I think it's already been fairly well understood by a subset of physicists that F&P probably had demonstrated a legitimate, previously unexplained phenomenon and that the primary mistake was in overinterpreting the results and allowing the U's PR department run too far with it.
What I find interesting is that when confronted with that idea, many physcists just get stuck at the original claims and don't understand that there is likely a novel phenomenon of some sort, deserving of study.
I was struck by the viciousness of attacks against Fleischmann and Pons in the months after their cold fusion announcement. A few physicists even went out of their way to call them frauds and charlatans -- it wasn't enough to say that Fleischmann and Pons were mistaken.
As if two quiet, humble, respected PhD's in electrochemistry were crackpots orchestrating some kind of scam. I feel sorry for the decades of shaming they had to endure (Fleischmann died 4 years ago; Pons is still alive).
The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum. When some of the results were turning out to be negative, it seemed that almost no physicist was willing to say, hey wait a minute, it's not cold fusion but maybe there's a new interesting unknown phenomenon there.
I was a grad student at a different U at the time, nearing my Ph.D. in non-fusion-related, but surface, physics.
The issue at the time was that they released their results to the press before their results were vetted. They became instantaneous celebrities, and it wasn't clear that it was against their will.
They were very coy about the setup (patent issues? I'm not sure); there was no theoretical model that fit it; and quickly nuclear physicists were pointing out that with the kind of reaction they were talking about they would have been fried by the (radiation) by-products.
The field was very excited (See: "fifth force" for another tale of excitement in my grad-school days). After all, any time there is a result without even a model from which an explanation can possibly derive you are looking at a bunch of new ideas. This means people get to be imaginative, there's sure to be lot's of funding for it, etc. Great times ahead!
Others tried to replicate the results, but since the full experimental setup wasn't being revealed they had to guess. Their attempts at replication failed. This was not the way physics research was conducted, and people started getting pissed off. It was time for more details and proof that they actually got the results they claimed.
With that proof not forthcoming (some started claiming they had built a fuel cell rather than a fusion reactor) they faced a lot of criticism for their PR processes and closed-mouth policy. The damage to their reputation was irreparable.
To my knowledge nobody has yet been able to reproduce the original claims, but I haven't followed in a while.
It has multiple times. But if you really spend time looking into this it gets very interesting. It seems like the Pd Fleischmann & Pons used was no ordinary one.It came from a recycling process and had nano structural properties.
Most likely it was not even very pure but contained certain impurities that made tho whole process that effective. See the publications of Navy Research in the last months.
BTW: There are unified models that explain LENR very well, it just does and will never work under the current accepted paradigm - I personally give shit about paradigms, I use falsification and solomonoff induction only :)
To respectfully offer a different point of view, I have never found an internet forum that requires the veracity of claims be held to that level of scrutiny.
In fact, I've been downvoted and ridiculed for things like requesting a source be given, or quoting a mainstream textbook (which disagreed with a user.
HN is better than most imho, but most internet forums seem to be characterized by groupthink rather than vehement adherence to an ability to verify the truth of what one is claiming. I'd rather be in the company of the latter, even if they do ridicule you if your claims are not verifiable.
I can think of one such forum, which deals with issues around audio and compression. From observing that I'd suggest it's very hard to maintain both friendliness and an adherence to the scientific method, simply because there is an endless number of people who have no understanding of or respect for what you're trying to do.
They'll interpret friendly corrections as rudeness, and won't actually stop making wild unsubstantiated claims until you escalate to genuine abrupt rudeness and/or banning.
Also, they'd probably be accused of "groupthink" for trying to maintain that objectivity by those who disagree with the conclusions. Humans are hard to deal with.
No, that's only true when claiming something that is not compatible with the currently prevailing social/political narrative. If you're backing up the current narrative you're free to spew falsehoods. If you're studying something nobody else cares about then it's probably wise to at least try and stick to the facts.
I would call it the "ad hominem filter". It's a heuristic to more effectively divide one's attention. Sadly, most people's ad hominem filters are configured incorrectly and produce far too many false positives.
I believe it is a case of: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", although it certainly appears that some went too far with too little evidence in their criticism of the the original idea.
It was an extraordinary claim in terms of practical importance but it should only be scientifically extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. We take particles at normal temperatures, accelerate them in EM fields, and fuse them all the time.
What has this to do with persecution? If you read the article, there's nothing there. Some did believe his ideas, many did not, and he was not granted the job he wanted at a prestigious hospital (instead, they offered him a similar position but with somewhat less perks) and that's it.
Well, it might hasn't burned people, but a lot of harm has been done in its name that's nearly as bad.
From lobotomy, which was a common practice back in the day, to electroshock therapy to unconventional people (not legitimately crazy, just anybody as long as their parents/guardians convinced there was "something wrong with them" e.g. from gay to wanting to live a bohemian life and having a conservative family).
And of course modern science happily collaborated with all kinds of power to give us the atomic bomb, biological weapons, and other atrocities.
Convinced, as a scientific establishment, that your theories/dogmas about being straight/gay are correct, and subjecting the "sick" into electroshock and other therapy is not persecution?
What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?
And things such as lobotomy/heavy drugs/etc which were applied to all kind of strays/dissidents from mainstream values/conventions (and not just legitimately crazy people) is also classic persecution. And it didn't just happen behind the "Iron Curtain".
>Convinced, as a scientific establishment, that your theories/dogmas about being straight/gay are correct, and subjecting the "sick" into electroshocks is not persecution?
That's exactly right!
The intent behind the medical practices you list is not to oppress, but to cure. It's misguided, horrific, tragic, etc., but persecution it is not.
>What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?
The usual one. Citing Merriam-Webster:
1. to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict; specifically : to cause to suffer because of belief
2. to annoy with persistent or urgent approaches (as attacks, pleas, or importunities)
The key point is that persecution is generally understood to require some sort of punitive or retaliatory intent, which is not at all the case of the practices you mention.
Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution. N.B.: none of this was done in the name of science. To say that science has persecuted mankind to the extent that religion has is patently absurd.
In fact, and with my sincerest respect (really!), much of your above posts are absurd, conflating political/ideological persecution with varying forms of misguided medicine, recklessness, short-sightedness, etc. To be sure, these are all Bad Things, but persecution is a rather narrowly-defined concept, especially in colloquial use.
>The intent behind the medical practices you list is not to oppress, but to cure. It's misguided, horrific, tragic, etc., but persecution it is not.
That's wrong.
For one, the church also did legitimately believe that they were curing (saving the soul, etc) of those they persecuted. So the "good intentions" of those doing such acts is not the defining criterion.
Second, such science was used to promote political and moral agendas (there was nothing to cure in a homosexual, and even less in more blatant cases, e.g. putting people in favor of black civil rights or women's rights/suffrage in psychiatric asylums or shock treatment).
There are of course other places that used similar techniques (from USSR and Nazi Germany to Britain, nordic countries and beyond).
>Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution.
The scientific community was (and still is in various cases) complicit in adopting the political ideas (or promoting them in the first place), assisting those in power with scientific (or "scientific") theories and diagnoses, and enforcing them in practice. It was actual doctors, with degrees et al, that did those things, not politicians...
Also, if we widen the scope from persecution, then basically all organized religions have a whole litany of sins to answer for in other areas, lets go with high body-count wars for starters.
Well, all, or almost all "religious wars" have historically been cover-ups for expansion of territory, power plays between populations, and money grabbing. So religion was just a pretext there.
Weirdly, I have always believed this to be the case, but just yesterday I considered that it was possible I was wrong.
I can't now remember exactly what news story I read, but basically it made no sense at all, unless true religious belief was the motivation, rather than selfish greed.
> I was struck by the viciousness of attacks against Fleischmann and Pons in the months after their cold fusion announcement. A few physicists even went out of their way to call them frauds and charlatans -- it wasn't enough to say that Fleischmann and Pons were mistaken.
Perhaps it had a lot with the fact that they never allowed to perform independent measures and they never allowed to really perform the experiment in a controlled way.
I am curious - do you have a citation for that? AFAIR they published their results. That leaves reproduction of the experiments open to everyone with a laboratory capable of doing so.
In 1993, physicist David Goodstein of Caltech wrote a look back at the whole cold fusion thing, and how it had become socially/politically unacceptable to do work in that area, right when some well respected experimenters were finally starting to get some serious signs that something interesting and new was going.
Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:
> Recently, I told this story in a Philosophy course we teach at Caltech called "Ethics of Research." The first question, when I finished my tale, was, do I believe in Cold Fusion? The answer is, no. Certainly, I believe quite firmly the theoretical arguments that say Cold Fusion is impossible. On the other hand, however, I believe equally firmly in the integrity and competence of Franco Scaramuzzi and his group of co-workers at Frascati. I was disturbed when I saw that Franco had gotten caught in the web of science-by-news conference in April 1989 (although I was truly pleased that he finally got the long overdue recognition his agency ENEA owed him), and I was even more distressed when I learned that Franco and his group had observed excess heat (the "bad kind" of Cold Fusion). However, I have looked at their cells, and looked at their data, and it's all pretty impressive. The Japanese experiment showing that heat nearly always results when x is greater than 0.85 looks even more impressive on paper. It seems a particularly elegant, well designed experiment, at least to the untutored eye of a physicist (what do I know about electrochemistry?) What all these experiments really need is critical examination by accomplished rivals intent on proving them wrong. That is part of the normal functioning of science. Unfortunately, in this area, science is not functioning normally. There is nobody out there listening.
> I suppose that, if nuclear fusion really does take place whenever x is greater than 0.85 in palladium, the world of conventional science will eventually be forced to take notice. If not, then the whole story I have told you is nothing but a curious footnote to a bizarre and ugly episode in the history of science. Either way, I think the story illuminates the inner dynamics of the scientific enterprise in a way that few other stories have done. For that reason alone, it may be worth telling.
Thanks for that - great contribution to this discussion, and an independently worthy idea to share.
Can you (or anyone) describe in layman's terms the significance of 'is x > 0.85?' Looking back to 1993 from today, did the 'critical examination' the author said should happen, ever happen?
"The issue is how much deuterium gets into the metal. The ratio of the number of atoms of deuterium in the metal to the number of atoms of palladium is called x. It turns out, by means of electrolysis, or by putting the metal in deuterium gas, that it is rather easy to get x up to the range of about 0.6 or 0.7. That is already a startlingly high figure. If there are almost as many deuterium atoms as palladium atoms in the material, the density of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) is essentially equal to that of liquid hydrogen rocket fuel, which can ordinarily exist only at extreme low temperatures. In other words, palladium (and certain other metals including titanium) soak up almost unbelievable amounts of hydrogen or deuterium if given the chance."
Something might be happening around that concentration. Or maybe it’s just experimental error (again). But it is interesting that you can cram so much Hydrogen (or Deuterium) into close proximity by absorbing it into a metal & that fact means that these ideas aren’t completely crackpot.
Yes, it's not there yet, but approaches based on metal hydrides are one of the leading contenders for storing hydrogen for electric vehicles powered by fuel cells. Generally, the energy density is better than a battery, but much worse than a hydrocarbon fuel. Here's an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...
At an x of .85 you still have (.15 * 106) / (.15 * 106 + .85) = 95% of the weight in the storage system rather than the hydrogen itself which rules this out for most applications. Even with an x of .99 it's 50/50 when a conventional pressure vessel can get the weight easily below 20%.
Since the article was written, the author wrote that this was an area for further investigation but no one was doing it because of the politics at the time. Since then, did anyone ever investigate this further?
