Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Alan McDougall on 17/11/2008 17:13:07
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Hi
11 Cold fusion
AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy
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These things have their fashions my understanding that cold fusion actually does take place but the maximum rate at which it can be persuaded to work is far too low to generate any significant energy and definately nothing like as much energy as you have to put in to get it going.
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So far as I'm aware, nobody has demonstrated cold fusion in a way that has been reliably repeated by others.
However, if someone did get it to work the benefits would be huge. It's worth risking wasting a little money on research on the offchance that it works. In any event, a fair bit of the money is spent on students etc and we would be paying them to do something anyway.
It's a bit like having the navy or army rescue people who get into trouble on boats etc. If you look at the cost of the rescue, it's huge, but once you remember that we were paying these people anyway the cost is negligible.
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Yes guys I just can not see with my limited understanding of physics and science how it would ever be possible to fuse altomic particles at low temperatures and still get usable amounts of energy
But it remains a topic of discussion in scientific circles does it not?
Alan
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Alan McDougall
These "great questions" that you posted (some of them are not so great just interesting) are of course just lifted from another website and not your original writings. You should really quite your references when you are plagiarising other peoples work. I thought I posted this reply when you posted them all together but something must have gone wrong. I feel that you are just trying to cut and paste stuff to dominate the board and need watching
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Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.
I'd far rather read a bit of plagiarism than a rant about nonsense - which we find all over the Forums.
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sophie I always write my own replies and will only quote and post good quality scientific references. It is true that I have some original ideas that I am working on but they rest firmly within the core of mainstream science and only involve new ways of looking at things. I also try to indicate clearly where the break exists between broadly accepted ideas and my own.
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sophie,
Let him that is without sin cast the first stone
"I like that quote" I have tried and tried to be friendly but alas in vain. This is not plagerisation,
A billion friendly smiles did not help!!
Do I dominate the forum. I started this as "one thread" and "by agreement with other forum members split it into different topics".
Are we here to trade insult and generate hate and jealousy or debate and dialogue as sensible adults?
Soul Surfer,
Do you want me to leave the forum ,or must I continue to tip toe around the daisies of your sensitive soul. This sort of nonsense makes me sick on the stomach , really sick
I belong to numerous forum, scientific or otherwise. These are unanswered simply questions on physics and science (some not so hard for great minds on the forum) and if my new enemy would look carefully he will observe they contain absolutely no theories put forward by anyone, "just questions".
All these questions I was aware of due to a life as an amateur astronomer. life long reading and absorbing knowledge about physics, science and any other topic that could feed my insatiable curiosity about everything under the sun,
I am extremely well qualified to debate on this forum and have impeccable professional qualifications to back that up.
Do I come Across as some uninformed idiot?
Heck!! Man!! Does everyone always post completely unique original thought or questions, or do we sometimes remember what we have read somewhere or somehow. A case it my recent post on slow light, that came from a memory buried deep in my Psyche
40 years ago. was I stealing Larry Niven's idea?.
Alan
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SS
Me too - I can never manage to cut and paste things, largely because I post from memory. I do repeat a lot of ideas which I have 'heard' in the past.
I can get very grumpy myself too and I try to edit my grumpiest posts before they hit the forum. (Some readers may doubt that)
My point was really that the 'ten questions' were all of interest and worth discussing - unlike the rantings which we suffer on a regular basis. They might have got a better response if they'd been metered out one at a time.
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AMcD
The refreshing thing about your posts is that you always seem to be prepared to accept new things from other contributors, when justified. Unlike some others who's picture of Science is a romantic drama going on inside their heads but it's not in the real world.
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sophiecentaur
AMcD
The refreshing thing about your posts is that you always seem to be prepared to accept new things from other contributors, when justified. Unlike some others who's picture of Science is a romantic drama going on inside their heads but it's not in the real world.
Thank you for understanding. [:)] In my rather protracted life I have read a huge amount of information due to an insatiable curiosity about everything under the sun.
Thus often unresolved questions pop into my aged mind and I go to the amazing internet to see it there was any progress on the topic. ( of course there are mighty minds infinitely greater than mine that have no need for the internet)
Maybe this might be my job in the forum to try and come up with interesting new questions
Example your quote from the bible according to SS must be plagiarising and of course it is not you are quoting from memory . Another example if I read directly from original papers Newton or Einstein and quote then verbatim on the forum, then I am plagiarising?
But just to avoid performing "the sin for which there is no forgiveness in this life or the next", this evil, reprobate and depraved being will always show the source of ever post he makes in future. And my eagle eye will be on SS to make sure he does the same
Alan
Thus
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Now guys can we get back to the topics?
Thank you all,
Alan
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"But it remains a topic of discussion in scientific circles does it not?"
Yes, if you discussions like " Have you met Dr Smith? He's so dumb he just applied for a research grant on cold fusion" Or " I'm so pissed off with this I might as well try cold fusion".
A few people may well be saying "I want to research CF" because they know that there's not a lot of competition. Having got the money they can alsways transfer it to "related areas" of research.
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BC
Point taken , but there is a lot of ho ha, speculation by scientists , yes scientists
If you think (and I believe it is) cold fusion is silly nonsense then perhaps you could debunk the theory
Why with their supposed level of scientific understanding do they continually return to this topic, which I think is an impossibility, but obviously they do not.
Maybe it is because they think they can cash in like you stated, but as for me, I would not buy into any of their nonsense.
And where would They find grants to reseach CF?
Is makes me think about antigravity and debates obout the reversal of the flow of entropy in an open macro system like I presume the universe is
Alan
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As you said, "no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested".
The Western world can afford to pay for artists, why not a few oddball scientists? They are usually quite cheap.
The worst that happens is they say "we tried"; the best that could happen is pretty close to literally saving the world.
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Yes guys I just can not see with my limited understanding of physics and science how it would ever be possible to fuse altomic particles at low temperatures
The wavelenght of subatomic particles increases as the temperature decreases (The Broglie's relation: λ = h/p) and so quantistic effects as tunnel effect become more probable; remember that in the late 30' it was discovered that it were slow neutrons that interacted more with the fissile nuclei.
That said, I really don't know if cold fusion is really possible or not.