Reader Michael called my attention to a pair of dueling articles about cold fusion. You may remember the kerfuffle about this issue, first reported as a viable process by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989, who said they could effect nuclear fusion at room temperature, a process previously thought possible only at extremely high temperatures. If their finding was real, it opened up the possibility of immense amounts of clean and low-cost energy, and a possible solution to the use of fossil fuels.
Sadly, the process was not only shown to be theoretically difficult, indeed, impossible. Further, several researchers failed to reproduce Fleischmann and Pons’s results. Because of this, the idea of “cold fusion” is now, so to speak, on the back burner. (There’s a pretty good summary of the issue on Wikipedia). But a small coterie of researchers continues to work on it, convinced that they’ve been unfairly maligned, and that the process can really be demonstrated. While the resolution of this issue is above my pay grade, I’ll bow for now to the scientific consensus on the nonexistence of cold-fusion, but I’m also aware that nobody has ever detected a crucial and ubiquitous result of this process: the production of gamma rays. That alone puts cold fusion in strong doubt.
But the issue remains in the news, for there are sporadic reports by enthusiasts of fusion-produced “excess heat”, i.e., energy generated that’s greater than the energy put in; the “60 Minutes” site reported this in 2009. And now, in a new essay in Aeon, “Why do scientists dismiss the possibility of cold fusion?“, Huw Price argues that cold fusion wasn’t dismissed on good scientific grounds, but simply because the phenomenon was considered as a “a reputation trap” after the first failures to replicate. That is, like alien abductions and Bigfoot, the phenomenon is considered so unlikely that it’s seen as the bailiwick of cranks, so that nobody will touch it any more for fear of ruining their scientific reputation.
Huw Price isn’t a physicist but a philosopher, described in the article as “Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge” and “Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk”, a think tank pondering the serious risks of modern technology.
Price points out, rightly, that one or two failures to replicate doesn’t mean that the original result of Fleischmann and Pons was wrong. The failures to replicate may have meant only that the replications were flawed, or they could have missed the cold fusion. But I believe there have been sufficient failures to replicate to show—combined with the theoretical objections—that we can’t take cold fusion seriously. Price dissents, touting the encouraging results of engineer Andrea Rossi of Milan (now living in the U.S.), who claims to have produced cold fusion in a device he won’t let others dissect (that itself is suspect). Price:
Again, the explanation for ignoring these claims [of Rossi and others] cannot be that other attempts failed 25 years ago. That makes no sense at all. Rather, it’s the reputation trap. The results are ignored because they concern cold fusion, which we ‘know’ to be pseudoscience – we know it because attempts to replicate these experiments failed 25 years ago! The reasoning is still entirely circular, but the reputation trap gives its conclusion a convincing mask of respectability. That’s how the trap works.
. . . What we should have done instead is to have engineered the exact opposite of a reputation trap – perhaps an X Prize-like reward for the first reliable replication of the Fleischmann and Pons results, above some commercial bar.
That seems disingenuous to me. First of all, scientists rushed to replicate the phenomenon when it was first found, and failed. Second, if cold fusion retains even a shred of credibility, there is indeed an “anti-reputation trap,” for the first person to confirm it would win a Nobel Prize, as well as providing the planet with a source of safe and reliable energy. But Price sees the rejection of cold fusion as a continuing “irrational pathology”:
At last I can explain what I meant earlier, when I asked you to hold on to the thought that I must be a bit flaky myself, if that was your reaction to my willingness to take cold fusion seriously. If you do think that – at least, if you think it without having studied the evidence for yourself – then your reaction is a symptom of the reputation trap. But now I’ve suggested that the trap itself might be an irrational pathology, in a special case such as this, in which the cost of a false negative is very high. If I’m right, then in a more rational world, we would fix our scientific norms to escape it. In a more rational world, you wouldn’t think I’m flaky.
. . . Reputation traps have a useful purpose in the Kuhnian picture. They help to maintain the stability important to what Kuhn called normal science – the ordinary, useful kind of science when paradigms are not under threat. But this is compatible with the claim that they can be harmful in special cases (of which cold fusion might be one) – and that we could do better if we were better at identifying those cases in advance.
Then Price resorts to the inevitable argument of crank scientists: Galileo’s ideas were dismissed too! (Note, though, that they were dismissed on religious rather than scientific grounds):
It would be easy to overstate the analogy between mainstream institutions and the Inquisition, but it isn’t entirely empty. If we refuse to acknowledge the possibility that existing scientific institutions are not working as well as they might, we do something to reinforce it. If the reputation trap makes it impossible to question the role of the reputation trap, then the Cardinals are winning.
Of course for every ignored Galileo wannabee whose results are really true, there are a gazillion Galileo wannabees who are genuine cranks. Are Rossi and his colleagues among these?
