Did I make cold fusion happen? - Casual Physics 003

Transcript

hi everyone welcome back to casual physics my name is Matt and in today's video we're going to be talking about what actually happened in my first cold fusion experiment it was six weeks ago and I've had quite a lot of people asking me you know just what happened did it work did it not did you show that cold fusion was real tell us about it so that's what today's video is going to be about before we delve into the detail though I think it's useful just to cast our minds back six weeks to refresh our memory as to what I was actually doing okay I started with a lot of scrubbing and cleaning plenty and plenty of sanding before I burnished the nickel mesh with palladium put it into the reactor and then sealed it all up tight sucked out the air put hydrogen in the next day heated it up and waited so the main idea with this experiment is that if there's something interesting happening inside the reactor something that's producing an extra source of heat then what I will do is it will make the reactor temperature rise above what it would normally like to sit at this type of experiment was done in the past a guy called les case was one of the people who I was inspired by he observed a 20 degrees Celsius change in temperature which is significant and that's one of the things that drew me to this experiment because my equipment is well capable of measuring such a big temperature difference of course what you can't say if you see a big temperature changes its fusion you've got to do more experiments to make sure that you can rule out the possibility that it was some unknown chemical reaction perhaps the hydrogen interacting with some contaminant that you accidentally put in to the system there'd be some oils from grease or something like that those type of contrast and comparing experiments I plan to do I've not rushed to do them yet and there are two reasons for that firstly it's just time so I only can do my few 50% of the time two weeks out of every four the other two weeks I have to work to get money to pay my bills just like everybody has to and actually as a secondary a side point if anybody watching this just happens to have some spare bitcoins no spare dollars euros pounds that are just burning a hole in their pocket and they'd like to help this effort I've put some links in the description below where you can donate if you feel inclined but honestly no pressure just you being here watching this video is enough for me but it's just on the off chance you have a bit of spare cash so that's the first reason I haven't rushed to do these comparison experiments the second reason is because honestly I'm just not convinced that I've seen a significant temperature rise in the data for my first experiment and to understand that what I'm gonna do now is just to dive into the data and show you what I've seen and to show you my analysis of that so I've been doing my analysis using a coding language called Python and using a platform called Jupiter labs which allows me to write my thoughts write my code and visualize my data all in one place so what you join me for a little bit of a deep dive into some data okay this is a Jupiter notebook don't worry we're not going to be going through it in all its detail for those of you who are interested to do that I've put a link in the description below where you can download this notebook and also the data that we are analyzing so that you can play about with it to your heart's content for the rest of us though let's just go with the flow and have a look at the data here it is this is the temperature data I acquired on August 23rd got up at around 6 o'clock went to bed at around 3:00 it wasn't exciting but it was a really long day this temperature data consists of three regions so the first part of the experiment was when I was just heating the reactor with no hydrogen in it then I put the hydrogen in and some interesting things happened and then I took out the hydrogen around 3:00 now 2:30 and then I let the whole thing just cool down naturally the most interesting bit is obviously this middle part what we're really interested in understanding is does this temperature go significantly above the baseline now what do we mean by baseline the baseline is the temperature at which the reactor would get to if I didn't put any hydrogen in to understand what that temperature is we need to look at this heating region first so let's zoom in on that so here we are 7 to 11:30 I can now fit a curve to this data to build a model and let's do that I'll spare you the details and now this model when I overlay on top of the data it fits it very well and I can now use that model to predict into the future and that will tell me what the temperature of the reactor would have been if I didn't put any hydrogen in so let's have a look at that alongside the temperature data when we put the hydrogen in that's this so hydrogen goes in around 11:30 and then all weird stuff happens which we'll talk about here is the baseline temperature which is 187 okay where do we begin with this data firstly these three big spikes basically just ignore those these spikes are there because those times I was playing with the gas pressure I was sucking out hydrogen putting new hydrogen in at different pressures just to play about with it to see what happened there's nothing really meaningful we can get from these spikes what else do we see well most of these data points do seem like they're above the orange line so we could claim that there's an extra source of heat going on inside that's one thing that superficially that we see most of this temperature rise of this top point here is around 192 so most of this five degree temperature rise happened within the first half an hour of me putting in the high that's something else that we can see and then thirdly there just seems to be this general undulating character to the temperature which frankly I was I was surprised about when I saw those are three observations that we can make and it's tempting to start drawing conclusions from them but what you should be asking at this point is Matt where the hell are the error bars in your data okay so probably not that many people are asking that question so we're just gonna take a slight detour to understand what arrow buys actually are before continuing okay so let's think about something that's conceptually a bit simpler than cold fusion your height and how it's changed over time of course says you were a little baby you were very small and then you grew bigger you had a growth spurt