It's Not Cold Fusion but It's Something
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
What I find interesting is that when confronted with that idea, many physcists just get stuck at the original claims and don't understand that there is likely a novel phenomenon of some sort, deserving of study.
As if two quiet, humble, respected PhD's in electrochemistry were crackpots orchestrating some kind of scam. I feel sorry for the decades of shaming they had to endure (Fleischmann died 4 years ago; Pons is still alive).
The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum. When some of the results were turning out to be negative, it seemed that almost no physicist was willing to say, hey wait a minute, it's not cold fusion but maybe there's a new interesting unknown phenomenon there.
The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum.
In fact, I've been downvoted and ridiculed for things like requesting a source be given, or quoting a mainstream textbook (which disagreed with a user.
HN is better than most imho, but most internet forums seem to be characterized by groupthink rather than vehement adherence to an ability to verify the truth of what one is claiming. I'd rather be in the company of the latter, even if they do ridicule you if your claims are not verifiable.
They'll interpret friendly corrections as rudeness, and won't actually stop making wild unsubstantiated claims until you escalate to genuine abrupt rudeness and/or banning.
Also, they'd probably be accused of "groupthink" for trying to maintain that objectivity by those who disagree with the conclusions. Humans are hard to deal with.
Sadly, mainstream science can be as vicious in persecuting heretics as the Church was.
From lobotomy, which was a common practice back in the day, to electroshock therapy to unconventional people (not legitimately crazy, just anybody as long as their parents/guardians convinced there was "something wrong with them" e.g. from gay to wanting to live a bohemian life and having a conservative family).
And of course modern science happily collaborated with all kinds of power to give us the atomic bomb, biological weapons, and other atrocities.
Convinced, as a scientific establishment, that your theories/dogmas about being straight/gay are correct, and subjecting the "sick" into electroshock and other therapy is not persecution?
What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?
And things such as lobotomy/heavy drugs/etc which were applied to all kind of strays/dissidents from mainstream values/conventions (and not just legitimately crazy people) is also classic persecution. And it didn't just happen behind the "Iron Curtain".
That's exactly right!
The intent behind the medical practices you list is not to oppress, but to cure. It's misguided, horrific, tragic, etc., but persecution it is not.
>What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?
The usual one. Citing Merriam-Webster:
1. to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict; specifically : to cause to suffer because of belief
2. to annoy with persistent or urgent approaches (as attacks, pleas, or importunities)
The key point is that persecution is generally understood to require some sort of punitive or retaliatory intent, which is not at all the case of the practices you mention.
Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution. N.B.: none of this was done in the name of science. To say that science has persecuted mankind to the extent that religion has is patently absurd.
In fact, and with my sincerest respect (really!), much of your above posts are absurd, conflating political/ideological persecution with varying forms of misguided medicine, recklessness, short-sightedness, etc. To be sure, these are all Bad Things, but persecution is a rather narrowly-defined concept, especially in colloquial use.
That's wrong.
For one, the church also did legitimately believe that they were curing (saving the soul, etc) of those they persecuted. So the "good intentions" of those doing such acts is not the defining criterion.
Second, such science was used to promote political and moral agendas (there was nothing to cure in a homosexual, and even less in more blatant cases, e.g. putting people in favor of black civil rights or women's rights/suffrage in psychiatric asylums or shock treatment).
Here's but one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis
There are of course other places that used similar techniques (from USSR and Nazi Germany to Britain, nordic countries and beyond).
>Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution.
The scientific community was (and still is in various cases) complicit in adopting the political ideas (or promoting them in the first place), assisting those in power with scientific (or "scientific") theories and diagnoses, and enforcing them in practice. It was actual doctors, with degrees et al, that did those things, not politicians...
Well, all, or almost all "religious wars" have historically been cover-ups for expansion of territory, power plays between populations, and money grabbing. So religion was just a pretext there.
I can't now remember exactly what news story I read, but basically it made no sense at all, unless true religious belief was the motivation, rather than selfish greed.
Perhaps it had a lot with the fact that they never allowed to perform independent measures and they never allowed to really perform the experiment in a controlled way.