Before we go on, let me paste in here the acknowledgments at the end of Price’s article:
Templeton again! This time, curiously, it’s not the John Templeton Foundation, but the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF), a more explicitly religious arm of the Templeton legacy. Note that Martin Rees, who’s also affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, won the Templeton Prize (from the John Templeton Foundation) in 2011. I have no idea what the TWCF is doing messing with this stuff, but it’s always fun to guess, as Templeton is never involved in straightforward support of science unless it’s also supporting its mission of combining science and spirituality. I suspect that Templeton likes Price’s piece because it does down the scientific establishment, supporting the ideas that a dubious maverick can be right.
But back to whether Rossi et al. are latter-day Galileos, unfairly dismissed by a closed scientific Establishment. The answer says Ethan Siegel (a physicist and science writer) is “no!” In a long 2014 piece at Starts with a Bang called “The E-cat: cold fusion or scientific fraud?”
The E-Cat is the device developed by Rossi to demonstrate cold fusion and generate excess power. Here it is:
As Siegel notes, although scientists have assented to signing contracts and non-disclosure agreements if they’d be allowed to dissect and examine the E-Cat, Rossi has refused.
I won’t summarize the rest of Siegal’s takedown, but he raises five questions that, he says, must be answered to show that the E-Cat, or any similar device, could really generate power via cold fusion (the following is a direct quote from Siegel’s article):
- A device that demonstrably was generating its own, self-sustaining energy reaction, unpowered by an outside source of any type.
- A quality, closed-calorimeter measurement of the energy output of the device.
- Successful detection of gamma-rays coming from the device, a telltale signal that’s a by-product of all known nuclear reactions.
- An examination of the before-and-after of all products and reactants, to verify that a nuclear transmutation had, in fact, taken place.
- And finally, I’d demand that the test take place independently, meaning that the team that performed it was a team of reputable scientists with a track record of scientific integrity, without outside interference from Rossi or his associates.
Siegel then looks at an unpublished paper claiming that the e-cat does produce cold fusion, and concludes that it fails all five aspects of this test. Importantly, the test wasn’t independent at all (Siegel’s emphasis):
So Rossi himself participated in the test, including switching on-and-off the dummy reactor, as well as:
- intervening in the insertion of the charge (reactants) into the e-Cat reactor,
- intervening in the startup of the reactor,
- intervening in the shutdown of the reactor, and
- intervening in the extraction of the powder charge (products) from the e-Cat reactor.
So Rossi himself, the person whose device must be tested independently to ensure that he is not tampering with the results, tampered with the only portion of the test that showed a compelling, positive result!
In the meantime, the other members of the independent team are:
- Giuseppe Levi, longtime collaborator of Rossi,
- Evelyn Foschi, X-ray specialist of medical devices in Bologna, Italy,
- Hanno Essen, a retired professor of physics from Sweden whose research is mostly in theoretical chemistry (all three of these people participated in previous independent tests of the e-Cat), and
- Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér, from Uppsala University in Sweden. Höistad participated in the hugely flawed previous e-Cat test, Pettersson has been working on Rossi devices since 2011, and Tegnér participated in the previous test as well.
In other words, this is not an independent team; there is not any person on this team who could be considered independent at all! This is a team of people who have been testing Rossi devices in a flawed and unconvincing way previously, and continue to do so today.
Siegel’s piece is a hard-hitting examination of Rossi’s claims, and, reading it—it’s easily understood by the scientifically informed layperson—I conclude that the E-Cat isn’t a good demonstration of cold fusion, and, indeed, may be a gigantic hoax.
I’m not going to say that we’ll never get cold fusion to work—it would be a foolish scientist who’d rule such things out as forever impossible—but it certainly doesn’t look good. It’s been more than a quarter century since Fleischmann and Pons’s demonstration, and we still have no convincing evidence for cold fusion. That is not, as Price claims, because cold fusion is a “reputation trap”, but because of repeated failures to replicate the first results as well as the crankish atmosphere that pervades the cold-fusion community. The judicious stance is to be an a-fusionist.
“Why do scientists dismiss the possibility of spoon bending?“ Is it because it’s a ‘reputation trap’? Or does it have something to do with the way the shifty-eyed guy squirms nervously in his seat and starts imposing bizarre “conditions” when The Amazing Randi asks for full transparency?
Which brings up the point: Testing of any putative device should include not just observation of the output, but controls to preclude cheating. Because cheating has been rife in the “free energy” field.
And, as we speak, advances in HOT fusion are being announced by the Max Planck Institute in Germany. They are now preparing to test a device capable of sustaining very high temperatures. The goal is 100 million degrees Celsius. Certainly even if successful, making the process practical will take more decades. Stay tuned.
And Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks is working on a similar concept:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
Skunkworks has a very solid reputation for getting things done, so I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t woo.
This suggests to me, if we want to get to fusion faster, it is a good place to invest some serious money. The film on Skunkworks suggested 20 years before we can replace all carbon usage. If so, that would be excellent progress. How much sooner can we get there if we accelerate funding to match NASA’s moon landing project?
