Slashdot Mirror
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.
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