and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Unfortunately, if you are the person who arrived here from that search, I can't help you. Of the problems I have with my dick, drippy is not one of them. Droopy, maybe. Drippy, no.

What I can help you with, however, is Cold Fusion. Why? I dunno. Just cause someone said so.

Currently the topic of Cold Fusion is heating up and it's been in the news lately. A number of articles have been talking about the U.S. Department of Energy's new found interest in Cold Fusion and that they have decided to review the more recent research available. At this point, it's a terribly compelling topic if you have any interest in energy at all..

Fusion, of course, is the opposite of Fission. It's the combining of atoms to create larger atoms. We know that Fusion does occur (luckily for us) because, as the They Might Be Giants song goes, the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees. This simple line from a children's song can teach us most of what we need to know about Fusion: it is the combining of smaller atoms to create larger ones and it requires extreme heat (energy, really). Until 1989 the only Fusion experiments we humans had managed to pull off were highly expensive, high-heat laboratory experiments that used either nuclear explosions or insanely high temperatures to force nuclei together.

Cold Fusion, it's existence still being debated, is so named for the fact that it is "cold". It does not (if it's real) require large amounts of outside energy. In fact in 1989 two dudes - Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann - announced that they had carried out an experiment that proved the existence of Cold Fusion and they did it, essentially, in their garage. They did this by sealing a bunch of heavy water (water that is composed of deuterium - aka "heavy hydrogen", heavy because it has a neutron which normal hydrogan (protium) does not have) up in a jar with two electrodes sticking into it. One electrode was composed of palladium and as a small amount of electricity was sent across these electrodes the energy caused the heavy water to split apart into it's elements oxygen and deuterium (you can do this with normal water, too). The important step here is (hypothesized) when enough of the deuterium is absorbed into the palladium that things begin to "smoosh together" (that's science speak for "crowded"). When things smoosh together enough Cold Fusion happens (or is purported to happen).

So how did they prove it happened? Who cares? First, they observed enough heat being let off from this glass jar that was not otherwise attributable to the electrolytic process of heavy water breakdown so they were pretty convinced the heat came from fusion reactions (which releases energy in the form of gamma rays). Second, we care because harnessing the power of Fusion would be huge. It would essentially provide us with a neverending supply of energy. A good comparison would be that of a fusion powered rocket. Since we don't have a good grasp of rockets, let us further apply it to cars: A fusion-powered rocket compared to our current rockets would be the equivalent of a car that would be able to travel twice as fast as any car today AND with a fuel efficiency of 7,000 miles per gallon. Whoa.

However, it's only good and dandy until you get into the thick of the debate. Many people don't believe Pons and Fleischmann proved anything. The experiment has been repeated by many with varying results. Since the claims of the hypothesis breaks the rules of physics we have today some people believe it can't even happen (though I suspect those same people didn't believe the earth was round, either).

If you want to get into the politics a bit more a good start would be to go read this enteraining article over at WIRED Magazine (note: this article was written back when WIRED was a decently good read - 1998). It's opening paragraph reads:

What If Cold Fusion Is Real?

It was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in 1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A surprising number of researchers already have.

The bottom line is that Cold Fusion is sort of like String Theory right now. Right on the cusp. Developing. Under Construction. In the works. But as my friend KC always likes to point out "Everyone thought Newtonian physics was it once, and then along came Einstein" - he broke Newton's rules AND he broke the i-before-e rule twice in his own name!