I would have to see the quote but skunkworks suggesting 20 years may be something of a tongue-in-cheek inside joke. People in the field regularly joke about the fact that in the 1950s, fusion was 20 years away. Then in the ’60s, it was a mere 20 years away. And now today, we’ve made so much progress its a measly 20 years away.
Right. I’ve heard it described as long-term. Probably not a sure thing either. But, I would think at some point, where, perhaps there is a prototype that can power a small town, You could scale it up with enough funds. The programs I’ve recently seen look promising.
The question for me becomes should we stop research into cold fusion? Admittedly Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons created a reputation trap: and I would agree this alone is not enough a reason to stop research program.
Is cold fusion thermodynamically impossible or is it kinetically very difficult? The latter is definitely a yes. If the former is a yes I would not waste my tax dollars on the concept.
It is easy to put just barely enough energy into two nuclei to overcome the coulomb barrier and get them to fuse. Physicists and chemists have been doing that sort of traditional ‘cold’ fusion in accelerators for decades. But because the coulomb barrier is high compared to the energy required for fusion, you almost inevitably get excess excitation energy given off as gammas.
The only way around gamma release is (a) emit some additional particle, which we could detect, (b) say you’ve found a new mechanism that somehow ignores the electromagnetic force, allowing your positively charged nuclei to come together at much lower energies than their charges would allow, or (c) say you’ve found some new de-excitation mechanism not predicted by quantum mechanics.
I suppose the latter two are in the realm of the theoretically possible, but they’re not thought to be very likely. Those sorts of claims are kinda up there with people claiming they’ve figured out where Einstein’s relativity went wrong; before I believe you, let’s at least see some math, please.
Its also worth noting that we don’t stop private research on the subject. That still goes on, as does research in other countries (I believe the Japanese spend money on it, but I could be wrong about that). So I don’t see how the failure to produce a working reactor can be blamed on scientific censorship, because no actual censorship is going on. The research is still being done. Just not with (much) US taxpayer support.
Thanks for the reply … way beyond my realm of expertise.
I think my point is if we don’t try we are unlikely to succeed. Though who knows about serendipity.
Fleishmann and Pons pissed in their own soup by not going through the classical peer review. An understandable mistake in some ways.
Regarding Templeton funding this sort thing, probably preferable than funding the Discovery Institute? “Bona fide” science should bleed Templeton dry? Just a question.
The counterpoint is that we always have more research ideas than we have funding, so it behooves institutes like the NSF to be good stewards of the public’s money and evaluate research proposals not just on their potential payoffs, but also their likelihood of success. If everything we know about physics gives some proposal a negligible chance of success (cold fusion, telekinesis, FTL travel), then it’s going to be very lowo on the priority list, and that means in most cases it doesn’t make the funding cut. In some cases it might make the cut; say, for example, the government has a big pot of money it wants to spend on high-risk, high-payoff energy research. But most grant opportunities aren’t big enough or narrow enough that cold fusion will be seen as better than the majority of other submitted research proposals.
it is basically the usual reasoning, but the problem is on to direction.
first there is evidence it works, it is relicated hundreds of time, and therory obey to experiments, not the opposite.
the second is that there is a huge hidden assumption in your reasoning, it is that the nuclear reaction involve few particles.
It is clear today, that since it happen inside a metallic lattice, in some uncommon structure, it involve a collective quantum phenomenon.
one example of the theory proposed is the one of Edmund Storms (an scientist of LANL who replicated and studied LENR).
http://lenrexplained.com/
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEexplaining.pdf
this is probably ot the final theory, but this is the kind of approac
for peer reviewed papers you can start with Current Science special issue on LENR
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/feat.php?feature=Special%20Section:%20Low%20Energy%20Nuclear%20Reactions&featid=10094
and NaturWissenschaften review
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00114-010-0711-x
this incomplete list of peer reviewed papers
list 153 papers about observed excess heat in LENR
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf#page=6
you can ad the He4, transmutations, tritum observations.
best evidence seems to be He4/heat corelation as observed by McKubre, Miles, DeNinno (ENEA) and reviewed here
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf
it is sure real, but clearly not hotfusion.
LENR is to hot fusion is what is supercondution to Ohm law
Now I know it’s real science. Springer wants to charge me $39.95.
for “Status of Cold Fusion 2010” by Edmund Storms
you can read that pre publish
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf
but the final version is NW copyright.
His book “The Science of LENR” is still a reference, as much as Cold Fusion for Dummy and his Student guide to Cold Fusion.
Current Science 108/04 is however open (Indian Academy of science).
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/feat.php?feature=Special%20Section:%20Low%20Energy%20Nuclear%20Reactions&featid=10094
the review by Forthley reviews key papers, even if it is oriented toward US Navy Spawar papers
https://www.academia.edu/17964553/Condensed_Matter_Nuclear_Science_October_2015
My advise while reading articles is to ignore any reference to theory, the domain s too young to argument on theory, to support or to criticize. This is the main cause of delusion on both size, and main cause of ignoring data by both side.
