Jan

28

As a person who has an advanced degree in Physical Chemistry, this article about the Italian Cold Fusion saga piqued my interest. Reading the article, the papers, observing their high school attempts at being scientific, and looking at the amateurish lab equipment makes me adopt a "wait and see" attitude, the same attitude I adopted when the guys from Utah announced their debunked "Cold Fusion." I think my "wait and see attitude" will still be in effect in the next hundred millenia or so. One key caveat was when I read that Zero Hedge, Popular Science and other minor players were interested, and the AIP Journal, Journal of Applied Physics, and International Journal of Applied Physics wasn't included, and showed no interest. I like to question why do these pseudo breakthroughs always come from minor league universities and research facilities, and not from MIT, Cambridge, Harvard, Caltech, Rensselaer Polytechnic (The Toot) etc? These attempts and vast pronouncements that crop up every decade or so and defy every conceivable law of science, and frankly, they bore me. Somehow, I suspect that there are gullible investors involved who are chomping at the bit looking for free energy and untold riches. Frankly, I wish they would perfect a perpetual motion machine and do away with all this ballyhoo..

Rocky Humbert replies:

Jeff: One cannot help but smile when one notes that the research was done at the eponymous University of Baloney. (I've forwarded the paper to my brother who has a Princeton PhD in Plasma Physics (say that five times fast)– and who changed careers after both developing a stutter and concluding that we will not see commercially feasible fusion in his lifetime.)I may have already shared this seminal MIT paper– which tests the Effectiveness of Foil Hats … with surprising results. Interestingly, ZeroHedge has not mentioned the paper. See this article.

Michele Pezzutti comments: 

Jeff and Rocky: have you spent more than five minutes in doing research on comments and opinions on their work before brushing this off? Or you have just stopped looking at the words 'cold fusion', the picture or the name of the University? By the way the University of Bologna has very ancient origins, it is considered the first University of the Western world. Conventional date set by a committee of historians dated the origin of the University of Bologna in year 1088. May be it is not cold fusion but an efficient way of producing energy anyhow and deserves attention and funding. And regarding the amateurish lab equipment, many scientists started their work building their own equipments in an amateur way. Is it really true that great discoveries can be done only by huge and rich institutions or it is more the individual genius that matters? Where was Bill Gates when he created MS-DOS? At MIT with a team of 300 scientists or in a garage with a friend? 


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