Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 6 March 2007, 11:16 AM
High temperature superconductors blow cold
Cold fusion is still twitching, amazingly, although it's even less likely to generate useful amounts of power than the hot stuff. The fractal theory of consciousness occured to me while watching The Cure at Glastonbury, and sadly hasn't stood the test of time - or sobriety. And room temperature superconductors never happened.
The New York Times has a small retrospective (registration required) of the twenty years since high temperature superconductors made it big on the science scene.
These were an amazing discovery - ceramic compounds with zero electrical resistance that worked at much higher temperatures - but still way below zero - than the exotic metal superconductors then known. Theorists postulated that there might even be compounds that were superconductive at room temperatureL: a dazzling prospect.
They promised so much - super-efficient energy transmission, new methods of transportation, novel power generation - but never panned out. Most frustratingly, in two decades nobody's quite sure yet how high temperature superconductors work - as sobering a reminder of our fallibility in science as the morning after was to the no-longer-artificially-enlightened Goodwins in his tent.
Next time in Old Fart Looks Back - Bubble memory, Josephson junctions and the Apple Macintosh: whatever happened to these forgotten technologies?
PreviousComments on this post
I received this email today, which I'm posting slightly edited as a comment to the original post. RG
Greetings. You wrote:
“Cold fusion is still twitching, amazingly, although it's even less likely to generate useful amounts of power than the hot stuff.”
I do not think you have any basis for that statement. Some cold fusion cells have generated tens to hundreds of times more energy, albeit less power, than the best plasma fusion run in history. That is to say, they have produced 50 to 500 MJ, whereas the best hot fusion run produced 6 MJ. Furthermore, cold fusion cells cost a few thousand dollars and they could be mass produced for very little money, whereas plasma fusion reactors cost billions of dollars.
You referenced the recent peer-reviewed paper by Szpak. Please note there have hundreds of other positive, peer-reviewed papers in mainstream journals. You will find a list at our website, http://lenr-canr.org/
Unfortunately, little progress has been made in cold fusion, because the research has been attacked, ridiculed and brutally suppressed, especially in the U.S. and the U.K. Although there has been cold fusion significant research in Italy and Japan, we, in the U.S., have never put any substantial resources into this field. The last sizable cold fusion project was the State of Utah's National Cold Fusion Institute. This research confirmed the excess heat and proved that cold fusion is a nuclear effect, by demonstrating neutrons and "tritium up to fifty times background . . . in four out of four cells" in concentrations of 10^10 to 10^11. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGtritiumgen.pdf
All other cold fusion research projects were cut off abruptly, without any serious consideration, mainly by harassing the researchers and firing them on trumped up charges of unethical behavior. Prof. Melvin Miles was a Distinguished Scientist and a Fellow of the China Lake Naval Laboratory. When he published positive results, all of his funding was cut off; he was ordered not to discuss the results or attend conferences; and he was reassigned to a menial job as a stock room clerk. (He soon retired.)
The APS in particular has gone out of its way to attack cold fusion researchers, including the late Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger. Schwinger resigned from the APS in protest, and he wrote:
"The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf
The only major research in the U.K. was a Harwell. This resembled the early project at MIT in that both the experiment produced excess heat.[...] At Harwell, the researchers had no experience with calorimetry so they did not understand their own results. They consulted with two top experts who demonstrated that there the result was positive. See:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MelichMEbacktothef.pdf
It is far too early for you to conclude that cold fusion cannot solve the energy crisis.
Sincerely,
Jed Rothwell
Librarian
LENR-CANR.org
