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):

1. A device that demonstrably was generating its own, self-sustaining energy reaction, unpowered by an outside source of any type.
2. A quality, closed-calorimeter measurement of the energy output of the device.
3. Successful detection of gamma-rays coming from the device, a telltale signal that’s a by-product of all known nuclear reactions.
4. An examination of the before-and-after of all products and reactants, to verify that a nuclear transmutation had, in fact, taken place.
5. 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.