Michio Kaku totally dismissive: Cold Fusion is due to chemical reactions

  • Michio Kaku is a well known priest i.e. popularizer of mainstream physics - such a guys tend to concentrate all negative aspects of establishment, like the pluralistic ignorance bias, superficiality and ignorance. It's like to ask bishop or catholic church preacher for his opinion about evolution or let say heliocentric model - his opinion would be biased even more, than the opinion of the rest of society, because these people are payed just for their trolling at public (Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox belong in this cathegory).



    https://www.reddit.com/r/Physi…ence_gets_boring_trivial/

  • Stephenrezz -


    You are guessing and changing what someone said.
    Interpreting what they "obviously must have meant", changing the context.


    he he - nice way to quote people


    Where exactly am I guessing and changing what someone said. Here are your EXACT quotes:


    LFH Sam: "Michio Kaku is an idiot."


    LFH Sam: "He is an idiot for many reasons"


    I quote people in a very accurate way. You are wrong.


    EDIT: 'Alan Smith' likes this. Really Alan?? facepalm

  • FUD is like an infection. First, Kaku gets infected, then the millions that trust Kaku as the ultimate in valid science knowledge get infected. It's similar to an indorsement in politics. There comes a point where a LENR product release is the only way to change minds to the truth.


    Axil, I actually do not disagree with you that the uninformed will follow Kaku like lemmings, but that in no way shape or form qualifies the man as an idiot...he just like many, has no belief in the technology at this time. You are correct that it will take a LENR product release to change the minds of the masses (a repeatable truly independent demo among trusted peers would be sufficient for me personally), but alas we wait as the LENR can gets kicked farther down the road.

  • Michio Kaku speaks with a lot of charisma but is out of touch with most of particle physics. His personal contribution to string field theory is fine but not up to the level of Mandelstam, Venziano, Schwarz, Green, Yoneya and Scherk (Kaku's work is not even mentioned in Schwarz's seminal review of string theory...). Kaku left active research quite young, from the time I started my PhD. He has a tendency to exaggerate some things about physics for the sake of getting more attention and publicity (read $$$, nice haircut à la Einstein isn't it?).
    In comparison, his theory of human teleportation, his speculations on the inflaton scalar field, his spacetime theory of consciousness, etc... have a much more fragile and tendentious basis than CF/LENR. For this yes Michio Kaku can be viewed as an idiot.

  • Michio Kaku is a well known priest i.e. popularizer of mainstream physics - such a guys tend to concentrate all negative aspects of establishment, like the pluralistic ignorance bias, superficiality and ignorance. It's like to ask bishop or catholic church preacher for his opinion about evolution or let say heliocentric model - his opinion would be biased even more, than the opinion of the rest of society, because these people are payed just for their trolling at public (Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox belong in this cathegory).



    https://www.reddit.com/r/Physi…ence_gets_boring_trivial/


    Wait a minute...please tell me that I am misunderstanding what I am reading...are you saying Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox are paid trolls rather than honest serious scientists and physicists? Please tell me you are not disrespecting the most brilliant minds of our time and their work. I absolutely cannot believe the things I am reading here in this post!! This is unbelievable.

  • All though I don't share his enthusiasm for astrobiology Cal Sagan was different from Michio


    "Astronomer and noted Carl Sagan gave his perspective on cold fusion and its coverage in the press when he responded to a question posed at a gathering of science writers at Cornell University in November 1989.
    "In the case of cold fusion," he said, "we have a contention that you do something with palladium and with some hydrogen isotopes— on a table top, at room temperature— and you can make fusion happen, or at least generate fusion products, or at least make some heat that otherwise can't be generated. That's the contention. And it may or may not have ultimate commercial applications, which is why everybody is interested in it, not because there might be some novel physical process.


    "Now how do we decide that?" he continued. "Do we decide it by polling the membership of the American Physical Society? No! Polls don't work. They might not be knowledgeable or the minority might be right; it's happened many times in science. Do we write an article saying, 'Well, there is a disagreement, but the prevalent opinion is thus and so?' No. What we do is we say, 'The scientists don't know! They can't figure it out.' Some people say this thing, some people say that thing— too early to say say! Let's wait a few years. I guarantee that five years from now, this will be a dead issue. It will either be, there is such a thing or there isn't such a thing. We will not be sitting in some middle ground wondering. The stakes are too high. Either way, the definitive disproof of Fleischmann and Pons or the definitive proof. The rewards are so great that scientists— competitive, querulous lot— will decide one way or another."
    (End of Fire from Ice quote of Sagan)"

  • Stephenrezz -


    I will not justify the time having a discussion with you and I will not be shamed to silence for my right to freely express my thoughts on the Internet.
    If you think I am wrong, let's just leave it by that then.


    Just because I made a statement does not mean that I have to defend that statement and that I am willing to spend time discussing it with you.
    Over and out :)

  • /* are you saying Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox are paid trolls rather than honest serious scientists and physicists */


    This is your private extrapolation, which I leave without comment, but the cold fusion findings (and many others) are left without attempts for replication for nearly once century with community of honest serious scientists and physicists, despite their importance for future progress of human civilization is quite obvious.


