agoIs it possible that it's just a chemical reaction between the Deuterium and Palladium?
- TJensen 18y agoMy understanding is that the evidence they are seeing is particle "tracks" that would not exist except as a result of fusion.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoFrom five years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov... And even the best research is plagued by cold fusion's most nagging problem: a long history of failing to reproduce experimental results. McKubre is one of the more respected people in the field, and in more than 50,000 hours of experiments, he says, he has recorded 50 times when the setup "unmistakably" produced excess heat. From tonight's 60 Minutes, an exciting new result! McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government. Or, um, not. Sounds like he hasn't made much progress in the last five years. He's still stuck at "about 50" irreproducible results out of twenty years of experiments. Also, he still has no theory. This guy's only reproducible result is his ability to convince credulous journalists to publish stuff about him every few years. Wake me up when the Physical Review Letter is accepted for publication.
- Adam503 18y ago60 Minutes went to the American Physical Society to provide an impartial scientist to 60 Minutes to go out to one of the labs where the work was being done and do a hands on review of the work being done. That scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days, came back and said "something interesting is going on." He also said he was shocked he's coming back to tell 60 Minutes that something interesting was going on. What have we got now with M Theory? 7 new dimensions we haven't explored at all and alternate universes now going out ad infinitum... that means the potential explanations why palladium makes deuterium go all funky would be almost as infinite considering our current state of 4 dimensional scientific inquiry processes in a potentially 11 dimension universe.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThat scientist went to that lab, looked closely at everything for 2 days... Yeah, that also worked for Uri Geller. Scientists with Ph.Ds investigated his spoons! They found no gimmicks! Of course there's nothing wrong with the equipment that anyone can find by staring at it for two days. Let's do a little math. Consider the guy from SRI. He has been working on cold fusion for twenty years. The experiment is always described as "incredibly simple", so he probably should have been running it daily all that time, just cranking it over and over with the goal of getting perfect reliability and repeatability. But let's assume that, instead, he thinks really hard every time he turns on the equipment, so his group has run it about once a week. Once a week for twenty years is about 20x50 = 1000 experiments. He reports approximately 50 non-reproducible positive results. That implies that he gets negative results about 95% of the time, maybe more. So the instrument basically works. 95% of the time, the measurement shows that you get out exactly what you put in. That's pretty good! I've worked on lots of graduate-level experiments that have a far higher failure rate. (This isn't manufacturing. Your equipment is often literally held together with duct tape.) Of course you're not going to find an intermittent problem in a 95%-accurate instrument by staring at the thing. You will have to work with it for a while. And even working experiments will yield a certain percentage of mysterious anomalies that you will never understand. There's a power surge. One of the instruments has an intermittent software bug. One of the sensors burns out slowly, spending several months giving erroneous readings before it finally fails. A solder joint starts to work loose. Some piece of metal contacts your thermocouple and creates a bimetallic junction. There's a ground loop. Static electricity. You misread a dial. You nudge a knob without noticing. Your materials come from different batches at the supplier. Some of your students use a different procedure than the others. That's why irreproducible results have such a bad reputation. Everyone gets them. There are the stuff of legends ("gremlins", "Magic/More Magic", etc.) precisely because everybody gets them, and because they often lead you astray. You cannot hope to explain them all, because they are irreproducible! If you hope to pull an actual observation out of the noise, you either need to design a cleaner experiment, or make very careful observations and use statistics to pull out correlations ("Hey, every anomaly has occurred between midnight and 3am!" "Hey, every bad chip has come from a wafer that was handled by the guy who was once cited for forgetting his gloves!"). Then you construct hypotheses, and then zero in on those hypotheses. ("Hmm, if we feed the grad students more coffee the anomalies at 3am go away." "We lectured the guy about wearing gloves and the failure rate dropped by 85%.") If you can't reproduce the experiment after a lot of effort, you need to seriously consider the possibility that you're fooling yourself. I've seen a lot of scientists fail this test, temporarily or (sometimes) for entire careers. The other point to make is that scientists fight like tigers in print, but are often very polite in person, and exceedingly polite on camera. Remember: Scientists are anonymously graded by each other. You have to appear to fight fair, or your colleagues will downgrade your reviews and your grants will get rejected. So to get a scientist to make fun of another scientist's equipment on camera is like convincing the Pope to smack a non-Christian with a mace on live television. We prefer to eviscerate each other's manuscripts... often anonymously. That's why so many of us prefer to wait for something to appear in print... and why the cold fusion guys are justly vilified for going to the press before getting their work accepted by a journal.
- 27182818284 18y agoI wish the video would have focused more on the "nuclear effect" aspect to all of this. I feel pretty confident that in the end there will be something discovered, it just won't be fusion by any means. It will be some other nuclear effect. It also strikes me as odd that nobody seemed to really bring up neutron emission or anything like that. They keep talking about heat as the sign that something is happening, but not neutron emission. My first thought immediately was, "Are you seeing neutrons??" maybe that just got edited out of the final cut of the segment?
- ars 18y agoAll of the results where "it works for a while then doesn't" are apparently caused by one thing: contaminants in the palladium. Some palladium is refined from spent nuclear fuel. I read interviews where the guys says: "I had this great palladium, it gave results every time, but then it ran out and this other stuff doesn't work".
- mkyc 18y agoWhen I read the title I was hopeful. When I read the first comment and saw there was no breakthrough, I thought of the pain that something like this segment will cause editors at wikipedia's cold fusion. I went through many of the refs there a while back, and the gist was as follows. The whole thing has not yielded any significant results or breakthroughs since the first debacle. Various methods and theories continue to be proposed. A big source of vindication for supporters was a DOE report that said CF was not disproven. Many supporters take this to mean that CF has a chance. The scientific community has not thrown CF out and peered papers do get published, but CF's penetration is absolutely minimal. I really hope that the people working on this succeed. It may be a waste, but we don't know the chances on this lottery. This sort of reporting is annoying and sensationalist, though.
- zedwill 18y agoOn the article comments, there is a guy (Fractal Nature) that equals the mass of the proton to (sqrt 0.75) * pi / 2.7 Anyone knows where this formula comes from? I just thought that it is just too beautiful to have two of the constants of the universe related that way.
- jibiki 18y agoYes, you can find the derivation here: http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics/msg/5312a801e0785e66?hl=en& http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics/msg/5312a801e0785e...; ;)