Lessons from cold fusion, 30 years on
nature.com
nature.com
However it seems to be an area that's rife with the potentials for scams, with some participants claiming to be "almost at the point of commercial LENR setups" for many years now (e.g. Andrea Rossi and his E-Cat work)
Sites like https://www.lenr-forum.com/ and https://e-catworld.com/ have more info. on it.
I'd like to see one or more of the companies get there, but having followed it on and off for some years, I'm not holding out a lot of hope...
When someone tries to sell you a product that goes against the accepted laws of physics, because some flawed experiment decades ago indicated that they might be wrong, you can be certain that it's a scam.
I mean click on the link. The first thing I saw there was people speculating that the latest nature paper is part of some military plot, because they all know LENR works, yet they want to hide the fact from the public as long as possible.
>'Some assertions at the time, along the lines of “I knew it was nonsense,” scarcely exhibited the openness to surprise on which science depends.'
I felt this was a very important message in the article that could be useful in many more areas of life than cold fusion research or even application of the scientific method.
I do agree that people shouldn't be selling half-baked ideas, but I also know that often, funding is a necessary requirement for scientific breakthroughs. So while I agree my mother shouldn't be investing her savings in such things, I don't want to dissuade other types of informed investors from pitching in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
Sure it’s not over unity right now but it is fusion at room temperature. And it’s always possible we might find lower energy ways to make muons at some point.
I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups. Then a guy was attending the press conference, and posting what was announced. (The 1989 version of live blogging.)
And then I was able to download the Pons & Fleischmann paper (as opposed to waiting months for it to be published), and print it out. Though I didn't have the correct set of troff macros...
That was pretty frickin' cool. That showed what living in the Information Age was all about.
As for CF itself, I was a bit skeptical, and followed the news closely for a while on others trying to reproduce the results.
I remember my Physics teacher in Jr High talking about this development. He took a week of classes to debunk their claims and ended the week with the phrase, "They will have their 15 minutes of fame and then quietly retire and disappear from the scientific community."
Which is pretty much what happened.
However, it was nice to just run a semi-complex SQL query inside a cfQuery tag, at least compared to building queries in ASP and the like at the time...so long as you remember that you have to explicitly sanitize your inputs.
An easy way to view the contents of a data structure is nice.
And most importantly: there's much better stuff now than even up-to-date ColdFusion.
I learned that having a poor reputation among the influential opinionists is not a strong indicator of a language's inherent worth. As a language designed to achieve a specific purpose I think it is equal (or superior) to many options with a better reputation, e.g. PHP, Ruby, Python, Jython, Groovy.
I also learned that a language can be substantially improved with small, incremental improvements. Modern CFML has an JavaScript-inspired syntax, objects, closures, lambda, and countless benefits that come from running directly on the JVM.
Also, they can hammer out a solution to things pretty quickly with it. I don’t know if this is so much the language or the developer, but at a minimum it doesn’t appear to be a hindrance to development.
It's not so much as it's preferred, but rather that it's possible. In fact, because templates and business logic are really just the exact same language with different grammar, a CFML programmer may be passively incentivied to mash the two together because, well, what's the point of splitting it up anyway? If I'm just going to run these ten lines of code to acquire my data and run these ten lines of template to output my data, I might as well put these twenty lines next to each other into one file...at least for now. You can always split it up later if it becomes more complex, or if you want to take "proof of concept" code and refactor it in the house style.
If you want you can structure your programs with as much (or as little) buzzword compliance as you wish. There are numerous frameworks which help you structure your code, including a few that are quite similar to Ruby on Rails. CFML doesn't hold your hands and declare the one true correct way to structure your code properly, which is both a big strength and perhaps its biggest weakness.
Not sure why you'd put PHP and Apache Groovy in that list.
As for Groovy, I meant to say Grails. I don’t really know, I just remember it touted heavily ten years ago. Every time I check out Groovy I am forced to ask what the point is. Looks like dumbed down Java to me. If you’re going to dumb down Java, do it properly and make a language as dumb as CFML. :-)
Likewise a laser runs at "negative" T, but which is hotter than infinity T (pop inversion happens at T<0). There's no contradiction because T is again defined in eq., so we're just abusing terms.
So if we got net energy out of a fusor it would, for all practical purposes, be "cold" fusion. In fact, it doesn't have a T at all ;)
There is nothing insightful in this article apart from above tldr.
Once Pons and Fleischman doubled-down on their position, they became their own worst enemies, but is seemed to me that they were initially just naive about the reception such an announcement would get. This was not a Rossi-style scam, or something that could have harmful consequences in the way that, for example, anti-vaccination pseudo-science does.
If they had waited a year or two then everything would have calmed down by then (and no award, of course) and less hype about the experiments.
> We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make controversial claims. The ridicule that was sometimes directed at Fleischmann and Pons was bound to make them double down. When researchers turn out to have been mistaken, they must be allowed a way back without disgrace.
Great quote
Nevertheless, the hype was very high at the time.
People in our physics department had tested it and dismissed the claims almost immediately. It wasn't rocket science.
Jones was much more reserved, and discussed with the press only as a result of the media attention https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-PHYSI...
""" But Jones downplays any comparison to his work with such historical breakthroughs as the invention of the light bulb or the hydrogen bomb.
"We have a lot more work ahead of us," he said. "We need to have some patience and do the scientific groundwork before we jump to too many conclusions."
"""