    Nowhere in human history the mainstream science ignored the practically important findings so obstinately - not even during medieval times.
    We should draw some conclusion from this situation - sooner or later. The situation with mainstream science is not good at all, as you may guess from many citations herein


    https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=30708128&postID=9088151405154313186
    https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=30708128&postID=1422479114366525407

  • Kaku has succumbed to the simplicity of the meme. When that meme infects the mind then the thinking process stops. For Kaku, the meme is fusion and if LENR does not fit into that meme then LENR is invalid. Simple memes are the most devastating; they…

    Well, Axil is spot on here. Now, I have not read the sources linked here. However, what is quoted from Kaku is standard pseudoskeptical rant going back to 1989, that developed as a general meme about cold fusion, but that was never established by scientific process.


    Without reading over this, for example, his statement that if a tabletop cold fusion apparatus were operating, it would be deadly due to neutron radiation. This assumes that there is a known reaction, "cold fusion," and especially it assumes that it is ordinary d-d fusion, which will generate one fast neutron for every two reactions. Huizenga, in 1993 or so, wrote in the second revision of his book that the Miles work finding a heat/helium correlation was amazing, and that, if it were confirmed, this would solve a major mystery of cold fusion, i.e., the product. But then he said that he expected it would not be confirmed, because no gammas. Notice, he did not say "no neutrons." He knew that a neutron free reaction was possible, merely unlikely, i.e., in the normal branching, this was a rare reaction. But he was, again, assuming that the reaction would be a known one.


    The gamma is necessary if a fusion reaction has a single nuclear product. I.e., if d+d results in helium, conservation of momentum requires that gamma. But if the reaction is not d+d, as such, and if it has two products (or more), then there is no problem with conservation of momentum.


    We don't know what the reaction is, it is a mystery. But deuterium is being converted to helium with the fusion energy showing up as heat. The correlation is unmistakeable, so this is a done deal. It was confirmed. However, the ratio is still a bit imprecise. The theoretical value is 23.8 MeV/4He. That is "consistent with" what's been measured, but the precision is on the order of 20%. It's not easy to do this work!


    So, just as a simple thought experiment. Takahashi has shown that four deuterons in a particular physical configuration will collapse to form a Bose Einstein Condensate. That's math. He has shown that the BEC will proceed to fuse within a femtosecond. Again, math, this is all using Quantum Field Theory, under conditions that are not normally thought possible. However, a particular physical configuration of the palladium metal in these experiments may set up a resonant cavity that creates the necessary low-relative momentum conditions. The fusion would produce 8Be which is normally very unstable, it would fission to two helium nuclei. No direct neutrons.


    Now, the difficulty with that theory. While the 8Be nucleus, while intact, would probably radiate energy as photons at relatively low energies (not the hot gamma Huizenga expected), it seems unlikely that there would be time to radiate the energy away, so it would show up as hot alpha particles (helium nuclei at high velocity). The Hagelstein limit for charged particle radiation in these experiments is 20 KeV; above that level, effects would be observable that have not been reported at significant levels.


    Basically, Kaku, if quoted fairly, has no idea what he's talking about, he doesn't know what the actual issues are with cold fusion, he is just repeating ideas from 25 years ago, as if they were fact. That doesn't make him an idiot, but the behavior is idiotic, and a genuine scientist, if this is pointed out, he will recognize it. If not, well, scientists get attached to being right like just about anyone else.


    He really ought to get out and look around. The world is larger than he thinks.


    Now, maybe he has shifted his position, I have not looked at that last video. I normally avoid videos, but, later, I'll make an exception. Fingers crossed. I'm rooting for him. I love to see people overcome their own traps.

  • Logically, if Michio Kaku is an idiot or should be discredited at all because of his view on one specific very small fringe corner of of science, then almost all of the mainstream science community must be idiots worthy of discredit. I really am blown away by what I am reading in this thread.

  • Logically, if Michio Kaku is an idiot or should be discredited at all because of his view on one specific very small fringe corner of of science, then almost all of the mainstream science community must be idiots worthy of discredit. I really am blown away by what I am reading in this thread.


    Its a matter of politics and which way the wind is blowing. Kaku is a get along guy not a seeker of ultimate truth. Kaku must make a living as a science guru. He cannot afford to devote years of his life like many of us have done to understand the intricacies of this new dimension in science. There is no market for this truth in his world.

  • stephenrenzz said "I really am blown away by what I am reading in this thread. "
    I prefer Muhammad Ali to Michio any day..
    Rossi and Ali have more things in common besides arrogance, inspiration and grit... they don't worry about popularity


    "“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given
    than to explore the power they have to change it.
    Impossible is not a fact.
    It's an opinion.
    Impossible is not a declaration.
    It's a dare. Impossible is potential.
    Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

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