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Bubble Fusion Researcher Faces Fraud Trial
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 11, 2007 02:41 PM
from the some-days-it-is-not-hip-to-be-square dept.
from the some-days-it-is-not-hip-to-be-square dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In 2001, Rusi P. Taleyarkhan shocked the world by claiming he had successfully produced a positive net energy bubble fusion reaction; cold fusion. The New York Times reports that a congressional hearing is now under way against Taleyarkhan, even though Purdue University has already cleared the scientist of any wrongdoing. Dr. Taleyarkhan said last night in an e-mail message that the subcommittee's report represents 'a gross travesty of justice.' He asked, 'Where are the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the Asian community during this episode that has caused this biased and openly one-sided smear campaign?' You can view the full (colorful) e-mail at Dailytech."
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News: Bubble Fusion Inquiry Under Wraps 231 comments
hubie writes "Purdue University launched an investigation last March into the questionable research behavior and actions by Prof. Rusi Taleyarkhan following his controversial claims of achieving bubble fusion. The investigation has completed but the results are being kept secret. The alleged behavior is remeniscent of another tabletop fusion incident from a number of years back.
Coincidentally, Purdue University has just secured Federal money to open up a new energy center. A more cynical person than I might suggest that there is a connection between the two."
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Science: Cold Fusion Scientist Exonerated 171 comments
Icarus1919 writes "New Scientist reports that the scientist who discovered a possible cold fusion reaction by bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sonic waves has recently been exonerated of accusations of scientific misconduct following the verification of his results by another scientist."
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Clearing Up Confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
WOW, that's a loaded statement. Let me correct a few things:
1. Taleyarkhan didn't report his research until 2002.
2. I have never seen a source that claims that sonofusion is currently net positive. That's an incredibly difficult feat to achieve, and has been an active point of research.
3. Bubble Fusion is NOT Cold Fusion any more than a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor [wikipedia.org] is. In fact, the reaction is hotter than hades. (About 10 megakelvins, or about as hot as the center of the sun.)
This is a bit of a misstatement. According to TFA, the Congressional subcommittee that's responsible for funding various scientific endeavors into new energy sources asked Purdue to review its finding. So Purdue reopened the case, and is again putting Taleyarkhan through the wringer.
On a side note, shouldn't this be listed under "Science" rather than "Hardware"?
Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:4, Interesting)
You need to remember, Tokamak is basically a REALLY LARGE Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. It uses different technologies to accomplish its goal, but both devices perform plasma confinement to achieve fusion.
Parent
Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:5, Informative)
Tokamaks and Fusors do indeed work by plasma confinement, but the methods are so different that you can't really call a Tokamak a big Fusor. Tokamaks use magnetic fields to try to force the plasma together, while Fusors use the charge of the plasma itself [wikipedia.org] to keep it together. In addition, instead of inducing massive current in the plasma to heat it, Fusors simply accelerate the particles to the energies necessary, because of the favorable MeV/K conversion (for example, 15 keV = 174 megakelvins) [wikipedia.org], thus making the device far simpler and easier to operate (just compare the size of a typical Tokamak to that of a typical Fusor), as well as requiring much less energy.
Again, your point is valid, but Tokamaks aren't that similar to Fusors.
Parent
Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
On another note. I always found it interesting that D+D = He4 fusion is rejected by the physicists because the resulting He4 would have too much energy and eject a neutron to become He3. So why then does He4 constitute 90-something percent of the naturally occurring helium? What is the reaction that is supposed to produce this atom? It's just a question, I'm not claiming anyone is right or wrong with this. I really want to understand where it is supposed to come from.
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Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:4, Informative)
(1) H + H = D + positron + energy (since really H is all that is around initially)
(2) D + H = He3 + energy
(3) He3 + He3 = He4 + 2*H
From what I remember from the classes I've had covering this, there is a lot of energy considerations and collisional cross section issues that make it occur this way. 2 deuteriums would indeed make a He4 nucleus that is too unstable to last very long, so it undertakes this somewhat convoluted but more quiescent path. Also in these considerations usually H is in much better supply than D is, so the probabilities are better for (2) to happen than your way.
IIRC in certain situations (like a nuclear bomb) when you can do it there is also the possibility of
(4) Tritium + H = He4 + energy
but I'm pretty sure that you need to seed that with quite a bit of tritium to get it to work reliably.