Thanks for linking the article, and in particular for quoting the relevant paragraph. Taking that step back and giving people the the benefit of the doubt that they're working in good faith while at the same time recognizing the proper functioning of science is so important.
Well said. As far as I could see the whole thing was a huge scandal and black eye on the scientific community. The way Robert Park of the American Physical Society acted was particularly bad (he outright accused scientists of fraud without any evidence to back it up). Much of it probably came from competition for funding, as quite a few people got their feathers ruffled once the Dept. of Energy announced it would put funding into Cold Fusion research, thus diverting it from their own projects. Without absolving them of any responsibility for overstating their claims (which they absolutely should shoulder), it is truly a shame Pons & Fleischmann's findings could not be processed more rationally than they were at the time.
>> What I find interesting is that when confronted with that idea, many physcists just get stuck at the original claims and don't understand that there is likely a novel phenomenon of some sort, deserving of study.
I found the physicist reaction "it can't be nuclear, it has to be chemistry" a bit disturbing. The cell was said to contain all of 4 elements, and none of the physicists were offering an explanation for what chemical reaction the two chemists were missing.
It is a grave problem in science that humans generally insist on putting ideas in to one of two buckets. Those buckets being the almost-certainly-true and almost-certainly-false. We need to be comfortable with allowing some, if not most, ideas to remain in the we-dont-really-know bucket for extended periods of time. Only then can we reason effectively.
Ideas don't need buckets, they need degrees of confidence - which are a tool that research uses internally, but which have never percolated outside of science to the general public.
When crazies tell you that evolution or climate change are "Just a theory" science should be able to point to a confidence estimate and say "But we're really sure about the evidence for them."
With something like CF, it would have been completely appropriate to assign a low confidence to the possibility of sustainable fusion while assigning a higher confidence to the presence of unexplained results that needed further research.
Something similar could apply to a lot of fringe phenomena. "That's odd" gets a lot more traction when you can dissociate it from "That's theoretically impossible so let's pretend it's not happening."
Huh, the scientists that I know and studied with don't generally insist on putting ideas into one of two buckets. There are a bunch of buckets. Go ask an astronomer what a "two tooth fairy" theory is: a one tooth fairy theory is almost certainly false, but a two tooth fairy theory is that squared. And yes, this is how people theorize about what cold dark matter is.
The buckets are labeled "one tooth fairy" and "two tooth fairies". Two tooth fairies are much less likely than one.
The way this works is that you've got some experimental result which appears to violate the laws of physics. After working hard to make sure that it's not experimental error and the measurement means what you think it means, then you consider a change in the laws of physics. This is a tooth fairy. Is your proposed change ruled out by other experiments? Is there a new experiment you can do which will have an unusual result thanks to the tooth fairy? And so on.
If, during this process, you find yourself needing a SECOND change in the laws of physics in order to explain something, then that's a second tooth fairy. You don't want that, because that's even less likely to be real then the first one.
I think he just wants to say that people still see the difference between a one-tooth-fairy and a two-tooth-fairy where the latter lies closer to false on the spectrum of "falsity"
So, yes both fairies still fit in the bucket but now it's you who put them there and not them :P
I think the problem here is more nuanced. The first, cold fusion claim that they made belongs in the almost-certainly-false bucket; the many critiques of the work were decisive and clear. I'm not qualified to assess the merits of this new claim, but putting it in the we-dont-really-know bucket seems appropriate. The issue wasn't a rush to bucket, but not realizing that there was a second claim that needed bucketing.
If find the discussions around this area interesting. In many ways this is exactly how science operates, people come up with new things, either through observation or theory, they think about them and write about them and everyone else gets to decide if they are right or wrong. And there is never all right, or all wrong, but really just more questions. So if A is true does that mean B is true? Can we test to see if B is true? How about C, D, or E? All lead to investigation which leads to experiments which leads to discussion and arguments and finally to something useful.
Pons and Fleischman got a raw deal, it was perfectly reasonable for people to say "I don't believe you did your experiments correctly" or "I don't agree with the interpretation of the data you received." But it was wrong to call them fraudsters. It was also wrong to attach a stigma to people who were investigating things that were not supposed to be possible as cranks or gullible.
And yet a number of scientists of various levels of skill have continued and very slowly over time there have been experiments that could be repeated that exhibited behaviors that are not easily explained by the existing rules (which mostly are "no nuclear events at these temperatures and pressures.") As the article points out the micrographs of the metal surfaces are of particular interest because even if you don't believe in these events being nuclear, it is equally challenging to come up with a chemical explanation for the features found on the electrodes. Physical scarring that does not look like either plating or erosion, and chemical constituents which are not known to have any sort of exothermic reactivity.
So there is something there, not sure what it is and current theories don't explain it well or at all. That should be a source of excitement for scientists right? Doesn't seem so, instead you attacks on the people just trying to run the experiments!
When I see people unable to embrace a result for what seems like it would put them in the position of having been wrong earlier, I wonder "What drew this person into science in the first place?"
Maybe in the end, but they kind of brought it on themselves. They were excoriated for going to the press before peer review. That's something that you just didn't do. Then when nobody else could get their results they were in a bad place.
Thanks for pointing that out! The last two times I dug into it, I wasted two weeks just to find that their 'phenomenon/discovery' was near the limits of measurement error (or even below). Did anything change since then?
UPDATE: One of the authors is a self-proclaimed expert in cold fusion and the other one is a lawyer. I wonder why there were no physicists among the authors.
They didn't have any experiment description in the article?
All the reports of the Em Drive are not conclusive. The force that they are measuring is very small and very close to the experimental error. It looks more like involuntary p hacking that a good incontrovertible experiment.
