Weird ideas never die, they just go underground, and return with new names. “Cold Fusion” is now “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions,” and was the subject of a day-long symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It’s not clear how much credence to give this. It can’t be entirely kookery, because this was a press release issued by the ACS, and national societies tend not to be completely wacky. Then again, though, I look at things like this:
The original cold fusion experiment in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons was dismissed by some scientists as ‘bad’ science due to alleged errors in calorimetric systems, or heat measurement, that could have misled the scientists into thinking that the excess heat produced was nuclear in origin. Using more precise calorimetric techniques, a new study by Fleischmann and colleague Melvin Miles reports evidence that the excess heat generated is nuclear and not the result of calorimetric errors. “Our work shows that cold fusion effects are real, but we cannot assess if this excess heat can become useful. Much more research work is needed to answer such questions,” says co-author Miles, a chemist at the University of LaVerne in Calif.
And, well… Continued re-analysis of dubious old experiments to make them look better always makes me a little twitchy.
Anyway, the press release kind of leaped out at me from EurekAlert. Blogdom surely contains at least one person who is at the ACS meeting, so maybe a report of what went on will turn up.