This situation is the perfect, legitimate situation where patents make sense. I really wonder why Andrea Rossi doesn't simply patent his invention, and let the whole world know how - and if - it really works.
There's an informal italian patent on this. But not an international one, because "offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories".
The real difference is in disclosing the "secret sauce": a patent needs to disclose it, that's the whole point of patents. If that's not so, then it isn't really a patent on this (supposed) invention.
The parent was saying that there are clauses in international patent law that prevent applications for devices such as this, mainly because of time wasting and fraud.
@teamonkey: if so, ok. I was also forgetting something I had studied (being Italian): in Italy patents aren't awarded after an examination, they basically just certify the date of your claims. The whole examination and discussion of the patent are left to a trial, if there is ever one regarding it. I guess that' what the OP meant by "informal" patent.
This is why I want patents to be limited by how much work was put into creating that "invention". If it only took you a couple of days to come up with it and implement it, then I seriously doubt it's a world changing invention, and something others couldn't have come up with, anywhere in the world.
What Andreas is doing will obviously take more than a few days to invent.
We definitely need to change patent law, but requiring something to take time to be patentable does not seem like a good strategy.
1) Most break through inventions can be broken down in to smaller, patentable parts. Every patentable part at some point was "created" in an instant, rather than days.
2) You could use the logic to argue that software patents make perfectly good sense by saying that you had to spend years experimenting with software, learning what code works and what code doesn't work and understanding the market for various devices before coming up with your groundbreaking software patent on XYZ.
Elon Musk covered this. They don't patent things at Space X because their primary competitors are governments, and patent enforceability against governments is questionable at best.
This is an interesting point, but the situation here is very different. For space launches there is a very little market, and if eg the Russians undercut you your potential customers will go to them and you're going to lose money.
For electricity instead there is so much demand to satisfy that the inventor could make MUCH more money than he ever dreamed of just selling it in the Countries that would respect his patent.
If this gets verified that it produces more energy than it requires to get the thing started, our world will be revolutionized! Can't wait for the update. We can finally get rid of all the oil heads.
I suspect this will need several independent verifications, all of which meet the most stringent standards of scientific rigor.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Isolate the system in a Caloric chamber, once the device is at operating temperatures, and prove beyond all doubt that there are no hidden energy inputs.
Measure heat generated for a period of many hours. The results should be obvious.
Document everything for easy repeatability.
The Rossi-Focardi "E-Cat" is being seriously questioned. Their credibility is not great. I won't outright call it a scam yet, but I have grave doubts.
Note particularly: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel commented at scienceblogs saying Rossi did not allow the reactants or products to be measured on this occasion. In the previous tests there were not enough Nickel-62 and Nickel-64 (the only two isotopes which can fuse with hydrogen), at 3.6% and 0.9% respectively, in the reactants to explain the 10% copper output; these isotope levels are typical of natural copper, rather than of fusion by-product. According to Siegel, Rossi also refused to unplug the machine while it was operating despite it being an easy way to surreptitiously power the device. He also added that the supposedly independent testers had to rely on data supplied by Rossi.
ive been following this ever since the hoopla a few years ago. I want it to be real and I want to see the world changed by it, but until I see more verification I'm not getting my hope sup.
Cold fusion CONFIRMED - for people who live in rooms at temperatures of 859.1 degrees centrigrade, apparently. And who don't need their research papers to be peer-reviewed :)
It will be lovely if this pans out. It will be a challenge as well.
But besides the requirement of proof, the curiosity that Rossi continues to seek out funds when, if true, he could be building power plants and under cutting everyone on their cost of power. And thus crushing the power industry and becoming independently wealthy.
So that makes me skeptical. And like radio in the past, without understanding how it works, we don't make progress very quickly. Radio turned out to be a real thing, and this could too, but so far I'm still betting on the 'don't pass' line.
Simply put, they didn't actually exclude external sources of power, nor did they properly measure before and after fusion. The test also happened only when the device was on. This isn't an independent review; it's equivalent to me looking at it and saying "wow, that box is pretty!"
For everyone commenting on this story -- the link daeken posted is well worth a read. Very reasonable measures were completely ignored. The most amazing to me was the fact that external power was never disconnected from the device!
Some because they are hopeless naive, as you say, but probably some because they desperately want what is being claimed to be true, so they accept things they wouldn't generally accept in this specific case.
The only incredible thing is that Rossi seems to keep getting attention, which I suspect, along with naive sponsors, is the only thing he really wants.