I was not following the resents advances of the LENR. IIRC they heat a device with an electric current and they estimate how much heat it release. Measuring heat is a very difficult task, so the measurements are problematic. The additional heat is not too much. They don't have a device that can autosubstain the reaction, and that can silence all the critics.
If you want an to see how the physic community reacts to an anomaly, consider the high temperature superconductors. They are clearly impossible, well at least unbelievable, and the old theory forbid them. But 20 years ago they gave a foolproof method to build a high temperature superconductors in a good lab. The experiments were conclusive. You can even tweak the recipe and get a better superconductor. You can put them under high pressure and get more temperature. You can make many experiments with them. But still there is no good theory to explain how they work. Someone told me that the explanation was flux pinning, but apparently it still disputed and perhaps that explanation is wrong. But anyway, in spite there is no good theoretical explanation, you can make conclusive experiments with an relatively easy to build superconductor and some liquid nitrogen.
Mainstream physics love anomalies. You can get a Nobel price for confirming or explaining it. You can enclose a few graduate students to study it. You can get money from grants. But you must have to ensure a minimal probability that the anomaly is real, because you must release the graduate students someday ...
> Is that an anomaly or just an experimental error?
In my opinion any empirical data that has no currently obvious explanation should be called an "anomaly" until one is found. It doesn't matter how unlikely the Em Drive interacting with some ether or how low the thrust might be, the observed thrust is still an anomaly until you can find and confirm the actual cause. In the case of cold fusion, it was a mistake to (impolitely!) dismiss that anomaly without any obvious proof of the real cause. I have no idea about the current state of this research or whether it will ever pan out, but I am confident in saying that much.
And yes, this means we all need to have a much healthier, more skeptical, and less emotional response to reports of "anomalies" in the news.
If you work in experimental physics, you learn that "anomalies" are very common.
There's something in the data that you don't understand, and you don't know where it comes from. Sometimes you find it's a bug in the setup, and other times you realize it's already known physics. Part of the time you just don't pursue it further, because there's no time and money to do this for everything. Especially, if it's a small signal down at the noise floor and you are not in full control of the measurement so that it's likely to be a bug in any case, there's no point to pursue it further.
There's nothing to get excited about in emdrive. There's no theoretical reason to expect the device does anything. The experimental data is likely to be just systematic error. Other groups that published results (TU Dresden, NWPU) in the end failed to reproduce the effect, and concluded they found zero result within the bounds of measurement error. It is very plausible this is the case also for the eagleworks measurement, so saying there is "observed thrust" is likely scientifically misleading.
OK, thanks for the info. I was going off the "almost at the limit of experimental error" phrasing, and assuming that meant a small but reproducible effect.
And MIT wants to use it to make a fusion reactor with the same power output as ITER, but ten times smaller. Similar-size reactors have been built in four years.
They've also tested joining segments of tape together in joints, and found it doesn't add enough resistance to matter. So their design is modular and can easily be taken apart every year to replace the core, which basically solves the problem of damage from neutron radiation.
Whoa, that's very cool. Achieves superconductivity above liquid nitrogen temps. You wouldn't happen to know what the cooling setup looks like for REBCO superconductors? I wonder if you could use some kind of clever magnetic refrigeration setup to create 'electrically activated' superconductors? (i.e. use electricity to run a conventional motor in a rotary mag fridge setup discussed here: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1063/1.4880818)
There have been some reports of 4He and some high energy particle emissions, consistent with D + D → 4He + 23.8 MeV (heat) [1]. So yes, I would say there have been enough experiments done to call it an anomaly.
I believe what makes it so hard to tell is the labelling of any cold fusion researcher as a crackpot, which seems to have forced it 'underground'. Certainly a valid social experiment in physics if nothing else!
My understanding is that, while cold fusion might require some previously unknown interaction, Em Drive's issues are a bit more fundamental.
If the Em Drive works, it invalidates a lot of mathmatical equalities that are derived from the fact that electro-magnetism works through fields. So you're basically invalidating the fundamental nature of electro-magnetism, not "just" conservation of energy
Yes, and the theories which seem to be nonsense according to most physicists I've read.
If you stick to the pure experimental aspects of "we put a microwave in a can and obtained these anomalous results" and ignore everything else, there's something interesting there that bears investigation.
The big problem with all of the positive results from the EMDrive experiments is that -- without a single exception AFAIK -- the observed thrust doesn't stop immediately when they kill the power. It decays exactly as you'd expect if you were watching something cool off. Obviously that's a very strong and obvious indication of experimental error.
I did some back of the envelope calculations of the latest experiment that seems to imply that most of the 'tapering off' could simply be inertia since the direct neasurement was deflection distance, and the apparatus is very heavy compared to the force measured. A part of it definitely looks like a heating related effect because of the nonlinearity, but at the same time the implied cooling rate seems to fast for moderately hot equipment in a vacuum.
At this stage I don't think you can claim the measurements are obviously wrong without actually calculating heat loss rates and how heat expansion would affect measurement with the given equipment asymmetries.
The radiation would die away pretty quickly. It would be determined by the cavity Q, basically. Think about a bell that takes a long time to fall silent after it's rung. With radio waves near c instead of physical acoustic vibrations, you'd need an insanely high cavity Q, well into the millions, to keep the energy from dying out in milliseconds. But cavities used in this type of experiment probably don't exceed Q=1000.
This kind of "ringdown" effect can be observed at human-compatible timescales at low HF frequencies in crystal resonators. But only a fast oscilloscope will let you observe it in a cavity.
You'd expect the signal to dissipate even more quickly in a case like that, where it's being made to do work by pushing against an ether or otherwise interacting with something besides the cavity itself.
But it's premature to speculate on what might be happening at that level of detail.
I may be thinking about this wrong, but think of a boat being propelled by a motor. When you turn off the motor the boat doesn't just stop. Inertia continues carrying it forward as the friction of water absorbs its momentum until it comes to a rest.
