From: hal@finney.org
Date: Mon Mar 04 2002 - 17:51:28 MST
Coming soon to a front page near you:
Science magazine, the premiere American scientific journal published by
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, will publish
Friday an article reporting on apparent nuclear fusion in a tabletop
glass of liquid.
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/hottopics/bubble/index.shtml has
the technical article, a readable explanation, and an editorial comment
about the decision to publish the paper in the face of a failure to
replicate and an "airy dismissal" by Robert Park of the American Physical
society (visible for now at http://www.aps.org/WN/). Of course memories
of the cold fusion debacle loomed large and apparently considerable
pressure was brought to bear to postpone publication, to no avail.
Unlike the old cold fusion results, this one is based on sonoluminescence,
a poorly understood phenomenon in which tiny bubbles in liquid,
compressed by sound waves, emit intense heat and light. The liquid is
"heavy acetone", CH3COCH3 in which the hydrogen atoms have been replaced
by deuterium (acetone is common nail polish remover). The researchers
report detecting two signs of fusion: tritium (helium 3) and bursts of
neutrons.
Even if confirmed, this result would probably not lend itself to
the water-fueled cars and other fantasies that the Utah cold fusion
experiments suggested. It would be mostly useful as an inexpensive
testbed for nuclear fusion research. But it would certainly be
amazing if an exotic phenomonen like fusion could be produced using
sonoluminescence, which is simple enough to be the subject of amateur
experiments (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucapwas/sl/sono.html).
Hal
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