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Cold Fusion Conference Counts Eleven Labs
James Salsman writes: "From an American Physical Society conference session held a week ago, there appear to be now eleven institutions actively publishing cold fusion results: Research Systems (Arlington, VA), SRI International, ENEA (Italy), JET Energy (Welleslley, MA), Middle Tennessee State Univ., Russian Academy of Sciences, U. of Il. at Urbana-Champaign, U.S. Navy's SPAWAR Systems Center in San Diego, First Gate Energy (Woodside, CA, and a few blocks from my house), New Energy Research Lab. (NH), and MIT. Credible or crackpot? You be the judge."
I'm diving into the pool early here, but the first two mod-3+ comments are up, and they both need a nice, sensible rebuttal:
First: there is no grand conspiracy in science. Fox and Mulder are as nonexistant as Santa Claus. Likewise for cold fusion's early claims. How do I know this? Because I was in a tiny little physics department 150 miles due north of Pons & Fleischman (sp?) when they released their results. No big science. No big budgets. No reason to fudge results wrong and lots of reasons to verify a nearby peer's claim. Just a dozen PhD's, a very minimalist beam lab, some grad students pursuing Master's Degrees, and a whole boatload of freshman Astronomy courses.
Our department faculty jumped on it, because it was nearby, it was novel, and the experiment was easily reproduced. The math even somewhat works. Papers written all over the world came to the same conclusion ours did: close... but no cigar.
So... ditch the conspiracy theories. Rather than ask a physicist about cold fusion (a wild-card answer is all you'll get, 'cuz they're all tired of the subject like I'm tired of Roswell and any other tabloid topic), ask any physicist more carefully phrased questions:
1 - was the cold fusion experiment mentioned above a bust: yep.
2 - is there a conspiracy to bury cold fusion: nope.
3 - would it surprise you if cold fusion became a reality (in *any* form) someday: nope.
4 - what do you watch for as you snore your way through new papers or claims: breakthroughs, significant exothermy, or mention of something useful and unexpected, together something different about aparatus or method that explains the cause.
As for conspiracies, the closest to truth there is that top scientists do have monumental ego's. Perhaps even too big, if you ask me. Does it impede (as in SLOW DOWN) progress? At times. Does it ever prevent the truth getting out? Hell, no. It can slow release of information down, but nothing stops curiosity. More importantly, nothing ever stops all the rest of us from wanting to help discovery along, get famous (perhaps) or even for a brief time be 'Smarter than a Nobel Laureate'. And regardless of how shouted-down someone might be for an iconoclastic view *this year*, the truth gets out. Even a bad idea gets attention (I was once asked to build a prototype to help a professor convince a politician that some rube-goldberg gravity-defying device wasn't a perpetual-motion device capable of launching anything into space).
So, stop with crying 'conspiracy'. Yes, there might be papers being written. Are they making advances? Probably. But enough reputable papers have been written and enough effort has been put into this that it isn't conspiracy that makes physicists all shrug when people talk small, incremental cold fusion advances. The problem's just unsolved and we're all busy elsewhere on our own unsolved problems. The collective non-shrug will come when a respected peer calls one of us up and say "Hey, this one's *INTERESTING*".
-- The most powerful declaration in the scientific method isn't "Eureka!", but "That's funny..."