You could get similar charts between the EM drive cooling off as a boat slows down.
I agree that it's vanishingly unlikely that the EMDrive is doing anything but wasting electricity. But it's more productive to call attention to specific problems with the published research, rather than to wave your hands and issue a generalized bullshit call.
Well, reaction-less drives and free energy are roughly equally likely, and both are less likely than flying cars, so those claims haven't really changed my opinion too much on the subject.
If any potential really cool applications take too long to evolve, it'll be too late to make money off the patent, so the time for investment is now :P
We already know for a fact that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory. It fails to accurately describe gravity. A fundamental force of nature. Therefore we should expect that it fails to explain other phenomena as well.
General relativity would also be incomplete in this sense. It fails to describe quantum phenomena.
A better approach is to say that, to describe fundamental things in nature, what we have now is a patchwork of independent theories that are not quite meshing with each other.
I'm singling out QM only because that was what the poster above mentioned. I completely agree that all of our theories are equally flawed. Our patchwork of theories has holes in it so we cannot immediately discount ideas just because they don't fit with any of our existing theories.
In fact, we have two fundamental bad/wrong assumptions in both theories and that's why they can never be united without going into mathematical/physical mumbojumbo like strings theory.
In fact, humans build unified models that are not abstract and seem to work wherever you look - they are just not discussed...
See http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426.abstract for the phenomena.
Perturbatively quantized gravity exists and completely reproduces General Relativity as a quantum phenomenon.
Study of perturbatively quantized gravity is precisely why we know that General Relativity is not renormalizable by power-set counting in strong gravity, and precisely why we have a good definition for strong gravity (more than one loop of gravitons in a Feynman diagram) and also why we have a good idea about where to expect strong gravity (very close to the centre of mass-momentum of a black hole, and very close to the big bang).
Although the behaviour of arbitrarily high energy and high density matter may be found in a very different theory from General Relativity, there is no presently known reason why approaches involving renormalization group flow (e.g. asymptotically safe gravity) cannot "save" perturbatively quantized gravity by providing a renormalization scheme that works into the UV limit. One could likewise point to GUT programmes and say that at those energy scales a theory very different from the Standard Model will be more useful.
In the meanwhile, perturbatively quantized gravity is a perfectly good effective field theory, in the sense of the work by Kenneth G Wilson.
The point you're replying to is better addressed this way: the Standard Model doesn't even properly consider gravity, and it simply does not need to if in the UV completion of General Relativity you can recover the Minkowski metric in sufficiently tiny regions of spacetime. That's because the Poincaré group, the symmetry group of region of spacetime with the Minkowski metric induced on it, is baked right into the group theory of the Standard Model, and into General Relativity. One can read this as the Standard Model subsuming Einsteinean gravitation into it at that level, and thanks to perturbatively quantized gravity one could equally pencil in a gluon on the particle zoo tables and do gauge theory on that, and expect consistent results outside strong gravity as described above.
Finally, even if other symmetries are added (or the three matter ones are unified) in a Beyond the Standard Model Yang-Mills group theory, the couplings with the graviton outside strong gravity will be straightforward.
So, I don't agree that the fundamental theories of gravity and matter are a patchwork, nor that they mesh poorly, even though we do not have a meshing that works to arbitrarily high energy levels. But crucially, those arbitrarily high energy levels might not even be physically observable; we aren't certain about that yet.
Finally, whatever dark energy and dark matter are, how they generate the metric and how they interact with the rest of the Standard Model are subjects of various research programmes competing with radically different ideas for a theory of quantum gravity.
Yes, and it doesn't appear that any of the weird things under discussion in this case have anything to do with a GUT or TOE. The important thing to remember is that theories like Newton's Law do a great job in a large number of regimes -- you have to look at things like the precession of Mercury or an atomic clock in orbit to see why Einstein is needed.
I believe, if we take in account wave-particle duality, then we will be able to explain large parts of General Relativity using Newtonian physics, because waves are propagating, so second postulate is obvious, for example.
Intuition at GR-scale problems. Why I need to believe in Einstein postulates if I can just look at walking droplet 2D model of QM and see that these postulates are obvious?
Why do you need to consider Einstein's postulates if you can just look at a ball traversing a rubber sheet with a depression in it, for that matter? Same answer: because these rough analogues are not background-independent -- you would see a very different picture in each case if you moved the walking droplet or rubber sheet setups to the moon or to the ISS.
Einstein GR postulate number one: microscopic physics is background-independent.
These experiments' microscopic details behave the same on Earth, on the moon, and in the ISS, but their macroscopic behaviours sure don't. You have to input details of the local structure of spacetime into each of them if you want to predict their results (e.g., what trajectory the walk takes, or how long it takes for a ball to reach the bottom of a depression in the rubber sheet) successfully.
Also, we know that QM (as it stands) doesn't have a good way to deal with topological effects and their (low-energy) contributions to various things. TQFTs in 3+1D are an active area of research.
Heck, TQFTs in 2+1D are still under active research (and are behind Microsoft's quantum computer efforts).
isn't that what the Lipinski brothers suggest they have figured out (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008AcPPB..39.2823L) that was mentioned here just recently on HN (unifiedgravity.com)? - would be interesting to hear from someone with physics background to comment on this one
Indeed, if you look at the history of science, even modern examples such as the discovery of H. Pylori, it's a messy process. However, don't be confused by survivor bias: almost all extraordinary results turn out to be experimental error.
But you should not be trying to prove it works. You should be trying to disprove it, until no other reasonable explanation is left. The most obvious example is to use normal water instead of heavy water and see if you get similar results.
Well, if it's experimental error, then we learn a bit more about how to properly and carefully conduct experiments. If it's not experimental error, though...
Unfortunately, you have to look into it carefully to find out whether it's experimental error or something more interesting.
