A Curious Result on Cold Fusion Research
Loren Petrich
I got a paper reviewing the work on Cold Fusion from a certain
Douglas R. O. Morrison of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland
(morr...@vxprix.decnet.cern.ch) by e-mail.
Its main conclusion is that Cold Fusion is probably yet
another example of Pathological Science, and presents how the claims
of acceptance and rejection behaved in the fashion that Irving
Langmuir had described for Pathological Science. Langmuir's examples
had included such classics as N-Rays and polywater. His three phases
of treatment of such results by the scientific community are (1)
initial confirmation, (2) equal numbers of positive and negative
results, and (3) a large number of negative results.
One of his most interesting results was how the proportions of
positive and negative claims varied regionally. There were two main
regions of Cold Fusion researchers, whose results had shown different
behaviors. Region #1 includes the major labs and the Northwest in the
United States, along with Northern Europe, while Region #2 includes
the rest of the United States, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia
(principally India and Japan) and Latin America.
In a review for the May 1989 APS conference on Cold Fusion
(the effect was first announced in March that year), Morrison found
that Region #1 was already in Stage 3, while Region #2 was in Stage 1.
In that month, Region #2 shifted to Stage 2, and in the months since
then, most of Region #2 has shifted to Stage 3, with the exception of
some Stage 2 holdouts in India, Japan, Utah, and Texas.
There is the question of what caused Region #1 to turn
skeptical earlier than Region #2. I wonder if it is a matter of the
technical competence available to deal with this sort of problem. The
hypotheses I will suggest may cause some flames, so be warned. I
would not be surprised in the Region #1 labs are more advanced
technically than the Region #2 ones; that would certainly be the case
for major labs in the wealthier countries of the world. This would
have allowed the Region #1 people to work out what was going on with
this putative phenomenon much quicker than the Region #2 people. I
know that this may be taken as a put-down of the smaller labs of the
world, but the slow realization may simply be a reflection of the
difficulties of understanding this phenomenon. Any comments?
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Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster: lo...@sunlight.llnl.gov
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