But I think my claim has more to do with Rossi's E-Cat than with the original P&F experiments
The issue at the time was that they released their results to the press before their results were vetted. They became instantaneous celebrities, and it wasn't clear that it was against their will.
They were very coy about the setup (patent issues? I'm not sure); there was no theoretical model that fit it; and quickly nuclear physicists were pointing out that with the kind of reaction they were talking about they would have been fried by the (radiation) by-products.
The field was very excited (See: "fifth force" for another tale of excitement in my grad-school days). After all, any time there is a result without even a model from which an explanation can possibly derive you are looking at a bunch of new ideas. This means people get to be imaginative, there's sure to be lot's of funding for it, etc. Great times ahead!
Others tried to replicate the results, but since the full experimental setup wasn't being revealed they had to guess. Their attempts at replication failed. This was not the way physics research was conducted, and people started getting pissed off. It was time for more details and proof that they actually got the results they claimed.
With that proof not forthcoming (some started claiming they had built a fuel cell rather than a fusion reactor) they faced a lot of criticism for their PR processes and closed-mouth policy. The damage to their reputation was irreparable.
To my knowledge nobody has yet been able to reproduce the original claims, but I haven't followed in a while.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/cold-fusion-energy-advances-2...
http://lenr-canr.org/index/Summary/Summary.php
It has multiple times. But if you really spend time looking into this it gets very interesting. It seems like the Pd Fleischmann & Pons used was no ordinary one.It came from a recycling process and had nano structural properties. Most likely it was not even very pure but contained certain impurities that made tho whole process that effective. See the publications of Navy Research in the last months.
BTW: There are unified models that explain LENR very well, it just does and will never work under the current accepted paradigm - I personally give shit about paradigms, I use falsification and solomonoff induction only :)
Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:
> Recently, I told this story in a Philosophy course we teach at Caltech called "Ethics of Research." The first question, when I finished my tale, was, do I believe in Cold Fusion? The answer is, no. Certainly, I believe quite firmly the theoretical arguments that say Cold Fusion is impossible. On the other hand, however, I believe equally firmly in the integrity and competence of Franco Scaramuzzi and his group of co-workers at Frascati. I was disturbed when I saw that Franco had gotten caught in the web of science-by-news conference in April 1989 (although I was truly pleased that he finally got the long overdue recognition his agency ENEA owed him), and I was even more distressed when I learned that Franco and his group had observed excess heat (the "bad kind" of Cold Fusion). However, I have looked at their cells, and looked at their data, and it's all pretty impressive. The Japanese experiment showing that heat nearly always results when x is greater than 0.85 looks even more impressive on paper. It seems a particularly elegant, well designed experiment, at least to the untutored eye of a physicist (what do I know about electrochemistry?) 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.
> I suppose that, if nuclear fusion really does take place whenever x is greater than 0.85 in palladium, the world of conventional science will eventually be forced to take notice. If not, then the whole story I have told you is nothing but a curious footnote to a bizarre and ugly episode in the history of science. Either way, I think the story illuminates the inner dynamics of the scientific enterprise in a way that few other stories have done. For that reason alone, it may be worth telling.
The whole article is here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html
Can you (or anyone) describe in layman's terms the significance of 'is x > 0.85?' Looking back to 1993 from today, did the 'critical examination' the author said should happen, ever happen?
"The issue is how much deuterium gets into the metal. The ratio of the number of atoms of deuterium in the metal to the number of atoms of palladium is called x. It turns out, by means of electrolysis, or by putting the metal in deuterium gas, that it is rather easy to get x up to the range of about 0.6 or 0.7. That is already a startlingly high figure. If there are almost as many deuterium atoms as palladium atoms in the material, the density of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) is essentially equal to that of liquid hydrogen rocket fuel, which can ordinarily exist only at extreme low temperatures. In other words, palladium (and certain other metals including titanium) soak up almost unbelievable amounts of hydrogen or deuterium if given the chance."
Something might be happening around that concentration. Or maybe it’s just experimental error (again). But it is interesting that you can cram so much Hydrogen (or Deuterium) into close proximity by absorbing it into a metal & that fact means that these ideas aren’t completely crackpot.
I found the physicist reaction "it can't be nuclear, it has to be chemistry" a bit disturbing. The cell was said to contain all of 4 elements, and none of the physicists were offering an explanation for what chemical reaction the two chemists were missing.
