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Comment by mordymoop | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to find that there is a lot of theoretical justification for possible mechanisms of cold fusion, and a lot of experimental evidence that must either be suggestive of something interesting, or indicative of bold-faced and widespread fraud.

It was also interesting the discover that the original experiment was dismissed because other experimenters failed to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons result ... despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately. For example, not meeting the same level of hydrogen loading in the metal matrix.

It could all absolutely be BS, but I was surprised that it wasn’t actually proven to be BS; it was just not proven to not be BS, and was then made “embarrassing”.

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You can’t prove a negative though, the onus was on F&S to prove their result and they couldn’t do that. They had misinterpreted some of their results (they had not detected gamma rays or fusion byproducts) and had made errors in their experimental design. Basically they were chemists, and their claims of fusion were based on misunderstandings of the physics.

A way to think about this is just to eliminate fusion from their claims. Ignore that, they didn’t have any evidence for it. The bottom line was, could they reliably generate useful heat. The answer to that was also no. So really, what are you left with?

Having said that room temperature fusion is a real thing. You can build a fusor in a garage with commonly available parts. It may well be possible to generate very low levels of fusion reactions in various ways, but generating useful energy that way may never be possible. Best of luck for these people for trying, you never know and maybe some useful insights will come from it.

>> Basically they were chemists, and their claims of fusion were based on misunderstandings of the physics.

That's an interesting interpretation. My interpretation at the time was that they are chemists and ruled out chemical reactions as the heat source. They concluded it must be physics. Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment. They seemed really arrogant to me.

And here we are 30 years later with it unsettled.

The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.

Compare this with high temperature superconductivity. If you get a time machine and go to 1985 and try to promote high temperature superconductivity, nobody will take you seriously.

But a team discover one material and published a clear recipe to built it. Other team tried some variations, and discovered an easier recipe to build them and published it. So soon everybody and their dog was making new variants, and new variants, and new variants...

A few years ago, they gave one in the physics' lab for undergraduate students, and we made a few measurements for a month carefully because they don't tolerate humidity. Until someone put it in a glass with water and ice to measure the properties at 0°C.

Also, now you can also see the recipe in a video in YouTube by "Applied Science": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU , the guy has some advanced lab, but nothing too advanced.

The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.

>> The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.

That certainly seems to be the case today, but it was not the case when physicists rejected the claim outright. In other words, the rejection came before the reproducibility problems.

I can tell you exactly what the editor said after reading the first paper about high temperature superconductivity:

fake quote> Nah.

The nice thing about physics is that it doesn't matter if the community reject the idea. If you have a nice experiment that is reproducible and has clear and easy instructions, sooner or later the community will accept it, and you may get a Nobel price. If the experiment is weird and you are unlucky, it can take a few decades.

Here is another weird experiment, with another weird result, but it's reproducible and has clear and easy to follow instructions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment

This is entirely unlike high-temperature superconductivity, though. We knew superconductivity was a thing in some materials under a give material-dependent critical temperature. Looking for compounds with higher critical temperature is not a major shift, or surprising in any way. Why would any editor say no when someone writes “look, we’ve found a crystal with a high critical temperature”?

Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.

We had an explanation of superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair but it didn't apply to high temperature superconductivity. It took many years to get a good enough explanation of high temperature superconductivity, and IIRC there are a few details that are not understood. So it was surprising that someone made a high temperature superconductor.

As far as I know, there is no theoretical reason to discard cold fusion. There are a few "cold fusion" method that work, like using muons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion but it's so expensive to create muons and they are short lived, so you expend more energy than the useful energy you can collect from the device.

So (in 1985) both phenomena were in the same class, it was not theoretically impossible, but no one had shown a good experiment were they happened.

> Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.

Perhaps we agree, the problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. (And too many scammers publishing bad experiments and trying to get investors.)

The concept of low-temperature fusion in itself is not absurd necessarily, but there is a whole lot of orders of magnitude to overcome. And it cannot be easy or common, or we’d have seen it already: one particle releasing ~1 MeV in a crystal leaves traces, which we can interpret very well. So the proofs need to be solid, not just hand-waving “it must be fusion, because we haven’t got the faintest idea”.

