Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWill we ever be able to create unlimited energy with cold fusion?
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Hey Daniel, you're a big science fiction fan, right?
Oh? Yeah? When something news on Netflix, if it's science fiction, I'll almost always watch the first five minutes.
Even if it's about a giant space banana.
Hey you make that movie, I will watch it.
But is that something you watch with your family. Is your wife into science fiction?
Ah, that's a bit of a bone of contention over the remote. I would say her tastes are a bit different.
She doesn't like science fiction.
Let's just say she doesn't necessarily choose them for the science.
They don't need to be correct for her to enjoy them.
That's right. I mean, she's also a scientist, but she's able to suspend disbelief in she finds other things in these movies to make them appealing.
Oh yeah, what's her favorite science fiction movie?
It's kind of embarrassing though, for me as a physicist, because her favorite science fiction movie is called Cold Fusion, which has like so many terrible plot holes in it, but the one redeeming feature is that it stars Keena Reeves wearing a U. Chicago's sweatshirt, which is her alma matter.
I am Jorge. I'm the creator of PhD Comics and the co author of the book We Have No Idea, A Guide to the Unknown Universe.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and coincidentally, I'm also the co author of the book We Have No Idea A Guide to the Unknown Universe. What are the chances what you wrote that book too. I mostly wrote it together with some guy I was emailing with online.
And how did you meet this with this man? Tinder?
It did involve the Internet that those are the only details I'll go into.
It involved something else, cold, right, you cold emailed me.
That's right, just a cold email out into the Internet to look for a creative partner.
But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a product of iHeartRadio.
In which we reach out to you through the various hot and cold tubes of the Internet to try to explain to you all the crazy, all the crazy and amazing things that we find in our universe and make them make sense to you.
All the amazing processes out there and science and technology in fact that maybe we can use one day to our advantage as a human species.
That's right. One goal of physics is to understand the world so that we can tame it, right, to use it to our advantage, to build new technology, to transform what it means to be human, what it's like to live as a human in the modern world, and of course at the core of that is energy.
So today on the program we'll be talking about it technology, or I guess a physics concept that could potentially solve all of humanity's problems, right, that's how they've been selling it since the eighties.
Yeah, exactly. It's sort of the holy grail of physics. If it works, then everything will change. I mean, imagine if energy was cheap or even free, almost everything that we do in life could be made easier with energy.
Yeah. Is there something in our knowledge of physics, like in how the animals are put together, or the quark or the particles that we could use to solve our energy crisis.
It seems like it must be. I mean, we live in such an energetic universe. We're always talking on this podcast about particles going at the speed of light, or enormous huge balls of fire we call the sun, right, or a crazy black holes squishing things and beaming out jets from galaxies. Like, there's so many energetic processes out there, so much energy is just stored in the matter around us. It's still it's frustrating to me that we have such difficulty tapping into it. That we're you know, digging up buried plants and burning them in order to extract the tiny little bit of energy.
That's our best idea so far.
It seems Yeah, it seems like we should have figured out something better by now, given the incredible amounts of energy all around us and the huge processes. You know, it's like we're we're at a buffet. We're just like nibbling on the crumbs that have fallen off the table.
We're filling up on the salad, which is a rookie mistake for buffets.
Exactly, if you pay for the buffet, it goes straight for the main course, exactly.
Yeah. So today we'll be talking about one such technology or piece of science that could change everything. So today on the program, we'll be talking about cold fusion. What is it? Is it cold or is it the name of a new sports drink firm, Gatorade.
It's going to be the name of a new sports drink once we get off this podcast and go pitch it to Mountain Dew as part of their Extreme Universe Drink series.
Yeah, on a bottle of dark energy.
Nobody wants a bottle of dark matter though, that's not.
Going to say, but yeah, cold fusion.
Cold fusion is a topic that's been bouncing around in physics for decades and decades, and you know, for a long time it was the dream of scientists to achieve fusion without having to build basic the sun in miniature. And then for a while it seemed like maybe it was possible. No, maybe it was impossible. Now people are saying, maybe it's possible again.
Yeah, it's been around for a while, right, I remember, I think it was a big deal in the seventies and eighties. That's when they first thought maybe it could be possible.
It was in the late eighties when there was a lot of media coverage over some experiments that turned out to maybe not be one hundred percent scientifically valid.
And so people sort of gave up. But recently you're saying, there has been new things that maybe make people think it is possible.