So, yes both fairies still fit in the bucket but now it's you who put them there and not them :P
The way this works is that you've got some experimental result which appears to violate the laws of physics. After working hard to make sure that it's not experimental error and the measurement means what you think it means, then you consider a change in the laws of physics. This is a tooth fairy. Is your proposed change ruled out by other experiments? Is there a new experiment you can do which will have an unusual result thanks to the tooth fairy? And so on.
If, during this process, you find yourself needing a SECOND change in the laws of physics in order to explain something, then that's a second tooth fairy. You don't want that, because that's even less likely to be real then the first one.
When crazies tell you that evolution or climate change are "Just a theory" science should be able to point to a confidence estimate and say "But we're really sure about the evidence for them."
With something like CF, it would have been completely appropriate to assign a low confidence to the possibility of sustainable fusion while assigning a higher confidence to the presence of unexplained results that needed further research.
Something similar could apply to a lot of fringe phenomena. "That's odd" gets a lot more traction when you can dissociate it from "That's theoretically impossible so let's pretend it's not happening."
Pons and Fleischman got a raw deal, it was perfectly reasonable for people to say "I don't believe you did your experiments correctly" or "I don't agree with the interpretation of the data you received." But it was wrong to call them fraudsters. It was also wrong to attach a stigma to people who were investigating things that were not supposed to be possible as cranks or gullible.
And yet a number of scientists of various levels of skill have continued and very slowly over time there have been experiments that could be repeated that exhibited behaviors that are not easily explained by the existing rules (which mostly are "no nuclear events at these temperatures and pressures.") As the article points out the micrographs of the metal surfaces are of particular interest because even if you don't believe in these events being nuclear, it is equally challenging to come up with a chemical explanation for the features found on the electrodes. Physical scarring that does not look like either plating or erosion, and chemical constituents which are not known to have any sort of exothermic reactivity.
So there is something there, not sure what it is and current theories don't explain it well or at all. That should be a source of excitement for scientists right? Doesn't seem so, instead you attacks on the people just trying to run the experiments!
When I see people unable to embrace a result for what seems like it would put them in the position of having been wrong earlier, I wonder "What drew this person into science in the first place?"
Maybe in the end, but they kind of brought it on themselves. They were excoriated for going to the press before peer review. That's something that you just didn't do. Then when nobody else could get their results they were in a bad place.
UPDATE: One of the authors is a self-proclaimed expert in cold fusion and the other one is a lawyer. I wonder why there were no physicists among the authors. They didn't have any experiment description in the article?
Please change the title to "Blog:..."
That being said, I still think it's wrong of mainstream science immediately reject Cold Fusion/LENR or even Em Drive research.
Just take it for what it is, an anomaly. Which may or may not lead to a breakthrough.
In response to you, "unlikely" is not the same as "may be".
A couple of times in this discussion, you've argued about the definitions of words, and your definitions have been... at least different from the way the words are normally used. It's kind of distracting from the actual discussion, without adding much.
What, in your usage, is the difference between "unlikely" and "may be"?
(By the way, I'm not arguing against "unlikely" wrt any of these things...)
When you're talking about an extraordinary claim, it's a good idea to use "unlikely" and not "may be". The moon "may be" has deposits of green cheese, we just haven't found them yet. It is unlikely that the moon has deposits of green cheese. It is likely that the EM Drive thrust measurement is measurement error.
These usages convey fairly subtles signals about one's understanding of, and confidence in, a physical phenomenon.
This is typically only learned by people who write papers and have advisors who can guide them.
A really nice example of this which is also immediately readable is Watson and Crick's 1953 DNA structure paper.
http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf
It's a classic understated style, with a small amount of boastful brilliance. The passive tone is a bit dated, but you can clearly see little was known about how DNA worked, and they were very careful not to make any strong claims without qualifiers.
The actual mechanism as you'd know bears barely a passing resemblance to that, since you've got the whole DNA replication complex assembly orchestrating it. So yes "suggests a replication mechanism" - but it doesn't remotely work as the suggestion would imply.
