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Cold Fusion and the Reputation Trap (aeon.co)
An anonymous reader writes: Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, has written an article about how the scientific community regards research into cold fusion, and those who undertake it. His argument is not that current cold fusion research is necessarily correct, but rather that actual scientific progress is inhibited by what he calls a "reputation trap." "People outside the trap won't go near it, for fear of falling in. ... People inside the trap are already regarded as disreputable, an attitude that trumps any efforts that they might make to argue their way out, by reason and evidence." Central to his case is Andrea Rossi's work, which is not taken seriously throughout the scientific community, and yet he's still doing business.
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Price's point is this: "Cold fusion is dismissed as pseudoscience, the kind of thing that respectable scientists and science journalists simply don't talk about (unless to remind us of its disgrace). ...the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in 1989 turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons. Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. Failure to replicate couldn't possibly be more than provisional – empirical science is a fallible business, as any good scientist would acknowledge. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest."
Rossi is a huckster who has a black box that he won't let anyone see with inputs that he won't let anyone measure.
If Rossi actually succeeded with cold fusion, he would be the richest man on the planet, instead he is a clown with a black box.
I mean, he's a philosopher but there is no such trap in science. There are people who are reputed to be swindlers like the Rossi guy, keep trying to sell their 'science' regardless that their proofs are irreproducible.
There are plenty of people working on fusion, it's not a dead science, it's just a very, very hard problem with no theoretical or experimental models that currently work and it may never work, hot fusion or even residential-grade fission is a lot closer than cold fusion will ever become.
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If some area of research is claimed as "discredited" it should mean that a higher burden of proof is required. There's no reason to shun cold fusion and declare that any research in it is wasted, that's unscientific. However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab. Part of the shunning of cold fusion also came from the embarrassment factor, as a lot of people had been quickly interested in it, world wide news reports, early hype followed by disappointment.
For astrology, it's been discredited over and over and over. There's never been any hint of evidence into validity, not even preliminary theories. The burden of proof to be accepted as a valid scientific researcher here is vastly higher than with cold fusion.
If Rossi's or anyone's claim that cold fusion (or some other power generation technique) worked was real, then they don't need anyone to believe them. They could just sell power and bootstrap themselves to millions/billions.
For example, if I could produce a few MW of electricity cheap, with a compact form factor, I'd just go to Hawaii (which has really expensive electricity) and undercut the price of electricity there and sell the power to a datacenter or a high rise building. With the profits, I could bootstrap and make more power generators, and displace more competing capacity.
And with generators that were powering MWs of buildings/datacenters, with no visible fuel inputs other than deuterium, I think credibility would soon be a non-issue.
--PM
Part of the problem is that while they claim there's no proof that it's caused by man, they also implicitly take the next step and imply that it's not that big a disaster.
ORLY?
The last I heard, the only way the issue of whether the claimed climate change is, as also claimed, caused by man (by fossil-fuel sourced carbon dioxide emissions) entered into it is that, if such human emissions are not a major causative factor, reduction of them by draconian government intervention is useless. (Worse than useless, actually, since the economic disaster such intervention represents could destroy the possibility of applying some effective solution if it is actually needed. For instance: If the planet is disastrously cooking and all else fails, we could orbit some continent-scale sunshades - but only if we could still afford an industrial-scale space program.)
That is a completely separate issue from whether climate change is happening. It is also separate from whether, if it is happening, it is a disaster, an annoyance, neutral, or even a good thing.
There are a lot of steps from "We noticed the temperature measurements are bit different from a century ago." to "We must reverse this trend, even if it means destroying industrial civilization, and freezing in the dark, and the exercise of totalitarian governmental power, or we'll all die!" Government and financial figures have jumped over all the steps - straight to the convenient-for-them totalitarian intervention and billions of dollars siphoned off from production to the operators of carbon credit markets - before the first couple steps were exposed to any substantial peer review.
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So we wait until the sky falls? Given lots and lots of evidence of climate change already happening? Don't give up smoking until the xrays show a tumor.
Your "way of life" is trivial to change. Stop driving some wannabe-cowboy SUV that does 3mpg on a good day, start recycling, turn the lights off when you're not in the room, etc. Cut back on American style conspicuous consumption.
The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is as an excuse to do nothing; the thinking that if it's not our fault then we don't have to fix it.
I disagree. The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is to attempt to *absolve* us from the sin of doing it.
Take for instance a forest fire. It happens. We attempt to blame someone. When the cause appears "natural" (e.g., a lightning strike or similar), then we as a species seem somehow *absolved* from responsibility. However, regardless of the blame, we often still attempt to stop a forest fire and attempt remediation afterwards, not because of some moral duty to the planet, but because it serves our economic interests. The truth of the matter, is the mere act of stopping/managing forest fires for our own selfish economic reasons may be one of the *unnatural* contributing factors of making future forest fires more intense. That doesn't stop most people from thinking we shouldn't put out forest fires that we didn't start. You can't really separate "us" from "natural" in the modern environment. If it's gonna burn, it will burn, eventually. In the bigger scheme of things does it really matter who started it? No. But the act of assigning blame shifts the debate on the cost burdens of any remediation process. The remediation of course is not about the forest per-se, but the economic value of the remediation the forest (e.g., prevent land-slide from covering highways, blocking dams, polluting water sources we use).
The point is that most everything in this climate change debate is about economics, not the planet. The planet was here long before us and will be here long after we are gone. The sooner people start realizing the whole thing is about economics, not the planet, and stop trying to assign blame to drive their remediation agenda, we can attempt to negotiate a reasonable path forward. In all likelihood that path might be better economically for us as a species but potentially *unnatural* when compared to how the environment would evolve without us.
This really just reminds me of the nuclear freeze protests of the 80's. The main argument put forth at the time, was that we should just stop and wait until we figure it out (basically the argument that is made by AGW folks). Of course we didn't stop and then the situation changed (no more USSR) which eventually led to de-escalation that seemed to be what would have been better in the first place. On the other hand the escalation we did could have had WWIII, but nobody knew at the time that economics would drive the eventual solution (e.g., no more USSR). The same thing is true with AGW. Nobody knows will happen, but I predict in the end, economics will drive the situation one way or the other. The current "A" part is really just posturing.
No, wait until the sky falls then blame the scientists for not being able to convince you before it was too late.
There's an elephant in this room and it's the oil and gas industry.
It's not so much that so many of us dream of a world where energy is free and limitless as a glass of cold water.
It's that most of us realise how much less horror would be in the world if there wasn't constant fighting over the limited fossil fuels that cold fusion would replace.
Scientific reputation and the laws of physics can go to hell if these are the things that are preventing us from living in a better, safer, cleaner world.
I'm willing to believe that it's all a hoax if it's 100% certain it is BS.
However, for the love of humanity, if there's even a shadow of a possibility that any of these experiments have shown something worth checking further then please can everyone shut up and stop shouting it down until we really are 100% certain it's snake oil.
Otherwise, it looks to many of us, like the elephant in the room is behind the angry mob goading them on to burn the heretics...