Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

> "The Google team explored three experimental set-ups that have been proposed to generate cold fusion — two involving palladium and hydrogen, and one involving metallic powders and hydrogen. None found evidence of fusion. The results have been published across 12 papers over the past 2 years: 9 in peer-reviewed journals and 3 on the arXiv preprint server."

It seems obvious to me that you can't achieve fusion using a catalyst. Catalysts are great if you're doing chemistry, but nuclear fusion is a lot different. You've got to force two positively charged nuclei to merge and I just don't see how a catalyst could accomplish that. That it didn't work for them seems to vindicate my casual dismissal, but I'm left wondering why they thought it worth trying in the first place. What were they thinking of that I haven't?

> "Trevithick recruited 30 researchers who had no strong opinions on cold fusion."

Surely 'having an open mind' about cold fusion is itself a "strong opinion" about cold fusion.

It's not a chemical catalyst, but the idea of muon-catalysed cold fusion has been around since the late 50s. I think I first read about it as a child in the appendix of Arthur C Clarke's "2061" novel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Is that an open mind or parallel thinking? It's an interesting idea anyway, but seems no way to efficiently create enough muons / u- mesons.

Muon catalysed fusion is not comparable to chemical catalysts for one thing. Secondly, although enough muons can actually be created, too many are lost for the reaction to work out.

As far as I understand, most of the ideas concerning how fusion at low temperatures, and their relationship with eg. Pd is not because of chemical catalysis, but because it readily dissociates and dissolves hydrogen (and isotopes) into it's crystal structure.

This process brings the hydrogen atoms ( at ntp ) at least as close as hydrogen molecules at roughly 2000 atmospheres, and maybe much closer, if I punched in the correct numbers.

I believe it was (when cold fusion was, ahem, hot) speculated that the process of hydrogen solution/diffusion within the metallic matrix had somehow forced the hydrogen much closer together, while possibly creating local heating because of changes in the metallic structure at high hydrogen saturation, and that this was somehow both hot enough and close enough to create fusion.

That makes a lot more sense, thanks. But if the metallic lattice is retaining the pressure of bringing hydrogen nuclei that close together, wouldn't the whole thing tear itself apart? Is that the instability they're talking about when they say "But at high concentrations the team was unable to create stable samples." ?

>at least as close as hydrogen molecules at roughly 2000 atmospheres, and maybe much closer,

it is just a liquid hydrogen density. If any cold fusion is there i would bet that it would be some play due to huge electron cloud of Pd.

Pressure/atom distance wise - the high pressure experiments using diamond anvil compress hydrogen up to 1M+ atm . That is still well below the Jupiter core though, and so naturally no fusion, yet one can make things interesting say by zapping that pressurized hydrogen with laser. Should get NIF style results with much less power or alternatively much better results with the NIF power.

They were thinking of quantum tunneling, which could, along with a lattice, allow protons to tunnel close enough together to fuse without having to cross the coulomb barrier. Or something. Some guy from a Berkeley LENR startup named Bloomsomething told me this tale once. Sounds vaguely plausible in a "quantum stuff is zany" way.

>Surely 'having an open mind' about cold fusion is itself a "strong opinion" about cold fusion.

A cynical reading might be: "30 researchers whose opinions on cold fusion were not strong enough for them to speak up at the job interview and thus forfeit the job".

I think it's probably people who weren't expecting to achieve the impossible, but were willing to experiment in areas of science that aren't well understood to possibly learn something new. Maybe there is some previously unknown effect that was mistaken for fusion in the previous experiments? It could be an exciting find.

But at the same time they have to know that the most likely scenario is a big null result and no new science discovered. Unfortunate, but if you knew where the next discovery was going to be you wouldn't have to hunt for it.

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