“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, I guess it’s that season again. The charlatan who claims to have invented a cold fusion d...
“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, I guess it’s that season again. The charlatan who claims to have invented a cold fusion device — the same device whose flaws were exposed here two years ago — has just held an “independent test” of his device, and there’s now a physics paper out claiming that this device works, and must be powered by some type of nuclear reaction!
Image credit: G. Levi et al.; get the whole paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.3913v2.pdf.
Well.
Look, let’s get a few things out into the open first. If there is a cold fusion device that actually works, that can harness the power of nuclear fusion to create energy, it would change the world. We would — as I’ve written recently — have a virtually limitless source of clean and cheap energy, and would not only be able to travel to Mars, but to any other world in our Solar System. We could even, literally, reach for the stars!
Image credit: OeWF (Katja Zanella-Kux), via http://www.wired.co.uk/.
But it’s not enough to just simply think about how wonderful it would be if it were true, especially because whether cold fusion can even physically happen in our Universe is currently an open scientific question. (The evidence so far says no, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible in principle!)
What we must do, when confronted with a claim that’s this extraordinary — that we have a device, at low-temperature, with neutral atoms, fusing atomic nuclei — is demand evidence that shows this is really true, and that we aren’t falling victim to some elaborate ruse.
Image credit: John Cooke, of “Piltdown Man”, one of history’s most elaborate scientific hoaxes.
What we need, if we want to take this claim seriously, is solid, incontrovertible evidence that what’s being claimed is what’s actually happening. Because one of the most important responsibilities that science has to society is to protect it from frauds, hucksters, shysters and con artists who would defraud you out of your money, time, and trust with their cheap trickery and chicanery.
Image credit: Rossi, Kullander, Essen and the e-Cat, retrieved from energydigital.com.
I’m taking it for granted that the vast majority of you don’t have the required expertise to tell whether this is legitimate, or whether this is an example of someone trying to swindle you (and all of us) into investing in something that’s meritless. But a lot of normally smart people are getting very excited about this, including:
Sebastian Anthony over at ExtremeTech,
Francie Diep over at Popular Science,
Mark Gibbs over at Forbes, and shockingly,
Tommaso Dorigo of Quantum Diaries.
So we’ve got to ask, is this test the real deal, or is it nothing more than crackpottery, as Lubos Motl says?
Image credit: from the Nov. 12, 2012 testing of the E-Cat, via G. Levi et al.
Let’s answer the following question: What would it take to convince a reasonable observer that you’ve got a controlled nuclear reaction going on here?
There are a few ways we could do it:
Allow a thorough examination of the reactants before the reaction takes place, and another of the products after the reaction, and show that nuclear transmutation has in fact taken place.
Start the device operating by whatever means you want, then disconnect all external power to it, and allow it to run, outputting energy for a sufficiently long time in a self-sustaining mode, until it’s put out a sufficient amount of energy to rule out any conventional (i.e., chemical) energy sources.
Place a gamma-ray detector around the device. Given the lack of shielding and the energies involved in nuclear reactions, gamma-rays should be copious and easy to detect.
Accurately monitor the power drawn from all sources to the device at all time
