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."

Comments

Climate Change

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who doubt that climate change is caused by man, and isn't an unmitigated disaster face the same condemnation, don't they?

Re:Climate Change

[prunus.avium]

The problem with climate change is we don't have a control group.

We know that Earth has gone through hot and cold cycles before (the Sahara was once a rainforest) so establishing a clear cause-effect relationship is impossible since we don't have another depopulated Earth to use as a control.

Hair Restoration and "Snake Oil" Patents

[Theaetetus]

In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles". This was the same rejection applied to applications for perpetual motion machines, teleporters, etc. - they can't possibly work, by definition, so the application is claiming a useless invention and is therefore ineligible for a patent.

Of course, then Rogaine and Propecia were invented and proven to cure baldness, and eventually the courts had to step in and tell the patent office that they were wrong and that hair restoration was at least theoretically possible.

Pons and Fleishmann are like the early snake oil salesmen, selling "tonics" for hair restoration from their carts. Their "evidence" is non-reproducible and poorly tested, and they lacked even a theory for how their machine worked, instead insisting only that it generated more energy than could be explained. Like hair restoration, that doesn't make the entire field impossible - it just means that at best, they had no idea what they were talking about, and at worst, they personally were frauds.

That doesn't mean that Rossi and his ilk are automatically frauds either - maybe they are (they're certainly in the "have no idea what they're talking about" camp, since they have no theories for why they're getting the results they're getting), or maybe they're like the first researchers for Rogaine who have some strange evidence of new hair growth. Until we have something that can be repeatedly and reliably tested and confirmed or rejected, or a defined theory that either works out mathematically or doesn't, then it should neither be accepted nor dismissed out of hand.

I've seen this in action myself.

[hey!]

I used to work in the public health field of vector-borne disease surveillance, and there is a long-standing myth that you can tell the species of a mosquito by the frequency of its wingbeats. This is nonsense -- like claiming you can always tell the difference between a flute and a saxophone by the notes they happen to be playing: their frequency ranges largely overlap. Nonetheless the myth resurfaces on a regular basis, and every few years someone will come up with a machine for identifying mosquitoes by their wingbeat frequency.

Why do people keep coming back to this myth? Because if you could do it that would be incredibly useful. Not all mosquito species bite humans, and not all species that bite humans or animals transmit diseases. In a West Nile Virus outbreak you'd set up listening stations all around your area. You'd roll the spray trucks if your equipment told you Culex pipiens was on the wing, because Cx. pipiens vectors WNV and bites both humans and avian WNV hosts. If it were Culiseta melanura you probably wouldn't because that species almost never bites humans. But using wingbeat frequencies this way can't possibly work, and mosquito researchers get thoroughly sick of debunking these devices every few years.

Now I was at a meeting, and I ran into a guy that had an acoustic mosquito identifier that worked on a slightly different principle: it did a fast fourier transform of the acoustic signal and attempted to distinguish between species based on the pattern of frequencies. I was intrigued; if you know anything about math you know this is very different from just taking the loudest frequency of a signal. It's more like telling the difference between a flute and a saxophone playing the same note by the instruments' timbre.

Now the idea that you could actually distinguish between species this way is far-fetched, because species is largely an arbitrary human construct. But if you could distinguish between distantly related mosquito clades that would be very useful (e.g. genus Anopheles is a severe concern in a Malaria sitaution but genus Culex is not). Now I have a friend who was editor of an entomology journal at the time. I ran into him at the same conference and as I was chatting with him I asked him whether he'd heard this guy's pitch. As soon as he heard the words "identification" and "frequency" come out of my mouth he literally turned his back on me and walked away -- and he was a personal friend of mine.

Now the chances that this FFT mosquito ID device worked and was practical were pretty small. It may even have been crackpottery, but it wasn't the same old crackpottery. It just sounded enough like the old crackpottery to elicit a strong disgust reaction from an expert.

Re:I've seen this in action myself.

[hey!]

