Talk:Cold fusion/Archive 49

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Archive 49

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I feel like this article is less about cold fusion and more about the Pons and Fleischmann Experiment. I know that experiment is essentially the most widely reported event relating to cold fusion, but shouldn't it get its own article that could focus on government involvement and backlash and important history stuff. However, the cold fusion article should probably be more about the science behind how cold fusion could work, maybe bringing up other possible ways to do cold fusions. You could even combine it with the muon-catalyzed fusion which I just realize has its own separate article. You could discuss why all the theoretical methods don't work or report on the state of research, which is mostly just people repeating the fact that the Fleischmann Pons Experiment doesn't work.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the term cold-fusion, which I thought was just any fusion at temperatures significantly lower than how it happens now. The fact that there is a separate article for muon-catalyzed fusion indicates I could be wrong, but that might just be because this article, again, mostly just describes the events, reports, and criticisms of the Fleischmann-Pons Experiment.

I would attempt this stuff myself, but it would involve making a new article, combining others, and completely changing this one, that I don't have the Wikipedia skills for. I would also need to do a ton of research into other methods of cold-fusion, which are heavily diluted in the sea of Fleischmann-Pons reports. MrMasterGamer0 (talk) 20:16, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Is there any science behind how cold fusion could work? With reliable sources? If you want speculation, Wikipedia is the wrong place. --Hob Gadling (talk) 06:55, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

This article is about "the Pons & Fleischmann Experiment and related follow-up work". That's a self-contained topic, and it's notable. So it's perfectly appropriate for there to be a Wikipedia article about "the Pons & Fleischmann Experiment and related follow-up work". And that's what this article is.

Separately, you can say that the title of this article (i.e., "cold fusion") does not reflect the content (i.e., "the Pons & Fleischmann Experiment and related follow-up work"). Now, my own opinion is that the current title is fine, but if you have other suggestions you can offer them! You can even propose to re-title this article literally "the Pons & Fleischmann Experiment and related follow-up work", although I would vote against that one, it's a bit clunky!

Separately, you can say that there ought to be a Wikipedia article on "approaches to nuclear fusion power that don't involve heating something up very much", I guess including scientifically-valid ideas like muon-catalyzed fusion and colliding beam fusion, and also things that don't actually exist like "the Pons & Fleischmann Experiment and related follow-up work". My opinion is that the current setup—where we have separate dedicated articles for those three things, but no overarching one—is the right setup. I think they don't just don't have much to do with each other in any detail. Let people interested in muon-catalyzed fusion read an article about muon-catalyzed fusion, without having to wade through a ton of other stuff thrown in that has nothing to do with muon-catalyzed fusion. There's plenty to say about muon-catalyzed fusion by itself—it's not a short article. And they're all findable as is—the legitimate approaches all have links from fusion power already. So I don't think merging them makes sense, nor making a new overarching article. See what I mean? --Steve (talk) 21:23, 23 November 2024 (UTC)