In Culture
The term "Cold Fusion" was coined in a 1956 New York Times article about Luis W. Alvarez's paper.
In 1957 Theodore Sturgeon wrote a short story "The Pod in The Barrier" where humanity has ubiquitous Cold Fusion reactors that work with muons, the reaction is "When Hydrogen One and Hydrogen Two are in the presence of Mu Mesons, they fuse into Helium Three, with an energy yield in electron volts of 5.4 times ten to the fifth power". Unlike the thermonuclear bomb contained in the Pod (which is used to destroy the Barrier) they can become temporarily disabled by "concentrated disbelief" that cold fusion works.
Read more about this topic: Muon-catalyzed Fusion
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)