perfidy

Technology Review is reporting that the Department of Energy has decided, on the basis of recent research, to look into cold fusion once more. Fifteen years after Pons and Fleischmann were greeted with awe and then ridicule, some are beginning to take it seriously again.

Read the article for the details, but the gist of it is this: some of the confusion over other experimenters not being able to reproduce the results lay in the concentration of heavy Hydrogen in the Palladium cells. If there are more Deuterium atoms than Palladium atoms, then you get extra heat. With lowered amounts, you get spotty to no results. Further, new experiments show that fusion byproducts (such as Helium-4) are appearing in amounts appropriate to the level of heat generated. No one really knows how all this is happening, but:

He [Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who chaired the tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge last August] suspects the difficulty lies with "a very powerful approximation" at the root of 70 years of nuclear physics—that all nuclear interactions occur between two particles in a vacuum. He thinks that assumption breaks down in cold fusion, where the interacting particles are tightly packed in a metal lattice. His idea is that the deuterium nuclei exchange vibrational energy, or "phonons," with the surrounding palladium atoms. That exchange could enhance nuclear interactions that would otherwise be vanishingly small, so that the reactions can occur at the rates implied by cold fusion experiments. Hagelstein's theory is still in development, but is reaching a point where he can start making testable predictions—a vital step toward making cold fusion a credible science. "In time, hopefully, we'll get more of the puzzle figured out," he says.

We see effects like this in chemistry - where the presence of one compound acts as a catalyst for the chemical reactions of two or more other compounds. Is it so unreasonable that there could be catalysts at the subatomic level as well? Who knows, we might get the fusion powered DeLorean after all...