Theory is required for engineering as JF Geneste of Airbus said at Milan LENRG conference, even a local and phenomenological one, it is required for experiment design as Edmund Storms says regularly, but I only observe that scientists on both side prefers to argument on (pet) theories than investigate in what challenge their theories.
How do you get the multiple nuclei in the lattice to interact without the intervening electrons getting in the way?
Or, possibly, have we just switched from nuclear physics on the 10^-15m scale to chemistry on the 10^-10m scale?
Now I’m perfectly willing to accept that some pretty weird things can go in crystalline lattices. Counter-intuitive, even. But on the other hand I’ve had to do enough XRD work over the years to know that we do know where the electrons are in atoms, and they get in the way of inter-nuclear reactions pretty damned effectively.
You are not the only puzzled. The problems is the observations.
Simple solution, often followed is to ignore some or all the observations.
On way to do that is to imagine an international conspiracy of incompetence frud and artifacts, which corelate each t create something tha really looks like a real complex phenomenon of material science.
My boring position is that I reject an artifact or conspiracy theory when it start to be more extraordinary than considering collective quantum effects in material science.
Rule of the skeptic is that frauds, bias, artifacts, do exist, but this hypothesis should not be more extraordinary than the observation.
I’m not puzzled by it at all. I don’t believe it.
A reaction pathway for muon-catalyzed room-temperature fusion has been known since the 1950s, and was experimentally confirmed in 1956 by Luis Alvarez (of dinosaur meteor fame). There are various technical challenges to realizing a net production of energy from this reaction, but it is, apparently, an area of active and legitimate research.
But this is not the Pons-Fleischmann process, which had no theoretical basis at all, but was really just an anomalous and unrepeatable result on which they pinned the label “cold fusion”.
Obviously, Huw Price has never read Gary Taubes’ book on cold fusion “Bad Science: the Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion”, available at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Short-Weird-Fusion/dp/0394584562
It’s a well-written book, anyone with any background in physics can see that Fleischmann and Pons were charlatans. They mis-represented what they had achieved, fudged their results, and generally botched their experiments, as was shown by the scientific investigation of their claims in 1989 by a distinguished panel of scientists. It is noteworthy that modern “cold fusion” experiments see neither gamma rays or neutrons, what should be the key particles to prove that cold fusion is happening. So the new wave of cold-fusion experimenters are reduced to claiming that the mechanism is occurring via a new process at present unknown to physics. It is well known to be extremely difficult to measure the total energy in chemical reactions.
I struggled with whether or not to comment on this, but I can’t resist the temptation. If this ends up being inappropriate, it can be deleted.
I don’t know anything about Fleischman and Pons, but I worked with the guy who was their graduate student on the project. I didn’t know about the association with cold fusion for a few years, so formed my opinion of his work without that knowledge, and I wasn’t very impressed (or maybe I should say I was very impressed with him, just not in a good way). Later, when I did find out about the association, I figured that was the problem right there.
Allan Franklin (physicist and philosopher of science at Colorado-Boulder) also has good work on P-F’s stuff.
Shame about Huw Price – his stuff on the philosophy of time is very interesting and in my view good work.
This statement really bothers me:
“What we should have done instead is to have engineered the exact opposite of a reputation trap – perhaps an X Prize-like reward for the first reliable replication of the Fleischmann and Pons results, above some commercial bar.”
To me, this indicates that Price has a profound misunderstanding of how science is supposed to be conducted. Promising prizes for a successful replication of a result is a sure way to confirm your own bias.
Offering money for proof of a preordained conclusion is certainly a peculiar way of trying to claim credibility. Unless there’s some kind of quality control, it’s almost bound to attract charlatans and the naively deluded.
For one thing, given who was involved in the actual experiment – the unpublished one in which so many people were connected to Rossi – who are they proposing to be the judges?
Yes, Price’s suggestion is preposterous.
We need a financial incentive, in addition to the trillions of dollars deriving from the greatest revolution in energy production in the history of our civilization and the guaranteed Nobel Prizes?
The reality is precisely the opposite: the financial incentives are so great that a discredited idea still attracts interest out of all proportion to its plausibility. And rightly so – even if the probability of success is so small, the benefit to mankind would be immense.
But those same financial incentives also attract fraudsters.
I believe Rossi has stated that the reason he doesn’t share info with people is because his invention is worth billions and he’s afraid someone will steal it/find a way around his patents. There are all sorts of problems with this logic, but the one pertinent point here is that even Rossi doesn’t seem to share Price’s opinion that more monetary incentives are needed. 🙂
There is every indication that Rossi and his E-cat are a scam. The E-cat couldn’t look more like pseudo science if Rossi had made a list of the line items on all of the most famous Baloney Detection Kits and set about to achieve each one in turn.
There could be something there. He could just be paranoid or greedy or inept at bringing his invention to market. There could actually be something there, maybe it isn’t cold fusion but something else, and he may merely be wrong about what is going on. But based on all the evidence to date, including his behavior, skepticism is very much warranted.
