I'd like to humbly request that popular science articles geared toward the general public refrain from using the word "theory" in the non-scientific sense. This article even includes the phrase "only a theory"!
I know there are more syllables, but can we start using the word "hypothesis" when it is correct to do so?
It's hard enough combatting anti-science ideologies and repeatedly having to explain that the word "theory" doesn't mean what you think it means. Please, journalists, stop making it even more difficult by using the non-scientific connotation of "theory" when you mean "hypothesis".
I know you say that because of this other utterly stupid cultural battle, but the use of “theory” in that article is largely correct. It would certainly not be correct to call their theory an hypothesis.
Theories can be wimpy or really strong, can be good or bad. They are the connective tissue you use to try and explain certain phenomena. From these explanations arise predictions that help you formulate hypothesis. You then try to falsify those hypothesis and if you fail your theory is strengthened (and if you succeed your theory is wrong and at the very least has to be modified or thrown out altogether).
A hypothesis is not a theory in waiting. You make a similar mistake as Creationists do when they call Evolution “just a theory”.
It is worth noting that the theory of Special Relativity is confirmed by the Michelson–Morley experiment, which happened 25 years before Einstein came up with his explanation. In the interim period, Lorentz had managed to come up with all of the contractions in Einstein's theory based on experimental data, but had no explanation of why it was true.
Einstein's insight was to come up with a single coherent theory that explained everything which had been observed, all together.
Therefore there was no period before they managed to confirm it.
The general theory was produced in 1916, when people were preoccupied by WW I. Its first confirmation was the precession of Mercury's orbit, which had been known about since the 1800s. Most people only heard about it after the second confirmation in 1919 when Eddington measured gravitational lensing during an eclipse. The third confirmation was the measurement of gravitational redshift.
Therefore it too was considered confirmed by the time most heard about it.
I say "considered" because several decades later physicists realized that all three confirmations are explained by a wide variety of plausible theories that do not possess the nonlinear characteristics of general relativity. (Removing nonlinearity would be desirable because it would make it easier to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.) This drove the development of better confirmations.
Note that theories are usually developed to explain existing observation, so the presence of confirmation before explanatory theory is actually quite common.
I may well be misremrembering a comment in a class that I took over 20 years ago.
Wikipedia lists a number of alternatives to general relativity. But I can't find any that look linear. There may not have been a linear theory, just a set of heuristics that any linear theory would be likely to support. In particular when I took general relativity, my professor made the following points.
Let's model a concrete photon coming out of a gravitational potential well. We can calculate exactly how much mass it should lose. Apply the particle wave duality to that energy loss we get GR's gravitational redshift to first order. Based on the wave interpretation, you can predict, to first order, the amount that time slows in a gravitational well.
To model Mercury, assume that the Sun creates a potential well. At all points in its orbit, assume that Mercury moves as Special Relativity says that a body with fixed angular momentum and the appropriate kinetic energy for that radius should move. (I forget whether you need to toss in the aforementioned time dilation.) To first order, you recover the GR correction to the precession of Mercury.
I forget the argument for the bending of light (maybe just throw gravitational time dilation into the mix?), but there is a first-order heuristic that can give the correct figure there as well.
The point is that if a series of heuristic arguments pull out the correct prediction for the original 3 tests, then any theory that tries to reasonably combine QM, special relativity, and gravity, is likely to give similar predictions to first order.
That professor claimed that the first test which he did not have a heuristic explanation for involved the actual time that light took to get from one point to another. Looking on Wikipedia, I think he's talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_delay.
A recent pre-print paper suggests that a few mistakes in Widom-Larsen's calculations lead to overestimating the amount of energy that can be produced:
A correct calculation gives a neutron production rate from (1) about
300 times smaller than what estimated in [1–3], for the value of the
mass renormalization factor β ≈ 20 considered there. In turn, it is
questionable that values of β can be realized, in particular for
bound electrons, so large as to give rise to useful nuclear
transmutation rates. A more detailed analysis of the attainable
values of β is needed to obtain more definite conclusions on this
interesting phenomenon, should it exist at all.