There's always another opportunity. You know. This is the thing about physics is that something seems impossible, but there's always a little window, there's always a little crack. Maybe you could figure out if you were clever enough, you could be the one to solve this problem. I like to fantasize about that. You know that there's like two eras in history. There's like before I figured out this incredible problem and after right, because there are stories like that, people who've cracked long standing problems or come up with some new ideas, some new technology that really change the way things work. And cold fusion, if you could achieve it, would be in that category. It would change everything.
Might let us live forever as a species. Right, we could maybe go to other stars with it.
Yeah, it would basically solve almost every problem. Like you're worried about enough fresh drinking water, just use some energy, desalinate the ocean. You're worried about overheating the planet, use some energy to pump the two out into space. You know, everything costs energy in the end, Almost every problem except for people being mean to each other, cost energy, even that one actually because in the end, you know, war and and all those kind of things come down to competition for resources. But if energy is free or very very plentiful, then there's enough resource to make enough food, to dig up enough gold to do almost everything you want for everybody.
Well, for that you need people fusion. That's a different kind of physics altogether.
That's a not safe for work talking also, So.
Today we'll explain to you guys, and explain to everyone out there, what is cold fusion. But first we were wondering what people know about it? How much do they know what it is?
Yeah, it's one of the topics in science. It really did leak out into very broad public and for a while it seemed like we were on the verge of an incredible breakthrough. But then again that was, you know, thirty years ago, and so I was I really didn't know whether people had heard of this or had an idea whether it was possible. So I went into this with an open mind.
So, as usual, Daniel went out and asked people, random people on the street if they knew what cold fusion was. Here's what they had to say.
I'm guessing it's doing fusion at lower temperatures. But I mean, I've heard that fusion in general is really tough to achieve.
So pressure, I'm not sure on that one.
Cold fusion I have.
Not no, no, no idea.
So in order to fuse two metal, you have to heat it up. But when you're like say, like in a vacuum, like in space, then there's like electrons just floating on it. But in space it's like in a vacuum, like you don't need the heat.
No, when you take out the blood, I guess, right, fusion is when you take up the blood so cold you just do it like frozen animal, buddy or whatever.
I don't know. I've heard the words.
I have no idea what they mean. Where would be your best guess?
Probably something to do with producing nuclear energy, right, So a lot of nose and a couple of confusions, not cold.
Fusions exactly exactly. Some some people had it sort of mentally adjacent to other topics. I got a very long explanation of how cold welding works. You know how to example, good you learned something I did. I didn't know that you could do welding in space, right, that you don't necessarily need like oxygen and air and fire to join two pieces of metal. So thank you for the mini lecture I received on cold welding.
And some people thought it meant transfusion, like a blood transfusion.
Yeah, and that's you know, hey, they freeze blood, right, and then they have thought, so that's sort of a cold transfusion. It makes some sense, right. I'm impressed when people don't have any idea what I'm talking about, but sort of on the fly come up with something reasonable to say. That's you know, that's creative thinking.
And to be honest, I didn't really know what it was until a couple of years ago I got hired to do a comic and a video about cold fusion.
Yeah, you have an excellent video.
So there's no shame in not knowing what it is.
I see, that's the standard. If Jorge doesn't know about it, then it's acceptable to be ignorance.
Well, if that's a standard, then everyone is pretty safe because I don't really know that much.
But then everybody needs to have watched every science fiction movie ever also.
Right, Yeah, that's right. So in the opening we talked about the movie with Canaries called Cold Fusion, and you're not a fan of the science in that movie.
No. I watched it once decades ago, refused to watch it again, but I remember thinking, oh my god, that makes no sense. Or they clearly just did that so some guy could drive a motorcycle through a bunch of explosions.
So the plot of the movie is what the Canaries is trying to achieve cold fuere to solve all of our energy problems.
Yeah, I think Keanu Reeves does achieve cold fusion, and then there's a struggle over control of it. But then it basically just you know, digresses into a bunch of motorcycles driving through explosions.
Hmmm, as does every movie, it seems.
Every movie with Keanu Reeves in it at least.
All right, Well, let's get into it then, Daniel. So there's two words here, cold and fusion, and somehow you've put together. Then it's a revolutionary concept. So what goes through? What is cold fusion? Or let's start with fusion. What is fusion?
Right?