And, to return to Everhusk's first post: Experimental error can result in an "anomaly". The experiment is not returning the results we expect. That's an anomaly. An anomaly doesn't have to be new physics.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof to take them as truth. Less extraordinary proof can still let them be a "may be". That's all they're trying to be for now.
It not good science to reject a hypothesis or anomalous result before the data makes clear what is going on. Imagine if the guys at Bell Labs had just said "eh, who knows, nevermind" when they couldn't figure out the hiss in the horn antenna.
There was no theory saying that the horn antenna should have no hiss. It was a classic example of being the first measurement of a thing. It happens all the time in astronomy. Since this measurement people have been much more open to whatever the data says when they observe in a new frequency band. If anything, the surprise in this particular case was mainly because the people doing the experiment weren't astronomers, and had never considered what they might see if they looked up. Excellent discovery, and easy and inexpensive to replicate.
> There was no theory saying that the horn antenna should have no hiss.
Then why did they go to such extraordinary lengths to find the source of it? Why didn't they just shrug and work around it?
Keep in mind they initially had no knowledge of the theoretical prediction of CMB, which was fairly recent and controversial. They just had a weird observation and busted their butts trying to figure out what it was.
> It was a classic example of being the first measurement of a thing.
Yes, now we know that. At the time it was not clear that it was a phenomenon worth measuring at all. I mean, they thought it was pigeons. It looked like a dumb error at first.
> Excellent discovery, and easy and inexpensive to replicate.
The "emdrive" is also easy and cheap to replicate.
I'm not saying that the emdrive works, I'm saying that experimental results matter. They should not be dismissed just becaus me they seem to violate theory. Violating theory is why people experiment in the first place.
Well, they were mostly weirded out that it was the same hiss no matter where in the sky they pointed the horn, and indeed, that's pretty weird. It was non-obvious, and now we know why.
For the emdrive, the effect is so small that it's suggested that the next step is to launch a powerful satellite costing $100mm or more. Uh, really?
From your comment, you seem to be tangled up in results being "dismissed". That's not what's going on, when people make comments about extraordinary claims and extraordinary results. A tiny, hard to measure result is not an OH MY GOD THE THEORY IS WRONG result. It is likely an experimental error.
Its ironic that skeptics of the EM drive not only refuse to consider the actual, empirical evidence, but also oppose testing it in the only way that is beyond dispute.
A tiny satellite in low earth orbit is a stunt, not a platform for high precision physics measurements.
For the satellite, there is atmosphere drag, magnetic fields, outgassing, etc, all probably bigger effects than the claimed drive effect!
Earth bound labs have much greater control of variables, reproducability, possibility to measure related quantities, possibility to run variations on experiments.
The reasons to do the satellite are (1) PR (2) wanting to NOT disprove the effect.
"May be" covers everything from "unlikely, but not quite impossible" to "almost but not quite certainly true".
A couple of times in this discussion, you've argued about the definitions of words, and your definitions have been... at least different from the way the words are normally used. It's kind of distracting from the actual discussion, without adding much.
Science writing, especially the hard core sciences, has a collection of terms that are used among practitioners and have very specific meanings that are well-understood.
These usages convey fairly subtles signals about one's understanding of, and confidence in, a physical phenomenon.
This is typically only learned by people who write papers and have advisors who can guide them.
A really nice example of this which is also immediately readable is Watson and Crick's 1953 DNA structure paper.
It's a classic understated style, with a small amount of boastful brilliance. The passive tone is a bit dated, but you can clearly see little was known about how DNA worked, and they were very careful not to make any strong claims without qualifiers.
Also worth noting: they were entirely wrong about the suggested replication mechanism of DNA (it doesn't work like that in nature at all). But hence the words they couch that statement in.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Their suggested replication mechanism was precisely correct. Please explain what you mean (btw I have a PhD in Biophysics, and my thesis was on the structure of DNA and RNA, you are free to use scientific language).
The actual proposal they had for replication was that the helix can obviously self-replicate from single stranded by just having new nucleotides come in.
The actual mechanism as you'd know bears barely a passing resemblance to that, since you've got the whole DNA replication complex assembly orchestrating it. So yes "suggests a replication mechanism" - but it doesn't remotely work as the suggestion would imply.
I think you're confused. Their description was precisely correct within the limitation of knowledge at the time. They certainly didn't imply that the mechanism was autonomously self-replicating (even though, thermodynamically speaking, that is correct).
The replication complex is just an enzyme, it only speeds up things that are thermodynamically favored (replication can occur spontanteously because the dsDNA is lower energy, but it's rare because forming the phosphodiester bond requires a high activation barrier).
I think for some reason you are expecting them to pull the full replication complex mechanism out of their hat in the '53 paper but none of that is really necessary. What they described is precisely the mechanism; the proteins are just decoration to make the process faster and more reliable.
"may be" doesn't give you an idea if it's 50% or 1% or 0.0001% likely. "Unlikely" does give you an idea: the probability is small.
When you're talking about an extraordinary claim, it's a good idea to use "unlikely" and not "may be". The moon "may be" has deposits of green cheese, we just haven't found them yet. It is unlikely that the moon has deposits of green cheese. It is likely that the EM Drive thrust measurement is measurement error.
There's a difference between ostracizing a researching and not giving them funds. You can exclude a researcher from funding without ostracizing them. And in any case, every funding source has different goals and agendas, and it's their prerogative how they wish to spend it.
Every physics department in the world gets a constant stream of letters and emails from people claiming important theories which should be researched. How do you propose picking which ones to spend money on?
Of course, most apparently whackadoodle ideas really are whackadoodle ideas, but occasionally you get one that isn't, and when that happens, it's usually big. Perhaps a (small) budget randomly assigned to whackadoodle ideas might be a good thing. Like venture capital for science -- most of the theories are going to crater, but once in a while you might get a unicorn.
