A History of Cold Fusion

Transcript

on march 23 1989 two electrochemists from the university of utah martin fleischmann and stanley ponds took part in a press conference where they announced to the world that they had achieved sustainable desktop nuclear fusion the events which followed were what is called in scientific circles a dumpster fire yet despite everything 30 years later there's a small but growing community in the world of physics who are sure that something happened learn more about the story of cold fusion on this episode of everything everywhere [Music] [Applause] daily this episode is sponsored by scotty vest going through airport security can be a real pain but it's something you have to do wearing a scottie vest jacket can make your next trip to the airport a breeze just have all your electronics in your pocket put your watch or any other metallic things you have on you in your pockets as you wait in line then just put your jacket in the x-ray machine and voila you don't have a pile of loose things to worry about losing i do this every time i go through the airport and it saves me tons of time and hassle you can get 15 off your next order by going to scottyvest.com and using coupon code everything everywhere all one word at checkout if you have noticed that we do not have an unlimited supply of clean energy at our disposal then you've probably also realized that the promise of cold fusion never quite delivered it's worth the time to go back to see what happened and where everything went wrong it began innocently enough with the experiments done by the above-mentioned ponds and fleischmann when they conducted a rather simple experiment with the element palladium heavy water and electricity palladium had been known to have a unique ability to store hydrogen within its metal matrix since the 19th century that part is not controversial there had been periodic reports in the early 20th century of scientists who found anomalous results in the 1920s austrians friday panath and kurt peters found helium produced in a similar experiment helium is the product when two hydrogen atoms fused together they published a paper but later retracted it when they claimed the helium came from the atmosphere in 1927 a swedish researcher named john tanberg also found evidence of helium produced with palladium and water and tried to get a patent the patent was denied however after the retraction of the panet and peter's paper and because he couldn't explain how his system worked in the pons and fleischmann experiment they ran electricity through some heavy water which is water with a larger amount of hydrogen isotope deuterium and a palladium cathode they turned it on and let the system run for a long time nothing happened the temperature of the system was about 30 degrees celsius which is what was to be expected given the energy going into a system then all of a sudden the temperature would jump up to 50 degrees celsius and stay there for about two days this was done without any changes to the system or the energy being put in the temperature would eventually come back down but sometimes this temperature spike would be repeated in the same setup so far nothing here is wrong you have two scientists who conducted an experiment and got a result maybe the results were cause of a glitch in the equipment maybe it was a cause of bad data or maybe they really found something either way that's how science works what came next however is where things really went off the rails a researcher named steven jones from nearby brigham young university in utah was doing similar research his research focused on something called muon catalyzed fusion which also involved fusion at low temperatures the two teams became aware of each other's work and agreed to submit papers to the journal nature at the same time they were to meet at a utah airport on march 24 1989 to simultaneously submit their papers via fedex that never happened the university of utah got wind of what was happening if what pons and fleischmen found was true then they would get a patent on something that could potentially be worth trillions of dollars the university of utah would be the patent holder and it would make it one of if not the wealthiest universities in the world they wanted to establish priority on the discovery for any future patent claims they also didn't want to get upstaged by their in-state rival byu pressured by the administrators at the university of utah ponds and fleischmann held a press conference on march 23rd the day before they were supposed to jointly submit their papers with jones this was when the problem started there are certain ways you do things in science there's an established norm for releasing findings to the rest of the scientific community a press conference is not how you do it prior to the press conference ponzi fleischmann hadn't really shared the results with anyone they hadn't published anything no one had verified or replicated their results during the press conference they explicitly mentioned fusion which was probably the other big mistake besides holding the press conference itself immediately after the event this became the top story around the globe researchers all over the world tried to replicate what pawns and fleischmann did pawns and fleischmann didn't actually reveal any details about their process or setup mostly for reasons of patent protection there was a flurry of results with researchers from prestigious universities like caltech cern and mit almost everyone who tried couldn't replicate the results by april 30th a bit more than a month after the press conference public opinion had turned major newspapers like the new york times called cold fusion dead the next day on may 1st the american physical society held a session at their annual conference on cold fusion where eight of the nine panelists said this was dead and the ninth abstained steve kunin of caltech said the entire episode was the result of quote the incompetence and delusion of pons and fleischmann unquote he got a standing ovation the rise and fall of cold fusion all happened in a span of five weeks over the next few months papers poured into other research journals showing an inability to reproduce the pons and fleischmann results the state of utah put 4.5 million dollars into a cold fusion research institute which soon closed due to a lack of funds stanley pons moved to france to do research and eventually renounced his american citizenship and has since refused to do many interviews martin fleischmann moved back to his native britain and eventually died in 2012 from complications with parkinson's disease you might think that this is the end of the story scientists announce something which can't be replicated get denounced and then sink into obscurity it's not while most researchers couldn't replicate ponds and fleischmann's results some did there has been an underground movement of researchers who have kept trying to replicate the results and explain what happened over the last 30 years these aren't guys in their garages wearing tin foil hats trying to create perpetual motion machines these are people at legitimate research institutions the debacle of 1989 so discredited the field that most people have to work in secret lest their careers suffer damage for starters they changed the name of the field from cold fusion and all the baggage that came with it to low energy nuclear reactions or lner there has been more reporting on the field which isn't immediately dismissive scientific american nature and other respective scientific publications have all written on the subject in the last few years and gave it an honest and balanced review of the state of research large research labs such as los alamos the u.s navy and even google have been doing some research into the phenomenon so where are things at if the effect is real there are two major things which will need to be done to move it forward first there needs to be a way to replicate the phenomenon consistently and second there needs to be a theoretical explanation to explain what is happening as for number one there still isn't a way to consistently replicate the production of energy one theory is is that it might have to do with the palladium metal used as a cathode the metal might need to have microscopic fissures or flaws in the metal to allow hydrogen to enter each piece of metal used will differ at an atomic level and those differences might be what is causing the inability to reproduce results until researchers can confidently say do this and you will get this result it's hard to see this going anywhere second if something is happening it almost certainly is not fusion fusion being defined as the fusing of two atomic nuclei is well understood and it has specific radiation signatures that don't appear with these lower temperature phenomenon one theory which is probably the leading one at the moment is that what's happening is an electron capture hydrogen nuclei which is just a single proton are being merged with an electron to create a neutron this theory has tons of problems with it as well as it shouldn't be releasing that much energy another theory is that hydrogen atoms are just being put into a previously unknown state which gives off energy this new product has been dubbed a hydrino and there's also real little proof of this either as of today cold fusion or low energy nuclear reactions or whatever you want to call it doesn't have a whole lot of momentum while there is still a small community of researchers until they can show something definite and reproducible and provide a theory as to what is happening cold fusion will be relegated to the fringes of science executive producer of everything everywhere daily is james mackala if you ever wanted to give some direct feedback on a show provide show suggestions or just talk about some of the previous episodes i've started a discord server if you're familiar with discord it's basically an online chat room that you can use as a standalone app or in a browser or on your phone i'm usually there in the evenings and occasionally throughout the day in north america time just go to everything dash everywhere dot com slash discord or click on the link in the show notes