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CNO cycle - nuclear catalyst (Score:4, Interesting)
Just as a chemical catalyst reduces the energy needed to perform a chemical reaction, and allows certain reactions to take place that couldn't happen directly, so does a nuclear catalyst allow nuclear reactions to take place at lower energies than would otherwise be needed.
This also explains why oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon are so common, as well.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Food for thought -- just supposing Taleyarkhan really produced sonofusion (however much of a stretch that might be), who stands to gain and who stands to lose if someone really produces a net-positive energy fusion reaction? How quickly would Congresscritters bought and paid for by big oil want to shut him up?
I'm not saying he did or didn't do it -- it's just that I'm betting if
Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
They hedged that bet a long time ago.
So, fission, fusion, whatever the "ENERGY" companies have expertise and resources to do it on a huge scale, which will net them a profit...
Corporations are smarter than you think... for the most part.
Parent
Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
American big oil would LOVE commercial fusion. North America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, tar sands, and oil shale, which lack only cheap energy to turn them into quality liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Cheap energy is also a prerequisite for turning fossil fuels into value-added plastics and nanofibers. Small fusion reactors would be excellent for the business of international cargo ships, and might even be adaptable to rail locomotives if the neutron flux is low enough. Fixed-location fusion reactors could also take up much of the New England heating load, perhaps even by effecient steam distribution in dense cities, freeing valuable fuel oils for transportation use, and freeing valuable natural gas for chemical synthesis. Cheap fusion would also help alleviate the impending fuel crisis caused by China's booming industrialization.
What do these things have in common? They cut American, Chinese, and Japanese ties to Middle Eastern oil fields. That would leave graying, shrinking Europe as their last captive market, not an exciting prospect for an ambitious imperial theocrat or Saudi prince.
Sure, commercial fusion would hurt some Big Oil markets, but overall I think it would open more opportunities than it closes. In the long run, all fossil fuels are destined to become more valuable for manufacturing than combustion.
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Re:Clearing Up Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
The more important error is that Purdue did *not* clear him of all wrongdoing, just of a sketchy authorship complaint. To quote the second and third freaking sentences of the article:
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Re:Omitted himself? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it was supposed to be independent verification of Taleyarkhan's claims. If he really did coauthor the paper, then his research was NOT independently verified. If his research was not independently verified, then funding may have provided on false or misleading data.
Parent
Congress is just technical enough ... (Score:5, Funny)
Lost credibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lost credibility (Score:4, Informative)
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Sharpton and Jackson (Score:5, Insightful)
What Sharpton and Jackson do is insert themselves into situations where race is an issue for their own gain. They care nothing about the people involved - only the increase of their fame, wealth, and power. They frequently involve themselves in situations where their presence is not needed or wanted. The latest example is Jesse Jackson meeting with the Atlanta Braves because of the lack of black ballplayers on their roster. It's ridiculous to think that a professional sports team would want to hire any but the best players they can afford. If the Braves were in a position to hire Ryan Howard, Barry Bonds, and Derek Lee, do you think that they would hesitate because the players are black?
The worst thing about Jackson and Sharpton is that they insult blacks because they further the notion that blacks need help to get ahead.
Parent
It's all in how you say it. (Score:5, Funny)
Jackson/Sharpton/Duke 3 of a kind (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy crap, I think the Asian community can do without the likes of people like Jesse "Heimy Town" Jackson and Al "Tawana Brawley" Sharpton. They represent their communities about as well as David Duke represents his...
"Taleyarkhan" is asian? (Score:3, Funny)
Congressional Investigation over Paper Authorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, mastershake_phd makes an interesting comment. "There must be something im missing here, what motive could congress have to investigate this guy? This isnt some major incident, most of the public hasnt even heard about this. I wonder what they are after."
Run your clock back a year ago. He was accused of spiking his experiment with Californium. Turns out that that whole assault was based on theoretical calculations and speculation. As much as some people wanted to "prove" that he had committed experimental fraud, they have so far, failed to make their case.
I suspect that there is much more to this story than reported by the Times. An inquisitive person who looks at the larger span of events, http://newenergytimes.com/BubbleTrouble/BFControv
As someone who has spent the last six years investigating controversial science, I have a good sense of the difficulties of new, poorly-understood science.
The challenge of replication in unchartered scientific territory is not to be taken lightly and readily dismissed as "evidence" of non-science. Many people in the field of science, when pushed, will admit that one can never prove a negative, no matter how may attempts fail.
