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What is Cold Fusion? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Kay Daniel, you're a big science witch and fan. Right.
0:10
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, When something new is on Netflix, if it's
0:12
Speaker 1: science fiction, I'll almost always watch the first five minutes,
0:15
Speaker 1: even if it's about a giant's bays banana. Hey, you
0:18
Speaker 1: make that movie, I will watch it. But is that
0:21
Speaker 1: something you watch with your family? Do you? Is your
0:24
Speaker 1: wife into science fiction? Ah, that's a bit of a
0:26
Speaker 1: bone of contention over the remote. I would say her
0:28
Speaker 1: taste are a bit different. She doesn't like science fiction.
0:31
Speaker 1: Let's just say she doesn't necessarily choose them for the science.
0:34
Speaker 1: They don't need to be correct for her to enjoy them.
0:37
Speaker 1: That's right. I mean, she's also a scientist, but she's
0:40
Speaker 1: able to suspend disbelief and she finds other things in
0:43
Speaker 1: these movies to make them appealing. Oh yeah, what's her
0:46
Speaker 1: favorite science fiction movie? It's kind of embarrassing though, for
0:48
Speaker 1: me as a physicist, because her favorite science fiction movie
0:52
Speaker 1: is called Cold Fusion, which has like so many terrible
0:56
Speaker 1: plot holes in it, but the one redeeming feature is
0:59
Speaker 1: that it stars he and leaves wearing a U Chicago sweatshirt,
1:02
Speaker 1: which is her alma matter. Hi am poorhand. I'm the
1:21
Speaker 1: creator of PhD comics and the co author of the
1:24
Speaker 1: book We Have No Idea, A Guy to the Unknown Universe. Hi,
1:27
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and coincidentally, I'm also
1:31
Speaker 1: the co author of the book We Have No Idea,
1:33
Speaker 1: A Guide to the Unknown Universe. What are the chances
1:36
Speaker 1: what you wrote that book to? I mostly wrote it
1:38
Speaker 1: together with some guy I was emailing with online. And
1:42
Speaker 1: how did you meet this this man Tinder? It did
1:46
Speaker 1: involve the Internet. That's those the only details I'll go into.
1:49
Speaker 1: And involved something else cold, right, you cold emailed me.
1:53
Speaker 1: That's right, just a cold email out into the Internet
1:56
Speaker 1: to look for a creative partner. But welcome to our podcast,
1:59
Speaker 1: Daniel and or Hey Explain the Universe, a production of
2:02
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio in which we reach out to you
2:05
Speaker 1: through the various hot and cold tubes of the Internet
2:08
Speaker 1: to try to explain to you all the crazy, all
2:11
Speaker 1: the crazy and amazing things that we find in our
2:14
Speaker 1: universe and make them make sense to you. All the
2:17
Speaker 1: amazing processes out there and science and technology and facts
2:23
Speaker 1: that maybe we can use one day to our advantage
2:25
Speaker 1: as a human species. That's right. One goal of physics
2:28
Speaker 1: is to understand the world so that we can tame it, right,
2:31
Speaker 1: to use it to our advantage, to build new technology,
2:34
Speaker 1: to transform what it means to be humans, what it's
2:37
Speaker 1: like to live as a human in the modern world,
2:39
Speaker 1: and of course at the core of that is energy.
2:41
Speaker 1: So to be on the program, we'll be talking about
2:43
Speaker 1: a technology or I guess the physics concept that could
2:47
Speaker 1: potentially solve all of humanity's problems, right, That's how they've
2:51
Speaker 1: been selling it since the eighties. Yeah, exactly. It's sort
2:54
Speaker 1: of the holy grail of physics. If it works, then
2:57
Speaker 1: everything will change. I mean, imagine if energy was cheap
3:00
Speaker 1: or even free, almost everything that we do in life
3:04
Speaker 1: could be made easier with energy. Yeah. Is there something
3:07
Speaker 1: in our knowledge of physics, like and how the animals
3:10
Speaker 1: are put together, or the courts, or the particles that
3:13
Speaker 1: we could use to solve our energy crisis. It seems
3:17
Speaker 1: like it must be. I mean, we live in such
3:19
Speaker 1: an energetic universe. We're always talking on this podcast about
3:22
Speaker 1: particles going at the speed of light, or enormous huge
3:25
Speaker 1: balls of fire we call the sun, right, or a
3:28
Speaker 1: crazy black holes squishing things and beaming out jets from galaxies. Like,
3:32
Speaker 1: there's so many energetic processes out there. So much energy
3:36
Speaker 1: is just stored in the matter around us. It's still
3:39
Speaker 1: it's frustrating to me that we have such difficulty tapping
3:41
Speaker 1: into it, that we're you know, digging up buried plants
3:45
Speaker 1: and burning them in order to extract the tiny little
3:47
Speaker 1: bit of energy that's our best idea so far. It
3:49
Speaker 1: seems Yeah, it seems like we should have figured out
3:51
Speaker 1: something better by now, given the incredible amounts of energy
3:54
Speaker 1: all around us and the huge processes. You know, it's
3:57
Speaker 1: like we're, um, we're at a buffet. We're just like
3:59
Speaker 1: new building on the crumbs that have fallen off the table.
4:02
Speaker 1: We're filling up on the salad, which is a rookie
4:04
Speaker 1: mistake for buffet's exactly if you pay for the buffet,
4:09
Speaker 1: goes straight for the main course. Exactly. Yeah. So today
4:12
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about one such technology or piece of
4:16
Speaker 1: science that could change everything. So today on the program,
4:19
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about cold fusion. What is it? Is
4:28
Speaker 1: it cold? Or is it? Is that? The name of
4:31
Speaker 1: a new sports drink from Gatorade. It's going to be
4:33
Speaker 1: the name of a new sports drink once we get
4:35
Speaker 1: off this podcast and go pitch it to Mountain Dew
4:37
Speaker 1: as part of their Extreme Universe Drink series. Yeah, on
4:43
Speaker 1: a bottle of dark energy. Nobody wants a bottle of
4:47
Speaker 1: dark matter though, that's not gonna say, but yeah. Cold fusion.
4:51
Speaker 1: Cold fusion is a is a topic that's been bouncing
4:53
Speaker 1: around in physics for decades and decades, and you know,
4:56
Speaker 1: for a long time it was the dream of scientists
4:59
Speaker 1: to achieve USUAN without having to build basically the Sun
5:03
Speaker 1: in miniature. And then for a while it seemed like
5:06
Speaker 1: maybe it was possible. No, maybe it was impossible. Now
5:09
Speaker 1: people are saying maybe it's possible again. Yeah, it's been
5:11
Speaker 1: around for a while, right, I remember, I think it
5:14
Speaker 1: was a big deal in the seventies and eighties. That's
5:16
Speaker 1: when they first thought maybe it could be possible. It
5:18
Speaker 1: was in the late eighties when there was a lot
5:20
Speaker 1: of media coverage over some experiments that turned out to
5:23
Speaker 1: maybe not be a scientifically valid and so people sort
5:26
Speaker 1: of gave up. But recently you're saying, there has been
5:29
Speaker 1: new things that maybe make people think it is possible.
