8 ms·

Great article. I'm not going to defend Rossi, but what happened in 1989 was a travesty. Yes, Pons and Fleischmann were premature in their annnouncement. But

Great article. I'm not going to defend Rossi, but what happened in 1989 was a travesty. Yes, Pons and Fleischmann were premature in their annnouncement. But they didn't deserve to be made pariahs, and there were others whose careers were destroyed for so much as publicly entertaining the possibility that cold fusion might be made to work. Edward Teller, on the other hand, was old enough not to care: Around 1992, McKubre says, he was summoned for an audience with legendary physicist Edward Teller. "He asked probing questions, in better depth, I think, than anyone else on the planet. You could see what a giant intellect he must have been in his time. I was subjected to this interrogation for four hours. At the end of it Teller said that he did not think that cold fusion was a reality, but if it were, he could account for it with a very small change in the laws of physics as he understood them, and it would prove to be an example of nuclear catalysis at an interface. I still don't understand what he meant by that, but I'm quite willing to believe that it's correct." [0] It really shows how political and, frankly, corrupt Big Science is. As this article points out, failure to replicate proves nothing. The charitable reading is that Pons and Fleischmann didn't even know for sure what properties of the alloy they were using were critical to the reaction, though they had some ideas. That possibility should have been considered. [0] http://www.wired.com/1998/11/coldfusion/ http://www.wired.com/1998/11/coldfusion/

Retric 11y ago
Early announcements would have been one thing, but all evidence points to these guys committing flat out fraud.
- marshray 11y ago
  Do you have a good link where I can read about this evidence?
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  What evidence is that?
- PeCaN 11y ago
  Evidence? As far as I can tell the only 'fraudulent' thing they did was jump to the conclusion of "WE MADE ENERGY WITH COLD FUSION" when they probably should've announced their result with "looks like we have some unexplained heat". They most probably were, however, understandably rather excited.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Producing even a little heat with fusion produces a lot of nasty radiation. As in kill everyone in the unsheilded room within a few seconds. Based on the amount of unexplained heat they produced fusion would have been extremely radioactive, however they did not treat there setup as an extreme radiation hazard. Which suggest they did not think there would be any fusion. PS: Here are some pictures for a device expected to produce less than 1W of fusion. http://www.cmgww.com/historic/farnsworth/inventions/fusion/fusionhot.html http://www.cmgww.com/historic/farnsworth/inventions/fusion/f... Note the deep and cheap to produce pit.
    - kryptiskt 11y ago
      They were chemists, not physicists. They were completely out of their depth when thinking about physics. From what I read in Frank Close's book they jumped the gun when they learned about Steve Jones (who wanted to explain Earth's He-3 with cold fusion), and they didn't want to risk losing credit for their major discovery. Obviously they were no saints and did lie and massage data when it all crumbled. But they behaved far more like blinkered true believers than frauds.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        Blinkered true believers and frauds differ only in one aspect: intent. I've met some 'true believers' and the common element was that they believed enough to risk other people's funds but not enough to risk their own. That makes it a very fine line between a true believer and a fraud, thin enough for me to bin them equally. It doesn't matter to me because I can't look into someone's head to figure out which of the two it is, no matter what they say or do, true believers may very well be frauds and people who you think are frauds may end up being true believers. In the end, the only thing that matters is results.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
api 11y ago
Big science is made out of meat like everything else and suffers from all the same biases and cognitive blinds and fallacies. Scientists are genetically 99.9% identical to new age woo woo peddlers and quacks. Science is more rational because it cultivates more rational methods, but not because it runs on better hardware.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Big science is made out of meat like everything else I take it you're referring to: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- MCRed 11y ago
  More specifically the scientific method, but the scientific method is out the window in society these days-- it's un popular. A politicians pronouncing something true (that is conveniently in his self interest) is given more weight than a thousand peer review publication (or even simple phenomena that can be measured in any college lab in the country.) Science seems to be dead, and what passes for it now is extremely politicized. At least outside of commercial institutions. I'm sure Intel and the people who make fab equipment are doing real science.
  - api 11y ago
    The scientific method is absolutely at odds with how human beings behave socially and politically. It's kind of strange that we ever came up with it. Our natural tendency is to use ideas to manipulate, to believe to belong rather than because anything is true, and to rely on a lot of sloppy heuristics in place of more cognitively expensive and time consuming modes of thought. Ultimately I think the only reason science became politically favored at all is because it was good at making people rich and building weapons to make them powerful. Truth has no part in it. Few people care about that, and not because they are evil but because they are a product of a Darwinian process that barely rewards it and that rewards other shorter term things much more.
MCRed 11y ago
I was around, and read the Pons & Flieshman paper before it was released (when the pre-prints were carefully guarded and numbered... do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?) IIRC it was the university that jumped the gun at least as much as them. I worked for a very well respected lab for physicists, the head of which should have gotten the nobel prize around that time (he missed out, but he was close). We replicated their experiment and then replicated it again with some changes that should have been innocuous. In both cases we were unable to observe the phenomena they observed. We published a paper to this effect, and were branded "deniers" by Mondo2000 and other fringe science advocates who really wanted to believe in Cold Fusion. We didn't disprove it, we didn't show evidence that P&F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time. Remember, failure to replicate an experiment either means the paper doesn't describe how to reproduce the phenomena well enough, or the observations in the paper are in error (for any number of reasons.) But we were just a datapoint. To claim they were frauds is a much, much higher bar. But they certainly were minor leagues scientists from a lesser university, and it's not surprising they were ostracized they way they were-- and that was politics (these "little people playing our game, the nerve!") as much as anything else. Big Science/Governent Science is very political and very corrupt. Genuine scientific outcomes are suppressed or ignored or rejected for publication because they violate the theories and beliefs of "peers" who "Review" them. I've been published and gone thru that gauntlet, and its very rarely about ensuring the integrity of the science, and much more about protecting grant receipts.
- gnufx 11y ago
  > do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?) I don't know, but the publicity machine at the time didn't inspire confidence in any science. > We didn't disprove it, we didn't show evidence that P&F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time. I'm surprised that a nuclear physicist would regard it as anything other than bollocks (to use the British technical term). It had the look of pathological science from the off in my eye. While I might have been willing to demonstrate the lack of fision products from an F&P apparatus brought to our detectors, it wasn't worth any significant effort/resources, and clearly nuclear physics expertise was the last thing that was wanted by proponents. Some of us were doing actual fusion experiments with things like platinum and palladium at the time. Their important property for nuclear physics, apart from the right atomic number, was ability to hang together in intense heavy ion beams, so that data-taking was just limited by the data acquisition interfaces, not the target. [Ob-hacker: the data acquisition and analysis systems were quite interesting, especially for the time.] For the record, I did get results published from such measurements which overturned widely- (universally-?) held belief in the field.
tim333 11y ago
I recall 1989 incident as Pons and Fleischmann appearing in the news saying they'd discovered cold fusion and then becoming a bit of a laughing stock when it turned out to be rubbish. I don't get how that shows that Big Science is corrupt or not. It seems a bit unrelated.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "becoming a bit of a laughing stock when it turned out to be rubbish" The important thing here is to separate the idea from the implementation. Is cold fusion theoretically impossible? I'm no expert, but there seems to be at least some scientists indicating it's not impossible. If that's the case, why does the failure of the first experiment matter? It's sad that the scientific community is partly based on reputation. I'd rather see all scientific work published anonymously, the work should speak for itself.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Cold fusion IS theoretically impossible, that's the point. Nuclear theory very much says that cold fusion doesn't work. Which means the experiments have to work because no one has a workable theory which predicts cold fusion.
    - pdonis 11y ago
      > Cold fusion IS theoretically impossible I think that's a bit strong. Nuclear theory does not say the energy isn't there (as the subject article of this comment thread points out). It also does not say it is impossible for the potential barrier between the nuclei (which is what makes it necessary to have high temperatures for conventional fusion to work) to be lowered somehow; someone upthread posted a reference to a conversation with Edward Teller where he basically said that's how he would explain cold fusion if it turned out to be true--the nuclear analogue of a chemical catalyst, lowering the activation energy required. It only says we don't currently know of any mechanism for lowering the potential barrier.
      - 11y ago

