5.27.2008

Cold Fusion - Woo or True?


Professor Yoshiaka Arata of the Osaka University in Japan is saying that he has finally demonstrated cold fusion in the laboratory. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have done the same in 1989, but they circumvented the traditional scientific peer review process and headed straight to mass media. They prostrated themselves before the world and were resoundly thumped by the science community when their experiments could not be duplicated.
Physicist Claims First Real Demonstration of Cold Fusion
While Arata´s demonstration looked promising to his audience, the real test is still to come: duplication. Many scientists and others are now recalling the infamous 1989 demonstration by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who claimed to produce controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature. However, no one - including Fleischmann and Pons - could duplicate the experiment, leading many people to consider cold fusion a pseudoscience to this day.

But one witness at the recent demonstration, physicist Akito Takahashi of Osaka University, thought that the experiment should be able to be repeated.

After the Pons and Fleishmann debacle, we should have learned that stories like these are nothing more than interest items until they have been proven true by repeated successful replication of the results in other laboratories with objective scientists at the helm.

2 comments:

Jed Rothwell said...

Previous cold fusion experiments were not a "debacle" except politically. They were attacked by the mainstream press (and bloggers like you) but in fact they were replicated in hundreds of labs, and published in about a thousand mainstream, peer-reviewed papers. Have a look:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/

By the conventional, old fashioned standards of science cold fusion is true beyond any doubt. In the Fact-Free New Age Reality Zone people ignore peer-reviewed papers, make up facts as they go along, and claim that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong.

Arata's previous results were confirmed by SRI, Los Alamos, the Italian Nat. Nuc. Labs and many others, and the present result are not much different, so I expect they will be confirmed as well.

- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org

The skepTick said...

Funny...seems like the Department of Energy reached a different conclusion. I wonder why.