Talk:Cold fusion

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Only a "few"?

Are you sure that it's only a "few" people who take the position that it's pseudoscience? I've followed this whole thing fairly carefully since its inception (being at the time a semi-hard science-fiction writer who, like my friend Jack Vance and other S.F. writers of my acquaintance, was blown away by the possibilities) and it seems to me that except for a few die-hards, it's long since been pretty much discredited.

But I'll certainly admit that there is a vast difference between being an advocate of a "pseudoscience" and being an advocate of an unpopular position that is somewhat outside the mainstream without being pushed by nuts and fanatics.

So maybe this is just a question of semantics in the CZ article?

My own impression of the article as at least the opening now stands is that there is not enough emphasis on the general rejection of the idea by the mainstream. But I certainly don't want to get into an ideological battle over this....

Cheers! Hayford Peirce 11:28, 14 September 2008 (CDT)

It depends on how you define pseudoscience. I would say this was bad science but not necessarily pseudoscience. Chris Day 14:33, 14 September 2008 (CDT)

That's my own feeling. So that I think it should be rewritten accordingly to say that whereas a few people think it's pseudoscience, most mainstream people simply consider it to be bad science. Hayford Peirce 15:46, 14 September 2008 (CDT)

Let us please not cite "my own feelings" for this sort of thing. Please cite some evidence in support of these claims. It is obvious that many scientists and magazines oppose cold fusion, but on the other hand I have a public opinion poll of scientists in Japan, and I have comments from the DoE panel and from readers at LENR-CANR. Based on this data, I believe that scientists are sharply divided with regard to cold fusion, but there is no overwhelming majority on either side. Based on the Japanese survey and the DoE panel, scientists are about evenly divided.

Let us not put statements into this article which are not supported by objective evidence and sources.

- Jed

Have rewritten the Intro to give a more skeptical view

I'm not an expert in this field, but I remember the initial excitement and the subsequent letdown. The Intro should reflect this actuality.

The more that I reread the initial effort here, the more I see it as a fairly unvarnished point of view that cold fusion actually exists.... Maybe it does -- but almost no reputable scientist believes that it does. Hayford Peirce 15:56, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

You wrote:

but almost no reputable scientist believes that it does.

I have a list of 4,000 reputable scientist who believe that cold fusion is real. Most of them observed it themselves. They are all reputable, or they would not be on my list. They include, for example, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin; two Nobel laureates in physics; the director of BARC (India’s premier nuclear physics laboratory) and later chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission; Bockris, Fleischmann and other authors of the leading textbooks on electrochemistry; several Distinguished Professors and Fellows of the U.S. Navy, the Electrochemical Society, NATO and other prestigious organizations; three editors of major plasma fusion and physics journals, and a retired member of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

Four thousand scientists is not "almost none."

- Jed

And by the way, you can read 500 papers, including papers by all the researchers I listed above, at http://lenr-canr.org/.

I suggest that you review this literature carefully before making statements about the research, or about the researchers themselves.

- Jed

Discussion

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What is the importance of neutrons?

I just cut the following from the background section to try and rework it here:

Nuclear reactions are normally initiated using neutrons or high-energy elemental particles. The process taking place under these conditions is well known and is the basis for the field called nuclear physics.

Reactions involving neutrons can occur because these particles do not have a charge and can pass through the barrier. However, neutrons are not observed to form under conditions that produce the cold fusion reactions and they are not known to exist as free particles in ordinary materials.

Why are neutrons important, especially the first bit relating to fission? The only relevance to fusion I can see is that plasma fusion gives off neutrons whereas cold fusion does not. Above seems to implicate them as being important for the fusion event. Is that true? And if so, it needs to be rewritten to establish why neutrons are significant. If not, then why are we discussing neutrons with respect to fission and the columb barrier? Chris Day 16:23, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I suggest we include the section you deleted, as follows:

Reactions involving neutrons can occur because these particles do not have a charge and can pass through the barrier. However, neutrons are not observed to form under conditions that produce the cold fusion reactions and they are not known to exist as free particles in ordinary materials.

The established theory is that nuclear fusion reactions cannot be initiated without the input of significant energy because the charge barrier between nuclei, called the Coulomb barrier, cannot be overcome any other way. Cold fusion generated widespread publicity since it seemed defy these theoretical considerations and represented a potentially cheap and clean source of energy.

Please do not delete it again without a discussion and careful consideration. As I said, this is not Wikipedia. You don't just clobber paragraphs here. You modify them carefully.

Neutrons are important because they are neutral, and if there were large numbers of free neutrons or other neutral particles such as muons, there would be no argument about cold fusion. But there are not. That's a key reason why cold fusion is so surprising and controversial.

The other reason is that high energy input is not needed, but if you had muons or free neutrons, you would not need it.

This may seem obvious to a scientist but it is not obvious to the general reader.

