[AdmSmith]

No, nothing has changed. there are still people trying to violate the thermodynamic principles, building perpetual motion machines, trisecting an angle etc.

[El Gato]

No, nothing has changed. there are still people trying to violate the thermodynamic principles, building perpetual motion machines, trisecting an angle etc.

Nobody ever claimed cold fusion energy was from nothing. If it exists, it would be from the same source as "hot" fusion, or fission for that matter. Namely the loss of mass in a nuclear reaction. E=MC2 and all that.

The thing about "cold fusion" was that, at least initially, no one was able to explain how the nuclei of the atoms were forced close enough together to fuse, against the electrostatic forces tending to keep them apart, without using the brute force technique of simply heating them up until the speed of collisions between the nuclui was enough to overcome the electrocstatic repulsion.

[JedRothwell]

AdmSmith wrote:

"No, nothing has changed. there are still people trying to violate the thermodynamic principles, building perpetual motion machines, trisecting an angle etc."

On the contrary, cold fusion experiments are predicated on the principle that thermodynamics work according to the textbooks. The experiments depend on calorimeters, mainly on the design perfected by J. P. Joule himself in the late 1840s. If, as you suggest, thermodynamic principles did not work, cold fusion experimental results would be meaningless.

I refer only to experiments that measure heat. In some cases, heat is not measured, and only experiments measure tritium, helium, neutrons and other nuclear effects are monitored. In some cases calorimetry interferes with these other measurements.

- Jed