5:33
Speaker 1: There's always another opportunity. You know. This is the thing
5:35
Speaker 1: about physics is that something seems impossible, but there's always
5:39
Speaker 1: a little window. There's always a little crack. Maybe you
5:42
Speaker 1: could figure out if you were clever enough, you could
5:44
Speaker 1: be the one to solve this problem. I like to
5:46
Speaker 1: fantasize about that. You know that there's like two eras
5:50
Speaker 1: in history. There's like before I figured out this incredible
5:53
Speaker 1: problem and after, right, because there are stories like that
5:57
Speaker 1: people who have cracked long standing problems or come up
5:59
Speaker 1: with some new ideas, some new technology that really did
6:02
Speaker 1: change the way things work. And cold fusion, if you
6:05
Speaker 1: could achieve it would be in that category, would change everything.
6:09
Speaker 1: Might let us a lift forever as a species, right,
6:11
Speaker 1: we could maybe go to other stars with it. Yeah,
6:14
Speaker 1: it would basically solve almost every problem. Like you're worried
6:17
Speaker 1: about enough fresh drinking water, just use some energy desalinate
6:20
Speaker 1: the ocean. You're worried about overheating the planet, use some
6:24
Speaker 1: energy to pump C or two out into space. You know,
6:27
Speaker 1: everything costs energy in the end, Almost every problem except
6:30
Speaker 1: for people being mean to each other, cost energy. Even
6:34
Speaker 1: that one actually because in the end, um you know,
6:37
Speaker 1: war and and and all those kind of things come
6:40
Speaker 1: down to competition for resources. But if energy is free
6:43
Speaker 1: or very very plentiful, then there's enough resource to make
6:46
Speaker 1: enough food, to dig up enough gold to do almost
6:48
Speaker 1: everything you want for everybody. Well, for that you need
6:50
Speaker 1: people fusion. That's a different kind of physics altogether. That's
6:55
Speaker 1: a not safe for working. So today we'll explain to
6:59
Speaker 1: you guys and playing to everyone out there, what is
7:01
Speaker 1: cold fusion. But first we were wondering what people know
7:05
Speaker 1: about it? How much do they know what it is? Yeah,
7:07
Speaker 1: it's one of the topics in science that really did
7:10
Speaker 1: leak out into very broad public and for a while
7:14
Speaker 1: it seemed like we were on the verge of an
7:15
Speaker 1: incredible breakthrough. But then again, that was, you know, thirty
7:18
Speaker 1: years ago, and so I was I really didn't know
7:20
Speaker 1: whether people had heard of this or had an idea
7:23
Speaker 1: whether it was possible. So I went into this with
7:25
Speaker 1: an open mind. So, as usual, Daniel went out and
7:27
Speaker 1: asked people, random people on the street if they knew
7:30
Speaker 1: what cold fusion was. Here's what they had to say.
7:33
Speaker 1: I'm guessing it's doing fusion at lower temperatures. But uh,
7:37
Speaker 1: I mean, I've heard that fusion in general was really
7:40
Speaker 1: tough to achieve pressure. I'm not sure on that one.
7:44
Speaker 1: Cold fusion I have not no no idea so in
7:50
Speaker 1: order to fuse two metals, you have to heat it up.
7:53
Speaker 1: But when you're like say, like in a vacuum, like
7:55
Speaker 1: in space, that there's like electrons just flowing on it.
7:59
Speaker 1: And but in ace, it's uh, like in a vacuum
8:02
Speaker 1: like like you don't need the heat, you know, when
8:05
Speaker 1: you think out the blood, I guess right, fusion is
8:07
Speaker 1: when you take up the blood so cold you just
8:10
Speaker 1: do it like frozen animal body or whatever. I don't know,
8:13
Speaker 1: I've heard the words. I have no idea what they mean.
8:16
Speaker 1: Where would be your best guess? Um, probably something to
8:19
Speaker 1: do with producing nuclear energy, right, So a lot of
8:21
Speaker 1: nose and a couple of confusions, not cold fusions exactly exactly.
8:28
Speaker 1: Some some people had it sort of mentally adjacent to
8:32
Speaker 1: other topics. Um, I got a very long explanation of
8:35
Speaker 1: how cold welding works. You know, how to learn something
8:40
Speaker 1: I did. I didn't know that you could do welding
8:42
Speaker 1: in space, right, that you don't necessarily need like oxygen
8:45
Speaker 1: and air and and fire to join two pieces of metal.
8:48
Speaker 1: So thank you for the mini lecture I received on
8:50
Speaker 1: cold welding. And some people thought it meant transfusion like
8:53
Speaker 1: a blood transfusion. Yeah, and that you know, hey, they
8:57
Speaker 1: freeze blood, right, and then they have thoughts. So that's
8:59
Speaker 1: sort of a hold transfusion. It makes some sense, right.
9:03
Speaker 1: I'm impressed when people don't have any idea what I'm
9:05
Speaker 1: talking about, but sort of on the fly come up
9:07
Speaker 1: with something reasonable to say. That's you know, that's creative thinking.
9:11
Speaker 1: And to be honest, I didn't really know what it
9:13
Speaker 1: was until a couple of years ago I got hired
9:17
Speaker 1: to do a comic and a video about Cold Future. Yeah,
9:20
Speaker 1: you have an excellent video. There's no shame in not
9:22
Speaker 1: knowing what it is. I see, that's the standard. If
9:24
Speaker 1: Jore doesn't know about it, then it's acceptable to be ignorant.
9:28
Speaker 1: If that's a standard, then everyone, uh is pretty safe
9:31
Speaker 1: because I don't I don't really know that much. But
9:33
Speaker 1: then everybody needs to have watched every science fiction movie
9:36
Speaker 1: ever also, right, Yeah, that's right. So in the opening
9:38
Speaker 1: we talked about the movie with canaries called Cold Fusion.
9:43
Speaker 1: And you're not a fan of the science in that movie. No,
9:45
Speaker 1: I um, I've watched it once decades ago, refused to
9:49
Speaker 1: watch it again, but I remember thinking, oh my god,
9:52
Speaker 1: that makes no sense. Or they clearly just did that
9:55
Speaker 1: so some guy could drive a motorcycle through a bunch
9:57
Speaker 1: of explosions. So the plot of the movie is what
10:00
Speaker 1: Kenna rees is trying to achieve cold fusion to solve
10:03
Speaker 1: all of our energy problems. Yeah, I think Keanu Reeves
10:05
Speaker 1: does achieve cold fusion, and then there's a struggle over
10:08
Speaker 1: control of it um. But then it basically just you know,
10:12
Speaker 1: digresses into a bunch of motorcycles driving through explosions, as
10:16
Speaker 1: does every movie, it seems every movie with Kenna Reeves
10:19
Speaker 1: in it at least. All right, well, let's get into
10:25
Speaker 1: it then, Daniel. So there's two words, your cold and fusion,
10:30
Speaker 1: and somehow you've put it together. Then it's a revolutionary concept.
10:33
Speaker 1: So what goes through? What is cold fusion? Or let's
10:36
Speaker 1: start with fusion. What is fusion? Right? So what is fusion?
