At 05:23 PM 3/23/2010, you wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
And the reason is obvious. Almost all known fusion is plasma,
thermonuclear fusion.
A.k.a. the brute force method. In the ACS press briefing, Peter
Hagelstein called this kind of fusion "vacuum reactions" which I
think is a good term.
Regarding words and the definition of "cold fusion," I would like to
remind readers that Humpty Dumpty was fundamentally right:
`I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I
tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
`it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so
many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'
I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in Martin
Gardner's wonderful edition, several nights a week to my 8-year-old
daughter, and we've been through it now, maybe five times or so, and
she knows the stories well. Her mother doesn't completely approve.
She started to read it one time, because my daughter clearly loves
it, and ran into the violence. "Off with their heads!" And the death
jokes. I find it, however, an excellent context into which to
introduce discussion of these things: a dream with dreams inside it. Safe.
Seriously, words come to mean whatever we use them to mean. The
definitions evolve and change constantly. The root or origin of many
words such as "meteorology" reflect initial misunderstandings. Many
words are based on previo
Yes.
us versions of technology used as analogies; you cannot fold a
computer disk folder, and a solid-state disk is not disk-shaped.
Arguing about such things is like arguing whether Pluto is a planet
or not. It is what it is, and it will remain what it is, regardless
of what we call it.
Yes. However, I'm pointing out the plain meanings, not all the
connotations and associations, and it is, in fact, unconscious,
not-explicit, associations that were much of the problem in 1989 et
seq. And now, the term "cold fusion" is practically inescapable.
There have been attempts for years to dissociate the field from the
fusion hypothesis, but they didn't work, and just about everyone in
the field, outside of formal contexts, calls it "cold fusion." That
is, what happens when you electrolytically load palladium with
deuterium? What is a device that does this, looking for excess heat
or nuclear phenomena, called? Whether the reaction is d-d fusion or
gremlin calisthenics, or, more likely, something else, it's called
cold fusion research and the cell is a cold fusion cell.
We need to get over it, and trying to call the Widom-Larsen black box
"not fusion" is a trick that will fool nobody who counts.
But Krivit fooled himself, in fact, he's now announced a rather
rose-colored-glasses view of what happened with the Nature blog.
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/blog/?p=137
Nature magazine reporter Katharine Sanderson
<http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/2010/03/acs_cold_fusion_calorimeter.html#more>wrote
fondly of "cold fusion."
The closest she wrote to this was:
(After repeating the old canard that "the results turned out to be
impossible to reproduce."
But people continue to present work where they claim that nuclear
reactions produce excess heat. Is it cold fusion, though? Part of me
wishes it were, so that the world's energy crisis could be solved in
one fell swoop. But I'm still not convinced.
Notice that this itself is carrying on the assumption that if cold
fusion is real, therefore the world's energy crisis is solved. Maybe,
but first things first! We know it's real, and people who have
believed that it was real, or possibly real, have spent, what,
hundreds of millions of dollars?, trying to scale it up, to make it
practical for energy production. No cigar. Fleischmann estimated that
it would take much more than that. Maybe. Maybe someone will get
lucky. Otherwise we need basic research to characterize the reaction
and to test the various theories. If we come to know what's actually
happening, it's not only invaluable for expanding our knowledge of
condensed matter nuclear physics ("cold fusion" for the common person
and for short), but might also allow more efficient engineering.
Arguing over whether it's to be called "fusion" or not is fighting an
old battle that did nothing more than distract everyone.
If it's not fusion, WTF is it? Seeking the answer to that is far more
important than what we call it, but the name is actually settled.
Cold fusion. Get over it. If it's found to be something that the word
fusion doesn't apply to, then maybe the name would change. There is
an alternate name based on a popular and completely unproven hypothesis:
Pathological science.
Words such as "LENR" are partly an attempt to be more technically
accurate, which is unnecessary, because no one is confused by
inaccurate terms such as meteorology. They are partly euphemisms,
coined by people hoping to avoid the stigma of the original term "cold fusion."
Yes. And it backfires. The skeptics will point out that we are
ashamed of the name. So, eff the shame. It's almost certainly fusion
*of some kind*, and nobody thinks that muon-catalyzed fusion isn't
fusion just because it's not hot, and if it turns out that you can
stick some deuterium in palladium and some unexpected neutron effect
transforms a bit of it into helium, nobody is going to believe claims
that "this isn't fusion." They will continue to call it "cold
fusion." More completely, maybe, cold neutron-catalyzed fusion, or
something like that.
And, if that's what it is, who discovered it? Hint: not the person
who developed the theory to explain it, but the person who found the
effect and realized that it was important, and published.
Euphemisms never last for long. They quickly take on whatever was
embarrassing or objectionable about the original word, so people
have to keep coming up with new ones. Look at the words for
"bathroom" or "special needs children" for example. Most euphemisms
-- unlike "LENR" -- are deliberately inaccurate or vague, but that
never fools anyone. Everyone knows that you seldom ask where the
bathroom is in order to take a bath.
When you ask where the bathroom is, most people assume you want to
know where the bathroom is, and politely avoid speculating on why you
want to know. Sometimes it's one thing, sometimes another.
Cold fusion. It's about time we start buying ads for it. I'm pretty
sure I'm going to advertise the kits with "cold fusion" in the name,
prominently. The fine print will say that the kits demonstrate what
appears to be a nuclear reaction and that the mechanism of the
reaction is as yet unclear, the subject of many theories and much
investigation and research. Hopefully, more and more of that.
