At 10:25 PM 9/28/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
(A blogger asked me what is the source of the dispute, and the academic politics. I like my answer, so let me copy it here. This is, perhaps, a softer, more understanding response than I might have made years ago.)
That's a good explanation, Jed. I'm not quite as old as the generation described as supportive of the experimental work, but my background led me, as well, to trust in experiment over theory, and that divide is broader than "science." Originally, I thought I'd be a nuclear physicist, and I was on my way, as an undergraduate student at Caltech. But my life took me to different places, so I never developed an investment in theory; I simply got an attitude and an approach from sitting with Feynmann -- who taught physics my first two years at Caltech, those lectures were the ones that became the standard text. I also had Linus Pauling for freshman chemistry, but he wasn't nearly as memorable.
The rejection of cold fusion is very understandable, but also tragic. My own long-term interest is in the development of social structures that can avoid these kinds of errors, without becoming vulnerable to the opposite errors. In a word, social structures that are intelligent, not merely dependent upon individual habits and individual limitations, summed.
The name "Cold fusion" was an error (i.e., preumature speculation), but a very understandable one, and, rather than reject it, as Krivit suggests (for good reason), I'd prefer to embrace it. There remain possibilities that don't involve fusion as normally defined, such as neutron absorption and resulting fission, but I'm going to be marketing science kits, and, as they say, bad press is better than no press. And "cold fusion" has the press.... low energy nuclear reactions and condensed matter nuclear science, though far more accurate, don't have the press.
Yes, Teller should be considered a supporter of cold fusion; bottom line, he didn't reject it and very clearly did not consider it to violate known physical principles, and he encouraged the research. It violates assumptions, that's all, and the assumptions it violates can be shown to be weak extrapolations of experience from one field to another. Before Fleischmann and Pons, how many researchers had made a systematic attempt to falsify the assumption that the calculations of quantum mechanics, simplified to the two-body problem, were good enough to accurately predict nuclear behavior in condensed matter? Fleischmann expected to establish an upper bound for the deviations as below his experimental accuracy, he's written. Instead, he showed that the deviations were much greater than expected, and easily measurable under the right conditions.
For their part, the cold fusion "believers" did a lousy job of selling it. Probably because of the obvious interest in energy generation, most attempts to explain cold fusion focus on the originally-discovered effect, excess heat, and, for lots of reasons, it is easy to impeach that and to dismiss it, when it is emphasized in isolation. The earliest effect that was actually conclusive was heat/helium correlation, which cut through the replication problem and turned it into classic proof through correlation (and this makes "failures" into controls). Somehow the presentation at the 2004 DoE review managed to sufficiently confuse the reviewers and the DoE so that the correlation was missed, and totally misrepresented in the summary report. I documented that confusion on Wikipedia, on the Cold fusion Talk page, but I've not seen it mentioned elsewhere. Probably the problem resulted from the Appendix on the Case effect results, which are a red herring, compared to the heat/helium work as reviewed by Storms. I had to read that appendix several times before I understood what was being presented. It shouldn't have been so hard, and I don't wonder that the negative reviewer who commented on it, and the DoE summarizer, misunderstood it.
