ADVERTISEMENT

SCIENTISTS: Fleischmann and Pons Cold Fusion or Cold Illusion - 25 years later..............

HA! Thanks, Michael. This brought back memories. I was at the American Physical Society March Meeting in St. Louis in 1989 when this first broke on the national news. We did some (literally) bar napkin calculations and saw a 10E80 discrepancy in the probabilities of nuclear interaction. Nevertheless, we rushed back to the lab, scrounged some heavy water, palladium foil, and a neutron counter and tried to duplicate the report. Nothing. In early May I was at the special CF session of the APS May meeting in Baltimore when group after group reported negative results. I distinctly recall Nathan Lewis of Caltech ripping cold fusion apart, ending with the snarky (Hey, he was from Caltech) quip, "Cold fusion has been verified by no university without a good football team". I mean, come on, BYU was ok but Utah wasn't that good in football back then. There are still pockets of research on CF going on around the world. Whatever Pons and Fleischmann saw, it wasn't what they thought. They saw what they wanted to see, which is the origin of pathological science.
 
ADVERTISEMENT