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.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
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.
Actually cold fusion works just fine, and powered the first practical time travel engine. Unfortunately, inevitably time travel leads to paradoxes until the universe (well the one with observers remaining) settles into a consistent steady state as increasingly improbably events take place until the result is no time travel.
Last time it was the bird with a baguette sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider at a critical point in time (ha!). http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
And poor Pons and Fleishmann are victims of the same process. No one (who will be believed) will ever be able to replicate their work. Something will always go wrong.
Oh, and don't try and take advantage of this information to do anything about it. I barely survived the Orca landing on my garage where my experiment was running, and I was 200 miles inland.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What a load of horseshit.
While cold fusion did get a huge black eye with Pons and Fleishman, that's not the primary reason people are skeptical. There is a really simple physical reason why cold fusion probably doesn't work: the Coulomb Barrier. Like charges (i.e. protons in nuclei) repel, and electromagnetic forces between nucleons are incredibly big. So big, in fact, you can calculate the kinetic energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, which gives you a minimum temperature at which you expect fusion to be possible. Now, maybe there's a clever way around that, but it would have to be something truly extraordinary. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Some nut like Rossi with a black box isn't going to convince anybody. He's got to explain precisely how it manages to circumvent the Coulomb barrier before his claims, or those of any other cold fusion researcher, are remotely credible.
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.
It's not like mainstream scientists give low credits to cold fusion out of nowhere.
There are strong theoretical reasons against cold fusion being possible. The repulsion force between two charged nucleus gets very, very strong when they get close (inverse square law, if they are twice as close, the repulsion is 4 times bigger) and they need to get very close in order for "fusion" to happen. 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).
Pretending to have "cold fusion" mean that the Standard Model of physics is wrong. It might be wrong (or more likely, incomplete), sure. But that's an extraordinary claim to make, and an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. That's what the "reputation trap" is all about. The same goes for FTL travel, or perpetual motion. Those things defies our current understanding of physics, and while our current understanding might be wrong, it's solid enough so we ask for very strong evidence before even considering it seriously.
And sure, you can try to find loopholes without actually breaking the Standard Model, like, doing neutron capture and then beta-decay. It doesn't need to break the Coulomb barrier, and it might look like fusion. But first it's not fusion (although it might serve the same energy-production role), and then even that is not as easy as it seems. Getting a reliable source of neutron isn't easy, the neutrons need to have the required speed for the capture to be efficient, and even then, the capture tends to be not be complete, so you would detect leaking neutrons.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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...