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Comment by mysterypie | Hacker News Reader

I was struck by the viciousness of attacks against Fleischmann and Pons in the months after their cold fusion announcement. A few physicists even went out of their way to call them frauds and charlatans -- it wasn't enough to say that Fleischmann and Pons were mistaken.

As if two quiet, humble, respected PhD's in electrochemistry were crackpots orchestrating some kind of scam. I feel sorry for the decades of shaming they had to endure (Fleischmann died 4 years ago; Pons is still alive).

The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum. When some of the results were turning out to be negative, it seemed that almost no physicist was willing to say, hey wait a minute, it's not cold fusion but maybe there's a new interesting unknown phenomenon there.

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I was a grad student at a different U at the time, nearing my Ph.D. in non-fusion-related, but surface, physics.

The issue at the time was that they released their results to the press before their results were vetted. They became instantaneous celebrities, and it wasn't clear that it was against their will.

They were very coy about the setup (patent issues? I'm not sure); there was no theoretical model that fit it; and quickly nuclear physicists were pointing out that with the kind of reaction they were talking about they would have been fried by the (radiation) by-products.

The field was very excited (See: "fifth force" for another tale of excitement in my grad-school days). After all, any time there is a result without even a model from which an explanation can possibly derive you are looking at a bunch of new ideas. This means people get to be imaginative, there's sure to be lot's of funding for it, etc. Great times ahead!

Others tried to replicate the results, but since the full experimental setup wasn't being revealed they had to guess. Their attempts at replication failed. This was not the way physics research was conducted, and people started getting pissed off. It was time for more details and proof that they actually got the results they claimed.

With that proof not forthcoming (some started claiming they had built a fuel cell rather than a fusion reactor) they faced a lot of criticism for their PR processes and closed-mouth policy. The damage to their reputation was irreparable.

To my knowledge nobody has yet been able to reproduce the original claims, but I haven't followed in a while.

> To my knowledge nobody has yet been able to reproduce the original claims, but I haven't followed in a while.

http://lenr-canr.org/index/Summary/Summary.php

It has multiple times. But if you really spend time looking into this it gets very interesting. It seems like the Pd Fleischmann & Pons used was no ordinary one.It came from a recycling process and had nano structural properties. Most likely it was not even very pure but contained certain impurities that made tho whole process that effective. See the publications of Navy Research in the last months.

BTW: There are unified models that explain LENR very well, it just does and will never work under the current accepted paradigm - I personally give shit about paradigms, I use falsification and solomonoff induction only :)

The coy PR manipulation continued with the Rossi E-Cat project. It sounds like there have been some partial replications beyond Rossi.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/cold-fusion-energy-advances-2...

Hoping for the best with that, but it's now almost two years later.

I've been following the Rossi debacle since 2011 so it has been quite a bit longer than that.

  The attitude was that if their claims weren't 100% right and 100% reproducible, they're scum.

You're describing every internet forum I've ever encountered.

To respectfully offer a different point of view, I have never found an internet forum that requires the veracity of claims be held to that level of scrutiny.

In fact, I've been downvoted and ridiculed for things like requesting a source be given, or quoting a mainstream textbook (which disagreed with a user.

HN is better than most imho, but most internet forums seem to be characterized by groupthink rather than vehement adherence to an ability to verify the truth of what one is claiming. I'd rather be in the company of the latter, even if they do ridicule you if your claims are not verifiable.

I can think of one such forum, which deals with issues around audio and compression. From observing that I'd suggest it's very hard to maintain both friendliness and an adherence to the scientific method, simply because there is an endless number of people who have no understanding of or respect for what you're trying to do.

They'll interpret friendly corrections as rudeness, and won't actually stop making wild unsubstantiated claims until you escalate to genuine abrupt rudeness and/or banning.

Also, they'd probably be accused of "groupthink" for trying to maintain that objectivity by those who disagree with the conclusions. Humans are hard to deal with.

No, that's only true when claiming something that is not compatible with the currently prevailing social/political narrative. If you're backing up the current narrative you're free to spew falsehoods. If you're studying something nobody else cares about then it's probably wise to at least try and stick to the facts.

I would call it the "ad hominem filter". It's a heuristic to more effectively divide one's attention. Sadly, most people's ad hominem filters are configured incorrectly and produce far too many false positives.

I believe it is a case of: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", although it certainly appears that some went too far with too little evidence in their criticism of the the original idea.

It was an extraordinary claim in terms of practical importance but it should only be scientifically extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. We take particles at normal temperatures, accelerate them in EM fields, and fuse them all the time.

