I have been Taleyarkhan with Yeong Kim, who is
also a professor at Purdue, and with Ed Storms. Kim told me:
[Taleyarkhan] believes his bubble fusion is a
hot fusion. After he found out that I have been
working on cold fusion and told him that what he
is doing is cold fusion and not a hot fusion, he
has been avoiding me for any scientific or technical discussions . . .
I have heard from other people that Taleyarkhan
wants to distance himself from the field of cold
fusion. It is not surprising. He knows what
happened to cold fusion researchers!
As to the technical question, is this some form
of cold fusion, Kim suspects it might be and I
gather so does McKubre. Storms disagrees. He
thinks there is no connection between the
Taleyarkhan effect and cold fusion. I cannot
judge, but anyone can see that it is "mostly" hot fusion.
However, many people such as the editors of
Nature and Robert Park, vehemently oppose both
kind of research. (They oppose anything that is
new, original or interesting. They have made it
their life's work to prevent progress.) This gang
of naysayers has deliberately conflated the
Taleyarkhan effect and cold fusion. They do this
as a political tactic. Whether they actually
believe there is a connection or not, they assert
there is one, especially in the press, because
they want to trigger attacks by the Washington
Post, Time Magazine and other rabid opponents of cold fusion.
In 1952, people used this political tactic to
destroy business rivals (and sometimes jilted
lovers, and other enemies), by calling them
"communists." Whether the target really was a
communist or not had nothing to do with it. The
purpose was to destroy the guy with guilt by association.
Ed Storms was baffled by the brouhaha in the
press. He said: "Naturally the detected amounts
are wrong because the measurements are not
sensitive enough to see the expected ratio. What
is the advantage to anyone to mix these two
phenomenon?" As I said, the advantage is that you
crush the opposition by associating them with
cold fusion. But Storms, in an
uncharacteristically naïve moment, said he does
not understand why anyone would attack research
in the newspapers in the first place. "This
situation makes no sense." If these other
researchers feel there is a problem with the
experiment, they should discuss it by e-mail, or
publish papers showing an error.
Here is my take on the situation:
Think Zeitgeist. This is the kind of age we live
in. This is what science has come to. When people
publish experimental results that contradict
theory, instead of debating the issues according
to logic and textbook knowledge, academic rivals
spread false rumors, they threaten lawsuits, they
meddle, and they conduct witch hunt
investigations to derail the research and destroy
careers. It worked with cold fusion, so now they
do it every time something new comes along.
Taleyarkhan is being investigated for "academic
misconduct" because a theoretician thinks the
experiment contradicts theory. It is now
officially "misconduct" to do experiments that
challenge textbook theory. Theoreticians have
appointed themselves the high priests of science,
and an experimentalist who does anything to upset
them is not merely mistaken or foolish, as they
said back in 1989. Now he is unethical, and he
must be "investigated" and crushed.
Perhaps, as Schwinger predicted, this will be the
death of science. Science is at a low point, and
no one can say when, or if, it will recover. But
I expect it will. Valuable, vital institutions
seldom collapse completely. Usually after they
reach an dysfunctional extreme, a crisis occurs,
and then the problems are fixed.
- Jed
