Sifting Through the Wreckage of Cold Fusion

Very interesting. It's great there are still mysteries in science to explore!

I read in some post, fusion are to come to stores near you. 'So sad to see the wreckage. Well, afterall cold fusion is far different than fusion, isn't it?

I remember one of Fleischmann and Pons first interviews on their discovery. They originally just proclaimed that they didn't know what they had found. The only thing they insisted that this was not a chemical process. Then they speculated that this might be a type of fusion and the rest is history.

Martin Fleischmann didn't live to see this nod of plausibility but I hope Stanley Pons gets to see this.

I think both the announcement of cold fusion and the backlash revealed institutional and systematic issues in the scientific community. Science works pretty well but it isn't perfect and is definitely subject to human fallacy. I thought it wasn't fair what happened to Fleischmann and Pons.

I'm thinking that science and scientists are not as objective as they would have you believe. With the competition for grant funds, I suspect that most scientists would be reluctant to publish anything of a controversial nature for fear of being marginalized. Human nature wins in the end.

Agreed. It's usually many decades after, when the stigma associated with the controversial work has faded, that scientists take a fresh look and say "maybe there was something there worth looking into..."

Announcing results via press conference, rather than going through replication and journal review, was perhaps their critical mistake, not particularly deserving of sympathy.

True, probably not the best way to conduct science.

Do you think that their actions, where prompted by their knowledge of the system, and if they had not? would we now be aware of Cold Fusion?

naughty

Where was their work critically reviewed and replicated? And if so, why did that not continue to be the case?

Did you read the linked article?

The paper under discussion was published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry

"...By October, tritium production and low-levels of neutrons in such experiments had been reported from a few reputable laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in India. Moreover, BARC researchers observed that the tritium production and neutron emissions were temporally correlated. ..."

I don't know anything about BARC, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Los Alamos.

In my previous post I provided the reasons I suspect it did not continue to be the case. You have to tell me why those are unacceptable before asking for more.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161110163009.htm

The research that Sturrock learned about in Tucson concerned fluctuations in the rate of decay of radioactive elements. The fluctuations were highly controversial at the time because it had been thought that the decay rate of any radioactive element was constant. Sturrock decided to study these experimental results using analytical techniques that he and Scargle had developed to study neutrinos.

In examining the radioactive decay fluctuations, the team found evidence that those fluctuations matched patterns they had found in Super-Kamiokande neutrino data, each indicating a one-month oscillation attributable to solar rotation. The likely conclusion is that neutrinos from the sun are directly affecting beta-decays. This connection has been theorized by other researchers dating back 25 years, but the Sturrock-Fischbach-Scargle analysis adds the strongest evidence yet. If this relationship holds, a revolution in neutrino research could be underway.

What monthly variation occurs in solar rotation?

Here is the original paper finding several cycles in the sun, including one that is 12 cycles per year:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.755.6809&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I would imagine that nothing in the sun is actually changing, but that the moon might be influencing some measurements. By what plausible mechanism would the sun have such periodicity on its own?

From the same article:

As we have found for other long sequence of decay measurements, the power spectrum is dominated by a very strong annual oscillation. However, we also find a set of low-frequency peaks, ranging from 0.26 year⁻¹ to 3.98 year⁻¹, which are very similar to an array of peaks in a power spectrum formed from Mt Wilson solar diameter measurements. The Mt Wilson measurements have been interpreted in terms of r-mode oscillations in a region where the sidereal rotation frequency is 12.08 year⁻¹. We find that the LMSU measurements may also be attributed to the same type of r-mode oscillations in a solar region with the same sidereal rotation frequency. We propose that these oscillationsoccur in an inner tachocline that separates the radiative zone from a more slowly rotating solar core.

What is an r-mode oscillation? from Wikipedia, on Neutron Star oscillations: r-modes or Rossby modes (a second type of toroidal mode) only appear in rotating stars and are caused by the Coriolis force acting as restoring force along the surface. Their periods are on the same order as the star’s rotation.

What an amazing coincidence.

So it turns out that there is some kind of interaction between neutrinos and some kind of radioactive particles, causing an increase in beta decay. Maybe that is what the cold fusion phenomenon really is, and maybe not.

Either way, if we can figure out how interaction works, and amplify it, then perhaps there is a source of power in capturing neutrinos from that massive flood of neutrinos that is passing through the earth every second. That would be even better than solar power, since you could capture them at night, or in a mine, under the ocean, or on a spacecraft.

It is certainly already practical for use as a source of energy in a space ship in a science fiction story.

I wonder how much we know about how steady neutrino flux is over long periods of time?

Many of the widely used radiometric dating techniques rely on beta decay; lead-lead, radiocarbon, and potassium argon, to name a few. I wonder what kinds of bounds can be put on the error this introduces to dating?

Just in the writing of this post my thinking has changed. I think there are two possible effects if neutrinos actually do have any effect on the radioisotopes used in dating.

One is the possibility that neutrino interactions will cause the beta decay to be slightly higher over time, shortening the half life, but that shouldn't matter if the neutrino flux doesn't change much over the long term. The half life of the radioisotopes was measured with the neutrino effect already included, so it would probably not be necessary to account for it. On the other hand, if there was any long term variation in the neutrino flux, like for tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of years then there might be a problem with any radioisotope dating.

The other is that in the original technology for C14 dating, they counted decay events rather than measuring isotope ratios. That would mean that the time of the month might have to be accounted for. At the peak of the neutrino cycle you might get more decay events, therefore higher estimates of the amount of C14 present, and therefore a more recent date. At the trough of the cycle you get fewer events, therefore a less recent date.

However, new C14 dating technology counts the C14 atoms rather than the number of beta decay events.

It might be very interesting to apply this discovery in the opposite direction. Perhaps we could use discrepancies in C14 dating to figure out the history of neutrino emissions from the sun. The C14 process has been calibrated to account for variations of C14 in the atmosphere for the past 50K years, and if any of the variations in that record are not the result of known processes then perhaps they indicate changes in the sun.

You may be confusing neutrons with neutrinos. Neutrinos are (all but) massless, and have little to no interaction with anything. There is no significant power source from them.

I'll defer to you on whether there is any power to be derived from them. As for interactions, I am not confusing neutrons with neutrinos. I'll refer you back to my first post:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161110163009.htm

No, Canary has his ducks all in a row.

That neutrinos effect beta decay makes sense too. Every beta decay (plus or minus, capture or emmission) involves emission of a neutrino or antineutrino, which could just as easily satisfied by capture of an antineutrino or neutrino respectively. As capture would be able to occur without the energy necessary for the mass of a neutrino or antineutrino for emission, the total required energy would be lower, making beta events more probable during higher neutrino flux.