
Lessons from cold fusion, 30 years on - okket
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01673-x
======
raesene9
There's an active community of companies and individuals still working on what
gets called LENR (cold fusion being a bit of a tainted term).

However it seems to be an area that's rife with the potentials for scams, with
some participants claiming to be "almost at the point of commercial LENR
setups" for many years now (e.g. Andrea Rossi and his E-Cat work)

Sites like [https://www.lenr-forum.com/](https://www.lenr-forum.com/) and
[https://e-catworld.com/](https://e-catworld.com/) have more info. on it.

I'd like to see one or more of the companies get there, but having followed it
on and off for some years, I'm not holding out a lot of hope...

~~~
hannob
It's not an area with the potential for scams. It's just scam.

When someone tries to sell you a product that goes against the accepted laws
of physics, because some flawed experiment decades ago indicated that they
might be wrong, you can be certain that it's a scam.

~~~
mrfusion
When did we finalize physics? From my point of view, if they show the evidence
then I’ll believe them.

~~~
hannob
Sure, there's always the potential for new physics. But honestly... I wouldn't
look for it in some crackpot internet forums.

I mean click on the link. The first thing I saw there was people speculating
that the latest nature paper is part of some military plot, because they all
know LENR works, yet they want to hide the fact from the public as long as
possible.

------
mrfusion
Here’s an often missed topic in this discussion. A method for lenr already
exists:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-
catalyzed_fusion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion)

Sure it’s not over unity right now but it is fusion at room temperature. And
it’s always possible we might find lower energy ways to make muons at some
point.

------
ansible
Cold Fusion, for me, was the first time I felt I was living in the future.

I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups. Then a guy was
attending the press conference, and posting what was announced. (The 1989
version of live blogging.)

And then I was able to download the Pons & Fleischmann paper (as opposed to
waiting months for it to be published), and print it out. Though I didn't have
the correct set of troff macros...

 _That_ was pretty frickin' cool. That showed what living in the Information
Age was all about.

As for CF itself, I was a bit skeptical, and followed the news closely for a
while on others trying to reproduce the results.

~~~
at-fates-hands
> I had first heard about CF in the Usenet science newsgroups.

I remember my Physics teacher in Jr High talking about this development. He
took a week of classes to debunk their claims and ended the week with the
phrase, "They will have their 15 minutes of fame and then quietly retire and
disappear from the scientific community."

Which is pretty much what happened.

------
winrid
Oh gosh. Thought this would be about Adobe Coldfusion.

~~~
dorkwood
What lessons were there to be learned from Adobe ColdFusion?

~~~
sjwright
As someone who still uses CFML today (not Adobe ColdFusion but rather a fully
open source workalike called Lucee, which runs in the JVM and is licensed as
LGPL) I can say that there's a lot I have learned.

I learned that having a poor reputation among the influential opinionists is
not a strong indicator of a language's inherent worth. As a language designed
to achieve a specific purpose I think it is equal (or superior) to many
options with a better reputation, e.g. PHP, Ruby, Python, Jython, Groovy.

I also learned that a language can be substantially improved with small,
incremental improvements. Modern CFML has an JavaScript-inspired syntax,
objects, closures, lambda, and countless benefits that come from running
directly on the JVM.

~~~
jsgo
My supervisor and one of my coworkers are coldfusion (can’t remember which
version number) developers. I’ve never worked in it, but I could easily see
someone with experience in ASP.NET or one of the Java web technologies JSPs
being able to understand at a high level coldfusion code and vice versa. It
seems to prefer code being in the same page as the presentation (at least,
from what I’ve seen them do), which may go against others, but seems to work
out fine there.

Also, they can hammer out a solution to things pretty quickly with it. I don’t
know if this is so much the language or the developer, but at a minimum it
doesn’t appear to be a hindrance to development.

~~~
sjwright
> It seems to prefer code being in the same page as the presentation

It's not so much as it's preferred, but rather that it's _possible._ In fact,
because templates and business logic are really just the exact same language
with different grammar, a CFML programmer may be passively incentivied to mash
the two together because, well, what's the point of splitting it up anyway? If
I'm just going to run these ten lines of code to acquire my data and run these
ten lines of template to output my data, I might as well put these twenty
lines next to each other into one file...at least for now. You can always
split it up later if it becomes more complex, or if you want to take "proof of
concept" code and refactor it in the house style.

