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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 t

by 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.

by MCRed 11y ago

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.