The replication complex is just an enzyme, it only speeds up things that are thermodynamically favored (replication can occur spontanteously because the dsDNA is lower energy, but it's rare because forming the phosphodiester bond requires a high activation barrier).
Then why did they go to such extraordinary lengths to find the source of it? Why didn't they just shrug and work around it?
Keep in mind they initially had no knowledge of the theoretical prediction of CMB, which was fairly recent and controversial. They just had a weird observation and busted their butts trying to figure out what it was.
> It was a classic example of being the first measurement of a thing.
Yes, now we know that. At the time it was not clear that it was a phenomenon worth measuring at all. I mean, they thought it was pigeons. It looked like a dumb error at first.
> Excellent discovery, and easy and inexpensive to replicate.
The "emdrive" is also easy and cheap to replicate.
I'm not saying that the emdrive works, I'm saying that experimental results matter. They should not be dismissed just becaus me they seem to violate theory. Violating theory is why people experiment in the first place.
For the emdrive, the effect is so small that it's suggested that the next step is to launch a powerful satellite costing $100mm or more. Uh, really?
From your comment, you seem to be tangled up in results being "dismissed". That's not what's going on, when people make comments about extraordinary claims and extraordinary results. A tiny, hard to measure result is not an OH MY GOD THE THEORY IS WRONG result. It is likely an experimental error.
For the satellite, there is atmosphere drag, magnetic fields, outgassing, etc, all probably bigger effects than the claimed drive effect!
Earth bound labs have much greater control of variables, reproducability, possibility to measure related quantities, possibility to run variations on experiments.
The reasons to do the satellite are (1) PR (2) wanting to NOT disprove the effect.
So? What if there was such a theory? It could still be false or incomplete, like Newtonian physics.
:P
Something that's 1% likely and something that's 75% likely require different amounts of evidence to get to 95%.
It might be an error, in fact it almost certainly will be. But it is not yet certainly an error.
Stand back: science still in progress!
“Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.” ― Enrico Fermi
Unfortunately, you have to look into it carefully to find out whether it's experimental error or something more interesting.
And, to return to Everhusk's first post: Experimental error can result in an "anomaly". The experiment is not returning the results we expect. That's an anomaly. An anomaly doesn't have to be new physics.
I think a lot of those rejections are coming from the crazy claims the EM drive inventor is making, everything from free energy to flying cars.
If you stick to the pure experimental aspects of "we put a microwave in a can and obtained these anomalous results" and ignore everything else, there's something interesting there that bears investigation.
This kind of "ringdown" effect can be observed at human-compatible timescales at low HF frequencies in crystal resonators. But only a fast oscilloscope will let you observe it in a cavity.
But it's premature to speculate on what might be happening at that level of detail.
Just speculating.
You could get similar charts between the EM drive cooling off as a boat slows down.
The graphed shape of how that thrust tails off is just a little part of that. Pointing at it does not help resolve the big problem.
At this stage I don't think you can claim the measurements are obviously wrong without actually calculating heat loss rates and how heat expansion would affect measurement with the given equipment asymmetries.
For sure, we should spend money to validate the EM-drive, but push back against funding going to all-out "free energy" without a lot more proof.
You have to focus on something - there are only so many grant and R&D dollars to go around
Of course, most apparently whackadoodle ideas really are whackadoodle ideas, but occasionally you get one that isn't, and when that happens, it's usually big. Perhaps a (small) budget randomly assigned to whackadoodle ideas might be a good thing. Like venture capital for science -- most of the theories are going to crater, but once in a while you might get a unicorn.
(The little wet-behind-the ears dears manage to write up six kinds of impossible things just to look at the arithmetic, never mind actual reality. Without batting an eyelid.)
Einstein GR postulate number one: microscopic physics is background-independent.
These experiments' microscopic details behave the same on Earth, on the moon, and in the ISS, but their macroscopic behaviours sure don't. You have to input details of the local structure of spacetime into each of them if you want to predict their results (e.g., what trajectory the walk takes, or how long it takes for a ball to reach the bottom of a depression in the rubber sheet) successfully.
Heck, TQFTs in 2+1D are still under active research (and are behind Microsoft's quantum computer efforts).
General relativity would also be incomplete in this sense. It fails to describe quantum phenomena.