I take it you've never had the pleasure of grading lab reports for the simplest experiments by undergrads?
(The little wet-behind-the ears dears manage to write up six kinds of impossible things just to look at the arithmetic, never mind actual reality. Without batting an eyelid.)
It could be a group project. Making sense of a crackpot theory, finding out if there's something testable in it, possibly testing it, and writing it all up. I'm only half-kidding. It would be more interesting and perhaps more socially valuable than repeating the same experiments in physics lab that the last 50 semesters did.
There are a couple of reasons to come down on stuff like cold fusion and em drives hard.
One of them is that of limited funding, there's almost definitely better places to spend money if the goal is progress
Another is how these claims set back scientific literacy of the general public
And how it can erode their trust in science
Look at how the ftl neutrino debacle did damage, even though no actual claims were made
The important thing for fusion isn't the average energy of the particles in your ensemble but the number of particles with energies around 15keV for D-D fusion. In the case of this experiment there was a potential of around that many volts around that palladium and if, theoretically, some deuterium could pick up a charge and cross that potential without running into anything else and then managed to run smack into another deuterium at the far end it had a high chance of fusing. There wasn't any a priori reason to think that those events would be common or uncommon and so barring experiment there wasn't any reason to dismiss cold fusion out of hand for temperature reasons. The lack of gamma rays was pretty significant evidence, though.
You calculated probability with wave function in mind, right? What if particle will collapse it wave when it is under a barrier (due to an impurity)? IMHO, without their waves, two particles can interact freely. High voltage and frequency are forcing atoms of hydrogen to jump frequently across impurities, so chance of reaction is increased a lot.
I assume your figure describes the probability of D-D fusion in pure deuterium at NTP? Is that correct?
Chemistry has a concept of a catalyst - Something that lowers the activation energy of a reaction thus increasing reaction rate. Why couldn't nuclear catalysts exist?
Essentially, yes that is correct. I based it on the cross section of Deuterium at NTP.
A chemical cataylst is a bit different because it doesn't require overcoming the coloumb barrier. If a nuclear catalyst existed, it would have to lower to almost no energy or even bypass the coloumb barrier for a D-D fusion reaction to occur at NTP. Do you know of any situations were the coloumb barrier has been altered?
Finding the cause of an anomaly is when the magic happens--that's where you learn something new, even if it's something driving systematic experimental error.
p.s. I see that this comment is getting a lot of up-votes and down-votes. The reason I made it is that I have discovered that my non-scientist friends, especially my smart engineer friends, really need this important principle repeated.
Maybe the reason is that you keep repeating this meme which – although technically true – oversimplifies things and doesn't help with resolving unexplained experimental results. Sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but now what? Should further experiments be funded in order to provide that proof, or should the unexplained results be buried, since there is no conclusive proof?
Proclaiming "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is a way to immediately block this discussion.
The purpose of the phrase is to be a reminder that the results are mostly likely experimental error. It doesn't block anything, it just reminds everyone what the most likely explanation is.
If you want to see a good example of this in action, look at the folks who thought they showed neutrinos went faster than light. They constantly kept in mind that the most likely explanation for the data was experimental error, and eventually showed that their experiment had an error. Nothing was "buried", nothing was "blocked", and good science was eventually done.
Hmm, one of the authors is a self-proclaimed expert in cold fusion and the other one is a lawyer. I wonder why there were no physicists among the authors.
> Low Energy Nuclear Reactions have been, for a long time, the archetypal crackpot technology.
> Huge promises. Failed replication attempts. Dismissal by the academic community. Accusations of handwavey pseudoscience. Advocates generally having low status. Associations with conspiracy theorists.
> Anyone associated with it or even expressing anything less than absolute certainty that it’s an unscientific non-starter is risking not just a reputation hit, but aggressive ridicule.
> Based on my understanding of the history of science, I think that the feelings I have around talking about this, that fear of that ridicule, should be a red flag. If the incentives are stacked too strongly against an idea (for good or bad reasons), it can become impossible for respectable people to entertain the idea. Often this is a correct approach, the vast majority of amateur science with big claims is nonsense. But what if something valuable was stuck in this trap?
> If not for observations of current dramatic failures of the scientific process in nutrition and medicine, my priors against a demonstrable discovery of this magnitude being ignored would be very formidable. As it stands, this would still be shocking civilizational inadequacy, but I can see a process by which it could have occurred.
> So I decided it was worth a couple of hours of investigation. Low chance of turning up anything of value, but low investment and in the worst case I’ll know a few more things and be able to hold up a conversation using actual understanding about why it’s bunk if someone ever tries to sell me on it, rather than simply using the “experts are probably right” heuristic.
Also let's not forget the Lugano report, an independent attempt at reproduction of Rossi's E-cat claims. It produced more heat that was put in, and the isotopes got formed.
Based on a certain model of fusion based on a theoretical model based on certain assumptions. You know that one falsification is enough to break any model and the standard mode has been falsified over and over again. This means that you can still use it in certain areas where the calculations are a good enough fit, but you can never use it as an argument against anything anymore.
Quantum erasers are a lot less impressive than they sound. They don't really "erase" anything. You can make a quantum eraser out of a few sheets of polarizing film. See:
imaginemore "the Lugano report" was not independent in any way. Rossi was involved at every stage. He supplied the "reactor" vessel. He put the "fuel" into the apparatus and he took it out. The three blind mice were allowed only a tiny portion of the supposed reaction products.
Unfortunately it's not clear to most people how obviously bogus the cold fusion thing was to an experimental nuclear physicist at the time -- especially if they routinely used palladium targets. (No, that's not having a closed mind or whatever -- just being clued-up.) Anyhow, it had classic characteristics of pseudo-science if you you were familiar with relevant history.
Clickbait. It's not something.
