Astronomy Cast 325: Cold Fusion

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1. I was born in Africa and Africa is one of the hottest continents in the world but even in Africa when it rains a bit, it rains A LOT.
   Even heavier then the guy that calls himself Andre The Giant(523 lbs). It's not even funny!
2. Such is the Creation of Allah: now show Me what is there that others besides Him have created; nay, but the Transgressors are in manifest error.
3. 5:13 lol i feel ya. garageband is awful
4. damnnn guys !! i would do anything for a -12 degree winter!! here in toronto we got a couple of weeks of that -40 nonsense! it gets warmer on freaking mars!!!!
5. +Keith Rhodes
   
   Please refrain from making such comments. Not only is it immature, but it is very useless.
   
   Regarding the video: Loved it:)!
6. Pamela Gay is a very beautiful woman, worth watching this just to see her play her part.
7. To much time advertising and blowing your own trumpet, and not enough time spent asking the questions.
8. Tedious and ignorant. 
   One claim you make, that $100k/year is going into LENR research, proves how out of date you are.   There are at least 3 companies that have raised >$3m in 2013. Work also continues at big companies like STMicrosystems, Toyota, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.  Then there are the national labs who keep it going at a low (for them) level and NASA.   You are off by a factor of at least 20.  
   
   Just because you think highly of yourself is no reason to talk about an area of science you have no expertise in.  As particle physicists and astronomers you may think you know everything, but quantum mechanics in solid state materials is out of your depth.  Like high-temperature superconductors, which physicists cannot explain analytically or with simulation, LENR is a coherence effect.   See Hagelstein's "Spin Boson Polarity with Losses."   
   
   We probably do see LENR in astronomy- it is likely why the Earth has too much Helium in the atmosphere to be explained by other known reactions, and why the solid core releases too much heat for other known reactions.  
   
   Researchers at SRI now have simple "exploding wire" experiments that are 100% replicable with "bomb-calorimetrey"  so simple even a physicist can understand it.  
9. When you say -12…do you mean Celsius or that strange other system that makes absolutely no sense? :D
10. Anyone else get aroused when she said hiney?
11. Oh wow. You're brave, taking this topic on. I've followed it from the beginning (since I too was in grade school) and it's almost as big a nut-attractor as the moon landing... ahem. (He says reviewing the length of his reply.)
    
    Pons and Fleishmann were chemists, which is why the nuclear scientists ripped their explanations apart with such ease and glee. "It's not Nuclear Fusion, as we define it" and that's probably correct. (If you want desktop fusion, build yourself a Farnsworth Fuser, although they're not very efficient.)
    
    Unless things have changed recently, one of the big problems in ab-initio quantum chemistry codes is the interaction of light and heavy ions. The adsorption  of hydrogen by metal hydrides was a big topic of research, and they were finding the best available simulations could not account for the relativistic effects when a proton finds itself in the presence of a massively charged atomic nucleus. (Then again, it's been a few years since I was deeply into this.)
    
    Protein folding turns out to be comparatively straightforward, because the relative atomic masses are so similar. Unless things improved, we don't actually know how hydrogen does the "squeezing into the lattice" trick. (We just name the phases.) And they certainly didn't know in the 90's.
    
    There is also the issue that quantum chromodynamics (governing nuclear reactions) becomes more intractable at lower energies, due to gauge interactions. The colder the matter, the worse our models perform. (Again, unless there's been a breakthrough in the last few years I haven't heard about.)
    
    If I had relativistic deuterium nuclei jumping around quantized points within a tuned lattice (maybe even true quantum dots?) then I honestly don't know what would happen, or who to ask. Do they tunnel? That's frontier science (or possibly just my ignorance) and that's why this issue hasn't died. It's kind of cool.
    
    Here's a far-fetched link that would take some intractable calculations to prove or disprove - if relativistic effects have anything to do with how the hydrogen behaves inside the metal, (which they do) perhaps such effects may be sensitive - tuned - to local variations in the Earth's gravitational field. Why not? If it has more to do with W interactions, (and we still believe the oscillating neutrino theory) then precise distance from local nuclear reactors might be important. There, that took me about thirty seconds to imagine two left-field effects that I'll bet are too stupid to even be considered, and wouldn't be controlled by the lab protocols. Imagine how many tricks the universe has up its sleeve?
    
    If we can't imagine ways that nature might be messing with us, then we have insufficient imagination.
    
