The contents of the piece were, as such, credible: the scientists who came up with the technique had patented it and even expressed that it was good only in principle and that they hadn't taken the trouble to verify it practically. The published paper is available here and the patent report here.
Now, it's not as if just the tone of the article was amiss - if it was only that, I wouldn't be concerned. The piece read like Sudarshan had assumed a lot of numbers and techniques to make his point. If he had done his due and had gone about reporting the development as any honest science reporter would have, it would be a fantastic article capable of inspiring research in India.
# The piece opens by saying a Dr Rossi was inspired by the Fleischmann-Pons experiment of '89 to start working with cold fusion. The FP experiment was debunked and trashed few months after it came out, and anyone who was inspired by that to continue in that very line of work is not going to be taken seriously easily. Given that the latter half of the article says how Rossi's work isn't in the cold fusion category but the low-energy nuclear reactions one, the reference to the FP experiment is just counter-productive.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Dr Andrea Rossi"]
[/caption]The piece portrays the US Department of Energy as sceptics for running down cold fusion. The DoE had reasons. They weren't the only ones who ran down cold fusion: it was defenestrated by the entire scientific community!
Tip: when it comes to science reporting, please don't distort reality by leaving out the context. It's just... stupid. Who are you benefitting when you write like that? Not the academic community, not the people involved in the research, not the people. It's just an opinion. Write it like it should be written.
# Next: Rossi's device is mentioned as something that "produces lots of energy." How? When did it produce lots of energy?
The piece says Dr Rossi challenged Dr Focardi, a physicist from the University of Bologna, to find faults with the device. After Sudarshan writes that Focardi failed in his attempts, he leaves the plot hanging there to hint that the device, having been vetted by ONE physicist, actually works.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="294" caption="Rossi with Dr Sergio Focardi"]
[/caption]What's missing are these: Have Rossi and Focardi published the evidence of that much energy? If they haven't published it, where did you get your opinion from? If they have published it, why are you afraid to print it?
#
"Four years later, Rossi unveiled the device that amplifies energy."
How is that possible without a second source of energy to perform the amplification? If there is no second source, then the sacrosanct first law of thermodynamics stands violated! Worse yet, these are Sudarshan's words, not Rossi's, and will pass muster only when spoken by other physicists who are willing to endorse Rossi's claims with sufficient evidence.
Sudarshan should have chosen his words more carefully. For someone reading the paper whose physics education was stopped and forgotten with high school, saying energy can be amplified without a second input can bypass the importance of the first law. To illustrate another instance of Sudarshan's foot-in-mouth disease, the piece says,
"Once you have steam, it is a matter of time before it is converted into electricity."
Sounds like there are going to be 17th century alchemists on stand-by as the reaction progresses.
#
"This is how it works: a minute amount of hydrogen is heated in a lead-covered chamber ... containing nickel powder. The hydrogen converts the nickel to copper and in the process, heat is given off, as well as low energy gamma rays."
Since when does hot hydrogen convert nickel to copper? Since when does hot hydrogen convert nickel to copper and release heat?
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="560" caption="In the Periodic Table of elements, nickel (Ni) and copper (Cu) are numbered 28 and 29, which are their respective atomic numbers (the number of protons in their nuclei)."]
[/caption]The nuclear transmutation of nickel to copper is an energy-consuming reaction: the copper nucleus is heavier, meaning the nickel nucleus is more stable naturally. Because Rossi is going the other way, he must be using an isotope of nickel (a variant of the metal that contains an extra few neutrons in its nucleus while keeping the number of protons intact). Which isotope of nickel?
This is where it gets even better: Ni-48 is one of the most stable isotopes on the planet, Ni-56 is produced by supernovae and not available easily on Earth, Ni-58 - the most abundant - forms by the decay of copper-58, Ni-59 and Ni-60 are available in extremely small quantities, Ni-62 is the product of nuclear fusion reactions, Ni-64 is formed by the electron-capture of copper-64, and the solar system doesn't have enough Ni-78 to have let Dr Rossi experiment with it.
What Sudarshan should have done is explained for the layman what really happens with the heating of hydrogen instead of deliberately misleading the paper's readers. When the hydrogen is heated in the presence of nickel as a catalyst, its electrons and protons are separated from each other and deposited in the spaces between nickel atoms in the metal's crystal lattice.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="426" caption="The nickel crystal lattice, with the black dots indicating the positions nickel atoms will occupy"]
[/caption]The remaining unpaired protons are, according to the patent, "statistically captured" by the nickel atoms. If you read the word "statistically" anywhere in a journal or patent report, it means that there's only a chance of that event happening. In other words, if the process is repeated over and over again, it will have happened enough times to warrant a practical consideration.
The rest is easy. The nickel isotope that captures a proton becomes heavier and gradually decays into an isotope of copper, releasing low-energy gamma rays. Further, the copper-isotope that results is heavier compared to its natural form, and gradually decays by emitting positrons and gamma rays. When such a positron encounters an electrons, anti-matter will meet matter and they will annihilate, releasing a gamma ray and a neutrino.
The lead encasement within which all this will occur will be capable of trapping the gamma rays and converting them into thermal energy. Another smaller source of energy is that when copper decays by the emission of gamma rays, it recoils, like a gun recoils after firing a bullet. This recoil is absorbed by the surrounding lattice of nickel atoms and gives rise to a vibration in the crystal that is slowly dissipated as heat.
The reason this proposed technique will work only in principle is that, for practical feasibility, the total amount of energy released should be demonstrably greater than the total amount of energy consumed. Otherwise, it's only an energy sink.
# With apologies for the digression, we now circle back to Sudarshan's article.
"Apparently the device heated Rossi's factory continuously for two years."
Do I dare ask where the attribution is? Why do apparent occurrences make it into a report that's supposed to be festering with hope, intent on sinking it with dubiousness? Moreover, instead of saying the device powered the factory for two years, the piece could have mentioned how much power that amounted to. There is another incidence of this "apparent" business when Sudarshan says,
"One gram of nickel apparently can produce 23,000 MW-hours of energy."
Making these many "apparent" claims makes the piece read like the work of a rumour-monger.
# Which it could easily be because the ONE reference that Sudarshan points to right at the bottom of the article is e-cat.com. Yes, the reference is not a neutral-third party or a collection of papers produced Rossi or Focardi but Rossi's website that smacks of desperation to have his solution proven practically.
This article is a discussion of the newspaper report only. If you're looking for physics of it and whether or not Dr Rossi's new device will ever see the light of day, you could go here. As a scientist put it,
"Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion."
2 comments: