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High energy on the cheap: and a little shrimp shall lead them
01/01/2005 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
There is a growing excitement in parts of the physics community these days, says by Mark R. Leeper. And you may have read about it here first. Back on September of 2002, Mark published the following article on Snapping Shrimp in his zine the MT Void. Buy Cold Fusion in the USA - or Buy Cold Fusion in the UK  "Department of Odd Science Facts: I was a little taken aback when I read an article about the Snapping Shrimp. This little character is really a candidate for Ripley's "Believe it or Not." It seems he (or she) has an unusual defense mechanism. The shrimp has a big claw and he snaps it shut. Just by the cavitation of the moving claw it creates a little bubble that pops and startles its prey. Whole submarines can hide the sound of their engines from sonar from just the popping bubbles from these shrimp. Isn't that something? No? Ya' say ya' not satisfied that this is an interesting creature? How about if I said that the bubble actually gives off light? It does, you know. Still not impressed? How about if I said that the bubble also gets hot? How hot? Something like 25,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Other sources I read made the temperature estimate considerably higher. [A now-defunct URL from ABC News] makes the temperature something like the temperature in the sun. This is one shrimp I would not want to mess with. It could end up frying me."
When I said this, I got people responding that they did not get the joke. Mostly the article was ignored. It sounds ridiculous on the face of it. In fact we are talking about a water phenomenon called sonoluminescence. For a long time it was just associated with the propulsion methods of submarines. I think it was during World War II that it was discovered that there was a glowing around the propellers of submarines. The phenomenon is that imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound give off light and even create heat. I mean a lot of heat.
As Kenneth Chang reports in the science section of the New York Times, "When the force of sound waves implode tiny bubbles within a liquid at room temperature, the surface of the bubble can reach temperatures at least 25,000 degrees Fahrenheit, more than twice as hot as the surface of the sun, scientists reported this month... The scientists, at the University of Illinois, did not speculate just how hot the bubble became, but said they had managed to create a state of matter called plasma inside the bubble. In it, some of the electrons have been stripped off the atoms. 'This is the first definitive proof of the existence of a plasma' during this kind of bubble implosion, said one of the scientists, Dr. Kenneth S. Suslick, a professor of chemistry at Illinois. Their finding supports the intriguing notion that it may be possible to compress these bubbles so violently that vapor molecules in them are heated to multimillion-degree temperatures." http://tinyurl.com/475pz
What are we talking about here? Little tiny points of immense heat. The points are too small to cause any damage. In fact though shrimp have been creating these bubble for a long time, nobody ever noticed the heat. They just knew the bubbles the snapping shrimp create put on a cool sound and light show. And I mean cool. Now how might the ability to create super-high temperatures in very small areas be useful? Do the words "cold fusion" come to mind?
Chang goes on to say, "In 2002, scientists performing an experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee even reported that they had used the technique to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium - the process that powers the sun. That experiment did not measure the bubble temperatures, but detected byproducts of fusion." OK, so cold fusion is no longer a possibility, but is already an accomplished fact. Or may be. The scientists are still farbling about it, trying to figure out what they have. People have announced cold fusion in the past and the tide of scientific opinion has been against it. However, the resistance to accept is becoming weaker as Chang reports.
Cold fusion, which now seems tantalizingly close, would be a source of--dare I say it--almost limitless very cheap energy. This does not mean that it will be usable. I frankly do not know if it would be safer and cheaper to generate than fission energy. But it does begin to feel like it is almost within our grasp.
Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper
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