10:39
Speaker 1: You see fusion every day every day you go outside
10:42
Speaker 1: and you bathe yourself in sunlight. You are standing and
10:45
Speaker 1: being warmed by the fires of an enormous thermonuclear fusion
10:49
Speaker 1: reactor called the sun. Right, So fusion is what happens
10:52
Speaker 1: inside the sun. It generates all that heat, which is
10:55
Speaker 1: a source of all life on Earth. Right, so thank
10:58
Speaker 1: you fusion. Without fusion, we would have nothing. And fusion
11:01
Speaker 1: very simply is just a way to release energy. You
11:05
Speaker 1: take two helium, sorry, you take two hydrogen nuclei, which
11:09
Speaker 1: are just protons, and you push them together to make
11:12
Speaker 1: a new element. Right, you're transforming hydrogen into helium. You
11:16
Speaker 1: push them together, they stick together to make a new
11:19
Speaker 1: nucleus with two protons in it. And that helium nucleus
11:23
Speaker 1: has less energy in it than the two hydrogens did.
11:26
Speaker 1: So what happens is that some energy is released. Are
11:28
Speaker 1: you make this and there's some energy left over, but
11:31
Speaker 1: you don't need, right, and so it just gets released
11:34
Speaker 1: in photons and energy. And that's that's burning, right, that's
11:37
Speaker 1: the fusion burning. So if I walk outside and I
11:40
Speaker 1: get a suntan, that's fusion. You were getting burned by fusion.
11:43
Speaker 1: You're fusion toasted. Well, something I never understood was why
11:46
Speaker 1: does helium, which is what when you get when you
11:50
Speaker 1: merge or fuse to hydrogen atoms, why does the combination
11:54
Speaker 1: of them have less energy? That's a great question, you know,
11:57
Speaker 1: like what happened to that energy? Why does it? What?
12:00
Speaker 1: Do you need less energy to make something that's like
12:02
Speaker 1: one plus one. That's a great question, but you're not
12:04
Speaker 1: really making one plus one. It's like, um, it's like
12:07
Speaker 1: one plus one equals one point nine, right, it's um.
12:11
Speaker 1: You're not just taking those two protons and putting them
12:13
Speaker 1: next to each other. Those protons are interacting. They're connected,
12:16
Speaker 1: right because remember this nucleus um holds itself together like
12:19
Speaker 1: acts like one thing. It's not just like two protons
12:21
Speaker 1: near each other. They're really they're fused, hence the word
12:25
Speaker 1: into one thing. On another episode, we talked about how
12:28
Speaker 1: that stays together because remember these are two protons. They're
12:31
Speaker 1: positively charged. They should be pushing away from each other. Right, Well,
12:34
Speaker 1: there's very strong forces that hold these two protons together,
12:37
Speaker 1: involving how the corks connect and and so the mass
12:42
Speaker 1: of that nucleus is reflected by the energy of these bonds.
12:46
Speaker 1: And so you shouldn't think of it as two hydrogen
12:48
Speaker 1: out and you think of it like the corks that
12:51
Speaker 1: are inside those hydrogen nuclei being rearranged into a helium nucleus.
12:56
Speaker 1: And it's all about that arrangement. You know, how those
12:58
Speaker 1: corks are sitting near each other. Yeah, I guess I
13:01
Speaker 1: forget that protons are made out of smaller bits, which
13:04
Speaker 1: are quarks. And so you're saying that in one hydrogen atom,
13:07
Speaker 1: I need a certain amount of energy to keep in
13:09
Speaker 1: those quarts together, but once I emerged two hydrogen atoms,
13:13
Speaker 1: you need less energy to hold all those little bits together,
13:16
Speaker 1: and so there's extra energy. Yeah exactly, it's like there's
13:20
Speaker 1: an economy of scale there, right, you can use the
13:23
Speaker 1: two they sort of help each other. If you take
13:25
Speaker 1: six quarks, it's easier to build a helium nucleus than
13:28
Speaker 1: to build two hydrogen nuclei, because then they have to
13:30
Speaker 1: be independent, they have to be totally colored neutral, all
13:32
Speaker 1: on their own, whereas if you have a helium nucleus,
13:35
Speaker 1: there's a lot more options, a lot of ways. You
13:37
Speaker 1: can configure these quarks into two protons that are sort
13:40
Speaker 1: of stuck together, but they don't actually kind of the
13:42
Speaker 1: two protons don't mush together, right, there's still kind of
13:46
Speaker 1: their own thing, but somehow being stuck together helps each
13:50
Speaker 1: one of them stay together themselves. Yeah, exactly, they stay
13:53
Speaker 1: their own thing, but they're connected right there, talking to
13:56
Speaker 1: each other. The way like when a proton and an
13:58
Speaker 1: electron come together to make hydrogen, it's still a proton,
14:02
Speaker 1: and it's still still an electron, but they've made something else,
14:05
Speaker 1: something which is bound together, which acts like one thing
14:08
Speaker 1: from the outside. So in the same way, these two
14:11
Speaker 1: protons they still are protons, but you know, they're interacting
14:14
Speaker 1: with the quarks inside the other protons, and they've come
14:16
Speaker 1: together to make this thing which is weirdly less than
14:19
Speaker 1: some of their parts. It's kind of like, um, you
14:21
Speaker 1: know how they text married couples more because they assume
14:24
Speaker 1: there are some efficiencies if you're married, like, oh, you're married,
14:29
Speaker 1: now you're too you're together, you have a partnership. You
14:31
Speaker 1: must have extra income or extra disposable income or something.
14:36
Speaker 1: You can also think of it, like think about the
14:38
Speaker 1: proton as like a bunch of corks connected with springs,
14:42
Speaker 1: and there's energy in those springs. You have to like
14:44
Speaker 1: arrange them in just the right way and put some
14:46
Speaker 1: energy in those springs to hold them together. Um, and
14:49
Speaker 1: then when you make the helium nuclei, you can like
14:51
Speaker 1: reuse one of those springs. You're like, oh, I don't
14:53
Speaker 1: need all of these, I can just use this one
14:55
Speaker 1: here twice because they overlap, you know, And so I
14:58
Speaker 1: have this extra spring which had this your energy in it.
15:00
Speaker 1: What do I do with that? Well, that just shoots
15:02
Speaker 1: off and so that's that's the basic process of fusion.
15:05
Speaker 1: Is pushed two hydrogen nuclei together to make helium plus
15:09
Speaker 1: some energy and a spring shoots off. Yeah, that's the energy.
15:12
Speaker 1: And you might think what is that spring? Well, you know,
15:15
Speaker 1: internal in the nucleus, all this stuff is stored is gluons.
15:18
Speaker 1: But when these two hydrogen nuclei fuse, which you get
15:21
Speaker 1: is a photon. It shoots out a bunch of energy. Okay,
15:23
Speaker 1: So that's what's happening inside of the sun and also
15:27
Speaker 1: inside of nuclear bombs, right, nuclear fusion bombs. That's basically
15:31
Speaker 1: what's happening is just you're getting a bunch of hydrogen
15:33
Speaker 1: squeezed together and having them fuse into hedium. That's right,
15:38
Speaker 1: And and that should help you appreciate the scale of this, right,
15:41
Speaker 1: Like an enormous thermonuclear explosion, right, a hydrogen bomb. Those
15:45
Speaker 1: things are incredibly powerful. They're devastating and kill millions of
15:47
Speaker 1: people if you dropped one on the city. All of
15:50
Speaker 1: that comes out of a tiny amount of fuel that
15:52
Speaker 1: you do not need a huge amount of plutonium to
15:55
Speaker 1: have that bomb. And that tells you how energy dense
15:59
Speaker 1: matter is. Like, they is so much energy and matter
16:02
Speaker 1: that if you're able to release some of it, it's overwhelming.
