“Cold fusion” moves closer to mainstream acceptance
portal.acs.org
portal.acs.org
Where the story left off, there were a few competent researchers with well-designed experiments that were getting indications that something was happening that was not covered by current theory. However, cold fusion research was by then out of fashion, and no one was interested in looking deeper into those results and confirming or refuting them.
As Goodstein notes, "What all these experiments really need is critical examination by accomplished rivals intent on proving them wrong. That is part of the normal functioning of science. Unfortunately, in this area, science is not functioning normally. There is nobody out there listening."
1. It's from the American Chemical Society. While no one is infallible, they're not exactly flakes.
2. There are some serious names and institutions involved. Same caveat as 1.
3. Ask yourself if your doubts are based on hearsay of hearsay. Unless you are a nuclear chemist or physicist who has tried experimentally to produce low energy nuclear reactions without success, maybe there are reasons research has continued for so many years in the face of overwhelming public and professional ridicule.
And what if my doubts are based on my fathers work, who did actually try to reproduce this experimentally? And published the failure in Fusion Technology? And I went to the lab and saw the equipment too.
Basically the problem with the experiments is that no one does the calorimetry correctly. And especially that people do not calculate the Faraday Efficiency of the electrolysis, and so show excess heat when there is none.
You seem to be confusing being hopeful or popular with being (proven) right.
Sure, cold fusion is interesting, and has the chance of a big pay-off, but it also presents enormous problems to a would-be researcher, including lack of funding, dismissive colleagues, and ignorant pseudo-skepticism from the public. For a professional scientist to pursue it in the face of such problems require more than faith and courage; it probably requires at least some evidence they've seen with their own eyes. If you're interested, lookup Francesco Scaramuzzi and Julian Schwinger along with keywords of "cold fusion."
these people can choose what they want to work on. i am not putting a gun to their heads forcing them to do this. nor am i laughing at them.
if they're right - great. who wouldn't want a free lunch? but i don't see the point in painting them as heroes or presenting this work as something successful when, as far as i can see, it is not.
i've done research. you do it because it's interesting, not because of what other people think. and everyone has problems with funding: it's a market; if there's more money in one area there are more people too.
as i said, i'm not sure why you're so emotionally involved with this, but it doesn't seem healthy. if you're involved in cold fusion maybe you should look elsewhere, because science isn't really about being loved or acclaimed by the public...
BTW, if you do research solely by what you find interesting, more power to you. But to propose that most or all researchers do so, while not caring what their colleagues and peers think, doesn't square with well-documented reality (e.g. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
When I saw the submission title, I thought "oh no." And then I felt relief that it was not about the CF platform.
Coldfusion was pretty bad when it was first introduced, and it hasn't improved much. I've been dodging it for years, but some of my friends haven't been so lucky. Each of them hates it, and one had even quit his job because his employer didn't want to give it up.
Yes, I would be sad if CF became "mainstream" again and I had to learn it. If I recall correctly, everyone needed ColdFusion when it was first introduced, and it is only barely alive due to that initial boom.
Nevertheless I resolved to give it a shot, the experience was so bad I was reduced to a gibbering wreck, quivering and wishing for my sane C64 BASIC interpreter rather than having to write cf tag based code structures because the designers of the language couldn't be bothered to even finish the rudimentary cfscript implementation they made in an extremely half assed fashion.
CF needs to die; forever, I want it wiped from the face of the planet, if I ever decide to become a berserker instead of biting my tongue for blood I will just remember the pain inflicted on me trying to use this steaming pile of excrement.
Enough bad things can simply never be said about CF, this article headline alone almost gave me an aneurysm, and I felt a soothing feeling of relief wash over me when I realised they were only referring to the potentially junk science version so widely misunderstood by the public at large. I can think of no realisation in the same vein that would actually make me feel such a positive response except in this specific narrow example.
</rant>
<cfswitch expression="expr">
<cfcase value="val"> ... switch (expr) {
case "val"....The down-fall of CF was Rails since Rails is open-source, huge community, is free, and powered by Ruby. CF was closed sourced, small community, and powered by Java. Yuck.
:-(
By around 97, we (at UOL, a major ISP/portal in Brazil) had to develop a small program that automatically restarted it when cfserver (IIRC) locked up. During peak hours, it had to be restarted every minute or so.
By 98, all applications were migrated to saner platforms.
I still have to support CF.
Beats head against desk
There are lots of people investigating lots of exciting ideas out there. That's great. But there's a big difference between "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "hey, I can show that...".
When I saw the conference details, I hoped cold fusion was at the "show that" phase. Disappointingly, it continues to not be. Hence my post.
Are you serious? This boggles my mind more than anything about how bio systems work in nature in the last few years...
An NDA prevents me from saying much else, but I think I can say that the field is better developed than many people realize.
Then there's fundamentalist religious education. Plenty of funding there. Lots of impressively architected buildings. People with advanced degrees.
Recruitment, funding, and NDAs are but one metric of success.
Shouldn't it be excess neutrons?
The Hagelstein explanation seems interesting, but, again, unless we see some nuclear fusion, those guys are studying something completely different. Not to say uninteresting, but not what we could call nuclear fusion.
or, alternatively, show that it is possible to do coldER fusion. just, show that there's a process with the possibility of scaling down.
Really? In honor of the possibly-crazy-but-much-more-likely-liars-and-con men whose experiments couldn't even come close to being replicated. The whole article acts like any current research is a vindication of Fleishmann and Pons, but honestly, if cold fusion ever does come to pass, it will be despite Fleishmann and Pons' fraudulent work. How much time and credibility was wasted trying to recreate that BS?
Well, in the first few weeks after the announcement, several labs said they had replicated the experiment, so if Fleishmann and Pons were liars or con men, I suppose we must assume a vast conspiracy of such across several notable institutions... well, that or some people were excited, mistaken, and desperately wanted to find evidence of something that apparently wasn't there.
Bad results -- even replication of results ultimately found to be bad -- do not require liars, only error.