Posted on 11/20/2004 5:15:08 AM PST by Arkie2
I'll wait until some
Freeper does it at home and
posts a VANITY . . .
I can forgive the engineers, or in fact, the engineers do not need to be forgiven that. Engineers are trained to implement what is already understood. The best engineers will be able to put things that are already understood together in new ways. But it is the training of science that should keep the skepticism of our understanding open and who should be willing to consider alternatives. I think that is a major problem in science today...it is full of engineers. I don't mean to imply engineers are bad, in fact many fields of science require good engineering. But the problem is that many scientists have adopted the perspective of engineers. A respected mentor of mine said that engineers know what they know, but scientists know what they don't yet know. Far too many scientists are so wrapped up in what they do know...they forget what they don't.
I have not followed the science of cold fusion closely at all. I looked into it years ago when the Utah folks made the covers of the magazines. If you read my posts carefully, I have said less about CF than about the attitude of the scientific community towards the field.
That said, I think one of the 'weaknessess' of the field is in its approach. Almost every modern advance in physics has happened on a notepad with a pencil. It then gets proved in a laboratory. There is a lot of explaining how things that occured might have happened as opposed to deliberate designing of experiements to establish a particular understanding. That is why the scientific community slammed closed against them...that is not the way 'things are done' now. I think that is a mistake, but it is out of the current norm. Many of our older theories did come about from an understanding of an odd result...but not so much recently.
What I would like to see is a paper rather than an experiment. Someone to calculate how many mEVs it takes to fuse and how they theoretically could arrive at that energy or reduce that energy mathematically. Then design an experiment to do exactly what they theorized as opposed to trying things in the lab and then coming up with an explination.
However, where I differ from the 'mainstream' is that I recognize both as science. One may be a 'better' approach, but the other is not 'not science' just because it was not optimal.
"Needs more study."
Like the article states, if the majority of scientists who said 'cold fusion is impossible' are proved to be wrong, their careers are dead.
I don't see anything changing the status quo.
But I hope I'm wrong!
That's what sonoluminesent cavitation studies have done. Put the pencil to paper to get the predicted results and then design the experiement to see if the prediction works.
Taleyarkhan's experiements were based on the prediction that a rapidly collapsing bubble ( that was expanded through acustic waves ) would created the heat and pressure required for fusion to take place. The experimental data supported the predicted results.
For every time that has happened, there have been about 100,000 instances of some nut with a kooky hypothesis that goes against the mainstream...who is eventually proven to be completely WRONG.
The problem is the media really loves the "lone kook proven to be right" stuff so they mostly write articles and books about that, most documentaries on matters of science emphasize that angle, and most people seem to hate scientists and love to see them get their comeuppance.
Every science kook on the internet thinks they're Galileo or Alfred Wegener and immediately brings them up when they're challenged.
One of the serious questions, raised during the first controversy, was the lack of radiation (especially the lack of neutron production). The preferred reaction (by reason of conservation of momentum) is
2 Deuterium yields 1 Helium-3 + 1 neutron + gamma radiation.
There is about 17 MEV (million electron volts) released per fusion, so there will be considerable energy in the neutron and gamma radiation.
The latest breakthroughs seem to be aimed at solving problems like when or if the universe will collapse in on itself. No conclusive results yet and even if there were, who cares?
So the "serious" questions where not serious at all
but merely fugue to keep $$$$$ flowing to the same hot fusion people
and to wipe out the (better) competitive technology.
The great MIT physicist Phil Morrison said in 1989,
"If cold fusion works it will be the greatest discovery of man since fire."
In fact it's in use daily quite close to nealy all of us as we drive around (Used as a catalyst for vehicle emission reduction in (at least) US and Canadian vehicles - for decades).
Here we go again.
Agree about the slump. And how does modern science expect to break out of the slump if anyone who dares to think outside the box is immediately attacked, ridiculed, and cut off monetarily and intellectually from the mainstream?