The fuzziness about how you’d have fusion reactions by just putting protons in a metal is a bit dodgy. Everything else about it was a huge red flag. Yes, HTS are a bit different than older superconductors, and yes, we don’t know everything about them. But again, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that there could be some mechanisms that could move the critical temperature by a factor of 5 to 10. Fundamentally, it’s still an exotic form of collective behaviour. Cold fusion amounts to getting ~0.1 MeV (the order of magnitude to tunnel through electrostatic interaction to reach a nucleus) out of ~0.05 eV (the energy of a proton at room temperature). That’s about as plausible as saying that you’d reach Earth’s escape velocity by running down a mountain. Of course, you’d be more credible with a rocket strapped on your back. Cold fusion is missing that rocket.

Not every outlandish claim should garner the attention and respect from scientists. If you hide your "discovery," refuse to publish in scientific journals and be subject to peer review, if you claim "secrecy" is why no one can replicate your result, well, you'll be tossed on to the tall pile of folks claiming this or that physics breakthrough.

Physicists have to deal with this kind of crackpottery a LOT. They don't owe you their time unless you have some solid evidence and full transparency. Don't want full transparency? Be prepared to be called a fraud. That's how it goes.

> That certainly seems to be the case today, but it was not the case when physicists rejected the claim outright.

The claim was of specific results which were inconsistent with the people performing the experiment having survived it. The experimenters being alive to give press appearances was sufficient reason to reject that claim out of hand.

That something else very interesting, but unknown, might have been happening wasn't rejected until after robust reproduction attempts failed to produce any evidence of that.

Nate Lewis IIRC was at the press conference saying it wasn't chemical either.

The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting a fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of fusion. I dont really see what’s arrogant about that.

> The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting an [unknown] fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of [known] fusion reaction.

See it?

No I don't, even if there is something unknown going on that has none of the known characteristics of fusion, why even say it's fusion? Why attach that label to it, especially when you have no actual theory of what is happening and why?

To put it another way, why are you calling this an unknown fusion reaction? What's the basis for the claim that it was fusion of any kind?

F&P thought that the evidence they had found demonstrated fusion. That it was known evidence of fusion. They were simply wrong. Saying 'well it might be some unknown form of fusion' is post-hoc rationalisation (for which you have no evidence or theory). That's not what they were saying at the time.

It's so infuriating that 30 years later we're still fighting these fundamental misconceptions about what was going on.

Why America was called West India? Why + is used for absence of electrons? Why atom called atom("unbreakable")? And so on.

Discovery is not a science, but it is the part of science.

Excellent thanks. That's very helpful as those analogies are very apt. The West Indies has nothing to do with India. Atoms are no unbreakable. Cold Fusion has nothing to do with fusion. I'm glad we got that straight.

> [unknown] Fusion has nothing to do with [known] fusion.

I did it again. Shame on me.

Why call this unknown thing fusion though? If it exists at all. What's the justification for using that name for it?

LENR produces more energy than any chemical reaction. How you will name it?

> Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment.

No, what lots of people (many of them far more prominent chemists than P&F said, not just physicists) is that, if honest, it had to be measurement error, not only based on abstract analysis of the described setup and results, but also based on robust attempts to replicate the claimed results.

Fusors aren't room temperature.

It looks like positive-return-on-energy fusion will almost certainly be achievable in 5-10 years, though it won't be commercializable for a lot longer than that.

Fusors are room temperature. It’s the electrical gradient which produces the reaction, not temperature.

The ions thermalise very quickly even in a fusor; if they fused on the first collision rather than bouncing this whole thing would be much easier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor#Thermalization_of_the_io...

I do like how incredibly simple and easy fusors are compared to the other types of fusion reactor, but sadly they are still very very hot where it counts.

What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs.

If you don't understand it, it's not surprising that you can't make it useful. That doesn't say much about what you'll be capable of, after you do understand it.

While it's true that the onus was on F&P to prove their results, it's also true that if someone else is claiming to replicate the experiment, the onus is on them to do it correctly.

