{"id":3531,"date":"2009-03-24T21:47:02","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T21:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/03\/24\/cold-fusion-still-generating-h\/"},"modified":"2009-03-24T21:47:02","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T21:47:02","slug":"cold-fusion-still-generating-h","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/03\/24\/cold-fusion-still-generating-h\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold Fusion Still Generating Heat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve calls me out for not commenting<\/a> on new stories about “cold fusion”:<\/p>\n

\n

Becky and I have been having much more regular access to the internet since the power was fixed. We check e-mail just about everyday and can even skim yahoo news. Or Professor Orzel’s blog. I heard on BBC radio yesterday that there are people who have claimed to have evidence of cold fusion – which made me immediately think of a physics graduate who worked on sonoluminescence (bubble fusion) and of a talk given at Union last year about bubble fusion. Which made me immediately think of Professor Orzel and his skepticism over it all. So I checked his blog and he didn’t even comment on it. A physics blog not commenting on the “proof” of cold fusion. Ouch. What’s your problem with cold fusion? Give it a chance. BBC even talked about it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Everyone’s a freakin’ critic…<\/p>\n

Anyway, the impetus for the story that reached Steve in rural Uganda was a special session on cold fusion at the American Chemical Society meeting<\/a>. Which is also the answer to the question about why I haven’t written about it– it’s chemistry<\/em>, not physics. It’s right there in the name of the meeting.<\/p>\n

Just so you get something you wouldn’t’ve gotten from being subscribed to the right EurekAlert feed, though, I should also take this opportunity to mention a nice article on the subject<\/a> by Jon Cartwright, which goes through the relevant history and sketches out some of the recent developments that are generating buzz. It’s not entirely complete– it skips right past the whole sordid Taleyarkhan affair<\/a>— but it paints a sympathetic and reasonable portrait of the field.<\/p>\n

Personally, I remain pretty skeptical of the field, though the plastic detector thing sounds intriguing. Ultimately, though, the only thing that would be really convincing would be some version of the Built On Facts Protocol<\/a> for testing free energy devices.<\/p>\n

I’d be interested to hear from anybody who went to the ACS meeting session. Anyone? Google blog search doesn’t turn up anything from the scene, just links to the press release.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve calls me out for not commenting on new stories about “cold fusion”: Becky and I have been having much more regular access to the internet since the power was fixed. We check e-mail just about everyday and can even skim yahoo news. Or Professor Orzel’s blog. I heard on BBC radio yesterday that there… Continue reading Cold Fusion Still Generating Heat<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,33,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}