>I was struck by the viciousness of attacks against Fleischmann and Pons

Sadly, mainstream science can be as vicious in persecuting heretics as the Church was.

No. It really,really, hasn't been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

What has this to do with persecution? If you read the article, there's nothing there. Some did believe his ideas, many did not, and he was not granted the job he wanted at a prestigious hospital (instead, they offered him a similar position but with somewhat less perks) and that's it.

Well, it might hasn't burned people, but a lot of harm has been done in its name that's nearly as bad.

From lobotomy, which was a common practice back in the day, to electroshock therapy to unconventional people (not legitimately crazy, just anybody as long as their parents/guardians convinced there was "something wrong with them" e.g. from gay to wanting to live a bohemian life and having a conservative family).

And of course modern science happily collaborated with all kinds of power to give us the atomic bomb, biological weapons, and other atrocities.

Literally none of this is persecution.

>Literally none of this is persecution.

Convinced, as a scientific establishment, that your theories/dogmas about being straight/gay are correct, and subjecting the "sick" into electroshock and other therapy is not persecution?

What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?

And things such as lobotomy/heavy drugs/etc which were applied to all kind of strays/dissidents from mainstream values/conventions (and not just legitimately crazy people) is also classic persecution. And it didn't just happen behind the "Iron Curtain".

>Convinced, as a scientific establishment, that your theories/dogmas about being straight/gay are correct, and subjecting the "sick" into electroshocks is not persecution?

That's exactly right!

The intent behind the medical practices you list is not to oppress, but to cure. It's misguided, horrific, tragic, etc., but persecution it is not.

>What's the definition of persecution you are using that doesn't include such cases?

The usual one. Citing Merriam-Webster:

1. to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict; specifically : to cause to suffer because of belief

2. to annoy with persistent or urgent approaches (as attacks, pleas, or importunities)

The key point is that persecution is generally understood to require some sort of punitive or retaliatory intent, which is not at all the case of the practices you mention.

Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution. N.B.: none of this was done in the name of science. To say that science has persecuted mankind to the extent that religion has is patently absurd.

In fact, and with my sincerest respect (really!), much of your above posts are absurd, conflating political/ideological persecution with varying forms of misguided medicine, recklessness, short-sightedness, etc. To be sure, these are all Bad Things, but persecution is a rather narrowly-defined concept, especially in colloquial use.

>The intent behind the medical practices you list is not to oppress, but to cure. It's misguided, horrific, tragic, etc., but persecution it is not.

That's wrong.

For one, the church also did legitimately believe that they were curing (saving the soul, etc) of those they persecuted. So the "good intentions" of those doing such acts is not the defining criterion.

Second, such science was used to promote political and moral agendas (there was nothing to cure in a homosexual, and even less in more blatant cases, e.g. putting people in favor of black civil rights or women's rights/suffrage in psychiatric asylums or shock treatment).

Here's but one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis

There are of course other places that used similar techniques (from USSR and Nazi Germany to Britain, nordic countries and beyond).

>Moreover, you seem to be confusing "the scientific community" with "the political community", the latter of which is largely responsible for the misuse of scientific discovery in cases of actual persecution.

The scientific community was (and still is in various cases) complicit in adopting the political ideas (or promoting them in the first place), assisting those in power with scientific (or "scientific") theories and diagnoses, and enforcing them in practice. It was actual doctors, with degrees et al, that did those things, not politicians...

Also, if we widen the scope from persecution, then basically all organized religions have a whole litany of sins to answer for in other areas, lets go with high body-count wars for starters.

>lets go with high body-count wars for starters

Well, all, or almost all "religious wars" have historically been cover-ups for expansion of territory, power plays between populations, and money grabbing. So religion was just a pretext there.

Weirdly, I have always believed this to be the case, but just yesterday I considered that it was possible I was wrong.

I can't now remember exactly what news story I read, but basically it made no sense at all, unless true religious belief was the motivation, rather than selfish greed.

The whole premise of this thread is absurd to begin with. I think we're bordering on the beating (or dare I say persecution) of a dead horse ;)

> I was struck by the viciousness of attacks against Fleischmann and Pons in the months after their cold fusion announcement. A few physicists even went out of their way to call them frauds and charlatans -- it wasn't enough to say that Fleischmann and Pons were mistaken.

Perhaps it had a lot with the fact that they never allowed to perform independent measures and they never allowed to really perform the experiment in a controlled way.

I am curious - do you have a citation for that? AFAIR they published their results. That leaves reproduction of the experiments open to everyone with a laboratory capable of doing so.

For example, http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/cold_fusion_08

But I think my claim has more to do with Rossi's E-Cat than with the original P&F experiments

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