At 11:33 AM 6/20/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
See:
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-scientists-sin>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-scientists-sin
"David Goodstein in his new bookOn Fact and Fraud . . . Other cases
are not so clear. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons's "discovery"
of cold fusion, Goodstein concludes, was most likely a case of
scientists who "convince themselves that they are in the possession
of knowledge that does not in fact exist." This self-deception is
distinctly different from deliberate deception."
I commented after Jed's two comments:
Rothwell is highly knowledgeable about cold fusion. Someone who is
not might miss a crucial point, which the SciAm reviewer may also
have missed. Goodstein is a real skeptic, that is, he's aware of the
problems here on both sides. He is aware that the case of scientists
who "convince themselves that they are in the possession of
knowledge that does not in fact exist"does not just apply to Pons
and Fleischmann, indeed, it may hardly apply to them at all. They
quickly backed off from claims of fusion, for all they knew was that
that they were finding unexpected heat. The rejection of cold fusion
was based on an application of theory to a situation where the
mechanism was not known. You cannot do calculations from theory for
an unknown reaction. The obvious hypothesis of brute-force
deuterium fusion was easily rejected on fairly solid grounds, though
even there, possible unknown effects could damage the application of
theory. Today, hardly anyone in the field considers d-d fusion
reasonable now, and more sophisticated analysis by physicists has
predicted 100% fusion under unexpected and very rare, but possible
physical conditions (Takahashi Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate
theory), and there are other theories, none of them widely accepted,
and all of them difficult to test. Fleischmann was not looking for
cheap energy, he was attempting to explore the accuracy of the
2-body approximations of quantum mechanics, and expected to find
nothing. He was wrong, he found something. Which was then rejected
as impossible based on the very approximations he was testing. Bad
Science. But that was twenty years ago, and the field has moved on.
Publication in this field has exploded since 2004.