Stuff way cooler than a bug zapper for sure. The coolest thing I ever saw was a sonar device that killed mosquito larvae. Mosquito larvae are aquatic, but they can't extract oxygen from the water; they have to attach to the surface. This device emitted a powerful, upward sweeping frequency chirp, and when it hit the resonant frequency of the larvae's buoyancy bladder the larvae would pop like popcorn and sink to the bottom of the tank. All you needed was a fish tank full of larvae and he had one hell of an impressive demo.

The guy thought he was going to sell tens of thousands of these things, that mosquito control agencies would send armies of workers out to lower these things into stuff like storm drains to kill all the larvae. The thing is it's a lot cheaper to hire a college student at the beginning of summer, put him on a scooter with a bag of 180 day briquets; he doesn't even have to stop the scooter to chuck them into the storm drains as he passes. Even the environmental justification is relatively weak; the pesticides used on mosquito larvae tend to be very narrow spectrum to aquatic flies or arthropods and break down rapidly in the environment after being emitted by an extended release briquet. Used in things like storm drains and abandoned swimming pools they're extremely benign.

But the guy has been moderately successful; from what I hear agencies buy them to bring to public education events and fairs to do the same awesome demo he'd done, then they put them away.

Re:There are reasons behind that "trap"

[angel'o'sphere]

That's called the Coulomb barrier. So charged nucleus need to go very, very fast in order to have a chance to get close enough to fuse, and that's why fusion requires very high temperature (temperature being directly linked with average particle speed)
You are explaining "high temperature fusion" here. Not cold fusion, nor why cold fusion can't work ;D

At very low temperatures, nucleii can come close enough to fusion, too ;D

Anyway, the general term for cold fusion is: low energy nuclear reaction.

We know since roughly 1890-1910 (well, we, as in "we who care") that cold fusion is possible. If you google for it you find hundreds of especially Italian and Japanese PhDs working in that area before roughly 1930.

Pons and Fleischmann simply had bad luck. They found something in their lab and hurried to go public. Unfortunately as only a few other researchers could reproduce the stuff they found. On top of that as they accidentally said in an interview "might be cold fusion", they got disgraced by the news networks. (Actually at my university the experiments where reproduced as well, UniversitÃt Karlsruhe, KIT)

Regarding Rossi, as far as I can tell, there is nothing into it. The proclaimed reaction is ofc possible ... wasn't it some fusion that leads it excited Bor that decays then? However the apparatus seems not to make any sense.

Pretending to have "cold fusion" mean that the Standard Model of physics is wrong.
No, it does not mean that. Why should it?

Superconductivity was not explainable by the standard model either, until Cooper had an idea. And that idea makes absolutely no sense at all (looking at paired electrons as if it was a sound wave in a crystal). Nevertheless it is the standard in our days how we work with super conductivity.

I would not be surprised if H - H cold fusion in a crystal matrix works similar than Cooper pairs in a super conducting matrix.

Re:Cold fusion is psuedo-science

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

And note the Slashdot clickbait for the denialists, who have, in fine moonlanding conspiracy dudgeon, have now connected the cold fusion debacle with AGW. Boys, take it up with your buddies at Ezzon, who knew, admitted they knew, and purposefully lied about it. At this point, denialists have to get away from their creationist tactics, and bone up on your conspiracy theory stuff.

But to the actual topic at hand, the cold fusion business is largely neglected for the same reason that the concept of heating your house with two tea candles and a couple clay flowerpots. Because as the scientists say - it ain't bloody likely.

And this bit of silliness, the concept of the evil scientists intimidating others only works in the world of the weak-willed.

Hell, after Fleishmann and Pons announced their discovery, many scientists attempted to duplicate their results - very little luck. Even after many critical reviews, The University of Utah created the National Cold Fusion Institute.

side note - when the NCFI reported negative results, Fleischmann and Pons threatend to sue them.

Is this how people want science to operate? Jeezuz, what a bunch of bullshit.

And all Fleishmann and Pons had to do was to duplicate their own goddamned experiment.

It goes down in history as a physics version of the "Vaccines cause autism" debacle.