BLoggins02

The "cold" in cold fusion didn't have to do with the amount of energy it put out it had to do with the amount of energy required to be put in, that's why it was so exciting.

elwoodblues

Here's a good, realistic site concerning 'free' energy. There's also a link at the top to a timeline featuring a LOT of the proposed free energy machines through history (starting back around Da Vinci).

<a href="http://www.phact.org/e/realfree.htm" target="_blank">http://www.phact.org/e/realfree.htm</a>

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: elwoodblues ]</p>

Coragyps

True Free Energy story:

In the early 80's a co-worker of mine brought a "Magical Mystery Top" to work. This was a mail-order item consisting of a black base with a "precisely configured paraboloidal surface" and a small top to spin on this surface. (In actuality, the top was the rotor, and the base the stator of an electric motor - a magnet in the top, and a coil and triggering device in the base.) You could start the top, and it would spin for hours on end. It would accelerate its spin as in moved through the low point of the dished base.
Everyone in the lab came by and played with it. We newly minted PhD chemists, in particular, spent hours theorizing why and how the shape of the base gave the top such momentum, and made it defy friction so well. Nobody had a clue how it worked for two or three days, until the janitor came in, watched it spin for half a minute, and asked, "Where's th' battry?"

Francois Tremblay

Well, was there a battery ? Don't keep us in suspense

lpetrich

Actually, the "cold" part is the temperature that it runs at -- room temperature instead of several million degrees C.

Automaton

Actually, some variations of "cold fusion" actually do work (to a limited degree.) Take for example Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) and sonoluminescence.

JB01

By definition, cold fusion is any fusion in which the large electrostatic potential barrier between the fusing nuclei is overcome by catalysis rather than by ramming the nuclei together at very high speeds (i.e., thermonuclear fusion). The term was originally coined to refer to muon-catalyzed fusion, which actually works, unlike Pons and Fleischman's palladium-catalyzed setup from the late 80s. Unfortunately, the energy required to produce the muons for muon-catalyzed fusion exceeds the energy that can be extracted from the reaction.

zootwoman

my son had one of those. If it was a delux model it had a battery in the box for extended spins but the cheap versions had no battery. The top spun because of magnetism.

To make your own:

<a href="http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/suspension.html" target="_blank">http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/suspension.html</a>

The toy is called the Levitron here's their home page
<a href="http://www.levitron.com/" target="_blank">http://www.levitron.com/</a>

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: zootwoman ]</p>