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About cold fusion, he says: Maybe fifty years of physics will be proved wrong by one experiment, but don't throw out your furnace until that experiment has been

by tlb 17y ago

About cold fusion, he says: Maybe fifty years of physics will be proved wrong by one experiment, but don't throw out your furnace until that experiment has been replicated. Pons and Fleischman's announcement can hardly be described as telling people to throw out their furnaces. They announced that they had measurements which were not explainable by the prevailing theories, and the new theory it suggested would be hugely valuable. Some journalists made it seem even more exciting than that, but I don't think you can blame scientists for the way they are reported in the popular press any more than you can blame politicians for what's reported on Fox News. Of course, it turned out that their numbers were better explained by some subtle measurement errors, but it took hundreds of chemists years to convincingly refute the theory. It was not an unreasonable decision to announce it publicly, in order to mobilize the resources necessary to get to the bottom of it.

tokenadult 17y ago
it took hundreds of chemists years to convincingly refute the theory Some observers were skeptical from the beginning because the neutron output of a genuine fusion process was never found by the persons who announced their discovery of "cold fusion." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion It's also a matter of opinion whether the errors in measurement of total system energy inputs and outputs were subtle or gross. Being the son of an industrial engineer who studied chemistry, I'm of the opinion that the errors were inexcusably sloppy for researchers who held a press conference to announce their results.
- tlb 17y ago
  Oh, but the lack of neutron output was the most interesting part! If there had been neutrons, people would have assumed there was an obscure sort of inertial confinement fusion going on at some particular kind of defect in the crystal structure, perhaps a microscopic Farnsworth Fusor. Such an effect would be intriguing if it existed, but not very fundamental and probably not that useful. Cold Fusion was important because it raised the possibility of a previously unknown mass/energy conversion mechanism, or at least a manifestation of a poorly understood one like neutrino emission or absorption. Neutrinos are a good lesson in how much we actually understand the world. The neutrino flux from the sun is thought to be 10^12 particles per square meter per second, yet its mass is "Unknown, probably nonzero" [Wikipedia]. They don't seem to interact with ordinary matter much, but we can't rule out them interacting strongly with particular molecular structures in Palladium-Deuterium alloys. Nor can we rule out the presence of particles that interact even more weakly than neutrinos. The 1995 Nobel was awarded for finding evidence of neutrinos that are now thought to have been antineutrinos. Particle physics is not a solved problem.

by tlb 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago

it took hundreds of chemists years to convincingly refute the theory Some observers were skeptical from the beginning because the neutron output of a genuine fusion process was never found by the persons who announced their discovery of "cold fusion." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion It's also a matter of opinion whether the errors in measurement of total system energy inputs and outputs were subtle or gross. Being the son of an industrial engineer who studied chemistry, I'm of the opinion that the errors were inexcusably sloppy for researchers who held a press conference to announce their results.

tlb 17y ago
Oh, but the lack of neutron output was the most interesting part! If there had been neutrons, people would have assumed there was an obscure sort of inertial confinement fusion going on at some particular kind of defect in the crystal structure, perhaps a microscopic Farnsworth Fusor. Such an effect would be intriguing if it existed, but not very fundamental and probably not that useful. Cold Fusion was important because it raised the possibility of a previously unknown mass/energy conversion mechanism, or at least a manifestation of a poorly understood one like neutrino emission or absorption. Neutrinos are a good lesson in how much we actually understand the world. The neutrino flux from the sun is thought to be 10^12 particles per square meter per second, yet its mass is "Unknown, probably nonzero" [Wikipedia]. They don't seem to interact with ordinary matter much, but we can't rule out them interacting strongly with particular molecular structures in Palladium-Deuterium alloys. Nor can we rule out the presence of particles that interact even more weakly than neutrinos. The 1995 Nobel was awarded for finding evidence of neutrinos that are now thought to have been antineutrinos. Particle physics is not a solved problem.