One thing though. I don’t fully agree with Price, but I do think that there is a “reputation trap” in the sciences that can and does sometimes inhibit scientific inquiry. How many instances are there of scientists that make a decision about where to try and get a job or what to work on and a significant consideration is, “what will that do to my reputation if I work on this?” And rightly so. I don’t think it is a huge problem, and filtering out bad science or just incorrect ideas is necessary also, but I think there is room for improvement. Perhaps if there were a bit less of a need to compete for rather limited resources.
Lee Smolin thinks this is occurring in theoretical physics….working on anything other than string theory is a death sentence to one’s career.
Of course Smolin would say that, he is producing pseudoscience more than anything else. (E.g. his attacks on string theory.)
“touting the encouraging results”
If nothing else, this highlights the gullibility of the author. For every pseudoscience, there are reports that investigators are running successful experiments, yet nothing ever comes of it.
While any one problem with the field might could be explained away, there are enough of them that, together, they generate an unpleasant odor.
A key part of a scientific report is a description of the apparatus and methods sufficient for other researchers of appropriate skill, experience, and knowledge (professional colleagues, in other words) to reproduce your work. Beginning with Pons and Fleischmann, who announced their work on a TV news show, none of the subsequent researchers has met this requirement. Certainly not Rossi and his device. Since it should be clear what the original researcher did, a failure to replicate should be an argument against the original report. If the original researcher says, “you didn’t do what I did,” then he or she should explain more clearly what was done. The burden is not on the replicating researcher to figure out omissions or obscurities by the original researcher. Rossi’s work can simply be ignored since he refuses to provide instructions for replication.
Well, I don’t agree with this. That’s the way basic science usually works for sure. But here it’s clear that a vast amount of money would be at stake if this worked, so there is a perfectly valid reason for keeping the details proprietary as a “black box” in the early stages.
That’s why Ethan Siegel proposed the 5 tests that Jerry laid out above. Those tests are designed to validate claims that the device is working, without requiring disclosure of the black box in the middle.
If this were not a scam, the path would then be that genuine evidence that it’s working supports fundraising, they refine the device, they ensure that their intellectual property rights are fully protected, and ultimately disclose the entire mechanism. Only then do they get their slam-dunk Nobel Prize, of course.
“But here it’s clear that a vast amount of money would be at stake if this worked, so there is a perfectly valid reason for keeping the details proprietary as a “black box” in the early stages.”
Phui. That is what the patent system and intellectual property protection is all about. The inventor gets exclusive use/profit for a period of time in exchange for sharing the details with the world.
Why would you “Phui” me only to repeat exactly the same thing that I said?
“…they ensure that their intellectual property rights are fully protected, and ultimately disclose the entire mechanism.”
It’s true, however, that any genuine researcher in this field will be protective IN THE EARLY STAGES, until they figure out exactly what they need to protect; and until they have ensured that they are adequately protected in all relevant jurisdictions.
Do you see Ethan Siegel insisting that to preserve scientific credibility they must immediately reveal all details of the mechanism? No, at this stage he is rightly focused on proof of inputs and outputs under controlled conditions. We need to see a genuine EFFECT before we even start thinking about mechanisms.
Don’t get me wrong, I think these particualr guys are either scammers or monumentally self-deluded. But the fact that a research group is somewhat secretive about details of the the precise mechanism (not the EFFECTS) in the early stages is not of itself necessarily the mark of a scammer.
A key part of “peer review” is that someone with the appropriate skill set (a “peer”, literally) reads through the materials and methods sections (however they’re defined in your journal’s “house style”) to see if it is clear what has been done, and if all appropriate compounding factors have been controlled for.
Rossi doesn’t allow peer review. So he’s not even attempting to do science.
If I met the guy, I’d shake his hand. Then count my fingers.
The rejection of the results of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons was not just on the basis of non-replication. There were serious questions about the consistency of their claims. For a critical analysis, see Chapter 8 of A House Built on Sand, edited by Noretta Koertge. Interestingly, the take-down is by a philosopher: some of them are good guys.
The moment Price invoked the reputation trap, I could tell this was going to be a depressing bit of tedium. It’s a notorious tendency of this sort of apologist to criticize the psychology of detractors under the guise of caring about the unexplored results, in complete ignorance of the fact that the results not only have been explored, but are pretty unequivocal. The same thing happens in the anti-vax crowd and other pseudosciences.
It is, essentially, an ad hominem: if things don’t look promising, the results aren’t wrong; it’s the skeptics behaving unprofessionally or falling for some psychological trap or misunderstanding. Did Price even look into the matter before writing?
More to the point: Price is chastising us for failing to look into a matter that has not only already been disproved over and over, but that has no credibility in its current incarnation. By that logic, we are fools if we don’t investigate any of the billions of hypotheses that could plausibly be concocted. Is there something immoral about invoking practicality and current knowledge to judge which investigations are likely to bear fruit? What else are we going to use: the nigh-limitless claims of every crank, fraud, and incompetent who comes knocking? After all, it’s far easier to make stuff up than it is to investigate it.
