Cold Fusion Warmed Over

60 Minutes had a piece on last night about Cold Fusion -- that "crackpot" technology that once promised to provide table top fusion reactors. It turns out that while cold fusion is still ridiculed by most physicists, and practitioners have started terming it a "nuclear effect" rather than fusion, there's a growing body of evidence that these table top reactors do produce energy.


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The most powerful moment for me was the interview with Martin Fleischman, who retreated from research after wide-spread ridicule of his initial experiments. You could see the mixture of emotions he struggled with as he tried to gauge what these new experiments might mean to him, and to reflect upon what might have been.

By the way, if you want to read a quick paper on the physics of cold fusion, Noble Laureate Julian Schwinger, whose own paper on cold fusion was rejected by Physical Review Letters, summarizes here.