Cold Fusion Research Paper

Cold Fusion Research Paper

As the world becomes more aware of the growing need for a more abundant energy supply, one energy source has been swept under the carpet and virtually ignored. This source is cold fusion. Cold fusion is:

“A reaction that occurs under certain conditions in supersaturated metal hydrides (metals with lots of hydrogen or heavy hydrogen dissolved in them). It produces excess heat, helium, and a very low level of neutrons. In some experiments the host metal has been transmuted into other elements. Cold fusion has been seen with palladium, titanium, nickel and with some superconducting ceramics.” (Infinite)

In 1989 Stanley Pons and Martain Fleischmann announced to the press that they had discovered cold fusion. This announcement sent the scientific community in an uproar and the public news media went crazy. The public saw a new source of clean energy that had very little environmental effects. The scientific community saw a paper, which was not peer reviewed, of a scientific principle go out into the public without their consent. While the concept of cold fusion is contrary to the accepted views of physics, this small fact is not what had the community outraged. It was the way Pons and Fleischmann presented the experiment that caused problems.

The accepted way of presenting research results within the scientific community is to first publish your experiment to the rest of the scientific community, have other scientist verify your results, and then only after your results have been tested and verified should you go to the press. Science often has experiments that are contrary to the current theory, when these experiments are observed the theory is changed to allow the results to happen and be pre...

... middle of paper ...

...could all be showing the same effects without there being any merit to their clams.

The theories behind cold fusion are contrary to popular theory and therefore naturally run up against great resistance. Theories on why cold fusion is observed are still being developed, but a definitive theory is yet to be reached. There is a need for a new theory because cold fusion has been observed in such a verity of experiments that the possibility of error is not probable. The overwhelming number of experiments that have produced an effected dubbed ‘cold fusion’ forces a new theory to be considered.

Until a new theory is prescribed the world will have to do without the potential energy source of cold fusion. The world is in need of a clean energy source, therefore a theory must be devised and tested that will allow cold fusion to enter the physics community as a viable