Assyntk's List: cold fusion

• research method used to analyze how people understand situations and activities
• "Framing is the process by which a communication source, such as a news organization, defines and constructs a political issue or public controversy" (Nelson, Oxley, & Clawson, 1997, p. 221).

• Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974) was Goffman's attempt to explain how conceptual frames structure the individual’s perception of the society. Therefore, this book is about organization of experiences rather than organization of society.
• He used the picture frame concept to illustrate how people use the frame (which represents structure) to hold together their picture (which represents the context) of what they are experiencing in their life

• Frame analysis is underpinned by the idea that people must somehow classify their experience if they are to grasp its significance and communicate the experience to other

• These frames permit us to make sense of events by permitting us to dissect experience into easily manageable wholes.

   

   
• The meaning of an activity can be transformed in several ways.

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• Hilarious. Response of Collins to Franklin's critique of his interpretation of gravitational radiation experiments in terms of experimenter's regress.
  Funny as social science controversy about controversy in science;) - assyntk on 2013-05-11
• Also - quite an example of 'restrained academic attack'. - assyntk on 2013-05-11
• Also proves that Collins is a bit of a shit-stirrer (also evident in his webpages) - assyntk on 2013-05-11

• experimenter

• "Harry Collins’ work on the social problems of “calibration” and the acceptance of standard kinds of observations and apparatus in the fostering of experimental consent (see Collins’ Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice, 1985). Since the results of one experiment can only be judged as valid by comparison with the results of another experiment (i.e., the instrument is calibrated), one must always refer implicitly back to the credibility accorded to some prior experiment—a situation Collins refers to as the “experimenter’s regress”, and that is fraught with problems of authority." - assyntk on 2013-05-11

• What scientists take to be a correct result is one obtained with a good, that is, properly functioning, experimental apparatus. But a good experimental apparatus is simply one that gives correct results. Collins claims that there are no formal criteria that one can apply to decide whether or not an experimental apparatus is working properly. In particular, he argues that calibrating an experimental apparatus by using a surrogate signal cannot provide an independent reason for considering the apparatus to be reliable.
• In Collins' view the regress is eventually broken by negotiation within the appropriate scientific community, a process driven by factors such as the career, social, and cognitive interests of the scientists, and the perceived utility for future work, but one that is not decided by what we might call epistemological criteria, or reasoned judgment. Thus, Collins concludes that his regress raises serious questions concerning both experimental evidence and its use in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses and theories. Indeed, if no way out of the regress can be found, then he has a point.

• refers to a loop of dependence between theory and evidence. In order to judge whether evidence is erroneous we must rely on theory-based expectations, and to judge the value of competing theories we rely on evidence, but to detect errors in experiments we must be aware of theoretical predictions,
• This issue is particularly important in new fields of science where there is no community consensus regarding the relative values of various competing theories, and where sources of experimental error are not well known.
• If experimenter's regress acts a positive feedback system, it can be a source of pathological science.
• a typical relativistic phenomenon in the Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR).
• In EPOR, all scientific knowledge is perceived to be socially constructed and is thus "not given by nature".
• his article Son of seven sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical Phenomenon, Harry Collins argued that scientific experiments are subject to what he calls "experimenter's regress"
• The regress must be broken by "social negotiation" between scientists in the respective field.
• is foreshadowed by Sextus Empiricus' argument that "if we shall judge the intellects by the senses, and the senses by the intellect, this involves circular reasoning inasmuch as it is required that the intellects should be judged first in order that the intellects may be tested [hence] we possess no means by which to judge objects"

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• Bobby Stanley Pons (born 23 August 1943) is an American-French electrochemist known for his work with Martin Fleischmann on cold fusion in the 1980s and '90s
• Pons moved to France in 1992, along with Fleischmann, to work at a Toyota-sponsored laboratory. The laboratory closed in 1998 after a ₤12 million research investment with no results

