At 08:44 AM 12/6/2011, Peter Gluck wrote:
The Physics of why the e-Cat's Cold Fusion Claims Collapse
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/the_nuclear_physics_of_why_we.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScienceblogsChannelEnvironment+%28ScienceBlogs+Channel+%3A+Environment%29
The article is a great example of hubris. Well-written for a lay
person, does explain the so-called "mainstream" view of cold fusion.
My interest is, of course, LENR and the evidence regarding its
existence. Ni-H and Rossi is a recent claim, about which there is way
too little evidence to come to much of any conclusions other than the
obvious: Rossi looks like a con man. Now, if we could make judgments
about nuclear physics based on how people look, ordinary people would
be experts on nuclear physics, eh?
Here is where the article starts to jump off the cliff of reasoning
from outcomes, of assuming the conclusion:
All of our successful attempts at generating nuclear fusion here on
Earth require similarly high pressures and/or temperatures to those
found at the core of each and every fusion-powered star. In
mainstream physics, there are
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_confinement_fusion>three
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion>types of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_target_fusion>setups
verified to create nuclear fusion, all of which are working towards
the (metaphorical)
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/holy%20grail>holy grail
goal of the breakeven point. If you can reach and go beyond that
point, you'll produce more usable energy from your setup than you
put into it in order to create the fusion reaction.
But recently, attempts to create nuclear fusion with a relatively
low-pressure, low-temperature experiment -- what's commonly known as
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion>cold fusion -- have been
making a lot of noise.
Notice the word "all." Anyone who knows science should have alarms
going off when they come across that word. There is another word in
there, "successful." What does that mean? Here, I'm guessing,
"success" might mean "break-even." However, the three "verified"
setups haven't reached that goal, not in a verified way, at least.
Further, the context is that they are talking about attempts to
achieve fusion, and even one fusion reaction verified would be
success, even if it's far below breakeven. Bottom line, what they say
is just plain wrong. The clearest and least controversial example is
muon-catalyzed fusion. The controversy, then, is over whether or not
fusion catalyzed or arranged by other than muons is possible. What
they are not disclosing is the existence of a controversy, and, in
particular, they may not even be aware of it. There is a gap between
what "most scientists" believe on the matter of fusion, and what is
being published in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals, not to mention
in other places. The extreme skepticism on cold fusion has
disappeared from the mainstream peer-reviewed literature. It is still
found in tertiary sources, in articles that do not actually
investigate the topic, that just repeat the "conventional wisdom" as
if that had anything to do with the real state of science.
Storms, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," Naturwissenschaften, October,
2010, stands. I'm not aware of any more recent review of the field of
the same stature as to detailed consideration of the evidence. There
is now a substantial body of work confirming that there is a reaction
(covered by the rubrik, "Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect) that produces
heat and helium from deuterium, and if you can figure out a way to
produce helium from deuterium without fusion, well, you might get a
Nobel Prize just for that. The heat is correlated with the helium at,
within experimental error, the right value for deuterium fusion, but
that doesn't mean that the reaction is d+d -> He-4. It just means
that the fuel is likely deuterium and the ash is helium, any
intermediary reaction starting from deuterium and ending with helium
will produce that ratio.
Some people quibble about whether or not, say, a series of reactions
that start with producing neutrons, which are then absorbed to
transmute elements, that might end up with helium, are "fusion" or
not. But that's not relevant here. The authors are really denying
LENR, low-energy nuclear reactions, but ignoring the massive
evidence, and they just focus on Rossi.
They state that Rossi is claiming nuclear fusion. No, he doesn't.
It's not clear what he claims. Mostly he's claiming heat. This is a
shallow article, ultimately.
[...] you've got to overcome the tremendous Coulomb barrier (the
electrical repulsion between nickel and hydrogen nuclei), which --
according to our knowledge of nuclear physics -- requires
temperatures and pressures not found naturally anywhere in the
Universe. Not in the Sun, not in the cores of the most massive
stars, and (to the best of our knowledge) not even in supernova explosions!
From both an astrophysics and a nuclear physics standpoint, we can
conclude that these reactions are not happening, and that they're
certainly not happening at the incredibly low energies claimed by
the e-Cat team.
Let's say that real experts in quantum mechanics as it applies to the
solid state knew, in 1989, already, that there was no violation of
physical law in the idea that some low-energy situations might
catalyze fusion, that our ignorance was great. Where the article is,
to use a technical term in scientific philosophy, "whacko," is in the
assumption of impossibility in the absence a lack of specific
analysis of specific possibility as to specific mechanism -- and
Rossi is completely silent on mechanism, and the article isn't
explicit about mechanism, either, seeming to assume some sort of raw
brute force pressure/temperature thing, and even the 1989 U.S. ERAB
panel knew that it wasn't possible to rule out fusion. They simply
didn't see the evidence, and, in 1989, that was a roughly reasonable
position. That changed. It became unreasonable, but by then there was
an additional problem that has nothing to do with science and
scientific knowledge. Politics and the sociology of science.
We, many of us, remain quite skeptical about Rossi, but the
"impossible" argument doesn't hold water. It's surprising, for some,
to be sure. It's one thing to imagine some kind of d-d or multiple
deuterium nuclear reactions, another to go for something with nickel
and hydrogen, but if one is possible, it's not at all crazy to think
that something else, previously unknown, could also be possible. That
doesn't make it real, merely not a-priori "impossible."