If you read the article (which you shouldn't, because there's no physics), you will notice, that no new confirmed idea came out of it.
Who else came here thinking this was about Cold Fusion, the Markup Language from the 90s? I once met an 'Old Timer' at a Startup Interview here who had it in his resume. He felt threatened by my mere presence and kept referring to me as 'You Millenials' lol.
I had CF on my resume for quite a while as well, although I took it off to reduce the number of recruiters calling me.
Back in the age of classic ASP, Perl scripts and CGI scripts, Cold Fusion was a very decent technology choice. It was my introduction to a controller/view styled programming pattern (called Fusebox) back in 2000.
Then they (Macromedia) got bought out by Adobe and the whole thing descended into weirdness and MS came out with .Net.
I still use coldfusion and thought there would be more comments here about the language!
It has evolved to be a Java Framework, essentially, but I love it still.
Once you get into practice of using coldfusion components, which compile into java beans, it becomes the best of all worlds. Stable, easy to read and write, highly reusable, lots of functionality and expandability, fast, compiled, etc.
> although I took it off to reduce the number of recruiters calling me.
Why? If it was in demand due to scarcity, couldn't you have done freelance work at a ridiculously high hourly rate? I've come across another ol Indian dude (my Pop's age, we called him 'uncle') who was making a killing programming in some mainframe language called COBOL.
Answer this and I'll get off your lawn LOL.
( He also made fun of my node.js and react.js and said "You young kids are always moving on to the next shiny thing")
That limits your career long term. You might make good money for a while, but the well will dry up and not many would hire someone that's been doing nothing but cold fusion for 20 years.
Didn't think of that. Thank you for the career advise. I'm glad you highlighted the risks (it'll help me when I become old and think I am being clever working on then-outdated tech :)
I know people getting their bachelor's right now taking classes training in COBOL. Recruiters from US government contractors have told them there will be a demand for them forever because of how ingrained and specialized some of these legacy systems are.
You should seek to understand the importance of older technology and the problems it solved rather than judging the individual for feeling pride in knowing it.
If more people did this we wouldn't be solving the same problems over and over again.
All the ColdFusion code I've ran into still exists because it's too rotten of a mess to be replaced.
It tends to be very procedural code with lots of "libraries" that rely on side-effects rather than abstraction. The kind of thing where nobody understands how core concerns (like security) work, they just "know" it seems to work. Except those in the know, know that it doesn't always work, but it's all too fragile to fix it, either.
I know I've been extremely unlucky with the CF code I've had to deal with, but I've also never heard of anybody with a healthy CF codebase they aren't eager to replace.
I maintain a large codebase for an application that has been around for longer than a decade in CF. I love it.
I have also, over the years, been brought in to rescue applications that have grown into giant messes. So I'm not saying what you are saying is incorrect, but it has less to do with the language, in my opinion, and more to do with what happens to large applications that get written by multiple teams of people over the years, as they adapt to changing customer demands.
And, sometimes, by managers who don't understand code, the importance of documentation, or how to communicate and plan for business issues.
Build an app in any web application today and try to maintain it for a decade.
I agree, it's not really the language's fault. I'm involved with more than one application that's over a decade old, so I understand what happens.
My point is that a lot of the things still running around in ColdFusion aren't there because they're healthy, they're around because they are too sick to do anything else with. I've got too much personal experience with applications used by the government that I sure would not trust with my personal data! You know, things written before password hashing was standard practice ... and that still don't hash passwords.
To take advantage of modern technologies? To be able to hire coders? That's two off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty of arguments both ways.
Presumably if your codebase is healthy, there is structure and documentation that would make it comparatively easy to replace in a different framework as requirements evolve. Unhealthy codebases don't have this so that stick around without adapting/evolving
You wouldn't. I'm just observing that none of the CF I've had to deal with is healthy - it's all a mess they want to replace. Probably poor wording in my prior comment that was hard to parse as intended, apologies.
So there's run-of-the-mill old code that's accumulated a lot of cruft, is hard to get acquainted with, and can be tedious to work with. But it works, and doesn't get replaced.
Then there's old code that barely worked when it was new and is held together by duct tape. Often it's written in something antiquated like VB6 or COBOL and is very troublesome to replace. (Not that all VB6 or COBOL code is bad, mind you, but as soon as you get out of their problem domain things go downhill fast.)
Then there's ColdFusion.
--
(In all seriousness, I'm sure there's good ColdFusion code out there, but the stuff I've seen is like a weird mish-mash of all the bad parts of PHP with all the bad parts of ORMs and all the bad parts of XSLT.)
It's like a case study in all the bad things that can go wrong when you mix government projects run by people who didn't know what they were doing with 10-15 years of neglect, but need to keep the software alive because it supports a critical government function but there's nowhere near the budget to rebuild it properly.
It's not worth anyone's time to mess with it. I never thought it would take all that long to just redo it, especially considering all the time wasted trying to tweak it and get Salesforce forms embedded, for instance, but I don't make those kind of marketing decisions...
We have in large part just superseded it with some small static html+js sites dedicated to each of our products that we stuck on Azure webapps. So much easier, so much better, and, so much cheaper. But the main site limps along.
This is pseudo-scientific crap. There is a small echo chamber of LENR researchers, egged on by outright swindlers and dreamers whose desire to believe outweighs whatever scientific ability they had. Mainstream physics mostly ignores this sideshow. But articles like this keep popping up, selling the fringe crap to the public as reality.
I am not surprised by the downvotes. I know I stated my position brashly. It was a conscious decision to call it like I see it even knowing it would be unpopular in this forum.
But let me quibble: my attitude, as that of dismissive mainstream scientists, is based on education not ignorance.
What I find interesting is that when confronted with that idea, many physcists just get stuck at the original claims and don't understand that there is likely a novel phenomenon of some sort, deserving of study.