People who try to inject credibility merely because something is possible are either staggeringly naive or up to something.
I’ve never heard of it [Cold Fusion] being a reputation-trap. Not only a Nobel Prize, but essentially a huge amount of money lies behind it.
Two things worth noting:
1. Many more people have and are trying cold fusion than are reporting (advertising), and some have deep pockets.
2. Templeton stands to benefit. In the change (Order of 1/10^20) that they fund a successful effort, they can point to God as inspiration…bleech.
Enough laymen are amazed by a simple salt battery that this is probably nothing more than an electrochemical reaction in a blue box being touted as “cold fusion” to wow the idgits of the world and get some dumbass organization to throw money at then for a few years, like Templeton.
Intelligent design is a reputation trap. That’s my guess as to why Templeton might have a hand in funding this sort of apologetics.
Good on Siegel! The dealings of some physicists from my alma mater is an embarrassment. :-/
Re the Templeton World Charity Foundation grant, it isn’t necessary to know Price’s piece is garbage. Aeon as well as Templeton started Nautilus are both religious counter-culture, I don’t read either.
Excerpts from a background article:
“The two publications, Aeon and Nautilus, are, as I mentioned, science publications, but both are set up in a way that ensures religion is among their chief areas of interest.”
“Not long before Aeon launched, the Hains set up a charity called “The Touchstone Trust for Education” in the UK. According to the deed, the charity makes grants to support, among other things, “artists and researchers who are working on projects exploring contemporary beliefs, values and rituals.” Given the close fit between the Trust’s mission and Aeon’s goals, it’s not a big leap to assume that the Trust funds the work of Aeon.”
“The first articles published by Aeon include an article on the New Atheism by the philosopher Michael Ruse and an article on Western Buddhism by the British writer Tim Lott.”
“Nautilus launched shortly after Aeon, and Toronto’s Globe and Mail saw the two as part of “the vanguard of a new and richer approach to science, one that is more immersive and thoughtful, and that sees science as a creative act rather than a mechanical algorithm we apply to generate facts.” ´”
“The funder helping to keep the publication in operation for the first two years is the John Templeton Foundation, a well-known funder of research and publications pursuing answers to “big questions.””
“In addition to this aspect of counterculture, the cases of Aeon and Nautilus indicate that the countercultural, new-age dream of integrating science and religion is also being made a reality by cybercultural productions.”
[ https://www.jboy.space/log/ssrc-digital-media-reflection.html ]
This is *vile* stuff.
I can’t agree. If F&P themselves couldn’t replicate, even less others, it is a non-result by definition of measurement statistics of repetition. That is how some of the later fabricated stem cell research was revealed.
I can tell Price is a philosopher, again with the ‘circular reasoning’ non-argument. Earth orbits the Sun, we know it because it orbited the Sun 25 years ago (as well as last year). Price is welcome to break the circularity with new evidence if he wants – maybe the Earth is headed for the Sun core. (O.o)
At least he provides more evidence for the problems with taking the philosophic idea of ‘Kuhnian science’ as describing science.
More likely a familiarity with too often seen pseudoscience. This isn’t rocket science!
“when I asked you to hold on to the thought that I must be a bit flaky myself,”
That thought springs naturally to mind. 😉
Huw Price is caught in a reputation trap – he’s a philosopher commenting on physics. And his contribution just enhances the trap.
cr
So the device that demonstrates cold fusion is an “E-Cat,” huh? Sounds suspiciously as though it belongs to the same family of cryptic “E” devices as the “E-Meter” with which Scientologists audit each other for spiritual blockages caused by thetans.
Wasn’t the “E-cat” some sort of barcode scanner that got hacked to death a decade or two ago due to shoddy software security?
Do I dare to Google for an “E-probe”? No, not before lunch.
Thanks for reminding me to postpone my appointment with the proctologist again.
It’s every 10 yrs now. Relax.
Not sure I can wait that long; I’m missing a set of keys.
It’s called an “E-Cat” for crying out loud. Of course it doesn’t do anything you would want it to and it certainly isn’t going to exert energy for human benefit. For all we know, the cat inside that blue box is dead.
Transparent scam that this is, I’m sure we’ll soon be told that it’s a quantum E-cat. Hence the cat inside is in a superposition of dead and alive, which surely explains why he’s unwilling to open the box.
Hard to imagine that there’s anyone out there with triple-digit IQ who takes this seriously.
Note however that there are perfectly legitimate ways to generate tiny amounts of fusion in a table-top-size device — fusors, pyro-electric fusion, and muon-catalyzed fusion (though the last requires that your tabletop be near an accelerator with a muon beam). There are even practical applications for some of these, but power generation isn’t among them. There’s just an outside chance that muon-catalyzed fusion might one day be made to produce practical net energy, but don’t hold your breath; muon capture and the short muon lifetime make it very hard to do.
Something’s collapsing in that blue box, and it ain’t the wavefunction — this Rossi guy’s dreams of duping fat-cats into investing in his scam, is more like it.