- Jed

I'd suggest the way it was written was not even obvious to scientists. That was why i brought it to the talk page. It was not a random deletion I was trying to encourage you to discuss it (and above you do clarify what you were trying to explain in that paragraph). Some of your edit summaries are criticising your own work? I think you starting to see attacks where none exist. Chris Day 17:03, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I tweaked it a bit, and added muons. Perhaps that will only make it more confusing to the general reader. Anyway, let us try to explain it to the reader, rather than deleting it. I am confident that physicists on both sides of the debate consider this a major issue.

- Jed

No fanfare?

Jed, you wrote in in the subject for one edit that "There was no fanfare in announcement". I'm not sure what you mean here. How normal is it to have a press conference prior to publication? Pretty rare, I'd suggest. While I agree they probably did not have trumpets, literally, it is unusual to have a press conference to announce a scientific discovery. Fanfare or similar, in that context, is quite apt. Chris Day 16:57, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

I meant there was no fanfare at U. Utah. There was a great deal of fanfare elsewhere, but not accompanying the announcement itself. I base this on 3 sources:

1. A video of the announcement on YouTube. It seems quite subdued to me.

2. Mallove's book "Fire from Ice."

3. My conversations with Fleischmann, Pons and others at U. Utah. They were not thrilled to be announcing this. In fact, they dreaded it, and expected the worst. They were forced to make an announcement several years earlier than they planned to. See also Beaudette's book.

In other words, the announcement was subdued because everyone there expected to lose their jobs -- which they soon did. That's what they told Beaudette and I.

- Jed

You should probably be a Topic Informant, as an acquaintance of Pons and Fleishmann. See CZ:Policy on Topic Informants. Anyone got any opinion on this? Also, please sign your comments using the signature button in the toolbar or the "Sign your username" four tilde link in the special characters panel. --Tom Morris 17:33, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Hmmm . . . It says the Topic Informant is one who has "unique and important experience of historical events, CEOs, politicians, judges, inventors, and others who are (or were) close to the subjects written about . . ." I guess I fall in the latter category with regard to cold fusion. I know a lot about it, I have read and edited hundreds of papers and three books, and I been in several labs watching experiments and so on.

But the role of the Topic Informant is unclear to me, at least as it would apply to a technical article. Shouldn't this be based entirely on peer-reviewed papers, and other information that anyone can confirm? That's the usual standard for technical reviews. All of the statements I made can be found in the literature. (I should perhaps add some more footnotes.) Many are in papers available on line at LENR-CANR. All the papers at LENR-CANR came from the libraries at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech. I have 3,000 other papers that I do not have permission to upload, regrettably, but I do quote from them. The point is, you can go to a university library and independently confirm everything I say. (Unless I got it wrong!)

If this were a biography of Martin Fleischmann perhaps you would need a Topic Informant, but I do not see how it would apply this article . . .

Incidents in the history of cold fusion are well documented by the late E. Mallove in his book, and by C. Beaudette in his book. Beaudette has donated his source materials to the special collection on cold fusion at the University of Utah, so you can go there and view the letters and listen to the audiotape interviews. (I spent a week there in the stacks this summer. My idea of a vacation.) The incident I described above is on p. 149 of his book. And the entire book is now available right here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf

One other issue is that I am 100% convinced that cold fusion is a real nuclear effect. I don't know how you want to deal with this. I do not pretend to be undecided or neutral, because I have seen data from thousands of experimental runs, some with very high s/n ratios, which is to say compelling experimental evidence. On thing you will not find is a person who has read many papers and seen lots of data and yet who does not believe that cold fusion exists. Except for one person: Prof. Deiter Britz. Every other electrochemist and nuclear scientist I know who is familiar with the literature is totally convinced, mainly because the ones I know measured the effect themselves, repeatedly. If they did not believe their own instruments and x-ray film, they wouldn't be experimentalists, would they?

I shall now try four tildes.

Jed Rothwell 20:42, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Should be moved

...to cold fusion.

Behave, now, folks. :-) --Larry Sanger 18:16, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Surely you mean Cold fusion? Hayford Peirce 18:54, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

Both cold fusion and Cold fusion link to the same page, which is different from Cold Fusion. --Larry Sanger 18:56, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

The deed is done. Hayford Peirce 19:14, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

But what was the net difference in heat caused by your fusing them? Howard C. Berkowitz 19:32, 15 September 2008 (CDT)

When Mr. Klein returned home from a visit to his friend Teitelbaum, in the psychiatric ward, Mrs. Klein bombarded him with questions.

"Poor Teitelbaum," sighed Mr. Klein. "Sick in the head. He rants, he raves, he talks mishegas'"

"So how could you even talk to him?"

"I tried to bring him down to earth. I talked of simple, everyday things: the weather; did he need warm clothes; the ten dollars he owes us....

"Aha! Did he remember?"

"That meshuge he isn't," said Klein

"Oedipus schmedipus, as long as a boy loves his mother." Howard C. Berkowitz 19:54, 15 September 2008 (CDT)