Friday, November 28, 2008
It's been almost 20 years since the March 23, 1989 announcement that cold
fusion had been discovered by two chemists at the University of Utah. By
June, cold fusion was an object of ridicule. A small band of embattled
defenders retreated to holding annual conferences of like-minded
scientists to which skeptics were not welcome. The story now seems to be
entering a new chapter. Believers have begun showing a willingness to
confront skeptics, submitting papers to open meetings of major scientific
societies. They no longer use the term "cold fusion," preferring the less
contentious "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR) to describe their field;
LENR more accurately describes what, if anything, is going on. However,
the use of LENR has been undone by referring to "excess heat" as the
Fleischmann-Pons effect. This only serves as a reminder of the outrageous
conduct of the university administration and the incredibly sloppy
research on which the claim was based. This year, there is great
excitement over the work of Yoshiaki Arata, a respected professor at Osaka
University. In May Arata demonstrated the production of excess heat to an
audience of 80, but there have been many such claims over the years and
until it is replicated by someone outside the LENR community and a
plausible explanation is advanced, it will change few minds.
It was clear back in mid-September that Wired had a brief article naming a
group of scientist who were advising the Democratic candidate: Harold
Varmus, 1989 Nobel in Medicine and former director of NIH, led the group,
which included Gilbert Omenn, 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine, professor of
medicine at the University of Michigan, Peter Agre, 2003 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry, dean of medicine at Duke, Donald Lamb professor of astronomy
and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who does not yet have the
Nobel Prize, and Sharon Long, plant biologist and former dean of science
and humanities at Stanford. It is a sterling group of independent
thinkers. Heavy on the bio-medical end perhaps, reflecting the great
progress in that area in recent years. But their names have not come up
since, and the focus in Obama's camp has been on technologists.
It was a busy week on the lSS which had its tenth birthday. The space
shuttle Endeavor was docked to the station to help with the remodeling,
which added two bedrooms and a second toilet. It took four space walks
to free a rotating joint on a solar panel that must face directly toward
the sun to provide additional power, needed to double the crew from three
to six. My joints don't work like they used to either. They look great
on the evening news, but space walks are the most dangerous part of an
astronaut's job. Inside the ISS they tinkered with a device to convert
urine and perspiration to drinking water. The technology is not exactly
new; the city of Washington takes its water out of the Potomac above the
city, passes it through the guts of two million people, and returns it to
the river below the city as pure as bottled water sold as "pure spring
water," but that's another story. The extra water is needed for a crew of
six.
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