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.