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Physicists I've talked to in the past have said that "cold fusion" is no such thing and that there must be some interesting chemistry going on instead.
Chemical reactions are those that give or take energy when elcectrons move around and atoms/molecules get bound together or ripped apart.
Nuclear reactions are when the atoms actually change. These reactions are much, much more energetic.
One might want to call it chemistry or alchemy even, but it's quite clear (to some people at least) that there are a huge number of results that show heat production exceeding what is possible through chemical reactions.
The term the scientists prefer is LENR. It stands for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. There's also CANR, Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions.
All the info I've got, is what I've got from lenr-canr.org and googling random stuff. Also it helps that I've been a sucker for all things quantum mechanical since I was a kid and studied a bit of QM when in uni.
There was a lively discussion on sci.physics on usenet on the possible theoretical aspects before Pons and Fleischmann fell into disfavour. Documented here
I'm not saying this *is* a fact, or if it is, that it is in any way useful. There is some (some say a lot) anomalous heat being produced, and there have been cases of transmutation. This is hard data, and keeps coming in, and actually gets published in peer reviewed journals, though not in the US.
The theoretical aspect is not so clear cut. The explanation I proffered above, was got more or less from the article at lenr-canr and my own knowledge of quantum effects in metals. There are probably other explanations too. I'm not sure how much of these explanations have been tested experimentally. The process is still a bit of a black box and I'm not sure how many hypotheses are available and how many of those are testable.
Nobody is quite sure where the hard and particle radition is for instance. Flight of fancy might suggest, that the neutrons might get sucked into the palladium and be responsible for the transmutation effects. Maybe the hard radiation spreads somehow along with the fusing nuclei and gets a longer wavelength in the process. I.e. all the X-rays and gammas turn into infrared light and microwaves. I'll have to dig in when I have the time and see what theoretical aspects have been tested.
The lenr-canr page is a gold mine. It's relatively eclectic (read: cranky). For instance it's got a paper that was published "Alchemy Today", but it seems that the pages one *can* find in english are held out by cranky people, ie people who are willing to suspend their disbelief until they've formed a more fact based opinion. But there's a shitload of pdf's there to wade through. Some of them I'm guessing you need a PhD in the relevant field to read ;-)
Here's Edmund Storms' page. He was a respected scientist at Los Alamos. He's retired and is now a champion of cold fusion, and has got some heavy duty calorimeters in his basement to measure with. Some of his papers are available at lenr-canr.org.
There's Infinite Energy Magazine. There's Alternative Science. Infinite Energy is a bit cranky, reminds me of Omni a bit. Alternative science is a great page. It's a very opinionated, and well researched anti-skeptic page :-) It refuses to be called a scientific page ("I'm only a reporter"), and thus Magickally evades the skeptics. It's a plea to people to be real skeptics. It's not only a cold fusion page, but has all sorts of stuff that the scientific establishment has refused to look at (rightly sometimes, in my opinion). Also it examines the way MIT falsified data to make Fleishmann and Pons look bad. MIT has even almost apologized for it :-) |
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