16:05
Speaker 1: It's like it's incredible. And we've talked about this several
16:08
Speaker 1: times in the podcast. If you took like a raisin's
16:11
Speaker 1: worth of matter and touched into a raisin worth of antimatter,
16:15
Speaker 1: and the reason we choose those is because they're very
16:18
Speaker 1: easily able to annihilate all their energy, all their matter
16:21
Speaker 1: into energy. Then you get a huge nuclear explosion like
16:24
Speaker 1: the size of Hiroshima, and so there's a huge amount
16:27
Speaker 1: of energy story and matter, and like we were saying before,
16:29
Speaker 1: really just often we're scraping just the crumbs off the floor.
16:33
Speaker 1: When you burn fossil fuels, it's a huge amount of
16:36
Speaker 1: energy in them before and a huge amount of energy
16:39
Speaker 1: in them afterwards. You've just taken off a tiny little sliver.
16:42
Speaker 1: And so fusion is like this this way to tap
16:45
Speaker 1: into this incredibly dense energy source. And that's why it's
16:48
Speaker 1: so exciting, because the huge amounts of energy released from
16:51
Speaker 1: tiny amounts of fuel. It's kind of like if I
16:53
Speaker 1: if I took a raisin and I threw it at
16:55
Speaker 1: you that's not a lot of energy. You wouldn't get
16:58
Speaker 1: hurt by a raison owned by another person. But if
17:02
Speaker 1: I could somehow, like I don't know, you've been working
17:04
Speaker 1: out how fast you even? I think even if you
17:07
Speaker 1: had a major lea, you have a hundred mile raisin
17:09
Speaker 1: picture throw raising at you, it still wouldn't hurt very much.
17:12
Speaker 1: But if you somehow I don't know the answer to that,
17:15
Speaker 1: a hundred mile an hour raisin, would that hurt you
17:16
Speaker 1: if you ate it? Well, maybe the pensant where it
17:19
Speaker 1: hits you, you know, if the eyes. But but the
17:24
Speaker 1: idea is that, you know, if I threw the raising
17:26
Speaker 1: at you, it wouldn't hurt you or carry a lot
17:29
Speaker 1: of energy. But if you've somehow was able to like
17:31
Speaker 1: break apart the raisin, you know, like break apart not
17:35
Speaker 1: just the atoms of the raisin, but the corks inside
17:38
Speaker 1: of the atoms of the protons of the raisin, then
17:41
Speaker 1: there would be a huge amount of energy, right, yeah,
17:43
Speaker 1: exactly that you would not survive that. Yeah, that one
17:45
Speaker 1: raisin could power a city, right, I mean we're talking
17:47
Speaker 1: about huge quantities of energy, and so that's what fusion is.
17:51
Speaker 1: It's this we're trying to tap into this. And it's
17:53
Speaker 1: also tantalizing because we see it every day. We see
17:56
Speaker 1: it happening out there in the sun. Right, it's omnipresent
17:59
Speaker 1: or you can't it escape it, and so we know
18:01
Speaker 1: it's happening. It's the universe is primary source of light,
18:05
Speaker 1: and so we just want to you know, ride that
18:07
Speaker 1: wave and and use it to get the energy we
18:10
Speaker 1: need so we can listen to podcasts and make cookies
18:13
Speaker 1: and all sorts of fun stuff we like to do
18:15
Speaker 1: with our lives. Eat raisins, eat raisins. But you know
18:19
Speaker 1: it's not easy, right, those hydrogen atoms they don't like
18:22
Speaker 1: to come together. They're both positively charged. So what happens
18:25
Speaker 1: when you bring them near each other is they repel, right,
18:27
Speaker 1: They resist getting close to each other. So fusion is
18:30
Speaker 1: not an easy thing you can just like, here's a
18:32
Speaker 1: scoop of protons, go fuse, right, That's why we mostly
18:37
Speaker 1: just see them in crazy situations, right, like the center
18:40
Speaker 1: of the sun and nuclear bombs. That's usually where fusion
18:45
Speaker 1: likes to happen exactly because these protons resist each other
18:49
Speaker 1: until they get really really close. Once they get close,
18:52
Speaker 1: then this strong nuclear force takes over and they confuse
18:55
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff happens. But for that
18:56
Speaker 1: to happen, they have to get close enough, and it's
18:59
Speaker 1: you know, they're repelling each other. So it's like you
19:02
Speaker 1: ever try to push two magnets near each other. They're
19:04
Speaker 1: like slipping and sliding and going sideways and trying to
19:06
Speaker 1: avoid it or impossibly or imagine like trying to get
19:10
Speaker 1: a cat into a bucket of water, right. I mean,
19:12
Speaker 1: I'm not suggesting anybody to do that, but mentally imagine
19:15
Speaker 1: you know, it's not easy. It's a cat fusion, feline
19:19
Speaker 1: fusion um or or if you ever do like mini golf,
19:22
Speaker 1: you know how there's those holes where it's like the
19:25
Speaker 1: where you're supposed to get the ball is like at
19:27
Speaker 1: the top of a little hill. You think, oh, no
19:29
Speaker 1: big deal, I'll just roll to the top of the
19:30
Speaker 1: hill and it'll go in. But if you don't roll
19:32
Speaker 1: it exactly right, then it rolls off to the side
19:35
Speaker 1: or it skips over the top. Right. Fusion is like that.
19:38
Speaker 1: You've got to get the hydrogen atoms exactly the right speed,
19:42
Speaker 1: right at each other for them to get close enough
19:44
Speaker 1: to sort of fall in the hole and fuse otherwise
19:46
Speaker 1: they'll just deflect and go in other directions. Is it
19:48
Speaker 1: kind of like if you take two magnets the positive size,
19:50
Speaker 1: and you apply super glue on them and you try
19:54
Speaker 1: to stick them together. Like that would be kind of hard,
19:57
Speaker 1: but if you do manage to get them to touch
19:59
Speaker 1: each other, then and they'll stick together. Probably. I haven't
20:02
Speaker 1: done that experiment. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, um,
20:06
Speaker 1: you might end up reversing the polarity of one of
20:07
Speaker 1: them or something. I'm not even sure what would happen,
20:09
Speaker 1: but yeah, exactly if you can get them close enough together.
20:12
Speaker 1: And that's what's happening in the sun, right. What is
20:14
Speaker 1: the sun. It's a huge blob of hydrogen, but it's
20:17
Speaker 1: such a big blob that it has huge gravity, and
20:21
Speaker 1: so the gravity is squeezing all these protons together, and
20:24
Speaker 1: so there's nowhere else to go, right. They'd like to
20:26
Speaker 1: run away from each other. They're pushing against each other,
20:29
Speaker 1: but they're like a crowd at some you know, teenage
20:31
Speaker 1: rock concert. There's nowhere to go. You're in the middle
20:34
Speaker 1: of the mosh pit, so you have to bump up
20:36
Speaker 1: against other people. And so that's why fusion happens. In
20:38
Speaker 1: the sun because there's so much gravitational pressure that the
20:42
Speaker 1: protons can't avoid each other. That's how you get them
20:45
Speaker 1: close enough to each other. It's like you need these
20:47
Speaker 1: extreme conditions kind of like a and in a bomb,
20:49
Speaker 1: that's what happens to right, Like they they use like
20:52
Speaker 1: an outer bomb to compress the other the hydrogen, so
20:56
Speaker 1: that fuses. Right, that's exactly how these thermonuclear bombs work. Right.