A better approach is to say that, to describe fundamental things in nature, what we have now is a patchwork of independent theories that are not quite meshing with each other.
Study of perturbatively quantized gravity is precisely why we know that General Relativity is not renormalizable by power-set counting in strong gravity, and precisely why we have a good definition for strong gravity (more than one loop of gravitons in a Feynman diagram) and also why we have a good idea about where to expect strong gravity (very close to the centre of mass-momentum of a black hole, and very close to the big bang).
Although the behaviour of arbitrarily high energy and high density matter may be found in a very different theory from General Relativity, there is no presently known reason why approaches involving renormalization group flow (e.g. asymptotically safe gravity) cannot "save" perturbatively quantized gravity by providing a renormalization scheme that works into the UV limit. One could likewise point to GUT programmes and say that at those energy scales a theory very different from the Standard Model will be more useful.
In the meanwhile, perturbatively quantized gravity is a perfectly good effective field theory, in the sense of the work by Kenneth G Wilson.
The point you're replying to is better addressed this way: the Standard Model doesn't even properly consider gravity, and it simply does not need to if in the UV completion of General Relativity you can recover the Minkowski metric in sufficiently tiny regions of spacetime. That's because the Poincaré group, the symmetry group of region of spacetime with the Minkowski metric induced on it, is baked right into the group theory of the Standard Model, and into General Relativity. One can read this as the Standard Model subsuming Einsteinean gravitation into it at that level, and thanks to perturbatively quantized gravity one could equally pencil in a gluon on the particle zoo tables and do gauge theory on that, and expect consistent results outside strong gravity as described above.
Finally, even if other symmetries are added (or the three matter ones are unified) in a Beyond the Standard Model Yang-Mills group theory, the couplings with the graviton outside strong gravity will be straightforward.
So, I don't agree that the fundamental theories of gravity and matter are a patchwork, nor that they mesh poorly, even though we do not have a meshing that works to arbitrarily high energy levels. But crucially, those arbitrarily high energy levels might not even be physically observable; we aren't certain about that yet.
Finally, whatever dark energy and dark matter are, how they generate the metric and how they interact with the rest of the Standard Model are subjects of various research programmes competing with radically different ideas for a theory of quantum gravity.
If the Em Drive works, it invalidates a lot of mathmatical equalities that are derived from the fact that electro-magnetism works through fields. So you're basically invalidating the fundamental nature of electro-magnetism, not "just" conservation of energy
All the reports of the Em Drive are not conclusive. The force that they are measuring is very small and very close to the experimental error. It looks more like involuntary p hacking that a good incontrovertible experiment.
I was not following the resents advances of the LENR. IIRC they heat a device with an electric current and they estimate how much heat it release. Measuring heat is a very difficult task, so the measurements are problematic. The additional heat is not too much. They don't have a device that can autosubstain the reaction, and that can silence all the critics.
If you want an to see how the physic community reacts to an anomaly, consider the high temperature superconductors. They are clearly impossible, well at least unbelievable, and the old theory forbid them. But 20 years ago they gave a foolproof method to build a high temperature superconductors in a good lab. The experiments were conclusive. You can even tweak the recipe and get a better superconductor. You can put them under high pressure and get more temperature. You can make many experiments with them. But still there is no good theory to explain how they work. Someone told me that the explanation was flux pinning, but apparently it still disputed and perhaps that explanation is wrong. But anyway, in spite there is no good theoretical explanation, you can make conclusive experiments with an relatively easy to build superconductor and some liquid nitrogen.
Mainstream physics love anomalies. You can get a Nobel price for confirming or explaining it. You can enclose a few graduate students to study it. You can get money from grants. But you must have to ensure a minimal probability that the anomaly is real, because you must release the graduate students someday ...
I believe what makes it so hard to tell is the labelling of any cold fusion researcher as a crackpot, which seems to have forced it 'underground'. Certainly a valid social experiment in physics if nothing else!
In my opinion any empirical data that has no currently obvious explanation should be called an "anomaly" until one is found. It doesn't matter how unlikely the Em Drive interacting with some ether or how low the thrust might be, the observed thrust is still an anomaly until you can find and confirm the actual cause. In the case of cold fusion, it was a mistake to (impolitely!) dismiss that anomaly without any obvious proof of the real cause. I have no idea about the current state of this research or whether it will ever pan out, but I am confident in saying that much.
