Giving Pseudoscientists the Benefit of the Doubt
One of the most annoying things about pseudoscience is how many people will give individuals the benefit of the doubt if they can simply portray themselves as the victim of some sort of grand (or even not-so-grand conspiracy). A good example of this is the inexplicably favorable review of Charles Beaudette’s book about cold fusion, Excess Heat, that was recently posted at the widely read tech site, Slashdot.
For those unfamiliar with cold fusion, in the late 1980s two chemists at the University of Utah — Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons — claimed they had been able to create a fusion reaction at essentially room temperatures. Since fusion reactions typically occur only at very high temperatures, the process was dubbed cold fusion. Almost immediately the cold fusion claim was attacked, and eventually dismissed by researchers.
It still has a substantial following among some fringe science watchers, however, and Beaudette’s book argues that it was simply the haughtiness of establishment sciences that caused the unjustified dismissal of Fleischmann and Pons’ work.
This is absurd. Rather it were Fleischmann and Pons who short circuited a serious scientific analysis of their claims.
First, rather than submit their findings to peer review — a standard scientific practice — Fleischmann and Pons simply announced their findings at a press conference. This in itself is bad enough, but even worse the duo did not adequately outline how other scientists could go about replicating their work. The first scientists who attempted to replicate their work literally had to guess about the parameters of the cold fusion experiments based on photos and video from press conferences.
Second, while supporters of cold fusion continue to insist that physicists just don’t understand enough about the workings of chemistry to evaluate the work of Fleischmann and Pons, the reverse is really the case. The duo claimed they had achieved fusion which has a number of characteristics including the release of radiation in the form of neutrinos. But, in fact, their experiment was giving of no radiation, so whatever it was (if anything) that was happening in their lab, it was not fusion.
Third, the bottom line is that cold fusion was rejected because it was not reproducible. Nobody at a quality laboratory has ever been able to consistently reproduce the cold fusion effect, and after Fleischmann and Pons finally released the protocols of their experiment, most observers agreed that their setup was deficient in many ways that could easily explain the alleged excess heat they claimed for their reaction (and Pons had claimed they produced enough energy to boil water, indicating a phenomenon so strong that it should have been easy to reproduce in other laboratories).
As MIT physicists David Goodstein writes in an article on his web site (Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion?):
All of this was much less important than the fact that Cold Fusion experiments, if they gave positive results at all, gave them only sporadically and unpredictably. When Bednorz and Mueller announced the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in 1986, no one carped about control experiments, because, once the recipe was known, any competent scientist could make a sample and test it and it would work immediately. If, at their press conference, Pons and Fleischmann had given a dependable recipe for producing excess heat, they very likely would be Nobel Prizewinners now (as Bednorz and Mueller are) rather than social outcasts from the community of scientists.
It was the fact that Fleischmann and Pons’s claims were unsupported by scientific investigation that led to their downfall, not some hegemonistic conspiracy among scientists. And yet, for some reason, the urge is always to root for the underdog, no matter how erroneous or misguided he may be.
Sources:
Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion?. David Goodstein.
Excess Heat (book review). Jim Diggers, Slashdot.Org, April 8, 2001.
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