    There are some people deeply troubled by the confusion and contradictions among the various experiments, and some of the anecdotal anomalies. (eg: the Andrew Riley incident) Suspicions and feelings are completely unscientific, of course, but they persist. I find that interesting. Perhaps it's just a result of half-assed funding and borrowed equipment and we really are chasing a phantom with a faulty torch, but we need to be sure.
    
    So, I totally agree on the evidence that "Cold Fusion" as an energy source is bunk. But, I'm still prepared to accept that Pons and Fleishmann may have noticed some subtle condensed matter effect that is hard to replicate, and harder to explain. Since this kerfuffle began, the human race has started playing with Bose-Einstein Condensates and Holographic Atoms (corralled electrons) and a lot of people thought those weren't possible either. The few who did were intensely busy in the 90's playing with the new YBCO superconductors and comprehending cooper pairs, and probably missed the whole show.
    
    At least Inertial Confinement Fusion has progressed. It used to perpetually be 20 years away, but now it's perpetually 10. It seems most of the technical issues are solved (once again, a little more turbulent and subtle than we thought) and "scaling up" will actually make it easier. (The smaller your "sun in a bottle", the harder it is to keep. Funny that.) So the next proper step is a huge one capable of powering a city, and that requires a major government.
    
    But then, I'm just a guy, y'know?
12. Excellent presentation, everyone,, esp the views on how politics and finance can negatively impact Science and the reporting of it!
13. at 26:18 "The funding is really drying up" - The Sydney Kimmel foundation funded the University of Missouri with 5.5 Million USD for cold fusion research. See SKINR. The University of Missouri also hosted this year's international conference on cold fusion (ICCF). Vice Chancellor for Research Robert V. Duncan stated: "We at the University of Missouri (MU) are delighted to team with ENEA and National Instruments to review and explore developments in condensed matter nuclear science. There have been great advances in this discipline over the last five years by research labs and private institutions around the world, and this work will be explored at ICCF-18. The Naval Research Lab (NRL), and many other excellent laboratories have confirmed that the excess heat effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons are real, and roughly one thousand times larger than can be attributed to a chemical process."
14. 15:40 "the claims that have been made by more than one - not at a top ranked research center scientists - these claims have been made multiple times, but the experiment has never proven out at any of the big name top research centers that have tried it."
    
    It should be noted that the claims of successful replication have been made by scientists from Texas A&M, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Naval Research Center, SRI International, SPAWAR, The Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the Italian Department of Energy (ENEA), the Indian Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and many more universities around the world. None of these institutions has retracted their results.
    
    It is therefore not correct of Pamela Gay to imply that the successful experiments were done by sub par scientists.
    
    19:55 "and everyone jumped on it, it was an amazing story, pretty much over night major research institutions all over the world started trying to replicate what they'd heard based on the scant information that had been published"
    
    The "big name top research centers" that couldn't replicate the effect (or that thought they had and then retracted) failed because they were indeed missing vital information and were too impatient. Apparantly they didn't reach the loading ratio of Deuterium in the Palladium that is needed to get the effect going and concluded in a matter of weeks that cold fusion was dead.
    
    The nuclear scientists reasoned that a fusion of two deuterium atoms would not only produce heat, but also a lot of neutrons must come out of that fusion reaction. They felt already certain that it couldn't be fusion, because the amount of neutrons would have killed anyone near the experiment. They decided to look for neutrons and when they didn't find them, they concluded that nothing was happening. End of story.
    
    From that moment on anyone who claimed a successful replication was frowned upon at best.
    
    However the experimental evidence reported over the years in numerous peer reviewed papers in mainstream journals tells a different story.
15. Hey Pam, the generation of scientists that ridiculed cold fusion is also dying.  What are you willing to do if it turns out we had to wait for them to die in order to find out that P&F's cold fusion claims were substantively true?
16. cold fusion has not been successful because the standard model of atom is wrong. experiment should be designed  round correct version to succeed
17. It is cold in California, it's in the 40's over here. :(
18. Pamela's looking hot lately ;)
19. Any chance Bill Nye comes on the show someday?
20. I have to wonder. Are there any "catalytic" nuclear processes in nature at all? I obviously don't mean with a net-gain after energy-conversion; similar to stimulation of light-emission in lasers or how repeated measuring of unstable isotopes slows their decay (increases half-life).