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