Hope you’re right about collapsing dreams, but there are a lot of folks out there with way more money than sense, and it’s a good bet that most of them don’t read WEIT. There’s probably no scam so outrageous that it can’t gain the support of at least one rich fool.
You’ve landed at the intersection of PT Barnum’s “there’s a sucker born every minute,” and HL Mencken’s “nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
He’s levitating above the intersection – using his new “Bracker-Bum Amazing Levitating Underpants.” As demonstrated (oh, sorry, inadequate abuse of Capitals) By The Esteemed Research Psyhchist And Physikicist, Dr Herr Deepak Coprophagy and his Beautiful Assistant Chandra “Random” Wickrandomsinghe, these Underpants Will AMPLIFY Your Quantum Essence Allowing You To Levitate Along Lay Lines.
I haven’t heard Ley Lines come out in public for years. They’re overdue an outing!
<(In small print 🙂 E&OE ; objects in mirror may be closer than you think ; (microscopic print) vendor has no way of knowing if buyer has sufficient Essence to be amplified for successful levitation.
The author wrote: “several researchers failed to reproduce Fleischmann and Pons’s results.”
It is true that several early studies in 1989 failed to reproduce, but many more succeeded. By September 1990, 92 groups of researchers at major laboratories such as Los Alamos, China Lake and BARC reported replications. These replications were published in roughly 1000 mainstream, peer-reviewed journal papers. The author should review this literature more carefully before commenting on this research.
For a brief introduction to this subject, please see:
I followed the source of that video and found this:
“The selection of papers at LENR-CANR.org is somewhat haphazard because the authors decide what they want us to upload. LENR-CANR.org is a library, not a journal. It is not selective.”
This is not exactly a ringing endorsement and certainly far from being a claim that peer reviewed research has replicated anything.
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It’s interesting how “cold fusion” manages to cling to life. Proponents have been claiming they’re only six months away from making their detractors eat crow ever since 1989. A copy of Navy scientists from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego came through DC in 2009 with a dog and pony show about LENR experiments that seemed to result in alpha particle tracks. They managed to attract some fairly high level attendees to a talk at an Arlington restaurant, including a former head of DARPA. OTH, ARPA-E, the DOE version of DARPA, has funded no LENR proposals in spite of receiving many, or at least not up until a couple of years ago, when I stopped paying attention. Their mission is to fund high risk, high payoff stuff, so you’d think they would at least throw them a bone.
I was working on ICF in 1989, and my company sent me to the international conference on cold fusion in Sante Fe in 1989, not long after the Pons and Fleischmann press release. Some of the posters there were, without exaggeration, bizarre. According to one, for example, the P-F experiment was really generating muons, which resulted in local generation of a couple of hundred muon-catalyzed fusions. The resulting alpha particles then spread out until they hit their Bragg peak, where they generated a spherical shock wave. This then imploded back to the starting point, heating a “hot spot,” resulting in more fusion reactions! Someone must have actually paid the authors to gin up stuff like that, and then travel to Santa Fe to present it. What a country!
“DARPA… Their mission is to fund high risk, high payoff stuff, so you’d think they would at least throw them a bone.”
It seems to me that this stuff may have gone beyond rational high-risk high-reward to a stage where people are making an argument akin to Pascal’s Wager for pursuing it. No proven effect, no plausible theoretical mechanism, but we risk missing out on Paradise!
Yes, cold fusion has long been in extremis. But, as in the Hotel California, “they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.”
💥
The only way to explain the strange development in the saga of cold fusion is to place it in the context of propaganda, not in science, neither in the pathological one.
Huw Price is a member of the same college of Brian Josephson, an early supporter of the reality of the energy performances of the ECAT claimed in early 2011, although he was soon informed that those performances were based on blatantly invented data (1). Josephson is not the only physicist at Trinity’s, a college that boasts nine other Nobel prizes in physics. Although Price is a philosopher, he had all the possibilities to check that the position on CF of the mainstream science is the correct one and that there are no reasons for hoping that the ECAT, or any other CF device, could provide the solution to the energy problems of the future.
At the end of his essay, Price proposes a bet: “In a case like this, there is very little cost to a false positive – to investing some time and money into an avenue that in the end turns out to go nowhere.” This sentence is absolutely erroneous and dramatically misleading. It is not true that the cost of a “false positive” would be limited to “some time and money”.
It would be so if the CF were true science, carried out in the privacy of the laboratories and subjected to the necessary checks and peer review, but since the F&P press conference CF looked as propaganda. Its purpose has never been to convince of its reality the scientific community, but the public opinion. The CF’s mirage follows the mith of a suitable substitute for the fossil fuels (see for instance the recent issue of TIME magazine (2)), a miracle Energy Breakthrough that should allow 7+ billion people to keep the current standard of life and possibly improve it. Based on this expectation, the world decision makers are going to plan the economic choices in the coming decades. Raising false expectations risks to support wrong decisions, which could lead the human being more and more away from a sustainable equilibrium with the planet.
