atrasicarius wrote:rJD wrote:Pyrion wrote:Why are so many people eager to make fun of those non-mainstream-scientists?
Probably something to do with the slack and dishonest (and unscientific) behaviour of Pons & Fleischmann since their announcement in 1986 that they'd "discovered" cold fusion, along with the vast amounts of money and publicity they've garnered for it, without any results whatsoever to show for all the hype and moolah.
Wiki articleLet them research, maybe something profound will be found. Maybe it's all just bogus, maybe it's not.
The research takes money - every dollar, pound and euro spent on cold fusion is money that could be spent elsewhere. It may be possible but until we have good evidence that it is, pouring money into it in the hope that it's not just a pipe dream seems a ridiculous diversion of resources.
We have good evidence that something is going on there. We arent sure if it's actually fusion at all, or if it will be possible to produce energy from it, but I'd say the very fact that there's an unexplained phenomena here warrants further investigation. We'd probably understand what's going on by now if F&P hadnt jumped the gun and announced "LOL FREE ENERGY FOR EVERYONE!" Instead, since the initial promises turned out to be bullshit, no one wants to investigate it anymore.
You're right. I remember reading some of the original papers by Pons and Fleischmann and I seem to recall that other workers at the time managed to reproduce some of the events that led to the periodic generation of excess heat. However, I don't think that anyone managed to reliably detect any neutron formation. My (completely unsubstantiated) view is that there's no nuclear reaction here - just some good old-fashioned chemistry. Forcing hydrogen (or deuterium if you electrolyse heavy water) continuously into a palladium electrode for long enough is likely to lead to formation of hydrides (or deuterides). It's possible that decomposition of these could generate the heat that was detected.