If you want you can structure your programs with as much (or as little)
buzzword compliance as you wish. There are numerous frameworks which help you
structure your code, including a few that are quite similar to Ruby on Rails.
CFML doesn't hold your hands and declare the one true correct way to structure
your code properly, which is both a big strength and perhaps its biggest
weakness.

~~~
jsgo
yeah, I don't have a personal problem with the approach (followed by "which
may go against others, but seems to work out fine there"), just that it
deviates a hair there from what I've seen most try to push. But they're able
to hammer something out pretty quickly (and most importantly, it works) taking
that course so if it works for them I see no harm (it obviously isn't a
hindrance in any particular measure that matters).

------
Causality1
Cold fusion eventually being demonstrated wouldn't surprise me, since it's not
terribly hard to create fusion in relatively mild environments such as a
fusor. What's difficult is getting more energy out of it than you put in to
generate the reaction.

~~~
short_sells_poo
I'm not an expert but my impression was that a fusor isn't cold fusion at all.
The device itself does not heat up too much perhaps, but it literally
accelerates ions to fusion temperatures of >45 million Kelvin.

~~~
sfasfsafd
It's a partly a problem of semantics, really. You can't really say it's a
fusor runs at >45K because you're not in thermodynamic eq. (and therefore,
there is no T).

Likewise a laser runs at "negative" T, but which is hotter than infinity T
(pop inversion happens at T<0). There's no contradiction because T is again
defined in eq., so we're just abusing terms.

So if we got net energy out of a fusor it would, for all practical purposes,
be "cold" fusion. In fact, it doesn't have a T at all ;)

------
gnufx
Really, this stuff had the characteristics of pathological science even if you
didn't have the perspective of actually doing nuclear physics with palladium,
and barrier penetration on other systems. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043790).
It was clearly nonsense, on which I'd have put substantial money. I'd also
have put money on the apparently superliminal neutrinos of a while back being
due to the sort of issue that was eventually found; in contrast, those
experimenters deserve credit over their handling of the result. Contrary to
the article, you really shouldn't be so open minded that your brains fall out,
as they say. Competent experimentalists doubt their own anomalous results,
just as the bug is most likely in your code, not the compiler.

------
sytelus
TLDR; In 1989 couple of scientist claimed success in cold fusion and tried
publishing paper in Nature. No one can reproduce the experiments so Nature
didn't published and authors withdrew paper anyway. In coming years, those
scientists tried suing and name calling instead of accepting that they were
wrong.

There is nothing insightful in this article apart from above tldr.

~~~
mannykannot
"We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make
controversial claims."

Once Pons and Fleischman doubled-down on their position, they became their own
worst enemies, but is seemed to me that they were initially just naive about
the reception such an announcement would get. This was not a Rossi-style scam,
or something that could have harmful consequences in the way that, for
example, anti-vaccination pseudo-science does.

------
octocode
For some reason I was expecting this to be about Adobe ColdFusion

~~~
perilunar
Adobe ColdFusion. Nothing to do with adobe, temperature, or nuclear fusion.

------
raverbashing
I think one of the main issues with the F&P experiment was that the Nobel
committee was too quick to award them the Nobel Prize

If they had waited a year or two then everything would have calmed down by
then (and no award, of course) and less hype about the experiments.

> We should not too quickly judge, and thereby alienate, scientists who make
> controversial claims. The ridicule that was sometimes directed at
> Fleischmann and Pons was bound to make them double down. When researchers
> turn out to have been mistaken, they must be allowed a way back without
> disgrace.

Great quote

~~~
simonh
I don't believe a Nobel Prize was awarded for that research, and can't find
any mention of it. Which award are you referring to?

~~~
raverbashing
I stand corrected! I think it was some kind of Mandela effect of my part

Nevertheless, the hype was very high at the time.

~~~
scottlocklin
Pons, Fleischman and their university were responsible for _creating_ a bunch
of media hype and releasing the information to the press before publishing
(Jones too). The author of the nature article kinda forgot to mention that
somehow; that should be the real lesson of this -the media sucks at reporting
anything relevant in the sciences (and everything else).

People in our physics department had tested it and dismissed the claims almost
immediately. It wasn't rocket science.

~~~
kbutler
Pons, Fleischman and the university blew it, on both the science (didn't
measure neutrons, which are the signature of fusion) and the press (pumped the
hype without the science).

Jones was much more reserved, and discussed with the press only as a result of
the media attention [https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-
PHYSI...](https://www.deseretnews.com/article/40134/FUSION---BYU-PHYSICS-
RESEARCHER-BREAKS-SILENCE-ON-A-SIMILAR-NUCLEAR-BREAKTHROUGH.html)

""" But Jones downplays any comparison to his work with such historical
breakthroughs as the invention of the light bulb or the hydrogen bomb.

"We have a lot more work ahead of us," he said. "We need to have some patience
and do the scientific groundwork before we jump to too many conclusions."

"""