Well, so what is fusion? You see fusion every day. Every day you go outside and you bathe yourself in sunlight, you are standing and being warmed by the fires of an enormous thermonuclear fusion reactor called the sun. Right, So fusion is what happens inside the sun. It generates all that heat, which is a source of all life on earth. Right, So thank you fusion. Without fusion, we would have nothing. And fusion very simply is just a way to release energy. You take two helium, sorry, you take two hydrogen nuclei, which are just protons, and you push them together to make a new element. Right, you're transforming hydrogen into helium. They push them together, they stick together to make a new nucleus with two protons in it, and that helium nucleus has less energy in it than the two hydrogens did. So what happens is that some energy is released. You make this, and there's some energy left over, but you don't need, right, and so it just gets released in photons and energy, and that's burning, right, that's the fusion burning.
So if I walk outside and I get a suntan, that's fusion.
You were getting burned by fusion. You are fusion toasted.
Well, something I never understood was why does helium, which is what you can when you merge or fuse two hydrogen atoms, why does the combination of them have less energy.
That's a great question, you know, like what happened.
To that energy? Why does it? Why do you need less energy to make something that's like one plus one.
It's a great question, But you're not really making one plus one. It's like it's like one plus one equals one point nine, right, It's you're not just taking those two protons and putting them next to each other. Those protons are interacting, they're connected, right, because remember this nucleus holds itself together like acts like one thing. It's not just like two protons near each other. They're really they're fused, hence the word into one thing. On another episode, we talked about how that stays together because remember these are two protons. They're positively charged. They should be pushing away from each other. Right, Well, there's very strong forces that hold these two protons together, involving how the quarks connect, and so the mass of that nucleus is reflected by the energy of these bonds, and so you shouldn't think of it as two hydrogen nat and you should think of it like the quarks that are inside those hydrogen nuclei being rearranged into a helium nucleus, and it's all about that arrangement. You know, how those quarks are sitting near each other.
Yeah, I guess I forget that proton are made out of smaller bits, which are quarks. And so you're saying that in one hydrogen atom, I need a certain amount of energy to keep in those quarts together, but once I merge two hydrogen atoms, you need less energy to hold all those little bits together, and so there's extra energy.
Yeah, exactly, it's like there's an economy of scale there you can use the two they sort of help each other. If you take six quarks, it's easier to build a helium nucleus than to build two hydrogen nucleiic because then they have to be independent, they have to be totally color neutral all on their own, whereas if you have a helium nucleus, there's a lot more options, a lot of ways. You can configure these quarks into two protons that are sort of stuck together.
But they don't actually kind of the two protons don't mush together, right, They're still kind of their own thing, but somehow being stuck together helps each one of them stay together themselves.
Yeah, exactly, they stay their own thing, but they're connected, right, They're talking to each other the way like when a proton and an electron come together to make hydrogen. It's still a proton, there's still an electron, but they've made something else, something which is bound together, which acts like one thing from the outside. So in the same way, these two protons they still are protons, but you know, they're interacting with the quarks inside the other protons, and they've come together to make this thing, which is weirdly less than some of their parts.
It's kind of like you know how they tax married couples more because they assume there's some efficiencies if you're married. Yeah, like, oh you're married, now you're together, you have a partnership, you must have extra income or extra displicable income or something. Yeah, we'll tax me.
You could also think of it like think about the proton as like a bunch of quarks connected with springs, and there's energy in those springs, right, you have to like arrange them in just the right way and put some energy in those springs to hold them together. And then when you make the helium nuclei, you can like reuse one of those springs. You're like, oh, I don't need all of these, I can just use this one here twice because they overlap, you know. And so I have this extra spring which had this extra energy in it. What do I do with that? Well, that just shoots off. And so that's the basic process of fusion is push two hydrogen nuclei together to make helium plus.
Some energy, and a spring shoots off.
Yeah, that's the energy. And you might think what is that spring? Well, you know, internal in the nucleus, all this stuff is stored as gluons. But when these two hydrogen nuclei fuse, which you get as a photon, it shoots out a bunch of energy.
Okay, so that's what's happening inside of the sun and also inside of nuclear bombs, right, nuclear fusion bombs. That's basically what's happening is just you're getting a bunch of hydrogen squeeze together and having them fuse into hemium.
