cold fusion?

[rone]

No, i'm not talking about my company's inherited product.  palecur alerted me about this report.  This section,

The new cold fusion experiment went something like this: scientists inserted a small pyroelectric crystal (lithium tantalite) inside a chamber filled with hydrogen. Warming the crystal by about 100 degrees (from -30 F to 45F) produced a huge electrical field of about 100,000 volts across the small crystal.

provoked this response.

<lammah> dilithium!

The best part, for me, was in the summation at the end:

The current cold fusion apparatus still takes much more energy to start up than you get back out, and it may never end up breaking even.

"May"??  You mean there's a possibility we could defeat the specter of entropy?  Zounds!

Comments

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I swear to you that says "sphincter of entropy".

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

No matter how tightly you clench, a little gas always escapes.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

(1) "Entropy" does not refer to not being able to get more energy out than you put in (2) The wording's kind of sloppy, but they're comparing to reactions in which you do get more energy in useful form out than what you put in, an example of which would be your everyday charcoal fire (mmmm, hot dogs) (3) Idiot news media seem incapable of understanding this experiment has nothing to do with fusion as a power source; what the researchers are excited about is having come up with a compact neutron source.

[frosch.livejournal.com]

Idiot news media were also incapable of understanding that the ARPA Net had nothing to do with Usenet, LiveJournal, Yahoo, or BitTorrent, but was all about enabling flag officers of the US Navy to make fun of incompetent Soviet submarine navigation.