[Sooner78]

I wouldn't take this article too serious until someone with a physics degree from somewhere other than Utah certifies it as credible. Smells of really bad science to me.

[coloradan]

I wouldn't take this article too serious until someone with a physics degree from somewhere other than Utah certifies it as credible. Smells of really bad science to me.

It's pretty credible to me: Here's the relevent part: Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute. People in airplanes absorb much more than that.

In other words, the machine produces an output of neutrons that is barely over 10% of background levels. One neutron every 15 seconds is, well, not very many. "Notably absent is shielding," the article says elsewhere.

In contrast, if the cold fusion experiments were generating the heat they were said to generate from fusion, Pons and Fleischmann would have been promptly killed from all the neutrons that would have had to have been generated. Many, many orders of magnitude different.

[hopespringseternal]

I wouldn't take this article too serious until someone with a physics degree from somewhere other than Utah certifies it as credible. Smells of really bad science to me.

Well, the guy who invented the thing died in 1971, so it is hardly new ground. While it is mildly impressive that a high school kid built it, the machine itself is rather simple to be terribly impressed by its construction: the vaccuum pump connected to it is more complex and harder to build.

And it sounds like he is operating it at a ridiculously low energy level, albeit enough to demonstrate the principle.

[TheAngryClam]

People build these Farnsworth fusion devices in their basement all the time as a hobby- probably part of the reason he got second place. The fusion isn't the interesting part- it's his improvisation of various techniques in the construction.

Here's a website about Farnsworth's fusion reactors, including some directions on constructing your own:

http://fusor.net

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

The title and the first few paragraphs tend to imply that the kid invented this thing from scratch. He didn't, he built something that has been around for awhile. The most amazing thing is that he did it on the cheap from stuff that he found in junk yards and thrift stores. I'm not trying to take away anything from the kid, what he did was pretty cool.

I wonder how much money Los Alamos and NASA spent on their apparatuses (apparati?)