That's right, And that should help you appreciate the scale of this, right, Like an enormous thermonuclear explosion, right, a hydrogen bomb. Those things are incredibly powerful, they're devastating, They kill millions of people if you dropped one on a city. All of that comes out of a tiny amount of fuel, Like you do not need a huge amount of plutonium to have that bomb. And that tells you how energy dense matter is. Like there is so much energy and matter that if you're able to release some of it, it's overwhelming. It's like, it's incredible. And we've talked about this several times in the podcast. If you took like a raisin's worth of matter and touched it to a raisin worth of anti matter, and the reason we choose those is because they're very easily able to annihilate all their energy, all their matter into energy. Then you'd get a huge nuclear explosion like the size of Hiroshima. And so there's a huge amount of energy storre of matter. And like we were saying before, really just often we're scraping just the crumbs off the floor. When you burn fossil fuels, it's a huge amount of energy in them before and a huge amount of energy in them afterwards. You've just taken up a tiny little sliver. And so fusion is like this this way to tap into this incredibly dense energy source. And that's why it's so exciting, because the huge amounts of energy released from tiny amounts of fuel.
It's kind of like if I took a raisin and I threw it at you. That's not a lot of energy. You wouldn't get hurt by a raisin thrown by another person, but I could somehow, Like I don't know, you've.
Been working out how fast you can throw a raisin.
Even I think even if you had a.
Major lead, you have one hundred mile an hour raisin.
Picture throw raising at you, it still wouldn't hurt very much.
But if you somehow, I don't know the answer to that one hundred mile an hour raisin. Would that hurt you if you ate it?
Well maybe it depends on where it hits you, you know, if it did the eye, So get your point. But the idea is that, you know, if I threw the raisin at you, it wouldn't hurt you or carry a lot of energy. But if you I somehow was able to like break apart the raisin, you know, like break apart not just the atoms of the raisin, but the quarks inside of the atoms of the protons of the raisin, then there would be a huge amount of energy, right, yeah, exactly that you would not survive that.
Yeah, that one raisin could power a city, right, I mean we're talking about huge quantities of energy. And so that's what fusion is. It's this we're trying to tap into this, and it's also tantalizing because we see it every day. We see it happening out there in the sun. Right. It's omnipresent, right, you can't escape it, and so we know it's happened. It's the universe is primary source of light, and so we just want to you know, ride that wave and use it to get the energy we need so we can listen to podcasts and make cookies and all sorts of fun stuff we like to do with our lives. Yeah, eat raisins, Eat raisins. But you know it's not easy, right, those hydrogen atoms they don't like to come together. They're both positively charged, So what happens when you bring them near each other is they repel, right, they resist getting close to each other. So fusion is not an easy thing. You can just like, here's a scoop of protons, go fuse.
Right, That's why we mostly just see them in crazy situations, right, like the center of the sun and nuclear bombs. That's usually where fusion likes to happen.
Exactly because these protons resist each other until they get really really close. Once they get close, then this strong nuclear force takes over and they can fuse and all that stuff happens. But for that to happen, they have to get close enough, and it's you know, they're repelling each other, so it's like try to push two magnets near each other. They're like slipping and sliding and going sideways and trying to avoid it.
Yeah, or it's impossible.
Or imagine like trying to get a cat into a bucket of water, right. I mean, I'm not suggesting anybody to do that, but mentally imagine you know it's not easy.
It's cat fusion. Feline fusion.
Or if you ever do like mini golf, you know how there's those holes where there's like the where you're supposed to get the ball is like in the top of a little hill. You think, oh, no big deal, I'll just roll it to the top of the hill and it'll go in. But if you don't roll it exactly right, then it rolls off to the side, it skips over the top.
Right.
Fusion is like that. You got to get the hydrogen atoms exactly the right speed, right at each other for them to get close enough to sort of fall in the hole in fuse, otherwise they'll just deflect and go in other directions.
Is it kind of like if you take two magnets the positive size and you apply super glue on them and you try to stick them together, Like that would be kind of hard, but if you do manage to get them to touch each other, then they'll stick together.
Probably I haven't done that experiment. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, you might end up reversing the polarity of one of them or something. I'm not even sure what would happen, but yeah, exactly if you can get them close enough together. And that's what's happening in the sun.
Right.
What is the sun. It's a huge blob of hydrogen, but it's such a big blob that it has huge gravity, and so the gravity is squeezing all these protons together, and so there's nowhere else to go, right, they'd like to run away from each other. They're pushing against each other, but they're like a crowd at some you know, teenage rock concert. There's nowhere to go. You're in the middle of the mosh pit, so you have to bump up against other people. And so that's why fusion happens in the sun, because there's so much gravitational pressure that the protons can't avoid each other.