F&P were unable to replicate their results. People have been trying for decades, with their help and the best they get is some occasional anomalies. The contention that the experiment has never been ‘properly’ replicated comes from the fact that they made some errors in their experimental design and description. How can you ‘properly’ recreate an experiment if the given design is known to be inaccurate?

If you follow the known to be inaccurate description people will complain you’re not doing what the actually did. If you do what they actually did (or seem to have done as best we can tell), people will complain you didn’t follow their published description. Meanwhile F&P still couldn’t get reliable results themselves.

Muon-catalyzed fusion is well understood and F&P are well known frauds. There isn’t something interesting here.

> What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs.

Sometimes. Often, what you’re left with is unusable experimental results because you don’t have a clue. The proper way to resolve that is what they did with faster-than-light neutrinos: ask for collaboration with other labs and try to replicate the result. This whole thing is not science, it’s cargo-culting the way science is described in pop culture.

The most exiting phrase in Science is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny...”

Which is when (if you do Science much) your heart sinks because you become absolutely certain that you have made (another) mistake and will now spend days/weeks/months trying to pin it down.

Just wanted to follow up on fusors, since the technology seems to be less known that it deserves to be. As parent says, it is a completely solid, in-your-garage demonstration of fusion. Lot's of information at fusor.net [0].

[0]: https://fusor.net/

> despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately

They (Fleischmann & Pons) did not prove anything in the first place, so after that the “not the true experiment” thing is a fallacy. There will always be too much of something or not enough of anything. You can never replicate exactly an experiment, but this does not prevent all of science from progressing and reproducing results. Physics does not care about who operates the experiment. So if something works only when specific people try it, it does not give any confidence in the results. In other words, it does set the bullshit alarm ringing.

There is no theoretical foundation for cold fusion, and no known mechanism for it to work. So even if it does exist, their stance of “just trust us, and let us move the goalposts about replicability” is just voodoo and, yes, bullshit.

I thought Japanese researchers had already replicated the "anomalous heat generation" in LENR. https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/cold-fusion-japan-takes-the-le...

Why is this still considered BS if independent research teams have reproduced this ?

It's important to distinguish between current actual results from labs working very carefully and methodically and turning up interesting anomalous results, and the original claims made by F&P.

Yes there is interesting physics here and there's a lot we don't know about the behaviour of hydrogen and deuterium in dense metallic crystal lattices. Who knows, that behaviour might even have something to do with fusion.

That's separate from what F&P were claiming 30 years ago. They claimed to have produced 'tremendous heat' and to have detected evidence of fusion (gamma rays and fusion products). They couldn't replicate the heat measurements, there were experimental errors that mean we can't know if they had generated excess heat at all, and they were simply mistaken that the evidence they had gathered indicated fusion.

Two things can both be true at the same time. These new experiments might indicate heat generation and might indicate fusion, and the F&P experiments demonstrated none of those things. Those are not contradictory statements.

Heck, F&P might even have stimulated fusion in their experiments. It's impossible to prove a negative. The point is they didn't demonstrate that at all.

Digging into the research here, there are a lot of results which indicate some form of LENR should be feasible in suitably complex environments. As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation.

The experimenters researching this clearly don't have a great way to control for other factors in an experimental setting either.

As an example, there are multiple reports of transmutations being observed following a hydride doping experiment... however these are all done by gas spectrometer. It's unclear from the experiments whether there happened to be random impurities in the hydride prior to doping.

Similarly heat/neutron measurements are really difficult to get right and be convincing.

As a materials physicist, I have no idea what you mean by this:

> As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation.

Screening effect from what? There is nothing surprising in the way hydrogen behaves in a metal. We can simulate that with great accuracy, in fact we do it all the time as hydrogen embrittlement is an important issue in metallurgy.

This type of cold fusion would require two nuclei overcoming humongous energy barriers to get close enough to each other. No form of motion within a crystal lattice or no amount of deformation is going to provide that. The energies involved are about 6 orders of magnitude short.

Heat is trivial to measure, we’ve been doing that since the 19th century. Neutrons are not particularly difficult either, we’ve been doing that since the 1940s.

The idea of LENR is not to move hydrogen protons in a lattice, but to make it jump over imperfections, with hope that it will land into nuclei.