Retric 11y ago

Early announcements would have been one thing, but all evidence points to these guys committing flat out fraud.

marshray 11y ago
Do you have a good link where I can read about this evidence?
ScottBurson 11y ago
What evidence is that?
PeCaN 11y ago
Evidence? As far as I can tell the only 'fraudulent' thing they did was jump to the conclusion of "WE MADE ENERGY WITH COLD FUSION" when they probably should've announced their result with "looks like we have some unexplained heat". They most probably were, however, understandably rather excited.
- Retric 11y ago
  Producing even a little heat with fusion produces a lot of nasty radiation. As in kill everyone in the unsheilded room within a few seconds. Based on the amount of unexplained heat they produced fusion would have been extremely radioactive, however they did not treat there setup as an extreme radiation hazard. Which suggest they did not think there would be any fusion. PS: Here are some pictures for a device expected to produce less than 1W of fusion. http://www.cmgww.com/historic/farnsworth/inventions/fusion/fusionhot.html http://www.cmgww.com/historic/farnsworth/inventions/fusion/f... Note the deep and cheap to produce pit.
  - kryptiskt 11y ago
    They were chemists, not physicists. They were completely out of their depth when thinking about physics. From what I read in Frank Close's book they jumped the gun when they learned about Steve Jones (who wanted to explain Earth's He-3 with cold fusion), and they didn't want to risk losing credit for their major discovery. Obviously they were no saints and did lie and massage data when it all crumbled. But they behaved far more like blinkered true believers than frauds.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Blinkered true believers and frauds differ only in one aspect: intent. I've met some 'true believers' and the common element was that they believed enough to risk other people's funds but not enough to risk their own. That makes it a very fine line between a true believer and a fraud, thin enough for me to bin them equally. It doesn't matter to me because I can't look into someone's head to figure out which of the two it is, no matter what they say or do, true believers may very well be frauds and people who you think are frauds may end up being true believers. In the end, the only thing that matters is results.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

api 11y ago

Big science is made out of meat like everything else and suffers from all the same biases and cognitive blinds and fallacies. Scientists are genetically 99.9% identical to new age woo woo peddlers and quacks. Science is more rational because it cultivates more rational methods, but not because it runs on better hardware.