That's how you get them close enough to each other. It's like you need these extreme conditions, kind of like in a bomb. That's what happens too, right, Like they use like an outer bomb to compress the other hydrogen so that fuses.
Right, that's exactly how these thermonuclear bombs work. Right, You have a fission reaction which generates, you know, a huge explosion like Hiroshima, and that compresses the fuel you need for fusion so that it actually starts to fuse. So you have to be basically in the middle of the sun or in the middle of an already exploding nuclear bomb to make this one.
So not easy.
Not a place I would recommend visiting.
Yeah, okay, so that's fusion, and that's kind of what we usually see it as. It's as hot fusion right in the sun or in a bomb. So now let's get into cold fusion and how that's going to change everything if they can get it to work. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about cold fusion and how to make it here on Earth, and we talked about how it's kind of the process that's going on inside of suns and nuclear bombs.
That's right, and that's not typically the kind of thing you want in your backyard or in your neighborhood where they're generating energy. Right, if somebody said, if somebody said, hey, can we put them the sun down the street will provide a lot of energy, you'd probably say no.
You probably say put it in my neighbor's yard.
Depending on how big your yard is, that may not be far enough away from the sun. But essentially what scientists are doing to try to have fusion here on Earth is recreate those conditions. I mean, in a bomb, it's sort of a runaway reaction you have all the expend it all at once. But for a fusion reactor, what you want is something where it slowly expends that energy, where can be sort of controlled. But still in terms of like hot fusion here on Earth, we're basically trying to recreate the conditions of the sun or a nuclear bomb.
But maybe is it the same as the sun, but maybe just in a smaller scale like a mini sun.
Yeah, you know, physicists think big, like I want to make a star. No, they're basically making a mini sun. And the problem is like how do you contain it? Say you want to make something fuse and you want to get the energy out, Like what do you put it in?
Right?
You can't build it in a glass bottle because it'll destroy the bottle. Can't build it in a steel bottle because it'll destroy it. So they actually come up with these really cool magnetic bottles because the thing about the sun is that all the particles in there have electric charges. They're positive and they're negative, right, They're all ionized, which means that they can be bent by magnetic fields. So if you can get them to like sort of go in a circle, like around a doughnut shaped magnetic bottle, then maybe that you can just sort of spin around forever, banging into each other, making fusion and throwing out heat that you can capture without ever actually you know, melting the building that you're in.
Then it's more like an engine where you're slowly adding the fuel in instead of just burning the whole tank. Of gas at the same time. The idea is that you kind of have like a slow controlled sun explosion that keeps going and keeps making energy for you.
That's right. The way it would work is you start out with something cold and you have to pour energy in to begin with, right, But then once it gets hot enough that fusion starts happening. Then the fusion provides enough heat to keep things going to start to burn the next bit of fuel. It's sort of like adding a log to a fire, right, It's hard to get started, but once the fire is burning, you just put another log in and the fire itself starts more fire. So that's what they call ignition in a fusion reactor, is when it gets hot enough that you can just keep adding fuel at the right pace and it keeps producing enough energy. And that's really hard because you have this really hot thing. It's like millions of degrees, right, it's basically like a little slice of the sun.
Millions of the Hey, let's spend some time talking about temperature.
We could do a whole podcast episode about who's the hottest person in the universe.
So they're trying to do this on Earth, right, you said, my magnetic bottle is one way, and it's a hard problem because you have to contain this kind of explosion that's a million degrees in temperature, right.
Yeah, exactly, you have to manage it. And they've made it work in smaller scales. They've actually gotten energy out of the fusion reactor and in some cases they've even gotten more energy out than they put in, which is nice. And what they're doing now is they're building sort of a larger scale version to see if it can work on a commercial scale, like can you actually produce enough energy that you could like sell it and you can convince a power company to spend a billion dollars building this thing and run a business out of it.
And that's called They have really cool names for these projects, right, you like the names.
Oh my gosh, that's quite a standard. I don't think i've ever heard you said that before.
Well, I like it just as a kind of an anime flavor to it. Right, it's called like a tokamac right.
Yeah, that comes I think it's a comes from like a conglomeration of Russian words because the Russians were the first people to do that, and it comes from it. It's a toroid, which is like the geometrical name for a donut. Yeah, tokamac exactly.
And yeah, it sounds like a you know, like a giant Japanese anime robot.
That those movies don't always end very well though, so I'm not sure, but the wisdom of naming your massive sun creating experiment after an anime.