Our response to Ciuchi et al.’s preprint is as follows:
“Erroneous wave functions of Ciuchi et al. for collective modes in neutron production on metallic hydride
cathodes”
A. Widom, Y. Srivastava, and L Larsen (v1 Oct. 17, 2012)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.5212v1.pdf
Abstract: “There is a recent comment [1] concerning the theory of collective many body effects on the neutron production rates in a chemical battery cathode. Ciuchi et al. employ an inverse beta decay expression that contains a two body amplitude. Only one electron and one proton may exist in the Ciuchi et al. model initial state wave function. A flaw in their reasoning is that one cannot in reality describe collective many body correlations with only a two particle wave function. One needs very many particles to describe collective effects. In the model wave functions of Ciuchi et al. there are no metallic hydrides, there are no cathodes and there are no chemical batteries. Employing a wave function with only one electron and one proton is inadequate for describing collective metallic hydride surface quantum plasma physics in cathodes accurately.”
Conclusions: “No significant argument has been provided against our nuclear physics results. The experimental evidence of neutron production and nuclear transmutations in properly designed plasma discharge electrolytic cells [5] agrees with our theoretical analysis and belies the theoretical arguments given in [1] against a hefty production of neutrons in hydride cells.”
Note that ultimately it still comes down to low-energy fusion, in this case it's the fusion of two neutrons and Li-6 into Beryllium-8 which then decays into He-4 nuclei. This is somewhat similar to the CNO cycle whereby you keep adding protons to C-12 and the subsequent products until ultimately you end up with C-12 again plus a He-4 nuclei, and a lot of fusion energy along the way.
Fortunately there are several clear-cut experiments that can be conducted to verify each element of this theory, so we should see some progress on this (one way or the other) in the coming years.
It's a stretch of terminology to call neutron capture "fusion". This would make all (non-spontaneous) fission "fusion" too. Neutron capture is trivial to accomplish; there's no Coulomb barrier, as neutrons are uncharged. What's nontrivial, and an extraordinary-claim-demanding-extraordinary-evidence, is the production of free neutrons.
They don't have extraordinary evidence, or any evidence. Apparently I'm supposed be enthused about this future experiment, the outcome of which could be extraordinary, although there's no particular prior expectation for this.
From the submitted article: "Zawodny has designed a stamp-size array of metal tiles to test the theory. According to Larsen’s paper, the properties of some of the tiles should make it easier for electrons and protons to merge and form neutrons. If Zawodny observes evidence of neutron production, then he plans to do a follow-up experiment to see if those neutrons are fueling radioactive decay. Even if he gets the expected results, though, it would take several years and many corroborating experiments before LENRs could be considered confirmed."
. . . .
"So far, Larsen still has only a theory and some circumstantial evidence."
In other words, the operative word in the subtitle of the submitted article (used as the submission headline here) is "may." There doesn't seem to be any strong evidence yet that the process described in the article actually produces net energy output.
P.S. I heartily approve of (and have upvoted) the first comment this comment received, pointing out that there isn't even evidence that the speculated process described in the article even exists.
I'm sorry, but that's just not true. There have been 1000+ replications / reports of excess energy from this very same "anomalous energy effect" - the hard part is the how and why.
See the very same Joseph Zawodny speak of "It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy.." in a much more candid way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBlKc0TaqPs
> There have been 1000+ replications / reports of excess energy [...]
I followed the links, but the links I couldn't find an article with enough technical details about the experiments. I think that you know more about what is published in the subject, so can you please give me:
* One link to a paper where the excess of energy is clearly measure experimentally, that is published in a peer reviewed indexed journal with a high impact index.
* One link to an article with the technical details to reproduce the effect in the laboratory and measure the excess of energy. (Something like "Experimental LENR for dummies" would be nice.)
