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Comment by ajarmst | Hacker News Reader

In Atomic Adventures, James Mahaffey (who I unreservedly recommend) outlines the history, claims and problems with Cold Fusion. He was a member of one of the first teams to try to replicate the results, and points out that (from the point of view of working atomic scientists at the time) it was very clear that whatever this was, it was not fusion, as it lacked features that would have to be present if it were. Notably, the scientists pictured standing next to it weren't dead. It was also first announced in a press release, not a journal and the actual details of the experiment were initially kept secret (and not knowing the details was used as a reason that replication was failing) for commercial reasons. Whatever Pons and Fleischmann were doing, it pretty clearly wasn't science. It had none of the features of scientific enquiry, but nearly all of the features of a grift, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years.

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Don't leave out the part where Mahaffey first confirmed the P&F results before having to retract that due to improper equipment usage. That likely was a big contributing factor to the many conspiracy theories that P&F had in-fact cracked cold fusion and The Government/Big Old/The Illuminati were trying to keep it a secret.

(I love Mahaffey's books so much.)

Why would they necessarily be dead? Wouldn't it depend on how many neutrons were emitted?

...directly proportional to the amount of heat produced (which was a lot).

All of that clearly raises red flags, which are perhaps overwhelming, but it doesn't necessarily mean they were entirely wrong. Case in point, a certain pharma company with no track record whatsoever was recently working on mRNA vaccines: they did science by press release, didn't release details of their experiments purportedly for commercial reasons, had sketchy executives saying sketchy things, and it all turned out to be 100% right. It's hard to take the red flags and draw a conclusion based on that alone. The failure to replicate is far more important than the behavior of the actors involved.

P&F were not replicated, so we can safely say they were entirely wrong.

For some reason, their negative result makes some people believe other different kinds of "cold fusion" are more likely. This is not how conditional probability works.

Quote:

As a demonstration of reproducibility, samples of palladium-nickel-zirconium oxide powder, taken from a single batch of production, were employed in independent parallel test runs at laboratories at Kobe University and Tohoku University. Both laboratories observed sustained excess heat over a period of more than 10 days. The data were qualitatively and quantitatively similar between the two laboratories.

Reproducibility means a recipe that anyone can reproduce. Anecdotal reports of that sort don't count. They can be explained by incompetence or even fraud.

What the whole sorry cold fusion experience shows is that if you have enough people trying to do something, some will get positive results, regardless of whether the phenomenon is actually real. A real tip off is how variable and mutually inconsistent the ephemeral positive results are. This is a sign they are experimental artifacts, not anything significant.

Exactly. The fact that reported positive results always seem to be at the limits of detectability, whatever the equipment used, is a huge red flag that the results are probably artifacts.

> P&F were not replicated,

Including, after spending tons of money trying, by P&F themselves.

The crucial difference is that the mRNA virus, when finally scrutinized, was shown to be effective with effects that could be consistently replicated and there was a theoretical explanation consistent with other things we've observed about mammalian immune systems. People were absolutely correct to dismiss the claims about the mRNA virus until those demonstrations were available, and would be wrong to dismiss them afterward. Cold 'fusion' is still in the first phase and has been for decades. Science isn't about what might be right. It's about what can be demonstrated.

> Notably, the scientists pictured standing next to it weren't dead.

That’s clever and snarky and not at all helpful.

And if I’m to believe the comments about table top fusors below, it’s not even true.

Table top fusors do not produce the same amount of neutron flux as the cold fusion result (with huge amounts of heat production) would imply. Just a few neutrons here or there with fusors.

I don't find this argument convincing: "This is fusion." "It can't be fusion. We've got a pretty good understanding of how fusion works, and this is missing some key features. Notably, neutron flux consistent with the claimed heat." "This is a special kind of fusion that doesn't have any of the features your theory describes." "Ok. What's the theory that describes this result then?" <Waves vaguely at beaker of warm water> "I don't need a theory, it's been experimentally proven!"

As well call start calling a campfire "forest fusion" and offer to sell me the patent.

James Mahaffey, Atomic Adventures (Pegasus:2018 Reprint): 'A couple of things about the announced phenomenon bothered me greatly. Both Pons and Fleischmann had claimed over and over that their apparatus was producing “tremendous” heat and “measurable” neutrons. On the news, they were shown hovering over their operating fusion reactor, closely examining the apparatus as the oxygen and deuterium bubbled. That didn’t make any sense. It should have been the other way around—tremendous neutrons making measureable heat. If they were, in fact, making tremendous heat, then they would have been killed by the heavy neutron flux and secondary radiations broadcasting out of the unshielded deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction. Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even misting up their glasses.'

    Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling 
    water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even 
    misting up their glasses.'

Well, yes? According to Wikipedia, what F&P reported was an unexplained 20 °C rise in temperature.

That is a tremendous increase in temperature... when the expected amount is zero. But not exactly a "kill everybody in the room" amount of heat, right?

    For most of the time, the power input to the cell was equal to the
    calculated power leaving the cell within measurement accuracy, and the
    cell temperature was stable at around 30 °C. But then, at some point
    (in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about
    50 °C without changes in the input power.

It seems to me that there are large numbers of problems with their claims! But the temperature thing doesn't seem to be one of them?

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not arguing that they achieved cold fusion. Anybody with a shred of skepticism should assume they didn't, until proven otherwise via reproducible experiments.

People are not getting killed by the heat, but by the radiation needed to do that. My math on radiation is a bit shaky, but to heat water by 20 degrees, it needs to absorb 80000 Grey, isn't it. Now we can also assume that most radiation was not confined to the water. The dose to get a person sick is 2 Grey and 10 Grey (full body) is almost always fatal. Making a few leaps in logic here and it depends on how much water was heated, assuming it was in the litre range, then beeing close to such a device seems likely to be unhealthy.

I get what you’re saying, but I was reporting Mahafee said about the response of scientists to the first press conference. They were not claiming that their new type of deuterium fusion didn’t have the same relationship between generated heat and neutron flux. They were claiming it was ‘fusion’ generating ‘tremendous heat’ which was completely inconsistent with them standing next to it unharmed. The (still dubious) claim that this is a different type of ‘fusion’ that has different features came much later. I’ll very happily withdraw criticism if someone (1) publishes a properly reviewed study that is replicable and (2) make a convincing case for a theory that explains the phenomenon that is consistent with other observations of fusion. After several decades, we’re still not seeing any real progress on either of those, so I remain pretty confident of my skepticism.

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