A Technology That Would Change The World (If It Exists) | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org [Music] hi before we get into today's topic I want to do something I don't normally do on this channel I want just kind of like editorialize a little bit I've been doing this channel now for almost 5 years and anybody who's been following this whole time anybody who goes back and watches my videos from 2014-2015 can probably tell that there's been a bit of a shift in my level of skepticism a couple of things you know while back about the global consciousness project that a lot of you guys like that one and I even interviewed a guy that was sort of involved in it and I remember in the interview I said something to the effect that skepticism itself can sort of be its own dogma because a lot of scientific ideas that don't fit into you know the mold that we already have that don't really jibe with the scientific establishment a lot of times that can be just sort of shoved out the door and yeah I mean this can be applied to a lot of things in history is littered with discoveries that change the way we see the world that at the time totally went against the conventional wisdom and I made the argument a few different times that you know if you don't at least look into these you know outside the parameters ideas then science can't move forward because if you're always playing inside the same box and you never step outside of that and try something new and look at new ideas then there's no way for anything to grow from there and there's a part of me that does still believe this I think there is some merit to that argument but the longer I've been doing this channel and the more I've researched all these topics and looked into them and kind of followed all the rabbit holes and everything the more I've come to just sort of align myself with the scientific consensus you know it's kind of like the dunning-kruger effect right the idea that the less knowledgeable you are in a subject the more confidence you have in it you know and then that confidence kind of goes away the more you find out how much you don't know so it was really easy for me five years ago to sort of challenge a scientific establishment because I hadn't really researched a lot of these topics they hadn't really looked into them that much and then the more that I did the more I realized oh no I have no basis to stand on here I have no bona fides to challenge what these people are thinking so yeah I've generally come to just sort of trust the scientific consensus on things because for every single subject that I look into there are literally hundreds maybe even thousands of people out there who have dedicated their lives to understanding this and if those people have come to somewhat of an agreement or a majority of them believe something it would be the height of arrogance for me somebody who hasn't spent any more than you know a fraction of my time looking into it to challenge what they had to say about it you know I do still think that skepticism can become dogmatic and pervasive and kind of blind us to possibilities that maybe we aren't looking at because we're so stuck inside the box that we've constructed I do think that everything should be researched I don't think there's anything more scientific than that in the end I will always align myself with the scientific consensus and if new information comes up and the scientific consensus changes I will change right along with that all of that is to say the today's video is on a subject that most people consider to be junk science or pseudoscience but I'm going to approach this with as much of an open mind as possible and I invite you to do the same because some of this is pretty interesting so yeah today I'm going to talk about cold fusion I've covered a fusion energy on this channel before but just as a quick refresher Fusion Energi is when two atoms smash together in fuse into a new elements usually producing a whole lot of energy and usually done in situations of high pressure and temperature now this is obviously the opposite of nuclear fission that's when one atom is split into two atoms and releases energy that way and this is what runs the nuclear reactors that power our homes today fission reactions are usually done with very high mass atoms like uranium that have hundreds of protons and neutrons in them and fusion is usually done with hydrogen because it has the lowest mass it's literally one proton one electron you fuse those together and you get helium with two protons hydrogen fusing into helium is exactly what powers our Sun and it happens because the mass of the Sun is so big and the gravity is so strong that it's actually able to push these two protons together which they repel each other because they're both positively charged but this smashes them so hard that they actually eventually do fuse in together this boundary that I'm talking about that get past the electromagnetic barrier this is called the Coulomb barrier it takes a lot of energy and pressure to do this so in fusion reactors we're basically trying to replicate conditions inside the Sun but using a superheated plasma and that kind of flings these hydrogen ions around hopefully to smash them together fast enough to overcome that barrier of course the big problem with nuclear fusion so far anyway is that it doesn't really work as an energy source because it actually requires more energy to create then we actually get out of it which kind of defeats the purpose there's a lot of experiments and projects trying to sort of chip away at this problem and hope does spring eternal and this is of course hot fusion and by hot I mean very hot like surface of the Sun hot this is not something you would have sitting on your desk charging your phone unless your phone was a Nokia 3310 which of course can survive anything for that you want something that can produce energy at room temperatures cold fusion but cold fusion got such a bad rap back in the day for reasons that I will explain in just a second that proponents of the technology have sort of rebranded it to linner which stands for low energy nuclear reactions although sometimes it stands for lattice enabled nuclear reactions it's kind of used interchangeably the idea is this you get a jar you fill the jar with an electrolytic solution of lithium so heavy-water I need to explain heavy water real quick water as you all know is h2o 2 hydrogen atoms one oxygen atom now heavy water is the same thing but the two hydrogen atoms are actually deuterium so what's deuterium you may be asking well datoria m-- sounds really exotic but it's really just an isotope of hydrogen that has a neutron and a proton so it has two particles in its nucleus to like do a like duet like do all right deuterium you get it since it has twice the mass of regular hydrogen sometimes it's called heavy hydrogen hence heavy water by the way whenever you hear people talking about fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms what they're really talking about is deuterium because you kind of need that extra Neutron in there to you know go with the two protons when it becomes helium so okay I'm glad we had that talk next you add some electrodes a negative anode of palladium surrounded by positive cathodes of platinum once you introduce some voltage it creates an electric current that strip deterring madam's off of the heavy water molecules creating a negatively charged OD positive ion and a positively charged deuterium ions a positively charged deuterium ion is basically a proton and a neutron with no electron and since it's positively charged it's attracted to the negatively charged palladium anode once there it absorbs an electron and becomes neutralized but something interesting happens at the anode at the atomic level the Palladium in the anode is arranged in a cubic lattice and the gaps between the atoms in this structure are big enough for the tiny deuterium atoms to slip into as more and more deuterium atoms are attracted to the negative anode they stack up and push inward forcing more and more of the deuterium into the palladium kind of saturating it and saturating it actually makes that palladium metal sort of expand a little bit because you're filling it with deuterium atoms and here's where they put the squeeze on it by oscillating the current in the anode you can cause that palladium to expand and contract do the pressure of the term out of surrounding it this increases the density of deterring even further until eventually the datoria madam's start to fuse into helium this fusion reaction produces heat 24 million electron volts for every fusion that occurs the idea is of course you take that heat and can be used to power generators so when running these experiments you look for excess heat helium bubbles and oxygen bubble because when the heavy water molecules break apart the negatively charged do molecules attracted to the positive cat those where it splits up combines with other free electron atoms and creates oxygen gas o2 this in theory is how it's supposed to work and I think if we can put aside the controversy for just a second we can all agree it's pretty clever but you may be asking why all the controversy Joe to which I would respond you're young aren't you senior citizens my age and older remember that a whole thing happened in 1989 where reports came out that cold fusion it happened using this method and I mean it was everywhere and you gotta know the context of the time to really understand why this was such a big deal the oil embargo of the 1970s we had this huge oil crisis we were still kind of reeling from that a little bit in the late 1980s Three Mile Island had been a thing not too long before that so there was a big anti-nuclear movement going on global warming as an idea had just kind of been put forward and it was just starting again to people's consciousness and oh yeah the Exxon Valdez the biggest oil spill of all time had literally just happened like the same week that this was announced so the idea of a cheap renewable energy source was big big news plus just a few years earlier in like 1985 scientists discovered high temperature superconductivity for the first time which nobody thought was possible so we might have just been a little bit more open to the possibility at that point the researchers in the spotlight were Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and Stanley pons from the University of Utah they hypothesized this method of creating cold fusion reactions and we're funding the whole thing out of pocket up to a hundred thousand dollars they were spinning themselves to do this research and what they found or claimed to find while doing these tests was that there would be these spikes in the water temperature like the water would be at a steady 30 degrees Celsius and then out of nowhere with spike up to 50 degrees Celsius and kind of stay there for a little bit without them adding extra energy into the system so this extra energy seemed to be coming from somewhere which was positive and kind of confirmed their hypothesis but they couldn't figure out exactly how to make it happen it seemed to happen at random times they couldn't seem to induce it when they wanted it to so it was a little thing I mean it's not like they built MIT diffusion or anything but still it was it with some good news so they filed a grant to continue their work and when to publish their paper with Stephen Jones of Brigham Young University and this is where things took a very wrong turn the agreement between the three of them was to announce their findings in the journal Nature on March 24th of that year but Fleischmann and pons for reasons that nobody fully understands some say the University of Utah pressured them to do this so they could get credit for the discovery they jumped the gun and they filed their paper with the Journal of electroanalytical chemistry on March 11th and they announce their discovery along with a press release in a gigantic press conference in other words it didn't go through the peer-review process and for all those reasons that I listed earlier the discovery made news all around the world and Fleischmann and pons became household names for a while and that whole thing kind of pissed off Stephen Jones who parted ways with them and kind of distanced himself from the project but science and the peer-review process that it's based on marches on and because this was getting so much attention research labs from all around the world started trying to do this themselves and you remember the part earlier where I said that they had trouble sort of getting it to reproduce when they wanted it to yeah so did everybody else reproducibility is kind of super important in science you know if you claim to be able to make artificial life by mixing together chocolate milk and goat pee and then nobody else can get the same results I mean it sounds like a pretty good prank actually the point is this whole thing blew up in their faces as it should have you know whether or not they were able to get it to work is almost irrelevant because they didn't follow the process there's a reason why things are done this way so there were callous explanations the other people came up with to explain their findings some of them were just simple miscalculation some of them had to do with flaws in the Palladium and all this gets more complicated because there apparently were some labs that did validate their hypothesis a team in Georgia and a team from Texas A&M University got similar results but over 600 different teams tried this experiment and only a handful of them got anything that even closely resembled positive results some people call the whole debacle fusion confusion and the word hoax started flying around quite a bit it didn't help that the University of Utah immediately applied for a grant for twenty five million dollars from Congress the whole thing to start to sound really fishy in sentiment changed everybody was so excited about this