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Comment by jakeva | Hacker News Reader

".. is known to be pseudoscience" could be correct, until it is not. Dismissing someone's research interests is not just rude but also the attitude that led to this individual dropping out of academia altogether.

This is the sort of response the doctor who suggested washing hands after surgery received and is not particularly useful.

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No, you don't get it. "Cold fusion" is akin to dismissing the recommendation to wash hands before surgery, because the experiments promoted by the proponents were repeatedly shown not to give the results they claim.

It’s also the sort of response this got: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray

To pick one of many, many examples. There are errors in both directions (dismissing correct ideas, accepting pseudoscience), and overly simplistically suggesting all iconoclasts should be entertained is probably unreasonable.

I think there is a big difference in what you steer your students to do, and what you do as an established scientist.

A Masters level education in Physics is not the time to be going off the beaten track; you still have 5 years or more before you even understand the territory enough to offer corrections on the map.

Replace “cold fusion” with “homeopathy”, do you still think your statement applies?

I think cold fusion is closer to homeopathy than stellar fusion.

That may be true, and maybe the professor was right to discourage that track. A key difference I'd point out, however, is that one is more universally accepted among researchers as pseudoscience than the other.

For instance, the first sentence of the wikipedia entry for homeopathy: "Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine."

First sentence for cold fusion: "Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature."

The failures of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, or the fallout of that case, do not in my mind constitute pseudoscience. Skepticism notwithstanding, it is an actual area of research still funded by universities around the world - from wikipedia, as recently as 2015 "the Indian multidisciplinary journal Current Science published a special section devoted entirely to cold fusion related papers. https://web.archive.org/web/20170805185756/http://www.curren..."

I personally think it's more interesting than homeopathy or linking vaccines to autism. I think the research has yielded more tangible real world benefits, such as improvements to the sophistication of calorimeters. Furthermore, I think lack of reproducibility is not the same as proof of its impossibility or that it is pseudoscience.

Maybe it's my personal longing for a future with cold fusion speaking - and I don't think it's a good career move to focus on it - but I don't like seeing it dismissed in the same pile of detritus as homeopathy.

Fair, perhaps the comparison with homeopathy was overly harsh. I'd certainly not say they were at exactly the same point on the spectrum of "hard science <> pseudoscience". My intention with that point was to highlight that there _is_ a point where professors do need to discourage students, and the rate/vigor of discouragement should be proportional to the current priors on "likelihood of being junk".

I'd happily retract that point and stick to the point around the professor's duty to keep their students from falling into intellectual quicksand or other impediments; I think that's the more important one anyway.

And I certainly agree that cold fusion would be revolutionary if it turns out to be physically possible. However based on my understanding, there's a solid body of nuclear physics -- both theory and experiment -- that show that this process is many orders of magnitude away from being activatable at room temperature. So I'd personally rather fund modern fission, hot fusion, and renewables as significant research targets.

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