21:00
Speaker 1: You have a fission reaction which generates, you know, a
21:03
Speaker 1: huge explosion like Hiroshima, and that compresses the fuel you
21:07
Speaker 1: need for fusion so that it actually starts to fuse.
21:10
Speaker 1: So you have to be basically in the middle of
21:12
Speaker 1: the sun or in the middle of an already exploding
21:15
Speaker 1: nuclear bomb to make this work. So um, not easy.
21:20
Speaker 1: Not a place I would recommend visiting. Yeah, okay, so
21:22
Speaker 1: that's fusion, and that's kind of what we usually see
21:26
Speaker 1: it as. It's as hot fusion right in the sun
21:28
Speaker 1: or in a bomb. So now let's get into cold
21:32
Speaker 1: fusion and how that's gonna change everything if they can
21:35
Speaker 1: get it to work. But first let's take a quick break.
21:50
Speaker 1: All right, we're talking about cold fusion and how to
21:53
Speaker 1: make it. Here on Earth, and we talked about how
21:56
Speaker 1: it's kind of the process that's going on inside of
21:58
Speaker 1: suns and nuclear bomb that's right, and that's not typically
22:01
Speaker 1: the kind of thing you want in your backyard or
22:04
Speaker 1: in your neighborhood where they're generating energy. Right, if somebody says,
22:08
Speaker 1: if somebody said, hey, can we put them the sun
22:11
Speaker 1: down the street will provide a lot of energy, you'd
22:13
Speaker 1: probably say no. You probably say put into my neighbor's yard.
22:18
Speaker 1: Depending on how big your yard is, that may not
22:20
Speaker 1: be far enough away from the Sun. But essentially what
22:23
Speaker 1: scientists are doing to try to have fusion here on
22:25
Speaker 1: Earth is recreate those conditions. I mean, in a in
22:29
Speaker 1: a bomb, it's sort of a runaway reaction, you have
22:31
Speaker 1: all the energy expended all at once. But for a
22:34
Speaker 1: fusion react or, what you want is something where it
22:36
Speaker 1: slowly expands that energy, where can be sort of controlled
22:39
Speaker 1: but still um in terms of like hot fusion. Here
22:43
Speaker 1: on Earth, we're basically trying to recreate the conditions of
22:46
Speaker 1: the sun or a nuclear bomb. But maybe is it
22:49
Speaker 1: the same as the sun, but maybe just in a
22:50
Speaker 1: smaller scale like a mini sun. Yeah, you know, if
22:53
Speaker 1: physicists think big, like I want to make a star.
22:56
Speaker 1: You know, they're basically making a mini sun, and the
23:00
Speaker 1: problem is like how do you contain it. Say you
23:02
Speaker 1: want to make something fuse and you want to get
23:04
Speaker 1: the energy out, Like what do you put it in? Right?
23:07
Speaker 1: You can't build it in a glass bottle because it
23:09
Speaker 1: will destroy the bottle. You can't build it in a
23:11
Speaker 1: steel bottle because it will destroy it. So they actually
23:13
Speaker 1: come up with these really cool magnetic bottles because the
23:17
Speaker 1: thing about the sun is that all the particles in
23:19
Speaker 1: there have electric charges. They're positive or they're negative, right,
23:22
Speaker 1: they're all ionized, which means that they can be bent
23:24
Speaker 1: by magnetic fields. So if you can get them to
23:27
Speaker 1: like sort of go in a circle, like around a
23:29
Speaker 1: doughnut shaped magnetic bottle, then maybe they just can just
23:33
Speaker 1: sort of spin around forever, banging to each other, making
23:35
Speaker 1: fusion and throwing out heat that you can capture without
23:39
Speaker 1: ever actually you know, melting the building that you're in,
23:42
Speaker 1: and then it's more like an engine where you're slowly
23:45
Speaker 1: adding the fuel in instead of just burning the whole
23:48
Speaker 1: tank of gas at the same time. The ideas that
23:50
Speaker 1: you kind of have like a slow control sun explosion
23:55
Speaker 1: that keeps going and keeps making energy for you. That's right.
23:59
Speaker 1: The way it would work, as you start out with
24:00
Speaker 1: something cold and you have to pour energy and to
24:02
Speaker 1: begin with, right, But then once it gets hot enough
24:05
Speaker 1: that fusion starts happening. Then the fusion provides enough heat
24:09
Speaker 1: to keep things going to start to burn the next
24:11
Speaker 1: bit of fuel. It's sort of like adding a log
24:14
Speaker 1: to a fire. Right, It's hard to get started, but
24:16
Speaker 1: once the fire is burning, you just put another log
24:18
Speaker 1: in and the fire itself starts more fire. So that's
24:21
Speaker 1: what they call ignition. And a fusion reactor is when
24:23
Speaker 1: it gets hot enough that you can just keep adding
24:25
Speaker 1: fuel at the right pace and to keep producing enough energy.
24:29
Speaker 1: And that's really hard because you have this really hot thing.
24:32
Speaker 1: It's like millions of degrees, right, basically like a little
24:36
Speaker 1: slice of the sun, millions of Hey, let's spend some
24:39
Speaker 1: time talking about temperature poscast episode about who's the hottest
24:44
Speaker 1: person in the universe. So, so they're trying to do
24:47
Speaker 1: this on Earth, right, you said, magnetic bottle is one way, uh,
24:51
Speaker 1: and and it's a hard problem because you have to
24:54
Speaker 1: contain this kind of explosion that's a million degrees in temperature, right, yeah,
25:00
Speaker 1: exactly have to manage it. And they've made it work
25:02
Speaker 1: in smaller scales, they've actually gotten energy out of the
25:06
Speaker 1: fusion reactor, and in some cases they've even gotten more
25:09
Speaker 1: energy out than they put in, which is nice um.
25:12
Speaker 1: And what they're doing now is they're building sort of
25:14
Speaker 1: a larger scale version to see if you can work
25:16
Speaker 1: on a commerce for commercial scale, like can you actually
25:19
Speaker 1: produce enough energy that you could like sell it and
25:22
Speaker 1: you can convince a power company to spend a billion
25:24
Speaker 1: dollars building this thing and and and run a business
25:27
Speaker 1: out of it. And that's called They have really cool
25:30
Speaker 1: names for these projects, right, Like you like the names.
25:33
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, that's quite a standard. I don't think
25:36
Speaker 1: I've ever heard you said that before. Well, I like
25:38
Speaker 1: it to say, as a kind of an anime flavor twit. Right,
25:41
Speaker 1: it's called like a tacomac. Right, that's one name. Yeah,
25:44
Speaker 1: that comes I think it's a comes from like a
25:46
Speaker 1: conglomeration of Russian words because the Russians were the first
25:50
Speaker 1: people to do that, and it comes from it. It's
25:51
Speaker 1: a toroid, which is like the geometrical name for a
25:54
Speaker 1: donut um. Yeah, it tookomac exactly, And yeah, it sounds
25:58
Speaker 1: like a you know, like a giant Japanese enemy robot
26:03
Speaker 1: that those movies don't always end very well though, so
26:05
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but the wisdom of naming your massive
26:09
Speaker 1: sun creating experiment after an anime movie. But a good robot,
26:13
Speaker 1: you know, oh yeah, right, okay, it's a friendly, helpful robot.