this was such a big deal and then it just felt like the rug got pulled out from under us by April 30th the New York Times pronounced cold fusion dead and called the whole thing a circus and you know who really don't like to be called clowns scientists the science community turned on this thing hoard the very day after the New York Times article the American Physical Society had a special session just about cold fusion and eight of the nine speakers declared it dead and with Stephen Coonan of Caltech called pons and Fleischmann incompetent and delusional he got a standing ovation ouch pons and Fleischmann I mean their careers were over I mean their names are still punchlines in some circles to this day in any research into cold fusion dried up completely after that nobody wanted to touch it well almost nobody the University of Utah when they had an invested 4.5 million dollars to set up a cold fusion Research Institute in various independent researchers have tested different angles of the hypothesis over the years but none of them seem to be able to get any kind of funding for obvious reasons the idea does still have its supporters though they point out some of the anomalies that were done in some of the tests and some of the unexplained things that came out of the flurry of experiments that came up after the announcement was made and other labs from around the world have been able to get similar results in the years since then I'll put links to all that in the description below the best case scenario here is that there's some tiny specific detail that only a handful of labs actually accidentally got right and if we could figure out what that thing is it would make all the difference we could scale it up and it could change the world but the other side of that coin is that the number of positive results were so small that it's statistically insignificant and it's just an anomaly or a miscalculation and the whole thing is just attributable to nothing more than that this is the angle that the overall science community has had on this subject since 1989 do you think that's fair tell your wives and why not in the comment section but real quick before I bail there is actually another type of cold fusion that totally works totally provable and tiddly TB later look at this from the 80s it's called muon catalyzed fusion and it was first proven by Stephen Jones the same guy that was working with Fleischmann and pons from Brigham Young University he actually made a tiny little splash about this a few years earlier in 1985 but a much smaller one because you know he didn't blast it all over the news passes anyway in the air sometimes electrons and hydrogen atoms can be shared with other hydrogen atoms they don't really bond with each other just get caught in each other's electromagnetism the two nuclei are still positively repelled and sometimes and I mean barely almost never but sometimes the two protons can by some fluke get pushed together and fused well muons are subatomic particles that can take the place of electrons and they carry the same charge but they're 200 times more massive so if you replace the electrons and hydrogen atoms with muons and then bind two of those together that combined extra mass pushes the protons closer making the potential to fuse much higher so you bombard hydrogen atoms with muons they can produce fusion at room temperature and it can actually set off chain reactions bouncing from one atom to another fusing them as it goes until it eventually sticks with an atom and stays there they can do this on average about 150 times before they get stuck in each fusion event creates roughly 18 mega electron volts for a grand total of 2.7 Giga electron volts per muon created sounds great until you realize that making muons is actually really hard it's not as simple as mixing chocolate milk and goat pee or is it yeah the power it takes to create every muon that you create is about 5 Giga electron volts so you're losing energy for every muon they create the good news is it definitely works it's been thoroughly studied and this has been repeated over and over and over again we know it's a real thing it just takes more energy to create it then you get out of it it's the hot fusion of cold fusion but just like hot fusion people are chipping away at if we can find a easier more efficient way to create nuan's if we can find ways to keep them from sticking so they can create more chain reactions as we go along this might actually become feasible Fusion is a moonshot it's one of these things that just might be a little bit crazy but if we can pull it off could change humanity forever cold fusion is more like M Drive it's like a double moonshot which if there's not a drink called that there definitely should be one yeah I mean people get excited about mdrive because it's propulsion without fuel it would literally change everything about how we travel through space if it worked so I mean even if there's a tiniest chance if we're gonna get just a tiny tiny tiny positive result out of it people want to research that and it's that same mindset of but what if that Spurs people on to continue to support Leonard research so what do you think junk science are worth exploring talk about down the comments you know some of the concepts in this video you really have to step back a little bit and make sure you have sort of a foundational understanding of the underlying stuff before you can really get it I try to do that on this channel as much as I can but some of the other place that's really good to do that is brilliant org brilliant is a great sponsor this channel you all know that by now but I actually I don't just talk about it here I actually do talk about it in person out in the world the world when I venture into it I never leave this room and I talked about it because it takes things that maybe we studied 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Fucci yacht Oh David Thomas open-end and Greg head out thank you guys so much t-shirts is always available at the store answers a joke on slash shirts fun nerdy stuff I think you'll like them please do if you the first time here check out this video because Google thinks you'll like that or any of the others that you know might show up over here I talked about cool fun nerdy futuristic type stuff every Monday and every Thursday and if you like what you see I invite you to subscribe you'll be the first one to see him alright thanks again for watching you guys go out and now have an eye-opening week and I'll see ya Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,004,855

Rating: 4.9023523 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, fusion energy, cold fusion, fleischmann and pons, Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann, science scandal, muon-catalyzed fusion, low energy nuclear reaction, lattice enabled nuclear reaction, Chemical aided nuclear reaction, muons, future energy, clean energy

Id: cLvoCjz9Q1k

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019