The kicker is that the unit overheated and was destroyed in the first attempt. Something about that makes me very suspicious. If you were going to game the review to fake things, wouldn't you want to do a dry run first to see how the reviewers were going to do things? Then you could tweak your fakery to cover all your bases.
"The device subject to testing was powered by 360 W for a total of 96 hours, and produced in all
2034 W thermal."
When it does, and the reviewers find that the authors can't even get their units correct, this will be dismissed like every other cold fusion experiment.
"The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline"
Such idiotic claims. What comes next, that meat has twice the energy energy density of a fruit blender? Since when does one compare a fuel and a machine, instead of two fuels?
Neutrons. If it is a cold fusion device (which the arXiv article does not claim), then copious neutron production is almost unavoidable.
If I were evaluating something that claimed anything like nuclear power densities, you can be certain that I'd have radiation detectors around, and I'd write about it in my paper. This would be as much for my own safety as for science.
A successful invention of an alternative energy source won't require secrecy. That's what a patent is for. It's not something that can be commercialized (or even produced in quantity) without someone tearing it apart and figuring out how it works.
I'm not a fusion expert, but I studied physics in undergrad, and this seems pretty much impossible.
The first obvious question is "how are you overcoming the Coulomb barrier?". Protons absorbing electrons won't just 'happen' - it's energetically unfavorable, requiring 780,000 eV of energy input. (Unbound neutrons are unstable for this reason.) Given that the energy of chemical reactions is usually around 1-3 eV, one has to wonder where the heck all this energy comes from.
The second obvious question is "where does the excess energy/momentum go?". If (say) you hit a proton with an electron at 1 MeV, and 0.78 MeV is absorbed in conversion to a neutron, 0.21 MeV of energy and all the electron's momentum still has to go somewhere. Neutrinos weigh almost nothing, so all the momentum has to go into the neutron, which is now traveling at around 500 eV (not 1 eV). You'd likely also get gamma ray emissions.
The third obvious question is "what's the reaction cross-section?". Weak force mediated reactions happen very rarely, which is why the neutron's decay time is so long.
I agree with the general sentiment wrt this article, but I can address your first objection: quantum tunneling. Just like in those old (and real, even though energetically deficient) muon-catalysed cold fusion devices
Quantum tunneling increases the rate of energetically favorable reactions, but it can't create energy from nowhere. Eg. in the muon catalysis case, the reaction (D + T -> He4 + H) produced a huge amount of energy as soon as nuclei could "tunnel through" the barrier. In this case (p + e -> n + v), no energy is produced even after the barrier is overcome; the energy used to overcome the Coulomb barrier goes into the mass of the neutron. Hence, that energy still must come from somewhere.
With nickel at $6.64 per pound, and copper at $3.28, I'd be more interested in a device that went the opposite direction. (I mean, since it's not actually performing fusion anyway.)
What if you did crack cold fusion.. imagine the (justifiable) paranoia and measures you would have to take to protect yourself, and your discovery.
I'd want to get the plans/schematics in the public domain ASAP. Someone is going to throw money at you to help build bigger and better versions once all doubt is removed anyway.
I'm keeping the bubbly on ice for now. Not because the reactor may be a hoax, but even if it's wildly successful -- by which I mean CF replaces all current power generators -- does the estimable readership of HN think it's really going to reduce our energy bill?
Think of what goes into your bill -- it's not all a pass-through of whatever the provider had to burn, there's also labor and infrastructure.
But let's assume for argument's sake that CF is a plug-in replacement, and it's 1/10th the cost. What makes you think the utility execs will just give that away?
They have armies of lobbyists, decades of experience at bamboozling the public, and control of the infrastructure -- in some US states, they even have the power to seize property by force.
And when pressed, they'll just restructure their business so that their cost of buying energy is low or nonexistent, in order to justify their rates.
Or, more ominously, they'll manipulate the markets for CF materials to maintain or increase their rates.
Just a dose of reality. But, hey I could be wrong.
45 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadWhat Andreas is doing will obviously take more than a few days to invent.
1) Most break through inventions can be broken down in to smaller, patentable parts. Every patentable part at some point was "created" in an instant, rather than days.
2) You could use the logic to argue that software patents make perfectly good sense by saying that you had to spend years experimenting with software, learning what code works and what code doesn't work and understanding the market for various devices before coming up with your groundbreaking software patent on XYZ.
I think the same applies here.
For electricity instead there is so much demand to satisfy that the inventor could make MUCH more money than he ever dreamed of just selling it in the Countries that would respect his patent.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Isolate the system in a Caloric chamber, once the device is at operating temperatures, and prove beyond all doubt that there are no hidden energy inputs.
