Brilliant, I tell ya...

This documentary about Rusi Taleyarkhan’s ‘research’ into sonofusion has so many of his flaws exposed that it is down-right difficult to watch. From the dates to the instrumentation, his crap was so bad as to be positively stupid. I watched all 44 minutes, 27 seconds of it and am very sorry to have wasted sooo much time. ...but then again, “Dr. Rusi Taleyarkhan “ was the ‘researcher.’ Yeah, I’m going to have to watch it again to be sure I’ve gotten it right...

 

Fucking egotist. Watched it again. Dug Purdue rules physicist guilty of research misconduct out of the archives. Can you believe that ‘Taleyarkhan received from September 2008 to August 2009 a $185,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate bubble fusion’ after all the years and the SHTF?
 

(snip)

A Purdue University physicist who claimed to have demonstrated a tabletop fusion process that could revolutionize energy production was guilty of research misconduct in his attempts to demonstrate independent reproduction of his findings, a university committee said Friday.

The panel did not investigate whether Rusi Taleyarkhan fabricated his widely publicized and highly controversial research, but whether he intentionally misled the scientific community in claiming that his work had been replicated independently.

It has been six years since Taleyarkhan's original publication, and no one else has been able to duplicate his work, said physicist Michael Saltmarsh, who is retired from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and had tried unsuccessfully to reproduce the work.

Taleyarkhan was using a well-known technique called sonoluminescence, in which sound waves are used to collapse bubbles in a liquid, creating very high concentrations of energy and light. The technique is used for catalyzing chemical reactions, cleaning badly contaminated surfaces and melting fat during liposuction.

In a 2002 paper touted on the cover of the prestigious journal Science, Taleyarkhan reported that he used sonoluminescence on acetone in which the hydrogen atoms had been replaced with deuterium. The high temperature and pressure, he said, produced nuclear fusion, generating neutrons and tritium.

But the article was published over the vehement objections of several reviewers and was criticized heavily by other physicists.

While researchers tried to duplicate the experiment, Taleyarkhan set his postdoctoral fellow Yiban Xu to the task.

Xu observed the critical fusion products and prepared a paper submitted to Science under his name. The paper was rejected, in part because referees concluded that one person could not have carried out the experiments alone.

According to the committee - composed of scientists from inside and outside Purdue - Taleyarkhan asked master's candidate Adam Butt to review Xu's data. Butt's name then was added to the paper, even though he had not participated in the research.

That, said the committee, was clearly scientific misconduct, because it was designed to give the appearance of a collaboration that had not occurred.

Meanwhile, Taleyarkhan made significant revisions to the paper, both in terms of grammar and scientific content, according to the panel. The paper ultimately was published in 2005 in the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design with virtually no mention of Taleyarkhan's participation.

In a 2006 paper in Physical Review Letters on his own work, Taleyarkhan asserted that his original observations reported in the Science paper "have now been independently confirmed."

The Purdue committee, however, concluded that Taleyarkhan was involved heavily in Xu and Butt's paper.

"The direct assertion of independent confirmation ... is falsification of the research record and thus is research misconduct," the committee found.

(un-snip)

As T. S. Elliot wrote:

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

Worth watching just to see how stupid ‘academics’ can be sometimes. ‘Well respected’ my ass.

An Experiment To Save The World – BBC History Documentary

Published on Jan 5, 2016

March 2002, the scientific world was rocked by some astonishing news: a distinguished US government scientist claimed he had made nuclear fusion out of sound waves in his laboratory. Rusi Taleyarkhan's breakthrough was such important news because nuclear fusion is one of the most difficult scientific processes, and also one of the most coveted. It could solve all of our energy problems for ever. In principle, sufficient fuel exists on earth to provide clean, pollution-free energy for billions of people for millions of years.