somewhere and eventually your height plateaued and you've probably been there at the same height for many many years I am currently and I have been for a long time 176 centimeters now when I report that height to people actually they don't really know whether I'm 176 or whether I'm 170 6.5 maybe I'm actually that high or maybe I'm a little bit smaller 175 point five centimeters the reason why is because I'm reporting my height to the nearest centimeter so there is an error of plus or minus naught point five centimeters when we're representing data on a graph we typically represent it as points like this but what we really should do is represent our data as a range yes give the point so I'm 176 but I need to include the errors here that I could be as high as 170 6.5 or as low as 175 point 5 and graphically we represent those limits the lip the upper and lower limits with these bars and we join the bars together with a line and so this type of kind of diagram this type of way of representing a data pond with these bars is called an error bar okay these are over now back to the data now we know what an error bar is how can we apply them to our temperature data when you look at the details of the temperature sensor the thermocouple as it's called what you'll find is it's accurate to within plus or minus 1.5 degrees what that means is at each point I need to put an error bar of plus 1.5 and minus 1.5 we can also propagate those errors into the model and also see a kind of confidence with our final steady state temperature so let's have a look at that this is the final graph which I assumed story passed and you can see the data and the error bars around it and also a confidence interval around the model so that the final steady state temperature the baseline if you will how do we read these type of graphs well I'm going to zoom in here so that it's a bit easier to see instead of comparing a single data point here to the model which is this middle orange line and saying Oh is there is there a big difference instead what we need to do is look at the bottom of the error bar compare it with the top orange line here this is the difference which is meaningful and you see that difference in temperature is a lot less than if we just took the data point and compared it to the model so if we have a situation where the blue bar overlaps the orange then we can say anything at all and if we look back to this initial region where we pump the hydrogen in this is exactly what's happening the blue error bars are pretty much overlapping the model and so actually I can't anything about this I can't even tell you whether it's really happening or not I don't have enough accuracy in my thermocouple my temperature sensor I do appear to have enough accuracy in my temperature sensor to see that there has been a temperature rise generally speaking over much of the data the maximum we've really seen though is about 3 degrees 3 degrees Celsius is the difference between the bottom of this error bar and the top of the orange line so I guess the question is can I really claim anything with a three degrees temperature rise I'm not prepared to claim anything forget cold fusion for a moment I'm not even prepared to claim that I've really seen a temperature rise above the baseline and the reason is a I made an assumption when I made this orange model that the temperature in London was constant and actually it wasn't after I put the hydrogen in the ambient temperature went from about 24 to 26 so that that will have an effect on this baseline and in addition I don't know really that much about how my thermocouple behaves in a high temperature high pressure hydrogen atmosphere it may well be and I really don't know this it may be that this erratic behavior and may may be even the temperature itself might be impacted by the presence of hydrogen so long story short if I'm going to be conservative with things I think I'd have to say no I didn't see any cold fusion in my first experiment honestly I think if I had I would have been the luckiest cold fusion researcher ever so I'm not disappointed for me I learned a lot about just getting my experiment set up a lot about hydrogen about palladium and in the last six weeks I've understood a lot more about the role that cycling the temperature up and down can have on activating the material so I didn't do that I just let the temperature go up to steady state so I'm going to experiment with cycling the temperature and also I'd like to start using deuterium in my experiments instead of hydrogen okay what is deuterium it's technically what we call it isotope of hydrogen which means it's very similar in a lot of ways the deuterium is twice as heavy as hydrogen if you speak to people in the cold fusion community what you'll find is people say either the hydrogen just doesn't make cold fusion in which case I shouldn't be surprised with my results other people say hydrogen does produce coal fusion but just with 10 times less energy than if you used deuterium and so with that you might be asking well why didn't I just use deuterium to start with the reason is very simple it's just deuterium is really expensive and that's because it's far less common than normal hydrogen if we take water as an example of something that contains a lot of hydrogen that's the H in h2o the deuterium in just a glass of water that you might be drinking is naught point zero one five percent of all the hydrogen in that glass of water so it's a small fraction that is possible to extract to concentrate and make something called heavy water that just contains the deuterium and no hydrogen but it's an expensive process in my setup I need about two litres of heavy water in order to start making deuterium that's going to set me back 1,100 pounds it's not cheap but I'm determined to get this stuff because I think it's going to have a huge impact on the success of my next experiments so in the spirit of crowdfunding I've created GoFundMe page I've already got eight hundred out of the eleven hundred pounds so I'm almost there I put a link in the description below if you're feeling like you have a bit of spare cash every little really does count so I'm super appreciative of any support that you can give and support isn't just about money the fact that you're here watching hopefully liking or subscribing talking to your friends about cold fusion that's super important so I can't stress enough how grateful I am that you're here thank you once again for your time and attention and I look forward to seeing you here again in a couple of weeks for some more casual physics