Good evening Mr. Nye.
My name is Loki and I have Cerebral Palsy
so I'm sorry if I sound weird or look weird,
but my question to you is on cold fusion.
Was it something that actually had merit or
was it something that the scientific community
legitimately had reasons for banning it.
Your thoughts please.
Loki, Loki, Loki, you don't look that weird
it to us sir.
You look fine.
About cold fusion, so here was the idea.
There's a guy who really had the first patent
on television was the mythic, this is really
his name, Philo Farnsworth.
And it is said he told people that he had
the idea for television by plowing his uncle's
potato field as a kid and he looked at the
way the furloughs went across the field and
inferred that would be a way to make a moving
picture.
That same guy got it in his head that he could
make neutrons do whatever he wanted, like
he had this one success and he got it in his
head that he could influence neutrons and
he created a device which he called a phaser
and that word has later been used to describe
rotating vectors in light waves and heat waves.
But this thing was going to enable neutrons
to fuse together at room temperature.
He was not able to do it.
In order to do that, as far as we can tell
right now, you need the gravity of a star,
which we have at our nearby star, the sun,
and people have speculated that you could
also contain fusion, not speculated, I'm short
changing us, people have shown that you can
contain fusion in a magnetic field, a very,
very strong magnetic field, but no one has
been able to build a magnetic field powered
that 
fusion reaction makes enough power to establish
the magnetic field strong enough to hold it.
So in my experience growing up it's always
40 years from now when this will be done,
but recently an aircraft company, I guess
it was McDonnell Douglas, claimed that they'd
be able to make fusion happen at room temperature.
I'm very skeptical because I look at what
happens in nature with these stars, but so
far cold fusion was a myth.
Then about 25 years ago 1988, 1990 scientist
at a university in the state of Utah here
in the U.S. thought if they had established
cold fusion, that they had established a magnetic
field powered by the energy of the fusion
that would contain the reaction, but they
didn't.
They had the thermometer in the wrong place
on their lab equipment.
And I cite this as an example of journalists
who were not scientifically literate enough
to question this result, this published result
or announced result and the journalists let
the story spiral out of control to the point
where somebody like you 25 years later is
asking essentially the same question, can
we have fusion at room temperature's?
As far as we know no, however, it is reasonable
that you will be alive when people really
do figure it out.
It's exciting.
It's a great question.
