rhinoceros
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Re: Cold Fusion research revived(?)
« on: 2004-04-23 08:43:23 » |
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The following article appeared today in the MIT Technology Review. It is about the revival of research on Cold Fusion, a "holy grail" of physics which was supposed to provide us with unlimited cheap energy, solving all energy related problems at the household or personal level.
Is Cold Fusion Heating Up?
By Jeff Hecht
April 23, 2004
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/print_version/wo_hecht042304.asp
Though their work is dismissed by most physicists, a determined cadre of scientists is still chasing after what could be an energy jackpot—and their experiments are producing heat and nuclear byproducts that can't be otherwise explained.
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[rhinoceros]
I crossposted the full article along with this introduction of mine in the "Science and Technology" section of the BBS for archival purposes.
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=30198
I remember that 15 years ago (1989) Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two electrochemists from the University of Utah, announced that they had done cold fusion with minimal equipment in the chemistry laboratory. They made the announcement in a press conference, skipping the scientific community and peer review (probably to make sure that their own names and not someone else's would go in history books). They did make the headlines for a few weeks, while the scientific community was holding their breaths in curiosity and disbelief. But when the two scientists failed to reproduced their results they were automatically painted as con-men and the concept of Cold Fusion became a joke.
Now, it seems that research on Cold Fusion has been going on in the last 15 years and some results have been reported.
I wonder what the effects of cold fusion would be if it ever became reality. Besides the major economic/social upheaval, abundance of energy would allow us a deeper insight into human nature: People of good will tend to think that abundance of resources will relieve social tensions and everyone will be better off. A cynic might argue that people routinely pile up more that they need and that what matters to them is not satisfying their material needs but getting the advantage over other people by using their control of resouces. An argument can be made that this attitude has been hardwired into humans by evolution. A counter-argument can be made that this is only a result of the social circumstances and that rational reasoning can change it if the needs become less pressing.
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