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COLD_FUSION


Let me write-up what little                  November 25, 2005
I know about the Cold Fusion                 January  27, 2010
controversy.                                 February 15, 2012

  Once upon a time, a pair of
  researchers at a state
  university in Utah claimed to           They were messing around with
  have been achieved something            platinum electrodes saturated
  like "cold fusion" using an             with hydrogen or deuterium
  electrochemical aparatus.               (heavy hydrogen) in a
                                          complicated electrolyte soup,
  By "Cold" they meant "near              and claimed to have found
  room temperature", without              unexplained heat production
  the high temperatures and               when using deuterium.
  pressures of the magnetic
  bottle approach favored by                  Obviously: deuterium fusion!
  mainstream research.
                                                  This can seem plausible
n   The small bit I have to                       in a vauge way if you
    contribute is a theory                        visualize the tiny
    about how they got                            hydrogen atoms confined
    confused.                                     in the interstices of the
                                                  platinum lattice, pushed
       A rough understanding of the               closer together to the
       difference between chemical                point where they're more
       and nuclear phenomena is that              likely to fuse.
       the chemical is entirely a
       manifestation of the outer                     There are many problems
       shells of electrons, and                       with the notion though:
       nuclear effects depend on                      where's the radiation
       the nucleus at the core.                       going?  Why haven't the
                                                      experimenters killed
       If you start from there, and                   themselves?
       you find a different result
       for hydrogen and deuterium,
       you might very well conclude
       you're looking at a nuclear
       phenomena like "fusion": The
       only *difference* between
       hydrogen and dueterium is in
       the nucleus: hydrogen has a
       simple Proton, and deuterium         This is certainly the kind of
       is heavier, with the addition        mistake that *I* might've
       of (if I remember right) one         made, but unlike them, I'm free
       neutron (which has a weight          to tell you about it: I was just a
       equivalent to a proton).             student at the time, and I'm
                                            not in that game at all just now.

                                               Imagine if you were a
                                               full university professor,
                                               a researcher who'd already
                                               announced a result...
                                               backing away from something
                                               like this would be an
                                               impossibility.

                                               I asked some fellow students--
                                               grad students in chemistry--
                                               how you could get different
                                               chemical behavior with just
                                               a heavier nucleus.  Their
                                               immediate response: the
                                               specific heat would be
                                               different.

                                               And that was the "aha,
                                               of course" moment for me:
                                               think about heat as a
                                               vibration of atoms,
                                               increase the weight, you
                                               change their vibrational
                                               characteristics, you can
                                               store more heat, other
                                               things being equal, so
                                               yeah the "specific heat"
                                               changes.

                                                  And even I understood enough
                                                  chemical thermo to know
                                                  that when the specific
                                                  heat changes, *everything*
                                                  changes, you get
                                                  different energetics, a
                                                  different phase diagram...

  And further, I think they
  were probably taken-in by
  the spirit of the times:        Another thing that gave the story
                                  some initial credibility was that
  The 80s were a time when        when it broke, there were *two*
  it seemed like technical        groups claiming to have seen the
  revolutions were happening:     effect.

                                               But: neither group had
                                               any sort of background
                                               in fusion physics.

     High Tc superconductors.
                               SUPERCONDUCTING_STATE
     Quasi-crystals.
                         QUASICRYSTALS
     And Chaos Theory?                      And both groups were
                                            from Utah... that raises
        With some                           the question of how much
        caveats:                            contact they have with
                                            each other, perhaps they
        Chaos Theory in practice            shouldn't count as two
        has been less about                 groups precisely?
        expanding human
        capabilites than helping                And further, *both*
        to define it's limits.                  groups were mere
                                                State schools: rightly
        At the core of Chaos                    or wrongly (it's a
        Theory are findings that                mix of the two, I
        *should* have been well                 suspect) there's an
        known 30 years earlier,                 intense amount of
        from Fluid Mechanics                    snobbery about academic
                                                institutions.
                                                A researcher at
                                                an MIT or a Stanford
   Now, let's step back and                     is hardly going to
   see what this all says                       be impressed by a
   about Science.                               report from a state
                                                university in Utah,
   Djerassi bases his "Cantor's                 of all places.
   Dilemma" on the premise that
   scientific fraud is very rare.
   In the Cold Fusion story we have
   a case where it appears that
   error and *possibly* fraud was
   actually rather wide-spread:
   positive reports of cold fusion
   came in from multiple places,
   from people who were perhaps not
   the best and brightest, but were
   certainly respectable.

   On the other hand, as attempts at reproducing
   this multiplied, many negative results were
   reported as well, and thus we can say that
   Science Worked: there was a correcting force
   that staggered back toward The Truth.

         If you want to be aggressively skeptical
         about this though: if the pro-cold fusion     From that point of
         forces had a tendency to see what they        view, we were all
         wanted to see, might not the anti- side       distracted by the
         have repeatedly missed what they didn't       side show and
         want to see?                                  missed out on some
                                                       odd, promising
                                                       electrochemistry,
                                                       if not a form of
                                                       "cold fusion"
                                                       precisely.

                                                       But, as I understand
                                                       it, there are
                                                       cold fusion die-hards
                                                       who continue to
                                                       work on these
                                                       problems--
                                                       electrochemistry has
                                                       the virtue of being
                                                       relatively cheap, and
                                                       allowing for oddball
                                                       experiments--
                                                       possibly a field for
                                                       crackpots, possibly
                                                       an opportunity for
                                                       serendipity.


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