And yes, this means we all need to have a much healthier, more skeptical, and less emotional response to reports of "anomalies" in the news.
There's something in the data that you don't understand, and you don't know where it comes from. Sometimes you find it's a bug in the setup, and other times you realize it's already known physics. Part of the time you just don't pursue it further, because there's no time and money to do this for everything. Especially, if it's a small signal down at the noise floor and you are not in full control of the measurement so that it's likely to be a bug in any case, there's no point to pursue it further.
There's nothing to get excited about in emdrive. There's no theoretical reason to expect the device does anything. The experimental data is likely to be just systematic error. Other groups that published results (TU Dresden, NWPU) in the end failed to reproduce the effect, and concluded they found zero result within the bounds of measurement error. It is very plausible this is the case also for the eagleworks measurement, so saying there is "observed thrust" is likely scientifically misleading.
And the way you solve that is by experimenting, experimenting again and trying new approaches to the problem
Once it survives a couple of experiments, then you can say there might be something there
(Besides analysis of the experiment to try to eliminate errors on the design, but that's not possible for all kinds of errors)
The downfall of many interesting lines of inquiry.
They've also tested joining segments of tape together in joints, and found it doesn't add enough resistance to matter. So their design is modular and can easily be taken apart every year to replace the core, which basically solves the problem of damage from neutron radiation.
One of them is that of limited funding, there's almost definitely better places to spend money if the goal is progress
Another is how these claims set back scientific literacy of the general public And how it can erode their trust in science Look at how the ftl neutrino debacle did damage, even though no actual claims were made
Chemistry has a concept of a catalyst - Something that lowers the activation energy of a reaction thus increasing reaction rate. Why couldn't nuclear catalysts exist?
A chemical cataylst is a bit different because it doesn't require overcoming the coloumb barrier. If a nuclear catalyst existed, it would have to lower to almost no energy or even bypass the coloumb barrier for a D-D fusion reaction to occur at NTP. Do you know of any situations were the coloumb barrier has been altered?
They are supposedly very energy intensive to be produce, but it proves the concept of lowering the barrier.
Also, you can can make energy with it, just not enough to make it commercially viable
They talk about LENR but don't mention under which conditions it would take place, even in layman terms.
If you want to see a good example of this in action, look at the folks who thought they showed neutrinos went faster than light. They constantly kept in mind that the most likely explanation for the data was experimental error, and eventually showed that their experiment had an error. Nothing was "buried", nothing was "blocked", and good science was eventually done.
Today's hype is all about Ni-H
> Low Energy Nuclear Reactions have been, for a long time, the archetypal crackpot technology.
> Huge promises. Failed replication attempts. Dismissal by the academic community. Accusations of handwavey pseudoscience. Advocates generally having low status. Associations with conspiracy theorists.
> Anyone associated with it or even expressing anything less than absolute certainty that it’s an unscientific non-starter is risking not just a reputation hit, but aggressive ridicule.
> Based on my understanding of the history of science, I think that the feelings I have around talking about this, that fear of that ridicule, should be a red flag. If the incentives are stacked too strongly against an idea (for good or bad reasons), it can become impossible for respectable people to entertain the idea. Often this is a correct approach, the vast majority of amateur science with big claims is nonsense. But what if something valuable was stuck in this trap?
> If not for observations of current dramatic failures of the scientific process in nutrition and medicine, my priors against a demonstrable discovery of this magnitude being ignored would be very formidable. As it stands, this would still be shocking civilizational inadequacy, but I can see a process by which it could have occurred.
> So I decided it was worth a couple of hours of investigation. Low chance of turning up anything of value, but low investment and in the worst case I’ll know a few more things and be able to hold up a conversation using actual understanding about why it’s bunk if someone ever tries to sell me on it, rather than simply using the “experts are probably right” heuristic.
> And now.. I’m not quite sure what to think.
http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omv%C3%A4rld_system/filer/Lugan...
And later reproduced by the Russians, with similar results:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz7lTfqkED9Wdm1NeEtxMFJLTmM...
