Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American Column: 'It's Not Cold Fusion...But It's Something' (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American magazine has published a guest column on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) [putting] into context the history of what was mistakenly referred to as cold fusion and what happened. The bottom line is that there is compelling cumulative evidence for nuclear reactions taking place, including shifts in the abundance of isotopes, element transmutations, and localized melting of metals. Furthermore, those reactions do not have the characteristics of either nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Despite sharp criticism from much of the scientific community after the 1989 announcement by Fleischmann and Pons, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and other reputable organizations continued the research and published many papers.
The article reports that "to the surprise of many people, a new field of nuclear research has emerged," adding that even in the early 20th century, atomic scientists were already reporting "inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations."
Back in the 80's when my physics chops were far better I was sure they were on to something.
Just goes to show, that even in the scientific community, bias can play a part in what gets to the public. Just because they are scientists, doesn't mean they aren't human.
I hope those two guys get their due. They deserve it, and they took a ration of grief which damaged their careers. Fleischmann is dead- but someone should wrote Pons a check since he's still kicking around..
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
LENR is great for scammers. It's like free energy but with better sounding "science" behind it.
Scammers with the necessary scientific background and a good sense of misdirection can easily fool scientists. Scientists are good at finding natural causes for surprising results. However, if the result comes from deliberate trickery and that the trickster did enough research to avoid breaking all the laws of physics, scientists can be fooled like kids at a magic show.
So I thing that many of the results for LENR are poisoned by such scams and any attempt at meta-analysis is doomed.
Someone takes a blog article with no cited evidence as gospel truth, then crows about how it validates their personal beliefs. Particularly ironic in this case, as said personal beliefs are about scientists always jumping to biased conclusions. You don't say.
A) when scientists turn out to be wrong, who is it that proves them wrong - is it blog authors or slashdot posters? No, it's other scientists with stronger evidence.
B) there may be interesting accumulated evidence in the LENR field, but this guest blog does not cite any, so does not prove or disprove anything.
C) Many labs tried to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's work, and couldn't. The public backlash was heightened by them having gone to the press before peer review, but the real fault lay with the media over-blowing the hype prematurely - and people accepting unquestioningly everything the media said.
C) If there are, as alleged, some interesting results worthy of further study, then hopefully some labs will follow them up further. LENR falls in the extraordinary-claims basket, so the proper response for most labs is to ignore it until more speculative researchers get around to producing evidence strong enough to merit a closer look. Has that happened yet? TFA thinks so, but does not make a case a reputable lab would find compelling.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle. I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.
This is just a variant of the Galileo Gambit. Yes, over the last 200 years there have been several instances where "science" (as in the majority of scientists) has been sceptical to accept paradigm-changing new claims. Semmelweis is one example, as is Alfred Wegener with his idea of continental drift. But for every genius causing a major shift in scientific opinion, there have been legions of bozos proposing perpetuum mobiles, morphic fields, magnetic water cures, electric universes, and other crap. And on the other hand, many earth-shattering new theories like relativity (both versions) and evolution have been rather quickly accepted, because they were presented with convincing arguments and testable hypotheses. As Sagan said: they also laughed at Bozo the Clown...
Stephan
Back to Feynman, if the results are reproducible and current theory cannot explain it, there must be laws we don't know about. Further, if this behaviour is not reasonable within the existing theory then the existing theory is wrong.
Have we as scientists become is precious about our theories that we will protect then in the face of experimental evidence.
Scientific theories should be viewed as "useful models", not truth. Even if quantum theory isn't entirely true it is a good enough model to give us fission and the micro computer. But the belief that it is true may have blinded us to alternative theories that explain these phenomenon and could yield advances in other areas such as energy production and gravitic repulsion.