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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
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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