Oh dear. Somebody's still taking cold fusion seriously? Fleishman and Pons sure gave chemists a bad name for a while. I used to follow this stuff, the variations sure got baroque, but not as baroque as the theories to explain it all. And of course, Wired is the first place I'd look for serious information on the subject.
It'd be nice if it were true. But, as anyone who's done a basic P-chem lab course can tell you, getting good calorimetry numbers isn't that easy. And anyone who's looked at a list of current research topics within any decent university Chemistry dept. can tell you that calorimetry just isn't a hot topic, hasn't been for a long, long time. Modern experimental physical chemists do a lot of spectroscopy, nuclear physicists too. That's where cold fusion always fell apart, or has there been some breakthrough where something other than heat comes out? They laughed at Einstein, but they laughed at a lot of crackpots too. Actually, they didn't really laugh much at Einstein when he published his results, even when he was a patent clerk. Experimental confirmation came fast.
Cheers, Dan. |
