Comments on: Scientist Claims He Has Achieved Cold Fusion, Scientific Community Says ‘Impossible’ Green design & innovation for a better world Sun, 26 Jun 2016 23:10:50 +0000 hourly 1 By: ScienceFan Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:35:16 +0000 (Sigh)

No, cold fusion doesn’t work, and it isn’t an “obvious threat” to physicists studying fusion in a more traditional setting — if a fusion reactor could be made cheaply they would be ecstatic, because then they wouldn’t have to fight for huge grants all the time and funding. Academics don’t make any money off the research they do, unless they patent something and it sells.

And if you ask the physicists, the issue is that there isn’t any viable physical mechanism to achieve fusion at “cold” temperatures. And no, the fat is nobody has been able to duplicate the Pons and Fleischman work, the “anomalous heat” has almost always been well within the error bars.

Sure, it’s possible there is something a lot of people have overlooked. But it isn’t very likely. There are too many other well-established bits of physics that would work against something like this.

I mean, this is why all kinds of technologies are designed the way they are. The work on designing solar cells, for instance, is based o sound physical principles around the photoelectric effect. Can you get better at exploiting that? Sure, but you aren’t going to get more than 100% energy conversion.

And when you build your understanding of the world, as scientists do, you can eliminate certain possibilities. So we now know that is not possible to say magic words and turn someone into a frog, that dragons do not exist, that you can’t zap a dead body with electricity and make a Frankenstein monster. New theories don’t replace old ones — they just describe certain things better. Relativity, for instance, doesn’t “overthrow” Newton’s laws, it just describes situations that Newton’s laws don’t apply in. Newton’s laws are still perfectly useful and are in fact used all the damned time whenever anyone launches a communications satellite.

Rossi hasn’t offered up his machine for any kind of independent testing. There is currently no way to tell if the whole thing isn’t a scam. Just because he says he has a customer– which he won’t reveal, by the way — doesn’t make it so.

Rossi is proposing that he is achieving fusion of two metals, essentially, and somehow does it without it producing any of the associated radiation effects that fusing anything makes, or an isotope composition that makes any sense. That by itself is a big red flag.

Peer review isn’t perfect. But it exits for a reason. It is a backstop. It is a way for a researcher to ask “did I miss anything?” “Did I screw something up?” Rossi hasn’t done that.

By: swb338 Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:38:51 +0000 This article is somewhat dated and inaccurate. Rossi’s machine has been proven to work, independently validated by his first customer, and was sold on Oct. 28.

It’s not true that every attempt has been proven not to work. Google 60 Minutes Cold Fusion to learn about the teams around the world who have observed anomalous heat thousands of times since the original discovery. What is true is that the field has been pushed to the fringes due to the difficulty in controlling the effect and the obvious threat the technology holds to physics departments and physicists who have spent their whole careers and billions of dollars studying traditional nuclear fusion. Rossi’s contribution is that he’s the first to control and commercialize the process.