I've been paying attention to Cold Fusion off & on since '89. I used to read the Usenet group on Cold Fusion every so often. The field has definitely attracted some whackos, but there also continues to be enough in the way of intriguing and unexplainable results to allow at least some level of semi-respectable research to continue.
Thank God that every major scientific research endeavor that didn't show immediate and obvious, explainable results was not ridiculed and shut down by the scientific elite like Cold Fusion has been. We'd still be living in caves.
Sorry, but I have to disagree strongly with this point. Just because scientific experiments are not repeatable does not mean "there's no science there." It just means all the variables aren't well understood yet. If unexplainable phenomena are observed, even in some percentage of the experiments, then IMHO that's more than enough reason to continue scientific research.
Meteorologists get their scientific predictions & models wrong all the time. They have a real hard time predicting the weather a couple days in advance. However, they're more right than wrong, and the field of meteorology has produced some good stuff. The fact that meteorological predictions are regularly not repeatable or consistent is no reason to shut down further research and work. It just means that the field doesn't understand all the relevant variables and underlying key phenomena yet. Same with cold fusion.
Well we're pretty sure there's weather, hence our ongoing effort to understand it. The problem with cold fusion is the experimenters need to prove there's something there worth studying. If they get past that point then I would agree with you. First things first though. Prove there's a phenomenon, then on to the real research.
Exactly. Cold fusion is the best modern example that I'm aware of where technical elitism and closed mindedness has reared its ugly head. The way many "respected" members of the scientific community have summarily dismissed and treated legitimate research in this area over the past few years has been disgraceful, IMHO. If nothing else, unexplainable phenomena are at work. How could anyone but closeminded snobs who feel threatened discourage at least looking into it?
One of the most reasonable explanations I've seen advanced for this predictably has to do with money. The most vocal "that's impossible" detractors of cold fusion are those working in the hot fusion community. Nations around the world have invested billions of dollars in trying to achieve hot fusion, but practically nothing into potential alternatives. The theory is that the money hungry hot fusion community is deathly afraid that there might actually be something to cold fusion, in which case they'll have some of their funding taken away. Loss of funding is potentially a powerful influence for those screaming the loudest that "it's impossible."
Yes, you've touched what may be the key.
Going back into the mid 90s, I ran across a paper about a guy who was spinning a shaft in a drum and producing steam without a boiler. He was a plumber and noticed that pipes subject to "water hammer" effect got warm.
After some years fiddling, he built a machine that works very well. They did some calculating and it appeared the energy created was greater than that required to drive the motor. That would be Over-Unity and violates Newton's second law. In other words impossible. He got advice from some lawyers and dropped the whole bit about the anomolous extra energy, which in reality is probably not there. The machine is at the very least, extremely efficient.
A company was formed and now it's a legitimate business and has completely shed any mention of "over unity" energy.
You can visit their web page here : Hydrodynamics
The key was cavitation. It's also important to note that acoustic cavitation is also responsible for sonoluminescence, which produce tremendous temperatures.
I sure hope that there is something to Cold Fusion. There may not be, but we would be doing ourselves a great injustice not to follow every lead to it's utter end.
Is the idea instrinsically ridiculous? No, there are chemical cataylsts, it is conceivable there are nuclear cataylsts - though the forces they need to overcome are many orders of magnitude larger. But there is no evidence that anybody has ever found any. All there is, is some bad science overreporting unreproduced and merely alleged results, trying to hype a pretty lousy idea about how easy it might be to find such things, in order to scare up funding.
There papers get published, but are laughable. If such a thing exists, they haven't found it. And they never will, using methods and standards of experimental procedure that could have been taken from a perpetual motion machine patent application historical handbook. If anybody ever does find anything similar, it will be by quite different methods, and vastly higher standards, and it will be reproducible - readily, not hand waving about alleged outliers in integrated heat measurements.
A few years ago there was a big hubbub about the average body temperature of humans. Apparently it was the first time a check had been done since the late 1800s. Among other things it took them all summer to figure out that it wasn't that average body temperatures had change over the hundred years, but that the original study results were rounded to the nearest degree Celsius. ...Seemed obvious to me. :)
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