Gamma rays don't lie.
The whole idea is that these are potentially breakthrough discoveries that, if true, will change our understanding of physics.
I'd say "quantum eraser" is way crazier than (potential) LENR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
around the 15 minute mark for a demo.
"The Widom-Larsen theory offers a plausible explanation—localized conversion of gamma radiation to infrared radiation."
How does that work? Gamma penetrates matter pretty well. It should escape to some extent.
Rossi is nothing but a serial fraudster.
http://freeenergyscams.com/videos/
"The Russians" is actually one man, Parkhomov, a fully fledged nutcase.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlBG_A4Djp4
Some elements were formed from slow neutron absorption. Maybe they reproduced it in the lab.
If more people did this we wouldn't be solving the same problems over and over again.
It tends to be very procedural code with lots of "libraries" that rely on side-effects rather than abstraction. The kind of thing where nobody understands how core concerns (like security) work, they just "know" it seems to work. Except those in the know, know that it doesn't always work, but it's all too fragile to fix it, either.
I know I've been extremely unlucky with the CF code I've had to deal with, but I've also never heard of anybody with a healthy CF codebase they aren't eager to replace.
I have also, over the years, been brought in to rescue applications that have grown into giant messes. So I'm not saying what you are saying is incorrect, but it has less to do with the language, in my opinion, and more to do with what happens to large applications that get written by multiple teams of people over the years, as they adapt to changing customer demands.
And, sometimes, by managers who don't understand code, the importance of documentation, or how to communicate and plan for business issues.
Build an app in any web application today and try to maintain it for a decade.
My point is that a lot of the things still running around in ColdFusion aren't there because they're healthy, they're around because they are too sick to do anything else with. I've got too much personal experience with applications used by the government that I sure would not trust with my personal data! You know, things written before password hashing was standard practice ... and that still don't hash passwords.
Presumably if your codebase is healthy, there is structure and documentation that would make it comparatively easy to replace in a different framework as requirements evolve. Unhealthy codebases don't have this so that stick around without adapting/evolving
Then there's old code that barely worked when it was new and is held together by duct tape. Often it's written in something antiquated like VB6 or COBOL and is very troublesome to replace. (Not that all VB6 or COBOL code is bad, mind you, but as soon as you get out of their problem domain things go downhill fast.)
Then there's ColdFusion.
--
(In all seriousness, I'm sure there's good ColdFusion code out there, but the stuff I've seen is like a weird mish-mash of all the bad parts of PHP with all the bad parts of ORMs and all the bad parts of XSLT.)
It's like a case study in all the bad things that can go wrong when you mix government projects run by people who didn't know what they were doing with 10-15 years of neglect, but need to keep the software alive because it supports a critical government function but there's nowhere near the budget to rebuild it properly.
Back in the age of classic ASP, Perl scripts and CGI scripts, Cold Fusion was a very decent technology choice. It was my introduction to a controller/view styled programming pattern (called Fusebox) back in 2000.
Then they (Macromedia) got bought out by Adobe and the whole thing descended into weirdness and MS came out with .Net.
Now get off my lawn you millenial! :-)
Why? If it was in demand due to scarcity, couldn't you have done freelance work at a ridiculously high hourly rate? I've come across another ol Indian dude (my Pop's age, we called him 'uncle') who was making a killing programming in some mainframe language called COBOL.
Answer this and I'll get off your lawn LOL.
( He also made fun of my node.js and react.js and said "You young kids are always moving on to the next shiny thing")
It depends how old you mean, but if you're a few years away from retirement it could still be a good plan.
Love this phrase! I'm a Millennial, so I have ways to go, but this makes sense for when I hit my early 50s (if I am still alive and well that is)
It has evolved to be a Java Framework, essentially, but I love it still.
Once you get into practice of using coldfusion components, which compile into java beans, it becomes the best of all worlds. Stable, easy to read and write, highly reusable, lots of functionality and expandability, fast, compiled, etc.
We have in large part just superseded it with some small static html+js sites dedicated to each of our products that we stuck on Azure webapps. So much easier, so much better, and, so much cheaper. But the main site limps along.
But let me quibble: my attitude, as that of dismissive mainstream scientists, is based on education not ignorance.