Posted on 05/09/2007 4:22:53 PM PDT by saganite
The U.S. Navy think they can get cold fusion cooking, or is that chilling.
Cold fusion still sounds like a pipe dream. Being able to force atoms together at room temperature has been deemed impossible by almost every respectable scientist and or physicist in the world. But leave it to the U.S. Navy to push to wards that seemingly unattainable goal.
A recent academic paper published by the Navy's Space and Navel Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR for short) in San Diego suggests that cold fusion may actually be possible. The development has been supported by the scientific journal Naturwissenschaften, to which Albert Einstein used to contribute. SPAWAR scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have apparently achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR). More importantly, the reaction can if need be duplicated by other scientists to confirm the results.
Conventionally, nuclear fusion requires high heat and high pressure to force atoms together, typically two hydrogen to create one helium and a bunch of free energy. But the most well known fusion reactor, our sun, uses intense heat and intense pressure to do this. Back in 1989, there was a pair of researchers by the names of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann who had claimed that they had developed a sustained cold fusion reaction. But because their results could not be duplicated by anyone else, their results were regarded as anomalous and or erroneous. As I recall, their testing procedures and equipment had been contaminated by an outside source, therefore nullifying any creditable results. But in the interest of finding cold fusion, SPAWAR continued to research cold fusion with a variety of different materials.
Szpak and Boss have succeeded by coating a tin wire with palladium and deuterium, and then subjecting it to magnetic and electrical fields. They feel confident with their results and are offering plastic film detectors, CR-39 detectors, to researchers for inspection and confirmation of charged particle emission. That would help to prove that cold fusion has been found, or the beginnings of it.
Though it's still too early to tell, the new method does look promising. Further more, it can be easily duplicated by other scientists for confirmation and development. It will also help to spur future funding.
I like how a thread on cold fushion is placed with an article about Hillary, a mere coincidence? I think not.
I’d like to see them do it.
In Before the Mr. Fusion Pix!
Cold Fusion works well in a LAMP environment....oh, wait.
Try this site. Pretty interesting. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6426393169641611451&hl=en
Apparently cold fusion does work. It just does not produce enough result to be useful for anything except to convince some scientists that there is a Holy Grail there if they can just get a handle on it.
Was the writer a Navel gazer?
Good one. What I said before!
You must have missed the report of the explosion in Pons/ Fleishmann’s labs before they were cast into the outer darkness when the hot fusion guys ran them off.
I did. Tell me about it.
btt
Cold fusion . . . global warming . . . I’m so confused!
"... if need be.."? Is the author making some kind of joke? It's been almost twenty years since scientists started seeking an experiment demonstrating "cold fusion" which can be replicated by others. The fact that the author concludes that the most important deliverable "can be" duplicated, but that such results have NOT been duplicated, tells me pretty much all I need to know.
bump for later reading, should be fun
Me too, not sure I want too sign up for this “Holy Grail” quest.
He’s a journalist. Take his writing with a grain of salt. I’m sure the results will have to be replicated. Check out this related thread I posted a few days ago.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1821200/posts
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