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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

But the claim is not that the output energy will be a "little bit more" than the input - the claim is it should be obviously much more.

So there has to be a clear result, where no amount of tweaking will fix the base principle if it's erroneous?

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It's claimed to be producing energy via so-called "low energy nuclear reactions" involving hydrogen. You have to supply hydrogen (which you can get by electrolyzing water once the systems is up and running) and re-form the catalyst when it wears out. It's not claimed to be a perpetual motion machine, so stop attacking a straw man.

I remain highly skeptical about this, but it's not a perpetual motion scam.

Yes, it's true that cold fusion isn't, itself, perpetual motion. It does indeed meet that standard.

My invocation of perpetual motion is as a fencepost. If you can get people to believe in that, you can get them to believe in anything.

People like clean energy sources. They have good reasons – logical and factual reasons – to desire them. They also don't understand them very well. This has been true for centuries, as illustrated by the history of perpetual-motion scams, and thus it will likely remain true for the foreseeable future. People want to believe, and they will.

He didn't. He pointed out that people still invest in perpetual motion scams as reason to believe people will keep investing in cold fusion. The fact that cold fusion is less obviously a scam than perpetual motion actually strengthens his point.

Doesn't it require deuterium as opposed to normal hydrogen? If so, how are they producing deuterium?

Deuterium is pretty much everywhere. They generally concentrate it in water for most uses if memory serves.

It doesn't require deuterium.

Oh, there is always a third option in science: "Oops, the box would have given us a definitive yes-or-no answer if only the fuse hadn't blown, and gosh darn it, the local stores have no fuses in stock. Oh, and these fuses are special and cost $750,000."

You'll learn all about this phenomenon in years two through six of your seven-year Ph.D. program in experimental physics. ;)

I learned it in my first year physics course: to a good approximation, accuracy of results = log(log($equipment_cost)).

So, 100% accuracy cost $10 billion?

Sounds about right!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost

> With a budget of 7.5 billion euros (approx. $9bn or £6.19bn as of Jun 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built.

If only they'd put in $1b more, they'd have found that Higgs boson by now.

I think what he means is "systematic_error = 1/log(log(equipment_cost))"

For best results, purchase all equipment in Zimbabwean dollars.

The article actually claims "it will either succeed today, or fail today and Rossi has two months to rectify any problems".

So it already was avoiding a definitive answer from the start.

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