Yes, but that’s not how it works. There still is an energy barrier to “land into” a nucleus, and tunnelling through that is just not plausible with the energy of a proton in a crystal lattice, again by more than 6 orders of magnitude. Structure defects do not magically create energy to give it to nearby ions.

The mass of the proton is 1.67E-27, so we have about 20 orders of magnitude to spare.

I can see one way the mass is relevant in this case: it changes the particle’s wavevector. It does change the probability of tunnelling through the energy barrier (lighter particles tunnel mor easily), but that effect is completely negligible compared to the height of the barrier.

The energy you get from the reaction has nothing to do with the mass of the particles; not all mass is “converted” to energy. The mass energy of a proton is 931 MeV. The energy you get from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction is ~14 MeV.

Besides, this is irrelevant, as there is a ~1 MeV energy barrier preventing the reaction, which you still have to go through.

If you’re implying that the energy from one reaction could be used to make another reaction happen, then yes. But when your atoms emit 14 MeV each, you don’t have a crystal, you have a plasma. And this is not cold fusion, it is just regular fusion, same as in a star or in a tokamak.

Electric field can easily create plasma at tips. Effect known as St. Elmo's fire. If material have impurity in the form of a tip in a cavity, then an electric field can create plasma in this cavity.

No, it cannot. There is not a single instance reported of spontaneous plasma formation in a defect in a crystal, charged or otherwise. The electric field within a conductor is effectively zero: you cannot have the kind electric field required.

This would be very easy to see if it were happening: the brutal expansion of the plasma would create huge stresses and its high temperature would melt the material locally. This is just not happening.

You are also moving the goalposts again: there is no such thing as protons getting accelerated by a MeV just by interacting with defects; the mass of a proton is irrelevant; and you don’t have spontaneous plasma in a crystal. Nothing you’ve written in this thread is supported by reality.

> This would be very easy to see if it were happening: the brutal expansion of the plasma would create huge stresses and its high temperature would melt the material locally. This is just not happening.

Local melting reported from the beginning for 20+ years.

Quotes:

Occasionally, energy density is sufficient to cause local melting.[87] Melting is possible because many impurities lower the melting point well below that of pure palladium (1554.9°C).[105, 106]

In the course of these experiments, the Japanese researchers verified the existence of other phenomena frequently reported from cold fusion experiments, such as occasional releases of energy in the form of sharp bursts.

Formation of small craters on the surface of Pd cathode during electrolysis in electrolytes based on heavy water is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of low-temperature nuclear reactions. In this note we discuss the validity of these statements.

And so on.

I see, A Student’s Guide to Cold Fusion. That is cute. And now the goalposts have moved from spontaneous melting to local melting under an electric field.

Reference 87 does not support melting in any way (you don't get faceted voids from local melting, and yes, local melting is a thing, just not spontaneous at room temperature with unaccelerated protons). References 105 and 106 have nothing to do with melting.

It is not difficult to find references (I mean, real ones, not dodgy conference proceedings) showing that defects can lower the melting point of a metal under certain conditions. But lowering the melting point does not make melting happen on its own at room temperature, either. And even if you can demonstrate that there is some melting, rather than an electrochemical reaction, it does not mean that any fusion reaction happened. It's about as credible as blaming aliens for a pattern you see in the noise.

> Formation of small craters on the surface of Pd cathode during electrolysis in electrolytes based on heavy water is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of low-temperature nuclear reactions

This is bunk. The Earth is sometimes referred to as a disk; it does not make the flat earth argument sound, particularly if the people doing the referring are the same people building a case out of it.

Again, none of this makes any sense, you're just wasting your time.

This is interesting development. Back then when Pons and Fleischmann first came out with this in 89, they were heavily ridiculed ( or smeared) by main stream academics like MIT. It also turns out MIT has received a lot of money to do hot fusion research. Wouldn't be the first time that interests of funding interfered with science.

Yeah, I always heard it was complete BS, but when you look into it there have been some weird phenomena reported. Unfortunately no one seems to be able to reliably produce them.

Weird phenomena are a great way to justify a large investment of time and effort for yourself... But what the world wants is BORING phenomena.

I would say the science world wants weird phenomena, boringly reproducible.