This is the real cost at stake and the co-founder of CSER should know it.
(1) http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3219628&postcount=83
(2) http://worldofmagazines.net/time-magazine-2-november-2015/
Cold Fusion is NOT controversial. It is stigmatized. By a strict scientific literature test, it is a real phenomenon. But if you work on it, your career gets hurt. Stigma is more like racism or sexism or academic department-bias. (Not fun being the lone computer scientist in a department dominated by Electrical Engineers…) Like Climate Science, LENR has a large cadre of pathological skeptics organized in a denial campaign. People lose funding if the SUCESSFULLY publish peer reviewed papers. (SPAWARS). They loose their access to national labs where they have worked forever if the SUCCESSFULLY publish proof of the LENR reaction. (LANL most recently.)
Real phenomenon? By studying lab data at Brillouin Energy or Industrial Heat or SPAWARS or Toyota or Mitsubishi or countless other labs, any qualified mechanical engineer or experimental physicist can verify that excess heat beyond any conceivable chemical reaction is being released. Over the years there have been challenges to reproducibility, which has given some an opportunity to pathological skeptics to pretend that there is no effect, when actually there is very clear evidence in one identical experiment out of 10. That’s like claiming a slot machine never pays out because it can’t be made to pay out every time. Science still needs to explain things that work 1:10th of the time we press the on switch.
This problem is not limited to LENR. Check out the great book “The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin (who is himself a great physicist, frustrated with the lack of progress in the field since the 1980s). Another related work is
“Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics
Peter Woit
For the history of how Science got off the rails, see the long and wonderful history book,
Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed
https://books.google.vg/books?isbn=0967854830
Charles G. Beaudette
There are honest physicists who doubt LENR reaction based on a bunch of theoretical expectations. There are a number of very good reasons why this is unexpected. In fact it is easier to get plasma physicts (and for that matter Nuclear Engineers schooled in fission) to consider the reality of Santa Claus than to consider the Too-Good-To-Be-True story of LENR. As Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in to trouble– it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” But no matter how good you are at theory, and no matter how big and respectable the consensus is, in Science, Nature gets the only vote. Nature decides what’s true in Science. Humans can ALL be wrong. “The great thing about science is that it’s true whether you believe it or not!”
One problem with Physics (as well as Economics) is that they suffer from a plague of mathematicians. Mathematicians are nice people and they do amazing work. The fabric of science IS built with mathematics. But there is a real big difference between science and math. Math is an abstract body of imagination- castles in the sky- built out of logic an poetry. Lovely things which often turn out to be useful and in the mean time are great fun to work on. But mathematicians have no responsibility to match the universe I live in. And it restrains their creativity, so the fabulous fashionable ones don’t. They go off and imagine how many Strings could dance on the head of a pin.
Nothing wrong with being a mathematician, but don’t masquerade as a scientist if you have no interest in the real world when it defies your assumptions.
There are lots of amazing paradoxes being discovered in labs that these mathematicians who pretend to be physicists ignore. Look up Fischbach’s great work on the earth-sun distance and solar flares changing the decay rate of common isotopes. This is solid data from many labs over many decades. It is not going away. The standard model doesn’t seem to explain it. It is exactly the sort of thing that would unlock new understandings in the functioning of my universe. Yet it is ignored. Experiments that cost thousands of dollars are risky to people depending on budgets of 20 billion, like ITER.
LENR is also solid. Sadly Science has declined to accept the challenge. Fortunately Silicon Valley investors employ engineers to verify truth and don’t give a crap about the ideological objections of senior physicists and their younger fanboys. The work is going to be funded. Physics will learn of it from the business pages of the WSJ.
While hundreds of peer reviewed papers do exist showing the unexpected pattern of LENR, as those in Current Science mentioned above, lazy scientists expect to see stuff of this importance in either Nature or Science journals. It is unfortunate that the editors of those top institutions (along with the APS) refuse to give LENR research the benefit of peer review. If they really believed in the process of science, they would not deny peer review to well recognized scientific experts merely because they write on an unpopular topic. But by denying peer review, the journals “Science” and “Nature” succeed in making it look like nothing is happening. Nothing to see here. Move along…
Wikipedia is guarded by a cadre of anti-psueudoscience activists with a POV that LENR is not real. WIkipedia’s standard of truth is EXPLICITLY popular media, not scientific papers. SO non-scientist but pop science writer Taubes counts and 100 peer reviewed papers don’t by wikipedia standards. Wikipedia has an important goal – protecting people from things like anti-vax crazies. But they err by accepting the wrong consensus of the denial movement.
Likewise mathematicians masquerading as economists create amazing models with zero predictive power because they don’t care about all the important things- happiness, informal transactions, externalities, finite nature of resources, the “we have only one planet” hypothesis.
I have asked in the Roolz that people not submit essays as comments. Please do not do that again: this is nearly 1000 words long. I’ll let this one by, but please read the rules on the left sidebar.