Two is better! I have enough physical background to understand these papers but I'm not an expert in the subject. And I have to do my real work, so I have enough time to read two or three papers, but I don't have time to read 1000 of them.
I saw the webpage only for a few minutes, and most of the links look like special edition books and conference proceedings. I couldn't find the information I was looking for.
Calorimetric measures are extremely difficult to do correctly, so I would like to see:
) One paper in a well known journal, to be sure that an independent expert in the subject has read it thoughtfully.
) One clear description of the experimental setup, so I could try to convince some friends to reproduce it.
When I spent my entire Christmas vacation absorbing LENR a couple of years ago, it was just that... slight traces of reaction byproducts, and a few traces of pits in neutron detection gel, so, yes? The problem at the time was why so little of such things if it is fusion, but now we have this theory.
I was a little surprised when then said that the electron combines with the proton to form a neutron, but apparently it is called "electron capture" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture). In case anyone else was wondering...
Somewhat importantly, no one else claims isolated protons (hydrogen nuclei, which are stable) undergo EC. It's an effect of unstable, radioactive nuclei with too many protons and excess energy. Not free protons. In fact, naively that violates mass conservation: a proton+electron combined weigh less than a neutron. With EC, there is excess mass in the unstable nucleus. Here they are claiming something entirely different: the excess energy comes in from other electrons, in a coherent quantum mechanical effect. (An "effective particle", a "heavy electron", takes the place of a physical electron). It's not the same.
One thing that I like about Widom-Larsen theory is that it attempts to reason about possible quantum effects that could cause different sorts of reactions then fusion. While I was a tike back when Pons and Fleischmann were doing their experiments, I always thought the fusion explanation was bunk.
Extremely low energy neutrons created through quantum interactions makes a lot more sense then something majickally defeating the coulomb barrier with regularity (sure there are tunneling effects, but those don't happen with regularity.) While this area of physics is full of some quacks (Rossi for instance), I am glad this is starting to get more attention over the last few years. There is so much that happens as a result of quantum physics that is just counter intuitive, and really so much is left to understand about how the realm of the small effects our macro level reality. I really wish Feynman would have been alive when the first cold fusion craze was announced, perhaps he could have had clues to offer that made people think twice about possible quantum effects instead of the obvious craziness of fusion.
Can someone much smarter with physics than myself explain what the hubbub was a couple of years back when 60 Minutes and a few other sources were starting to rehabilitate Fleischmann?
Edit: Additional question - If the palladium based device described in 60 Minutes consistently outputs more energy than input (they just don't know how long each reaction will take, exactly how much energy will be output, or quite frankly how it works), wouldn't it be a trivial matter to daisy chain hundreds of these devices and get a relatively more consistent average energy output?
I remember my Physics teacher discounting this straight away and wouldn't let us talk about it at all. He simply replied, "They will be shown as frauds and quietly retire, never to be heard from again."
It stuck with me and I was glad to see someone revisiting the idea again.
I've been following the Rossi Ecat spectacle since stumbling upon it in 2011, and I think LENR (cold fusion) will be the biggest story on the planet in a few months time. I'm a 'believer'.
He has a mysterious device. He refuses to submit it to tests where anyone but him gets to measure the sytem's energy inputs and outputs. It hasn't been properly evaluated by third parties. He makes wild claims about both the product and how well it's selling. AND he has a history of this if you read about his previous ventures.
It has every hallmark of a con. At this point I'm genuinely interested - how can you believe it?
I'm following the ecat and Rossi story about the possible LENR device that he has (supposedly) built. Everything regarding this matter is surrounded by mystery and a lot of people objecting the tests.
I hope to see some serious development from other parties like
NASA. Could be really cool.
I know there are more syllables, but can we start using the word "hypothesis" when it is correct to do so?
It's hard enough combatting anti-science ideologies and repeatedly having to explain that the word "theory" doesn't mean what you think it means. Please, journalists, stop making it even more difficult by using the non-scientific connotation of "theory" when you mean "hypothesis".