Movie, no, no, but a good robot, you know.
Oh yeah, right, Okay, it's a friendly, helpful robot. It's going to come and solve all your energy problems. But the one they're building is called eater Iter and they're building it in France, and it's supposed to be done, you know, sometime in the next it's always ten years away, it seems. And that one might actually work, you know, it costs ten billion dollars, but it might actually work. But again, that's hot fusion, right, that's like really hard. It's a huge facility, costs billions of dollars. It's very difficult, but also a good name. I think, you know, I support anything related to eating as long as it doesn't eat the planet. Right.
Yeah, it's kind of a not a great foreboding name that's going to eat up the world. Maybe it'll solve all of our eating problems, you know, the disorder problem. But I heard it's like the biggest science experiment ever. Right, it's like even more expensive than the one it's earned, a large Hadron collider. Is that true?
I know.
Yeah, it's going to eclipse the Large Hadron Collider to be the biggest, most expensive science experiment ever. It might even be more expensive than the International Space Station. So yeah, that's pretty awesome. But it's also ambitious, you know. I love when people try to do monumental great works. That's really awesome because it's not the kind of thing one person can do or two people can do. It's the kind of thing we can only do when we come together as a species and put our brains to something and say, let's make the world a better place by spending a lot of money on physics.
Let's all eat together, so we'll call it eater.
Yeah exactly. And then there's another way people are trying to do, like hot fusion here on Earth, and that's saying, let's not try to have a continuous fire, you know, where you have this like fire that burns and generates.
Itself like a mini sun inside of a magnetic bottle. That's the Tokamac and the eater. But this is different.
There's another approach, which is like let's sort of have like a bunch of one off fusions. So what they do is they take a bit of fuel and they zap it with lasers from like every direction simultaneously, like one hundred and ninety six super powerful lasers zap it, and they hope that they get it hot enough that it confused before it explodes.
Wait, it fuses before it explodes. What does that mean.
It means that, like, the explosion takes a while to happen, and so if you can get it hot enough to get these these hydrogen nuclei hot enough, then they will fuse because they haven't yet had time to explode. Like it's gonna explode. But they call this strategy inertial confinement fusion because it's just like you try to get it to happen fast enough so the inertia keeps it together for long enough for it to fuse before it explodes. But then you know, it blows up and you get another pellet. He's out that one with lasers, that one blows up.
That's the strategy that one's kind of like like you're instead of having a minisun it's like you're stringing a sun out into a little tiny thread, right, and you're right, instead of having like one fire going on, you just string it along and you burn little bits at a time.
Yeah, exactly. It also seems the most science fiction you. I mean, you're like one hundred and ninety six super lasers focusing on something all at once. And there's a big facility in California called the National Ignition Facility that's trying to do this.
I've been there, and actually, you know, if any of you have watched one of the Star Trek movies, you know, the new ones with all the lens flares, you have seen this experiment because I think they used the filmed or they replicated it or something. When Scott is in the engine saying she cannot take any more, Cupton, I think that's basically either a model or the actual thing that they filmed it in.
Oh cool, Well, it's also a cool sounding phrase, National Ignition Facility. That's well named.
So is it as as good as she cannot take any more? Cupton?
It's as good as your Scottish accent is? Yes, maybe we should have some of our Scottish listeners write in and Ratesjorge Scottish accent.
There you go, and also eater and niff.
But all those are what we call hot fusion. That's sort of trying to replicate the Sun's strategy, get a bunch of hot hydrogen together and hope it fuses. But those are hard, right building one hundred and ninety six lasers or making a magnetic bottle for something that's thirty million degrees. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could do fusion at room temperature? Right? You didn't need all this crazy apparatus.
What if you could have cold fusion?
Exactly?
Did I just come up with that?
Yes? Or hey, yes, I've never heard that phrase before. Congratulations, that was brilliant.
Humans are trying to make fusion here on Earth. But they're both hot fusion strategies, basically mini suns. And you're saying there might be a way to do this cold without like millions of degrees or giant one hundred and ninety six lasers or anime robot names. There might be something easier.
Exactly, And that's tantalizing. That's the promise of cold fusion.
All right. Let's get into it, but first let's take a quick break.
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All right, So finally we're going to get into cold Fujion Daniel. So we've talked about fusion and hot fusion and hot yoga and how it's different than than the hot yoga. That's sort of. But now the idea is that we can maybe create a sun, but do it in a cold way where it's not braining or at millions of degrees.