26:16
Speaker 1: It's going to come and solve all your energy problems. Um.
26:19
Speaker 1: But the one they're building is called Eater I T.
26:21
Speaker 1: E R. And they're building it in France, and it's
26:24
Speaker 1: supposed to be done, you know, sometime in the next
26:26
Speaker 1: it's always ten years away, it seems. And that one
26:29
Speaker 1: might actually work, you know, it costs ten billion dollars,
26:32
Speaker 1: but it might actually work. But again, that's hot fusion, right,
26:34
Speaker 1: that's like really hard. It's a huge facility, costs billions
26:38
Speaker 1: of dollars. It's very difficult, but also a good name.
26:41
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I support anything related to eating
26:47
Speaker 1: as long as it doesn't eat the planet, right. Yeah. Yeah,
26:51
Speaker 1: it's kind of a not a great foreboding name. That's
26:54
Speaker 1: gonna eat up the world. Maybe we'll solve all of
26:56
Speaker 1: our eating problems, you know, the sort of problem. But
27:01
Speaker 1: I heard it's like the biggest science experiment ever. Right,
27:04
Speaker 1: it's like even more expensive than the one it's earned
27:08
Speaker 1: a large Hattern collider. Is that true? I know. Yeah,
27:11
Speaker 1: it's gonna eclipse the Large hage On Collider to be
27:13
Speaker 1: the biggest, most expensive science experiment ever. It might even
27:16
Speaker 1: be more expensive than the International Space Station. So yeah,
27:20
Speaker 1: that's pretty awesome. But it's also ambitious, you know. I
27:22
Speaker 1: love when people try to do monumental great works. That's
27:26
Speaker 1: really awesome because it's not the kind of thing one
27:27
Speaker 1: person can do or two people can do. It's the
27:29
Speaker 1: kind of thing we can only do when we come
27:32
Speaker 1: together as a species and put our brains to something
27:34
Speaker 1: and say, let's make the world a better place by
27:37
Speaker 1: spending a lot of money on physics. That's all eat together,
27:40
Speaker 1: so we'll call it eater. Yeah, exactly. Um. And then
27:44
Speaker 1: there's another way people are trying to do like hot
27:46
Speaker 1: fusion here on Earth, and that's saying, let's not try
27:49
Speaker 1: to have a continuous fire, you know, where you have
27:52
Speaker 1: this like fire that burns and and and generates itself
27:55
Speaker 1: like a minisan inside of a magnetic bottle. That that's
27:58
Speaker 1: the tocomac and the eater, But this is a different
28:00
Speaker 1: There's another approach, which is like let's sort of have
28:02
Speaker 1: like a bunch of one off fusions. So what they
28:05
Speaker 1: do is they take a bit of fuel and they
28:07
Speaker 1: zap it with lasers from like every direction simultaneously, like
28:11
Speaker 1: a nineties six super powerful lasers zapp it, and they
28:15
Speaker 1: hope that they get it hot enough that it confused
28:19
Speaker 1: before it explodes. When it fuses before it explodes, what
28:22
Speaker 1: does that mean. It means that, like the explosion takes
28:24
Speaker 1: a while to happen, and so if you can get
28:28
Speaker 1: it hot enough to get these these hydrogen nuclear hot enough,
28:31
Speaker 1: then they will fuse because they haven't yet had time
28:34
Speaker 1: to explode, like that it's gonna explode. But they call
28:37
Speaker 1: this strategy inertial confinement fusion because it's just like you're
28:41
Speaker 1: trying to get it to happen fast enough so that
28:43
Speaker 1: inertia keeps it together for long enough for the diffuse
28:47
Speaker 1: before it explodes. But then you know, it blows up
28:49
Speaker 1: and you get another pellet us app that one with
28:51
Speaker 1: lasers that one blows up. That's the strategy. That one's
28:54
Speaker 1: kind of like, um, like you're instead of having a
28:57
Speaker 1: minisun it's like you're stringing a sun out into a
29:00
Speaker 1: little tiny thread, right, and you're right. Instead of having
29:04
Speaker 1: like one fire going on, you string it along and
29:07
Speaker 1: you you burn little bits at the time. Yeah, exactly.
29:10
Speaker 1: It also seems the most science fiction. I mean, you're
29:13
Speaker 1: like hundred nineties super lasers focusing on something all at once.
29:17
Speaker 1: And there's a big facility in California called the National
29:20
Speaker 1: Ignition Facility that's trying to do this. I've been there
29:24
Speaker 1: and actually, you know, if any of you have watched
29:27
Speaker 1: one of the Star Trek movies, you know, the new
29:28
Speaker 1: ones with all the lens flares, then you have seen
29:32
Speaker 1: this experiment because I think they used they filmed, or
29:35
Speaker 1: they replicated it or something. When Scotty see the engine
29:38
Speaker 1: saying she kind of take anymore, Captain, I think that's
29:41
Speaker 1: basically either model or the actual thing that they filmed
29:44
Speaker 1: it in. Oh cool, Well, it's also a cool sounding phrase,
29:47
Speaker 1: National Cognition Facility. That's well named. So is it as
29:51
Speaker 1: as good as she cannot take anymore cutting? It's as
29:55
Speaker 1: good as your Scottish accent is? Yes, maybe we should
29:58
Speaker 1: have some of our Scottish listener is write in and
30:00
Speaker 1: rates Jorge Scottish accent. There you go, and also eater
30:04
Speaker 1: and but all those are what we call hot fusion.
30:08
Speaker 1: That's sort of trying to replicate the Sun's strategy, get
30:11
Speaker 1: a bunch of hot hydrogen together and hope it fuses.
30:14
Speaker 1: But those are hard, right, building a lasers or making
30:17
Speaker 1: a magnetic bottle for something that's thirty million degrees. Wouldn't
30:20
Speaker 1: it be awesome if you could do fusion at room temperature? Right,
30:24
Speaker 1: you didn't need all this crazy apparatus. What if you
30:27
Speaker 1: could have cold fusion? Exactly? Did I just come up
30:29
Speaker 1: with that? Yes? Or hey, yes, I've never heard that
30:36
Speaker 1: phrase before. Congratulations, that was brilliant. Humans are trying to
30:39
Speaker 1: make fusion here on Earth, but they're both hot fusion strategies,
30:43
Speaker 1: basically mini sons. And you're saying, there might be a
30:46
Speaker 1: way to do this cold without like millions of degrees
30:50
Speaker 1: or giant lasers or enemy robot names. There might be
30:55
Speaker 1: something easier, exactly, And that's tantalizing. That's the promise of
31:00
Speaker 1: old fusion. All right, let's get into it, but first
31:02
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. Alright, So finally we're going
31:17
Speaker 1: to get into cold fusion. Daniels, So We've talked about
31:20
Speaker 1: fusion and hot fusion and hot yoga, and now it's
31:24
Speaker 1: different than than the hot yoga. It's sort of but
31:27
Speaker 1: now the idea is that we can maybe create a sun,
31:31
Speaker 1: but do it in a cold way where it's not
31:33
Speaker 1: burning or at millions of degrees. Yeah. The idea is,
31:37
Speaker 1: can we get too hydrogen nuclei to get close enough
31:40
Speaker 1: together to turn into helium and release their energy without
31:44
Speaker 1: having to get the hydrogen so hot? Right, we don't
31:47
Speaker 1: want to create the sun, but we do want to
31:49
Speaker 1: extract that energy. So the problem, remember, is how to
31:52
Speaker 1: get the hydrogen close together. If you can just get
31:55
Speaker 1: them close enough together, they will fuse, but they repel
31:58
Speaker 1: each other. So you need something to get them close together.
