At 17:00 08/17/05, jeff.lane wrote:
Like cold fusion? There were a couple of scientists, in Utah, several
years ago that claimed they had made cold fusion work. That is clean,
safe, perpetual, fusion .I don't recall their names but they had the
scientific world standing on it's head for sometime until they
discovered that it was not completely perfect, i.e., infinitely
renewable. My question would be just how long did this run without
renewal? After the idea of infinity went away nobody heard anything
about these guys. If they had discovered pure cold fusion we could
power a whole city in a clean reactor no bigger that a service
station, if that big. The pellet to run a car thing........all of it
runs forever. Anybody think this won't or can't happen, or for that
matter, may already be there???
Most scientists consider Cold Fusion to have been a fiasco. Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann (the two Univ. of Utah Chemists who claimed
to have first observed it) never could explain the physics behind their
"discovery". (Neutrons are always released by fusion reactions and none
were ever detected with this so called cold fusion. In addition, most
other scientists trying to verify the Univ. of Utah experiments failed
to detect any energy release. The whole mess was probably due to the
unreliability of closed calorimetry experiments.)
So Physicists have pretty much debunked cold fusion. Interestingly, the
DOE (Dept. of Energy) still occasionally gets suckered by cold fusion
claims. These guys still seem willing to spend our tax dollars on
research grants for things like perpetual motion machines, Kirlian
photographs of the human aura, "zero point energy", "ball lightning",
"magnet therapy", etc. The most frequent warning sign of voodoo science
is that claims are pitched directly to the media, like the way the two
scientists from the Univ. of Utah released their "results", instead of
in scientific journals where they can be reviewed and tested by
reputable scientists.
That said, Cold Fusion still has believers, but not much confirmation.
Regards,
Bill
