Monday, March 06, 2006

Cold Fusion Update

The Cold Fusion story puts the lie to the rosy picture of scientific progress that is so often painted. Everyone likes to believe that we dwell in a time of endless progress, and it's just one happy step forward after another with everyone in agreement. We all look back at Einstein and think we, unlike those foolish uptight Victorians, would certainly have agreed with the paradigm shift he engendered had we been living during those times. Well, we wouldn't have. We deride Hitler's characterization of relativity theory and quantum mechanics as "Jewish physics", but when something new really does come along in our own lifetimes we as a society are even more belittling and ostracizing than he was. New scientific discoveries--truly new scientific discoveries--will necessarily upset the scientific apple cart. The problem is this: the more we know about nature, the richer we become in both material and mental wealth, the more we wish to believe that we've got it all, and the less willing we are to have that gravy train of grants overturned. Too much money and too much knowledge leads to very poor science.

Nature is what it is, not what we want it to be or have convinced ourselves it is; nor even what our theories tell us it is. The universe is elegant only if it truly is elegant, and not if it isn't.

Despite the best efforts of grant-burdened physicists and the parochial New York Times, the Cold Fusion story just keeps picking itself up off the ground, stronger than ever. This latest update comes from the NPR show Living on Earth.

GELLERMAN: Dr. Pamela Boss works at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. She and Dr. Stanislaw Szpak have produced some of the most definitive evidence of the cold fusion phenomenon. They fund the research mostly out of their own pocket and, even though he's retired, Dr. Szpak still comes in almost every day to conduct cold fusion experiments, perfecting a method that he says speeds up the reaction. Now, instead of waiting weeks for cold fusion to begin, it happens instantaneously.

SZPAK: Now we have 100 percent reproducible results. In other words, we always get to that last step. We are doing that within seconds.

...

GELLERMAN: Like Michael McKubre, Szpak and Boss have measured elevated levels of tritium and have focused on detecting the other radiation byproducts of fusion reactions, gamma and x-rays. Pamela Boss:

BOSS: We work with a lot of physicists here and they, of course, were very skeptical. So then, we borrowed equipment to do gamma ray measurements and x-ray measurement. And you could see they were tracking one another. When the gamma ray detector was going up, so was the x-ray detector. And I pointed this out to the physicist who was helping us and he was a little bit disturbed by that because he made sure that everything was on separate circuits, there was no cross talk.

...

SZPAK: We see appearance of elements which weren't there to start with. In other words, during the experiment itself these elements have been created. Now, by what mechanism, if you're asking me that question, I cannot answer because I simply don't know yet.

...


GELLERMAN: Szpak and Boss have published the results of their experiment in a prestigious, peer-reviewed physics journal. And Japanese scientists have reported similar findings. So, how might cold fusion work? Well, few researchers at U.S. universities are investigating the question because it's a career destroyer; those who study cold fusion do so at their own peril. One of the few who has from the very beginning is Peter Hagelstein of MIT.

HAGELSTEIN: This experiment implied the existence of some new physics. Hence, if there's going to be heat there are going to be neutrons; if there's no neutrons hence there's no heat, hence it's all wrong. It got very confused very quickly.

GELLERMAN: Today, because of his continued work on cold fusion, Peter Hagelstein lives a life of virtual academic exile at MIT. He lost funding for his lab and he never did make full professor.

...

GELLERMAN: As Peter Hagelstein sees it, cold fusion is not just a colder version of plasma or hot fusion, but an entirely different phenomenon. His theory doesn't violate any of the fundamental laws of nature. But it does require a rethinking of modern physics.

HAGELSTEIN: So, we start out now with a picture of a communication between reactions at different sites, and this is not in the textbooks.


There you have it: it's not in the textbooks, it upsets current theories, it can't be true, so cut off his funding, defrock the heretic. Is house arrest too good for him?

Science as it's really practiced.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

It seems to me it always been like this. The people most likely to come up with something new are the people most likely to take a risk.

Scientists can be just as stodgy as anyone else.

Rick Ballard said...

So, Cold Fusion causes global warming right?

Excellent piece, MHA, although it makes me nervous to think of science as a faith system - for some scientists anyway.

Eppur, si muove.

truepeers said...

Scientists have always had to chase funding, unless they were gentlemen of independent means. But what is perhaps different today are the importance of belonging to research teams, and to finding one's place in a highly-differentiated peer-review system.

Is there no one funding independent minds, in attempts to recreate the few heroic individuals of yore? If not, how might we encourage a movement to make this happen, if only at the margins of Mainstream Science?

MeaninglessHotAir said...

truepeers,

It's an excellent question. The closest thing we have is probably the MacArthur "genius award" grants. But my experience has been that, like retirement, the usual effect of the MacArthur grant is to dry up, rather than to encourage, the creative juices of the individual involved.

You raise an excellent point--the deeper we seek to probe the more massive the resources required and the more official approval required in order to make progress. No more "garage band" science.

Syl said...

I think public awareness, interest, and advocacy is important too. There exists the general notion that cold fusion is too good to be true, therefore 'don't get me excited about something so I look like a fool later' which implies 'don't waste your time on it.'

If the public were to get the sense that perhaps there really is something to it, then minds will slowly change and the environment in which funding is allocated will change too.

Of course, to be realistic, this is ass-backwards from the way science has worked through the years. Scientists lead, the public follows.

But the internet and communications in general have empowered the 'masses' to a degree never seen before in history. Not just for advocacy, but for the absorbtion of knowledge on which to base advocacy decisions. The situation may very well tip in reverse: the masses may now lead and scientists follow (in the sense of what to research not in what they find.)

The hockey stick business is a good example of the reversal.

Chan Chan said...

Yes, we live in the scientific Dark Ages when it comes to science that is disruptive of the status quo.

Even if the DoE announced tommorrow that CF was achieving some measure of success in labs behind closed doors it would takes years for this technology to develop into commercial products.

Sure it is all supposed to be clean and abundant, but my fear is that until the security aspects are solved, it will take a while to be adopted on the commercial side in a big way. Until then, it will progress in measured steps safely revealed to the public.

-Johnathan Chan

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