32:01
Speaker 1: And the basic strategy of hot fusion is making you know,
32:04
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure and a lot of temperature and
32:05
Speaker 1: these things will go really fast. Another way is to
32:08
Speaker 1: try to get the hygen closer together without heating it up.
32:11
Speaker 1: And it turns out that hydrogen likes to get sucked
32:15
Speaker 1: into this special kind of crystal. It's called palladium. It's
32:17
Speaker 1: a metal, and hydrogen iss really fits really well into
32:21
Speaker 1: the gaps between the palladium molecules and and and palladium
32:25
Speaker 1: sort of squeezes hygen together like packs. It's in the
32:28
Speaker 1: hydrogen in there, and the hydrogen gets much much closer
32:32
Speaker 1: in palladium than it will without the palladium. So you're saying,
32:36
Speaker 1: use something like a crystal to pack them in closer.
32:39
Speaker 1: But what But they're not going to explode yet. They're
32:41
Speaker 1: not gonna explode yet. But but you're you're most of
32:44
Speaker 1: the way there. You know. It's imagine it's like a
32:46
Speaker 1: big hotel room with really really tiny rooms, right, and
32:49
Speaker 1: everybody's in their own little room, and they don't yet
32:51
Speaker 1: notice that there's somebody next door that they really don't
32:54
Speaker 1: like that they want to run away from, because remember,
32:56
Speaker 1: hydrogen repels itself and so now, but you've gotten them
32:59
Speaker 1: really close together, so you have this opportunity for them
33:02
Speaker 1: to fuse. Yeah, you've got a bunch of people in
33:03
Speaker 1: a hotel, uh with tightly packed rooms. What could possibly
33:08
Speaker 1: happen while you're you're looking for an explosive situation? Right,
33:12
Speaker 1: you just have to persuade all these people to get
33:14
Speaker 1: together if you want something interesting to happen. That's one
33:16
Speaker 1: way to do it. Put a bunch of people in
33:18
Speaker 1: a hotel, a bunch of people who hate each other
33:20
Speaker 1: into tiny little hotel rooms next to each other exactly. Um.
33:25
Speaker 1: And then you apply a little bit of energy, right,
33:28
Speaker 1: and the idea is you probably just enough energy and
33:31
Speaker 1: maybe the hydrogens will fuse into helium because you've already
33:34
Speaker 1: gotten them so close together that maybe they'll like you know,
33:36
Speaker 1: pop out of their little rooms and fuse because they're
33:39
Speaker 1: near each other. That was the idea, like maybe little jostle,
33:42
Speaker 1: jostle around and accidentally bumping to each other. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
33:47
Speaker 1: All you have to do is get the hydrogen close
33:48
Speaker 1: enough together, so it's not a terrible idea. And then
33:51
Speaker 1: in nine these two guys in Utah, Ponds and Fleishman,
33:56
Speaker 1: they set up an experiment to try this, and they
33:59
Speaker 1: claim aimed that more energy came out of the experiment
34:03
Speaker 1: than they put in. Right, you have to put it
34:04
Speaker 1: a little bit of energy, a little bit of electrical
34:06
Speaker 1: energy to sort of get these hydrogens out of the
34:09
Speaker 1: cells that you've crammed them in. And they claimed that
34:11
Speaker 1: they saw a huge amount of energy come out of
34:14
Speaker 1: their experiment. So they did that. They put a bunch
34:16
Speaker 1: of hydrogen inside of a pollatium crystal and then you
34:19
Speaker 1: should They just put it over a fire and they
34:22
Speaker 1: noticed it was getting harder than it should have been. Yeah,
34:24
Speaker 1: they put a bunch of hydrogen inside this palladium and
34:27
Speaker 1: then they put it inside a bath of heavy water
34:30
Speaker 1: and they put um electrodes in it, which released, which
34:33
Speaker 1: broke up the heavy water, so you get deterium. Deterium
34:36
Speaker 1: banged in the hydrogen, and hydrogen came out of the cells.
34:39
Speaker 1: And what they were hoping for was that the hydrogen
34:41
Speaker 1: would fuse with the deterium, which is just a heavier
34:44
Speaker 1: version of hydrogen, would fuse and they would get a
34:47
Speaker 1: huge amount of energy. And it's all in a water bath.
34:50
Speaker 1: So what they were doing was just measuring the temperature
34:52
Speaker 1: of the water and they claimed to have a huge
34:55
Speaker 1: amount of unexplainable amount of energy, unexplainable by any way
34:59
Speaker 1: other than and cold fusion. And remember they didn't build
35:03
Speaker 1: a huge reactor. There's just like something sitting on a tabletop.
35:06
Speaker 1: The whole thing costs, you know, tens of thousands of
35:08
Speaker 1: dollars to build. You didn't need a magnetic bottle, you
35:11
Speaker 1: didn't need a hundred nine lasers. It was cheap, but
35:14
Speaker 1: it's good. Somehow they claimed extract all this energy from
35:18
Speaker 1: the nucleus of the atoms, and of course they got
35:21
Speaker 1: a huge amount of publicity. Was like on the cover
35:23
Speaker 1: of magazines, and everybody thought, this is the energy revolution.
35:26
Speaker 1: But but then nobody could reproduce it. You know, people
35:30
Speaker 1: were excited, and people in Japan and people in Texas
35:33
Speaker 1: and people in Boston, all sorts of folks try to
35:35
Speaker 1: reproduce this experiment because it seemed pretty simple. And at first,
35:39
Speaker 1: you know, some groups said, oh yeah, we see a
35:41
Speaker 1: little of this, always see a little bit of that.