One thing that is an indispensable lesson of graduate research: actually trying to make a cutting edge measurement and pick signal from noise is INCREDIBLY hard. It's easy to underestimate just how noisy frakking everything is. Every thing looks complex and uncertain and it's only through extremely hard work and careful measurement that you can know ANYTHING.

So complexity is actually the norm. The irreducible complexity of noise.

The weak SNR ratio would lead one to believe that the results are bullshit, no?

Yup.

The real tell tale is when the effect starts diminishing as SNR improves.

The giveaway that the EM drive is junk is that the effect has gotten smaller everytime the apparatus has removed a source of error.

Nothing is ever conclusive, but it points to something which should violate the known laws of physics really just being a pile of systematic error.

> despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately

I’ve been seeing this claim in another field: about hydroxychloquinine. Every time a study comes out which doesn’t show a benefit, people rush in saying “that’s because they forgot X, didn’t dose the right amount of Y, etc”

I’m actually not sure what to make of this phenomenon in general. I will say though that when you’re trying to test a hypothesis, completely replicating another experiment isn’t necessary. You should test it under a variety of conditions. That makes it easier to avoid the same hidden mistakes that the original experiment might have included.

You should definitely also try the exact original conditions. Think about reducing a tricky bug: you start with the exact input and code that first caused the problem, then try removing constraints to see what preserves the bug.

Ed; I should clarify: you start with whatever big nasty test scenario you need to make sure you can reproduce the effect at all, and only then can you start changing the conditions and be confident you're still measuring the same thing.

Yes but science and computer programming are fundamentally different activities. The programmer tries to reproduce the bug because his main fear is that he can’t see its effect. But the scientist’s main fear is that the experimental setup does not robustly test the underlying hypothesis. If you reproduce exactly the conditions (and remember you will always be criticized for missing X), the best you can learn is whether the previous result was not completely fabricated (or statistical noise). It’s much more productive to subject a result to a wide battery of tests.

If you're dealing with an unknown, confusing phenomenon, you don't know what the underlying hypothesis is. You don't know yet what constitutes rigorous testing and what is just wandering off into the weeds. So you need to start with seeing if the thing happens at all. You do in fact need to know whether the previous result was garbage before it can be productive to do a wide battery of tests. And "wide" depends on how sensitive to conditions your effect is, which you also don't know yet. Your closest thing to an anchor is the initial claimed setup, so start there.

If cold fusion exists that produces more energy than it consumes, it would take some extreme conditions. If cold fusion could appear under normal-ish conditions, we would have already observed it and tapped into it

Given that we only discovered and built dead downwind faster than the wind vehicles in the 2000s I wouldn't be so sure.

And for being relatively simple classical physics it was very controversial, with even some physics professors denying it was possible.

We did that? That sounds awesome. Source?

Some sources:

https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/museum/ddwfttw.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_%28land_yacht%29

The search term to use is "DDWFTTW"

It's a bit confusing, but some important points are:

* It only works if you're on land, you can't have a flying device that does this.

* Boats can sail faster than the wind speed, but have do so at an angle to the wind. (Just to convince yourself that this isn't completely strange).

* The wheels rotation on the ground is what drives the propeller, not the other way around.

Just thought I'd add a relevant link as the phrase "dead downwind" caught my eye

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht)#:~:te....

From Wikipedia: "After proposing the vehicle's design, and presenting the analysis to demonstrate its viability, the Blackbird team learned that others had previously conceived and built similar designs—most notably aerodynamics engineer Andrew B. Bauer, later with the Douglas Aircraft Company, built and demonstrated such a vehicle in 1969, based on an analysis presented in a student's paper from some 20 years earlier."

I don't think LENR is possible, but I'd love to be wrong and I do think that some money and energy should be spent investigating it.

What I find interesting is some phenomena that was clearly present in some of these demonstrations - even if it wasn't LENR. The anomalous results are worth investigating because there may be unknown physics lurking there, but anything related to CF is scientifically taboo.

Fleischmann and Pons had a lab sponsored by IMRA (the research division of Toyota) where they were supposed to repeat their experiment. They spent 12 million dollars without getting any believable results. The idea that their research was somehow suppressed is laughably wrong.

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