I am also keenly aware of the multitude of human issues in high-profile science; among these, intellectual property, intellectual primacy, competition for funding and grants.
The bold, outspoken criticisms of respected scientists in the popular media do not always make it easy for the lay reader to distinguish between science fact and science politics.
The important question to ask here, is, why all the fuss, and why a Congressional inquiry about who is listed on a science paper?
Steven Krivit Editor, New Energy Times
Re:Congressional Investigation over Paper Authorsh (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has actually done controversial science for a living, I have a good sense of how all science worth doing is new and poorly understood, and how little appreciation of that fact people on the fringe have.
In every experiment there are things that make you go, "Hmmm..." Almost all of the time they are irrelevant, and it is a matter of taste and good judgement as to when you spend the time and effort to follow up on them. People who have never done real experiments or who are very badly trained fail to appreciate this, and therefore ascribe to every anomaly a significance that it does not have.
There are several consequences of this: good scientists sometimes miss significant anomalies; bad scientists sometimes make important discoveries; good scientists spend almost all their time generating well-quantified reproducible results that accumulate to the betterment of humanity; bad scientists spend almost all their time pursuing irrelevant anomalies and telling everyone how smart they are.
Every experimental scientist knows that it is possible to prove a negative, and we do it all the time. They are called null results. The entire field of physics beyond the standard model has been generating reams of these for the past couple of decades. We know, for example, that neutrinoless double beta decay does NOT happen with a lifetime of less than some large number. The ABSENCE of a signal is the result. Likewise, we know that the 17 keV neutrino does NOT exist, and the experiments that proved it were designed in the manner of all such: they demonstrated that A=>B, and then showed !B, and therefore !A by modus tollens.
For example, if you have a working tachometer, and it reads zero, your engine is not running, because if your engine is running your working tachometer will read more than 100 RPM. Any such experiment involves a good deal of secondary experimental work to demonstrate that the tachometer really is working, and isolating it from any possible unexpected effects, but at the end of the day you are always detecting a phenomenon that is well-known, like a beta spectrum or the number of neutrons being produced, or in the case of a tachometer a spinning shaft.
Fringe scientists have a tendency to invoke "new physics" to explain why no one else measures the shaft spinning when they do. Good scientists understand that spinning is spinning, no matter what causes it, and that for the fringe scientist to be right everything we know about tachometers must be wrong, and that is simply not plausible.
Parent
Correct response (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead Taleyarkhan responded with an Appeal to motive [wikipedia.org], a logical fallacy. Big red flag in my book.
They aren't civil rights leaders (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Jackson and Sharpton are simple charlatans using race as a springboard for their own agendas. Civil rights is color blind. It'd be handy if people we believe to be civil rights leaders would start practicing that.
Has anyone ever heard of a case where Jackson and Sharpton have acted in the interest of the Asian community? Hispanic? American Indian? Arab Americans? Yugoslavs? Romanians? Jews?
Re:congress? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA, it would appear that it has to do with the administration of research grant money. If you make false/exaggerated claims, manipulate your results, omit your name from being party to research that substantiates your claims, all while having your research federally funded (at least partially), is why congressional oversight is getting involved.
Parent
Sonoluminescence is very, very cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sonoluminescence is really one of the easiest, cheapest ways to achieve simultaneously high pressures and high temperatures in a controlled fashion. Seriously. All you need is a jar of (ideally "de-gassed" or boiled) water, a piezo-electric speaker, something to drive it with at a certain frequency, and another microphone to detect when you are in resonance. Heck, you don't even need a microphone (by the end of the summer, I had developed my sense of hearing that I could detect the resonance and achieve the sonoluminescence without a microphone and a scope).
Trust me, people don't understand sonoluminescence well enough yet to actually rule out the possibility that enough heat and pressure occur to produce a few fusion reactions. These are a few of the something like a half-dozen theories on the source of the light of sonoluminescence: the Casimir effect (relativistic accelerating refractive index interfaces... more unlikely than sonofusion), Bremsstrahlung radiation, smeared spectral lines, and plain old Blackbody radiation.
I am glad some research money went to this guy. I say he should get more! I mean, this is NOTHING like cold fusion, and I believe that money should be spread out when it comes to fusion research, not just concentrated into a money-hole like the ITER project, which if it produces any positive net-energy, it will be from burning the $100 bills of the tax-payers (not just US tax-payers, either).
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