35:43
Speaker 1: But it was all done sort of a little too quickly,
35:47
Speaker 1: and you know, everybody was excited to be the second
35:49
Speaker 1: people to to make cold Frusian work, or the third
35:51
Speaker 1: person to make cold fusion work. People really wanted to
35:54
Speaker 1: believe it, and so there was a lot of signs
35:56
Speaker 1: done that wasn't really like up to the standard that
35:59
Speaker 1: you would backed. And in the end, when the dust cleared,
36:03
Speaker 1: it only took a few months, but people realized nobody
36:05
Speaker 1: could reproduce their result, and then they started getting not
36:08
Speaker 1: even the first people who did it, they couldn't do
36:11
Speaker 1: it again. Well, they claimed to have done it again, right,
36:14
Speaker 1: and they wanted more money to ask the government for
36:16
Speaker 1: millions of dollars to fund a larger experiment, but they
36:19
Speaker 1: never let people like examine their apparatus, and the results
36:22
Speaker 1: didn't make sense, and they wouldn't answer questions about it
36:25
Speaker 1: um And so that's not suspicious scientific behavior at all,
36:30
Speaker 1: I know, I know. And so it became a sort
36:33
Speaker 1: of an embarrassment, you know, um to the physics community, like,
36:36
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, we got all this attention from the
36:38
Speaker 1: media and from the public, and people got excited about
36:41
Speaker 1: this possibility. Then it turns out it was just shoddy experiments,
36:45
Speaker 1: and later people discovered that probably they did get a
36:48
Speaker 1: little bit of extra heat out of their reaction, but
36:51
Speaker 1: it was just a normal chemical reaction like hydrogen oxygen
36:54
Speaker 1: coming back together to make water releases some heat. So
36:57
Speaker 1: they weren't getting any nuclear fusion at all. They weren't
36:59
Speaker 1: get nearly as much energy as you would get you
37:02
Speaker 1: actually had nuclear fusion, And if they had, their whole
37:05
Speaker 1: thing would have exploded right there. They had released enough
37:07
Speaker 1: energy if they had actually achieved fusion, it would have
37:10
Speaker 1: demolished their building. So but did they actually you know,
37:15
Speaker 1: pretend on purpose, or were they also fooled themselves. That's
37:19
Speaker 1: a great question, and I'd love to see an in
37:21
Speaker 1: depth interview by like a really hard interviewer. But they
37:25
Speaker 1: famously clammed up after they were shown to be basically frauds. Um,
37:29
Speaker 1: and they insisted that what they had done was right,
37:32
Speaker 1: but they never really gave enough details for anybody to
37:34
Speaker 1: validate it or to understand whether they were outright lying
37:39
Speaker 1: or just sort of overly hopeful and confused by their results.
37:42
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, you want to on one hand,
37:44
Speaker 1: try to be generous in your interpretation and think, oh,
37:48
Speaker 1: they just got wrapped up in the excitement of their
37:50
Speaker 1: potential discovery and skipped a few steps. On the other hand, um,
37:54
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they were Maybe there were frauds. So
37:57
Speaker 1: so that particular idea for cold fusion didn't seem to
38:00
Speaker 1: have work. But does that mean that's that it's impossible,
38:03
Speaker 1: or that that idea can never work, or that do
38:07
Speaker 1: you think there are other ideas out there for cold
38:09
Speaker 1: fusion that could work. It's definitely not impossible, right, somebody
38:13
Speaker 1: could make it work. There's probably a way for it
38:15
Speaker 1: to happen. The problem is, once a field has such
38:18
Speaker 1: an embarrassing public implosion, like that nobody wants to work
38:22
Speaker 1: on it. Like you don't see young smart people saying
38:24
Speaker 1: I'm going to go into the field of cold fusion
38:27
Speaker 1: because it's a laughing stock. So currently it became synonymous
38:31
Speaker 1: with like confusion, confusion, confusion, Keanu Reeves exactly, like bad
38:37
Speaker 1: became synonymous with bad signs. I mean, like nobody wants
38:39
Speaker 1: to be a cold fusion physicist anymore. Exactly, Um, but
38:43
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean it's not possible. Those guys sort of
38:45
Speaker 1: ruined for everybody. It may it may not be practical,
38:48
Speaker 1: but you know, there might be a way to do it,
38:50
Speaker 1: And there are some other ideas, and there are some
38:52
Speaker 1: things that people have sort of made work, Like they've
38:55
Speaker 1: tried this idea with muans. If you take hydrogen and
38:58
Speaker 1: instead of having electrons going around the nucleus, if you
39:01
Speaker 1: have muans going around the nucleus. Remember, muans are just
39:05
Speaker 1: heavier versions of electrons. What happens is the muans they're
39:08
Speaker 1: sort of orbit is much smaller than the electrons orbit
39:12
Speaker 1: because muans are heavier. And what this means is that
39:15
Speaker 1: it lets the hydrogens get closer together and so that
39:19
Speaker 1: can make fusion happen. Well, I think you guys just
39:21
Speaker 1: have a branding problem again, you know, like you just
39:24
Speaker 1: call it something else and then have people work work
39:26
Speaker 1: on it. Extreme fusion, no tepid fusion maybe, or warm fusion.
39:32
Speaker 1: Nobody's gonna get excited about something named tepid. It's like
39:36
Speaker 1: limp fusion, yeah, or not so hot fusion, you know,
39:42
Speaker 1: just that it's not as embarrassing cryo fusion, fusion, oh
39:46
Speaker 1: my god, nano fusion. Just call it nan know something.
39:51
Speaker 1: So I like to believe that it's still possible. First
39:54
Speaker 1: of all, I hope that they get hot fusion to work.
39:56
Speaker 1: That would be awesome, but I'd love to believe the
39:59
Speaker 1: cold fusion as possible. Um. You know, none of the
40:02
Speaker 1: experiments out there are practical. This muan idea does work,
40:05
Speaker 1: but it's very difficult to make muans and to make
40:08
Speaker 1: it happen, so it's not energetically practical. But I'd like
40:11
Speaker 1: to believe that somewhere out there is somebody with a
40:14
Speaker 1: really clever idea that could actually make this work and
40:17
Speaker 1: could really revolutionize the way energy is produced. Yeah, it
40:20
Speaker 1: could be. It could. Then you could have like a
40:22
Speaker 1: fusion reactor in your home right or your car and
40:25
Speaker 1: your DeLorean like they did then back to the future. Yeah,
40:28
Speaker 1: or you could have you could even miniaturize it, you know,
40:30
Speaker 1: you could have your iPhone could uh, you know, you
40:32
Speaker 1: could just add a drop of water and you could
40:34
Speaker 1: run for days or weeks. Right, it would be incredible
40:37
Speaker 1: what could be achieved if we had cold fusion, if
40:39
Speaker 1: we had small, compact, non dangerous sources of energy that
40:44
Speaker 1: were ubiquitous that just a water is fuel. That would
40:46
Speaker 1: be amazing. Yeah, So to those of you who are listening,
40:50
Speaker 1: there's a whole field out there open in physics for
40:53
Speaker 1: you to maybe be the next great inventor, as long
40:56
Speaker 1: as you call it something else else cry fusion. All
41:00
Speaker 1: the smart people have run away from it, so the
41:03
Speaker 1: ground is very fertile for you to make some breakthrough. Yeah,
41:06
Speaker 1: you could change the world or the universe or the
41:09
Speaker 1: future of humanity. And if you do, you know, give
41:12
Speaker 1: us some credit or at least one percent of your profits.
41:14
Speaker 1: And if you're lying in a fraud, don't mention us
41:16
Speaker 1: at all, that's right, we will not. We will claim
41:20
Speaker 1: to know nothing about your research. We'll think you were
41:24
Speaker 1: talking about cold yoga or our new energy drink line,
41:30
Speaker 1: dark energy and cold fusion. All right, well, we hope
41:35
Speaker 1: you guys enjoyed that and learn a little bit more
41:37
Speaker 1: about this interesting Candarese movie, I mean idea. Thanks for
41:43
Speaker 1: tuning in, and if you have questions about how things
41:45
Speaker 1: do or do not work, please send them to us
41:48
Speaker 1: at Questions at Daniel and Horney dot com. We love
41:51
Speaker 1: hearing from you. See you next time. Before you still
42:01
Speaker 1: have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
42:04
Speaker 1: drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
42:06
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42:09
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
42:13
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening
42:16
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42:19
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