Yeah. The idea is, can we get too hydrogen nuclei to get close enough together to turn into helium and release their energy without having to get the hydrogen so hot? Right, we don't want to create the sun, but we do want to extract that energy. So the problem, remember, is how to get the hydrogen close together. If you can just get them close enough together, they will fuse, but they repel each other, so you need something to get them close together. And the basic strategy of hot fusion is make you know a lot of pressure and a lot of temperature, and these things will go really fast. Another way is to try to get the hydrogen closer together without heating it up. And it turns out that hydrogen likes to get sucked into this special kind of crystal. It's called palladium. It's a metal, and hydrogen just really fits really well into the gaps between the palladium molecules, and palladium sort of squeezes hydrogen together like packs it in. The hydrogen in there, and the hydrogen gets much much closer in palladium than it will without the palladium.
So you're saying, use something like a crystal to pack them in closer. But they're not gonna explode yet.
They're not gonna explode yet, but you're most of the way there. You know, it's imagined. It's like a big hotel room with really really tiny rooms, right, and everybody's in their own little room and they don't yet notice that there's somebody next door that they really don't like that they want to run away from, because remember, hydrogen repels itself and so now, but you've gotten them really close together, so you have this opportunity for them to fuse.
Yeah, you got a bunch of people in a hotel with tightly packed rooms. What could possibly happen?
Well, you're looking for an explosive situation, right, You just have to persuade all these people to get together if.
You want something interesting to happen. That's one way to do it. Put a bunch of people and know it's a bunch of people.
Who hate each other, into tiny little hotel rooms next to each other, exactly, and then you apply a little bit of energy, right, And the idea is you apply just enough energy and maybe the hydrogens will fuse into helium because you've already gotten them so close together that maybe they'll like, you know, pop out of their little rooms and fuse because they're near each other.
That was the idea, Like, maybe they'll jostle, jostle around and accidentally bumping to each other.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. All you have to do is get the hydrogen close enough together so it's not a terrible idea. And then in nineteen eighty nine, these two guys in Utah, Ponds and Fleischman, they set up an experiment to try this, and they claimed that more energy came out of the experiment than they put in, right, you have to put in a little bit of energy, a little bit of electrical energy to sort of get these hydrogens out of the cells that you've crammed them in. And they claimed that they saw a huge amount of energy come out of their experiment.
So they did it. They put a bunch of hydrogen inside of a palladium crystal and then they just put it over a fire and they noticed it was getting hotter than it should have been.
Yeah, they put a bunch of hydrogen inside this palladium and then they put it inside a bath of heavy water and they put electrodes in it, which released which broke up the heavy water, so you get deterium. The deterium banged into the hydrogen, and the hydrogen came out of the cells. And what they were hoping for was that the hydrogen would fuse or the deterium, which is just a heavier version of hydrogen, would fuse and they would get a huge amount of energy. And it's all in a water bath. So what they were doing was just measuring the temperature of the water. And they claimed to have a huge amount of an unexplainable amount of energy, unexplainable by any way other than cold fusion. And remember they didn't build a huge reactor. This is just like something sitting on a tabletop. The whole thing cost you tens of thousands of dollars to build. You didn't need a magnetic bottle, you didn't need one hundred and ninety six lasers. It was cheap, but it's could somehow they claimed extract all this energy from the nucleus of the atoms, and of course they got a huge amount of publicity. It was like on the cover of magazines and everybody thought, this is the energy revolution. But but then nobody could reproduce it. You know, people were excited, and people in Japan and people in Texas and people in Boston, all sorts of folks tried to reproduce this experiment because it seemed pretty simple. And at first, you know, some groups said, oh, yeah, we see a little of this, Oh we see a little bit of that. But it was all done sort of a little too quickly, and you know, everybody was excited to be the second people to make cold fusion work, or the third person to make cold fusion work. People really wanted to believe it, and so there was a lot of science done that wasn't really like up to the standard that you would expect. And in the end, when the dust cleared, it only took a few months, but people realized nobody could reproduce their result, and then they started.
Getting not even the first people who did it, they couldn't do it again.
Well, they claimed to have done it again, right, and they wanted more money. They asked the government for millions of dollars to fund a larger experiment, but they never let people like examine their apparatus, and the results didn't make sense and they wouldn't answer questions about it.
And so that's not suspicious scientific behavior at all, I know.
I know.
