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Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

<RANT>

I find this very frustrating. As someone steeped in engineering and the sciences, I am used to working with unusual, unexpected and/or exciting results and I am used to those results being confirmed, revised, denied, etc.

My frustration is not with the scientists; I'm sure I'd do the same thing given a possibly groundbreaking discovery and an inability to discuss much about it. My frustration is with us, the public, and with the fact that we can't be trusted as part of the broader team in this exploration. And I guess I'm frustrated with the media for feeding us with hyped-up-everything, since, even though we seem to demand it, it keeps us from being able to be involved in these conversations/discoveries.

</RANT>

edit: added tags...

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I agree with your conclusion.

As an example of early disclosure of unconfirmed results, I am fairly confident many members of the public still think we have evidence that neutrinos travel faster than light..

Agreed.

Interestingly, the blowback from early disclosure of unconfirmed [and bad] results can overwhelm subsequent disclosure of confirmed results. See: cold fusion. Cold fusion exists in a variety of forms, but, even in the face of continuing positive results, most in the public think that cold fusion is busted.

Note: I'm not claiming that cold fusion is a viable energy production technology, just that it certainly exists and that interesting results have been published about it over the last 20 years.

Citations? (to a credible source)

I think Discover had an article about the status of it gaining more mainstream acceptability - here it is: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/nov/27-big-idea-bring-back-... A more skeptical article from Forbes in Jan: http://onforb.es/ysGcVF

Thanks for the links. Neither of those articles say anything about cold fusion. They discuss the possibility of a cold fission.

From the Discover article: "A growing cadre of scientists now suspect that Pons and Fleischmann’s [1989] observations were the result not of fusion but of more plausible physical processes." "Fusion requires enormous temperatures and pressures, which is why it occurs only in stars and bombs." The first section is even titled, "Cold, Yes, But Not Fusion."

What I get from reading those articles, is that scientists think there might have been something to the 1989 experiments, but that it's not fusion. Instead, they believe it's a clean, low-energy form of fission. While interesting, this does not confirm the existence of cold fusion.

From the Forbes article, it appears that scientists are now referring to it as "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR). Consistent with the Discover article, this is described as a clean form a fission that scientists are currently researching. That's a far cry from saying that LENR exists in the wild, let alone cold fusion.

Thank you for providing the links. I was actually unaware of the research in LENR before, and I'm happy to have learned about it.

Thanks for the references. It is as you say: Science in general is getting over it's somewhat childish dislike for anything that has to do with "Cold Fusion" and there is some earnest research going on. And why not? If there is a chance cold fusion may work it is sensible to find out if it is indeed so. Or if not. So far they have a few interesting ideas and some unexplained experiments. But not more. No hard evidence. Just because scientists are taking it seriously again does not mean there really is something there. Compare it to MythBusters: "We've heard about this cool thing - let's see if there is something to it."

If you actually read those references, it's clear that they're not talking about cold fusion. It's rather a cold form of fission.

The difference is important, because our current understanding of fusion is that it can only occur at extremely high temperature and pressure (because that's what it takes to fuse two atoms into a larger atom). Fission (the splitting of atoms), on the other hand, happens to atoms without added energy or pressure.

If cold fusion were real, it would overturn our understanding of fusion. Cold fission does not, as far as I know, contradict our understanding of fission. That's why it's not surprising that scientists are taking cold fission seriously. But they are not taking cold fusion seriously.

Cold fusion doesn't actually exist. There might be evidence that there's some reaction with the materials used, but there's no reason to suspect its fusion at all. I think the CF crowd keeps redefining itself. Now this is all an interesting chemical reaction that's difficult to reproduce or requires some really specific parameters.

I think in that case the scientists involved did everything they could think of to explain their data before going public. So I wouldn't call it an early disclosure of an unconfirmed result, more like "Hey everyone, this is really weird, and we we can't explain it"

Historically, this is where one of 2 things would happen, either it would have some mundane explanation that the original investigator missed, or it's one of those anomalies that leads to new scientific discoveries.

So I think they handled it correctly, and got the right kind o f attention.

> So I think they handled it correctly, and got the right kind o f attention.

I also think they handled it correctly, but I believe the head of that org was relieved of command.

Not cool. He was very explicit about the how's and why's of what they were publishing, but many media outlets took it far away from context.

Wait, didn't the principal scientist resign as a result of the media hype storm?

Yes... http://news.discovery.com/space/opera-leaders-resign-after-n...

Yes he was sacked, but here's the important quote from that article:

Even Ereditato never claimed that their work had overturned Einstein. "I would never say that," he told Science last September. "We are forced to say something. We could not sweep it under the carpet, because that would be dishonest."

This is a bit unfair to the public. With any science, in my experience there are naturally different levels of disclosure. It is natural to share first with current collaborators, then with friendly recent collaborators, then with colleagues in related areas, then in informal seminar discussions, and so on.

One of the reasons for this is trustworthiness, as you say, but there is much more to it. Trustworthiness isn't the main parameter at all. A larger part of it is how much you trust the results. At each level of disclosure, by social convention there is a rough level of implied confidence that can also be spelled out more carefully. It is embarrassing to be wrong, and the higher your implied confidence was the more embarrassing it is! The rationale behind this social convention might once have been trust, but it is now free-standing.

Some incentives for layered disclosure are obvious; for example, for PR it might be useful to build a buzz within your research community. Other incentives are less obvious. For example, you might disclose early results to a colleague to hopefully get them interested and involved in the research. But if you disclose the results too broadly, too soon, then they will probably be less enthusiastic. They want the inside track on a cool problem, so that there is some time and freedom to explore it, and it isn't a race. (Races for results are stressful and also unfulfilling and wasteful; there's usually no point having multiple teams competing to do the same stuff, just trying to beat the others out for priority.)

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