At 10:16 AM 1/3/2013, Daniel Rocha wrote:
It was against all kinds of fusion, Jed. And he called Eric Lerner an idiot.
2013/1/3 Jed Rothwell <<mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>jedrothw...@gmail.com>
This is depressing. See:
<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/fusion_energy_from_edward_teller_to_today_why_fusion_won_t_be_a_source_of.html>http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/fusion_energy_from_edward_teller_to_today_why_fusion_won_t_be_a_source_of.html
A bit fuller quote:
For one thing, the history of fusion energy is
filled with crazies, hucksters, and starry-eyed
naifs chasing after dreams of solving the
world's energy problems. One of the most famous
of all,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/science/martin-fleischmann-cold-fusion-seeker-dies-at-85.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>Martin
Fleischmann, died earlier this year. Along with
a colleague, Stanley Pons, Fleischmann thought
that he had converted hydrogen into helium in a
beaker in his laboratory, never mind that if he
had been correct he would have released so much
energy that he and his labmates would have been
fricasseed by the radiation coming out of the
device. Fleischmann wasn't the first - Ronald
Richter, a German expat who managed to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Richter>entangle
himself in the palace intrigues of Juan Peron,
beat Fleischmann by nearly four decadesand
<http://ecat.com/>the latest schemer, Andrea Rossi, won't be the last.
This guy is relying too much on Charles Seife
("Sun in a Bottle") as a source. There is no
comparison with Richter and the Pons-Fleichmann
team. Pons and Fleischmann announced a set of
*experimental results,* Richter was a secretive
con artist. Pons and Fleischmann were not
"naifs," they knew that nuclear reactions in
condensed matter were not expected. They also had
not been "dreaming of solving the world's energy
problems." They were researching basic science,
and they found something *very* unexpected, and reported it.
Pons and Fleischmann did not claim to have
converted "hydrogen to helium." They would have
expected this reaction -- even if we substitute
"deuterium" for "hydrogen" to fix the guy's error
-- to be undetectable. They claimed an "unknown
nuclear reaction," and the radiation from an
unknown reaction *cannot be predicted,* so this
is simply an old pseudoskeptical trope.
The author is simply showing his ignorance. And
only now I look to see the author's name.
Oh! Charles Seife! He believes himself!
The subtitle of his book is "The Strange History
of FUSION and the Science of Wishful Thinking."
Apparently, he wishes he was insightful and correct.
Has this guy read "Status of cold fusion (2010),"
Naturwissenschaften? That is a peer-reviewed
review of the field, the most authoritative
statement we have on what current scientific
thinking is, among the knowledgeable (including
the editors and reviewers at NW, which is
published by Sprnger-Verlag, as their "flagship
multidisciplary journal," and SV is the
second-largest scientific publisher in the world. This is *mainstream.*
Because of Seife's blatant errors in his brief
description quoted above, we can know that he's
not knowledgeable. Even a knowledgeable
pseudoskeptic, if such exists, wouldn't make
those mistakes, writing for a major publication like Slate.
"Charles Seife is a journalism professor at New
York University." Great. Qualified to review
science? Journalists are expected to be accurate,
in addition to writing engagingly. Seife is
writing polemic, and doesn't seem to give a hoot
about accuracy. He has no clue as to the real
theoretical issues involved with cold fusion, nor
to the vast body of experimental evidence that
has led to the most recent understanding of it as
actually being, as to what Pons and Fleischmann
discovered, the fusion of deuterium to helium,
without the expected gamma radiation (which could
merely mean that the pathway does not involve d+d
fusion by the classic brute-force mechanism, but
*something else.*). The evidence for that is *conclusive.*
There is, in fact, *no contrary experimental
evidence,* and the fusion conclusion is supported
by the work of twelve independent research
groups, see the Naturwissenschaften review and
Storm's book, "The Science of Low-Energy Nuclear
Reactions" (2007). And Seife compares this with a blatant fraud, Richter?
Spit!