And so it became a sort of an embarrassment, you know, to the physics community, like, oh my gosh, we got all this attention from the media and from the public, and people got excited about this possibility. Then it turns out it was just shoddy experiments. And later people discovered that probably they did get a little bit of extra heat out of their reaction, but it was just a normal chemical reaction like hydrogen and oxygen coming back together to make water releases some heat, so they weren't getting any nuclear fusion at all. They weren't getting nearly as much energy as you would get you actually had nuclear fusion, and if they had, their whole thing wouldn't exploded, right, they had released enough energy. If they had actually achieved fusion, it would have demolished their building.
So but did they actually, you know, pretend on purpose, or were they also fooled themselves.
That's a great question, and I'd love to see an in depth interview by it, like a really hard interviewer. But they famously clammed up after they were shown to be basically frauds, and they insisted that what they had done was right, but they never really gave enough details for anybody to validate it or to understand whether they were outright lying or just sort of overly hopeful and confused by their results. And you know, you want to, on one hand, try to be generous in your interpretation and think, oh, they just got wrapped up in the excitement of their potential discovery and skipped a few steps. On the other hand, you know, maybe they were maybe they were.
Frauds, so that particular idea for cold fusion didn't seem to have work. But does that mean that's that it's impossible, or that that idea can never work, or that is, do you think there are other ideas out there for cold fusion that could work.
It's definitely not impossible, right, somebody could make it work. There's probably a way for it to happen. The problem is, once a field has such an em 're seeing public implosion like that nobody wants to work on it. Like you don't see young smart people saying I'm going to go into the field of cold fusion because it's a laughing stock.
So currently it became synonymous with like confusion, confusion, confusion, KENU reeves exactly like bad. It became synonymous with bad signs. I mean, like nobody wants to be a cold fusion physicist anymore exactly.
But that doesn't mean it's not possible. Those guys sort of ruined it for everybody. It may it may not be practical, but you know, there might be a way to do it, and there are some other ideas, and there are some things that people have sort of made work, Like they've tried this idea with muons. If you take hydrogen and instead of having electrons going around the nucleus, if you have muons going around the nucleus. Remember, muons are just heavier versions of electrons. What happens is the muons, they're sort of orbit is much smaller than the electrons orbit because muons are heavier. And what this means is that it lets the hydrogens get closer together and so so that can make fusion happen.
Well, I think you guys just have a branding problem again, you know, like, just call it something else and then have people work on it.
Extreme fusion, yeah.
No, tepid fusion maybe, or warm fusion.
Nobody's going to get excited about something named tepid. It's like limp fusion.
Yeah, or not so hot fusion, you know, just that it's not as.
Embarrassing cryo fusion.
Oh my god, there you go. Nano fusion. Just call it nano something.
So I like to believe that it's still possible. First of all, I hope that they get hot fusion to work. That would be awesome, But I'd love to believe that cold fusion was possible. You know, none of the experiments out there are practical. This muon idea does work, but it's very difficult to make muons and to make it happen. So it's not energetically practical, but I like to believe that somewhere out there is somebody with a really clever idea that could actually make this work and could really revolutionize the way energy is produced.
Yeah, it could be. It could. Then you could have like a fusion reactor in your home, right, or your car in your DeLorean like they did in the Back to the Future.
Yeah, or you could have you could even miniaturize it. You know, you could have your iPhone, could a you know, you could just add a drop of water and you could run for days or weeks. Right, it would be incredible what could be achieved if we had cold fusion, if we had small, compact, non dangerous sources of energy that were ubiquitous that just to water as fuel, that would be amazing.
Yeah, So to those of you who are listening, there's a whole field out there open in physics for you to maybe be the next great inventor, as long as you call it something else, called something else, cry of fusion.
All the smart people have run away from it, so the ground is very fertile for you to make some breakthrough.
Yeah, you could change the world or the universe.
Or the future of humanity. And if you do, you know, give us some credit or at least one percent of your profits.
And if you're lying and a fraud, don't mention us at all.
That's right, we will. We will claim to know nothing about your research.
We'll disavow We'll think you were talking about cold yoga.
Or our new energy drink line, Dark Energy and cold Fusion.
All right, well, we hope you guys enjoyed that and learn a little bit more about this interesting candorze movie, I mean idea.
Thanks for tuning in, and if you have questions about how things do or do not work, please send them to us at questions at Daniel andhorgey dot com. We love hearing from you.
See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain in the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
As a United Explorer card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval offer subject to change terms apply.
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