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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

I understand why a lot of people think this, but I don't think we can say that with confidence yet. Cold fusion "replicated successfully" multiple times in the 80s too.

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There are now several authentic videos of bits of rock (lead apatite) appearing to do things around magnets that they have no business doing.

Maybe there's a lot of smoke and no fire, but there's videographic evidence of something weird going on.

Unfortunately, we live in the age of TikTok. Videos on their own bring no more credibility than written text; they no longer evince a substantively greater investment of resources. I'm more inclined toward the cheerleading section of the LK-99 audience, but watching the videos I realized now is a perfect opportunity to apply recalibrated B.S. detectors.

This doesnt pass the smell test. Why would multiple independent labs fake their videos? What’s the conspiracy here? There is no upside, we will know in a couple of weeks if it’s real or not.

I didn't mean to insinuate that anybody faked anything. Just that video evidence on its own isn't per se any more credible than if they unambiguously made the same claim in writing. The technology for making fake or misleading videos is easy to come by, so why mentally lean on the fact that they were videos at all? Our answers wrt likelihood of truthfulness simply lie in provenance and other indicia of credibility that would be shared with claims in any other trivially falsified medium, like writing. Why, indeed, would multiple seemingly non-cooperating supposed researchers make the set of claims that have been made?

I don't think anything was faked, nor did I think anything was faked before videos began appearing. But that's precisely why this is an opportune time to exercise recalibrated judgment in not allowing the videographic character to inflate my cautious enthusiasm.

If it takes X weeks to do research and someone publishes results before that time, then the conclusion that the results are suspect is warranted and is in no way a conspiracy theory.

> Why would multiple independent labs fake their videos

Why would different newspapers spread hoaxes? Yet it happens...

Which hoax specifically was completely fabricated by the newspapers and spread by multiple newspapers? State run media obviously doesn't count.

Poor source checking and then issuing a retraction is not the same as a conspiracy among the papers to make something up completely.

newspapers get paid by the click

why would you respond to the question with an unrelated question instead of answering directly?

because incentives are the same

if that were true, you could have answered the question directly

you couldn't, suggesting that it isn't true

by the way, you forgot to respond to [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36984443

Thats because Cold Fusion does work, its just useless. It loses energy.

You need Muons, a negatively charged particle that is 200 times heavier than an electron. They replace electron in the atom. Two Muon-replaced atoms of hydrogen can fuse at room temperature.

The problem is that muons a very expensive to produce and decay quickly. So you spend more energy producing muons than you get from fusion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Wasn't the problem with Cold Fusion that it did NOT replicate, and thus got sullied with a bad reputation, so nobody wanted to touch it.

Then decades later, it's still kind of open question. Aren't there some studies still going on, more on the down-low since it has such a bad reputation. Kind of like the super-conductor, have to keep it quiet and make really sure before publishing.

Sabine did video on Cold Fusion that was pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbzcYQVrTxQ

There were positive and negative results, just like in this case.

Some stuff replicated. It was clearly not cold fusion.

Some people made a career studying the kinds of sonoluminescence needed to explain what that experiment saw. (And AFAIK, nobody found a use for the theory yet.)

The big difference is that standard theoretical techniques have indicated the compound to be promising from an electronic structure point of view and confirmed that it would be tricky to synthesize just right.

Cold fusion always was dependent on new physics to be discovered

In the cold fusion experiments, they were measuring an exess of heat. That's very difficult to measure, and some noise or experimental error can confuse the people.

No one measured a huge flow of neutrons, that were expected to be generated by the fusion and are more easy to distingish from noise.

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