stcredzero 11y ago
Big science is made out of meat like everything else I take it you're referring to: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
MCRed 11y ago
More specifically the scientific method, but the scientific method is out the window in society these days-- it's un popular. A politicians pronouncing something true (that is conveniently in his self interest) is given more weight than a thousand peer review publication (or even simple phenomena that can be measured in any college lab in the country.) Science seems to be dead, and what passes for it now is extremely politicized. At least outside of commercial institutions. I'm sure Intel and the people who make fab equipment are doing real science.
- api 11y ago
  The scientific method is absolutely at odds with how human beings behave socially and politically. It's kind of strange that we ever came up with it. Our natural tendency is to use ideas to manipulate, to believe to belong rather than because anything is true, and to rely on a lot of sloppy heuristics in place of more cognitively expensive and time consuming modes of thought. Ultimately I think the only reason science became politically favored at all is because it was good at making people rich and building weapons to make them powerful. Truth has no part in it. Few people care about that, and not because they are evil but because they are a product of a Darwinian process that barely rewards it and that rewards other shorter term things much more.

MCRed 11y ago

I was around, and read the Pons & Flieshman paper before it was released (when the pre-prints were carefully guarded and numbered... do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?) IIRC it was the university that jumped the gun at least as much as them. I worked for a very well respected lab for physicists, the head of which should have gotten the nobel prize around that time (he missed out, but he was close). We replicated their experiment and then replicated it again with some changes that should have been innocuous. In both cases we were unable to observe the phenomena they observed. We published a paper to this effect, and were branded "deniers" by Mondo2000 and other fringe science advocates who really wanted to believe in Cold Fusion. We didn't disprove it, we didn't show evidence that P&F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time. Remember, failure to replicate an experiment either means the paper doesn't describe how to reproduce the phenomena well enough, or the observations in the paper are in error (for any number of reasons.) But we were just a datapoint. To claim they were frauds is a much, much higher bar. But they certainly were minor leagues scientists from a lesser university, and it's not surprising they were ostracized they way they were-- and that was politics (these "little people playing our game, the nerve!") as much as anything else. Big Science/Governent Science is very political and very corrupt. Genuine scientific outcomes are suppressed or ignored or rejected for publication because they violate the theories and beliefs of "peers" who "Review" them. I've been published and gone thru that gauntlet, and its very rarely about ensuring the integrity of the science, and much more about protecting grant receipts.

gnufx 11y ago
> do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?) I don't know, but the publicity machine at the time didn't inspire confidence in any science. > We didn't disprove it, we didn't show evidence that P&F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time. I'm surprised that a nuclear physicist would regard it as anything other than bollocks (to use the British technical term). It had the look of pathological science from the off in my eye. While I might have been willing to demonstrate the lack of fision products from an F&P apparatus brought to our detectors, it wasn't worth any significant effort/resources, and clearly nuclear physics expertise was the last thing that was wanted by proponents. Some of us were doing actual fusion experiments with things like platinum and palladium at the time. Their important property for nuclear physics, apart from the right atomic number, was ability to hang together in intense heavy ion beams, so that data-taking was just limited by the data acquisition interfaces, not the target. [Ob-hacker: the data acquisition and analysis systems were quite interesting, especially for the time.] For the record, I did get results published from such measurements which overturned widely- (universally-?) held belief in the field.

tim333 11y ago

I recall 1989 incident as Pons and Fleischmann appearing in the news saying they'd discovered cold fusion and then becoming a bit of a laughing stock when it turned out to be rubbish. I don't get how that shows that Big Science is corrupt or not. It seems a bit unrelated.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "becoming a bit of a laughing stock when it turned out to be rubbish" The important thing here is to separate the idea from the implementation. Is cold fusion theoretically impossible? I'm no expert, but there seems to be at least some scientists indicating it's not impossible. If that's the case, why does the failure of the first experiment matter? It's sad that the scientific community is partly based on reputation. I'd rather see all scientific work published anonymously, the work should speak for itself.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Cold fusion IS theoretically impossible, that's the point. Nuclear theory very much says that cold fusion doesn't work. Which means the experiments have to work because no one has a workable theory which predicts cold fusion.
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > Cold fusion IS theoretically impossible I think that's a bit strong. Nuclear theory does not say the energy isn't there (as the subject article of this comment thread points out). It also does not say it is impossible for the potential barrier between the nuclei (which is what makes it necessary to have high temperatures for conventional fusion to work) to be lowered somehow; someone upthread posted a reference to a conversation with Edward Teller where he basically said that's how he would explain cold fusion if it turned out to be true--the nuclear analogue of a chemical catalyst, lowering the activation energy required. It only says we don't currently know of any mechanism for lowering the potential barrier.
    - 11y ago