Measure heat generated for a period of many hours. The results should be obvious.
Document everything for easy repeatability.
The Rossi-Focardi "E-Cat" is being seriously questioned. Their credibility is not great. I won't outright call it a scam yet, but I have grave doubts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_(entrepreneur)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
Note particularly: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel commented at scienceblogs saying Rossi did not allow the reactants or products to be measured on this occasion. In the previous tests there were not enough Nickel-62 and Nickel-64 (the only two isotopes which can fuse with hydrogen), at 3.6% and 0.9% respectively, in the reactants to explain the 10% copper output; these isotope levels are typical of natural copper, rather than of fusion by-product. According to Siegel, Rossi also refused to unplug the machine while it was operating despite it being an easy way to surreptitiously power the device. He also added that the supposedly independent testers had to rely on data supplied by Rossi.
But besides the requirement of proof, the curiosity that Rossi continues to seek out funds when, if true, he could be building power plants and under cutting everyone on their cost of power. And thus crushing the power industry and becoming independently wealthy.
So that makes me skeptical. And like radio in the past, without understanding how it works, we don't make progress very quickly. Radio turned out to be a real thing, and this could too, but so far I'm still betting on the 'don't pass' line.
The peer review process should really be exercised before looking to publish an article, to avoid just such lines.
Simply put, they didn't actually exclude external sources of power, nor did they properly measure before and after fusion. The test also happened only when the device was on. This isn't an independent review; it's equivalent to me looking at it and saying "wow, that box is pretty!"
Some because they are hopeless naive, as you say, but probably some because they desperately want what is being claimed to be true, so they accept things they wouldn't generally accept in this specific case.
"The device subject to testing was powered by 360 W for a total of 96 hours, and produced in all 2034 W thermal."
When it does, and the reviewers find that the authors can't even get their units correct, this will be dismissed like every other cold fusion experiment.
Such idiotic claims. What comes next, that meat has twice the energy energy density of a fruit blender? Since when does one compare a fuel and a machine, instead of two fuels?
If I were evaluating something that claimed anything like nuclear power densities, you can be certain that I'd have radiation detectors around, and I'd write about it in my paper. This would be as much for my own safety as for science.
A successful invention of an alternative energy source won't require secrecy. That's what a patent is for. It's not something that can be commercialized (or even produced in quantity) without someone tearing it apart and figuring out how it works.
The first obvious question is "how are you overcoming the Coulomb barrier?". Protons absorbing electrons won't just 'happen' - it's energetically unfavorable, requiring 780,000 eV of energy input. (Unbound neutrons are unstable for this reason.) Given that the energy of chemical reactions is usually around 1-3 eV, one has to wonder where the heck all this energy comes from.
The second obvious question is "where does the excess energy/momentum go?". If (say) you hit a proton with an electron at 1 MeV, and 0.78 MeV is absorbed in conversion to a neutron, 0.21 MeV of energy and all the electron's momentum still has to go somewhere. Neutrinos weigh almost nothing, so all the momentum has to go into the neutron, which is now traveling at around 500 eV (not 1 eV). You'd likely also get gamma ray emissions.
The third obvious question is "what's the reaction cross-section?". Weak force mediated reactions happen very rarely, which is why the neutron's decay time is so long.
Hope is the last thing you lose, but it's pretty clear this particular case of "cold fusion" is (as the debunking article linked above) shenanigans.
What if you did crack cold fusion.. imagine the (justifiable) paranoia and measures you would have to take to protect yourself, and your discovery.
I'd want to get the plans/schematics in the public domain ASAP. Someone is going to throw money at you to help build bigger and better versions once all doubt is removed anyway.
Think of what goes into your bill -- it's not all a pass-through of whatever the provider had to burn, there's also labor and infrastructure.
But let's assume for argument's sake that CF is a plug-in replacement, and it's 1/10th the cost. What makes you think the utility execs will just give that away?
They have armies of lobbyists, decades of experience at bamboozling the public, and control of the infrastructure -- in some US states, they even have the power to seize property by force.
And when pressed, they'll just restructure their business so that their cost of buying energy is low or nonexistent, in order to justify their rates.
Or, more ominously, they'll manipulate the markets for CF materials to maintain or increase their rates.
Just a dose of reality. But, hey I could be wrong.
Naturally the utilities would fight that with every fiber of their being. But doesn't everybody here dream of that kind of disruption?