• n the late 1920s, two Austrian born scientists, Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters, originally reported the transformation of hydrogen into helium by spontaneous nuclear catalysis when hydrogen was absorbed by finely divided palladium at room temperature. However, the authors later retracted that report, acknowledging that the helium they measured was due to background from the air.
• The most famous cold fusion claims were made by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989
• Pons and Fleischmann never retracted their claims, but moved their research program to France after the controversy erupted.
• Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah hypothesized that the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium that could be achieved within palladium metal using electrolysis might result in nuclear fusion
• at some point (in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about 50°C without changes in the input power. These high temperature phases would last for two days or more and would repeat several times in any given experiment once they had occurred. The calculated power leaving the cell was significantly higher than the input power during these high temperature phases. Eventually the high temperature phases would no longer occur within a particular cell.
• In 1988, Fleischmann and Pons applied to the United States Department of Energy for funding towards a larger series of experiments. Up to this point they had been funding their experiments using a small device built with $100,000 out-of-pocket.^[26] The grant proposal was turned over for peer review, and one of the reviewers was Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University.^[
• Jones had worked for some time on muon-catalyzed fusion, a known method of inducing nuclear fusion without high temperatures, and had written an article on the topic entitled "Cold nuclear fusion" that had been published in Scientific American in July 1987.
• hey felt that such a discovery could bear significant commercial value and would be entitled to patent protection. Jones, however, was measuring neutron flux, which was not of commercial interest.^[26] To avoid future problems, the teams appeared to agree to simultaneously publish their results, though their accounts of their March 6 meeting differ.^[27]
• Fleischmann and Pons, however, pressured by the University of Utah, which wanted to establish priority on the discovery,^[28] broke their apparent agreement, submitting their paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry on March 11, and disclosing their work via a press release ^[29] and press conference on March 23.^[26] Jones, upset, faxed in his paper to Nature after the press conference.^[27]
• Cold fusion was proposing the counterintuitive idea that a nuclear reaction could be caused to occur inside a chemically bound crystal structure.^[31] But the 1986 discovery of high-temperature superconductivity had made the scientific community more open to revelations of unexpected scientific results that could have huge economic repercussions and that could be replicated reliably even if they had not been predicted by established conjecture
• The announcement of a new clean source of energy came at a crucial time: adults still remembered the 1973 oil crisis and the problems caused by oil dependence, anthropogenic global warming was starting to become notorious, the anti-nuclear movement was labeling nuclear power plants as dangerous and getting them closed, people had in mind the consequences of strip mining, acid rain, the greenhouse effect and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which happened the day after the announcement
• They said the results had been confirmed dozens of times and they had no doubts about them.^[35] In the accompanying press release Fleischmann was quoted saying: "What we have done is to open the door of a new research area, our indications are that the discovery will be relatively easy to make into a usable technology for generating heat and power, but continued work is needed, first, to further understand the science and secondly, to determine its value to energy economics.
• The first paper submitted to Nature reproducing excess heat, although it passed peer-review, was rejected because most similar experiments were negative and there were no theories that could explain a positive result;^[36] this paper was later accepted for publication by the journal Fusion Technology
• On April 30, 1989, cold fusion was declared dead by the New York Times. The Times called it a circus the same day, and the Boston Herald attacked cold fusion the following day
• On May 1, 1989, the American Physical Society held a session on cold fusion in Baltimore, including many reports of experiments that failed to produce evidence of cold fusion. At the end of the session, eight of the nine leading speakers stated that they considered the initial Fleischmann and Pons claim dead, with the ninth, Johann Rafelski, abstaining.^[6] Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of "the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann," which was met with a standing ovation.^[48] Douglas R. O. Morrison, a physicist representing CERN, was the first to call the episode an example of pathological science.
• in September 1990 the National Cold Fusion Institute listed 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries that had reported corroborating evidence of excess heat, but they refused to provide any evidence of their own arguing that it could endanger their patents
• Mostly in the 1990s several books were published that were critical of cold fusion research methods and the conduct of cold fusion researchers.^[68] Over the years several books have appeared that defended them.^[69]
• The decline of publications in cold fusion has been described as a "failed information epidemic".^{[text 6]} The sudden surge of supporters until roughly 50% of scientists support the theory, followed by a decline until there is only a very small number of supporters, has been described as a characteristic of pathological science.^{[text 7][notes 3]} The lack of a shared set of unifying concepts and techniques has prevented the creation of a dense network of collaboration in the field; researchers perform efforts in their own and in disparate directions, making the transition to "normal" science more difficult.
• In the 1990s, the groups that continued to research cold fusion and their supporters established periodicals such as Fusion Facts, Cold Fusion Magazine, Infinite Energy Magazine and New Energy Times to cover developments in cold fusion and other radical claims in energy production that were being ignored in other venues. In 2007 they established their own peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science.^[101] The internet has also become a major means of communication and self-publication for CF researchers, allowing for revival of the research
• Cold fusion researchers themselves acknowledge that the flaws in the original announcement still cause their field to be marginalized and to suffer a chronic lack of funding,^[109] and no possibility of getting published.^[118] University researchers are unwilling to investigate cold fusion because they would be ridiculed by their colleagues and their professional careers would be at risk
• Some research groups initially reported that they had replicated the Fleischmann and Pons results but later retracted their reports and offered an alternative explanation for their original positive results. A group at Georgia Tech found problems with their neutron detector, and Texas A&M discovered bad wiring in their thermometers.^[163] These retractions, combined with negative results from some famous laboratories,^[6] led most scientists to conclude, as early as 1989, that no positive result should be attributed to cold fusion.^[
• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) now rejects patents claiming cold fusion.^[121] Esther Kepplinger, the deputy commissioner of patents in 2004, said that this was done using the same argument as with perpetual motion machines: that they do not work.^[
• A patent only legally prevents others from using or benefiting from one's invention. However, the general public perceives a patent as a stamp of approval, and a holder of three cold fusion patents said the patents were very valuable and had helped in getting investments.^[180]

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• Fleischmann confided to Stanley Pons that he might have found what he believed to be a way to create nuclear fusion at room temperatures.^[8] From 1983 to 1989, he and Pons spent $100.000 in self-funded experiments at the University of Utah.^[6][8] Fleischmann wanted to publish it first in an obscure journal, and had already spoken with a team that was doing similar work in a different university for a joint publication.^[13][14] The details have not surfaced, but it would seem that the University of Utah wanted to establish priority over the discovery and its patents by making a public announcement before the publication.^[13][14] In an interview with 60 Minutes on 19 April 2009, Fleischmann said that the public announcement was the university's idea, and that he regretted doing it.^[15] This decision would later cause heavy criticism against Fleischmann and Pons, being perceived as a breach of how science is usually communicated to other scientists
• On 26 March Fleischmann warned on the Wall Street Journal Report not to try replications until a published paper was available two weeks later in Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, but that did not stop hundreds of scientists who had already started work at their laboratories the moment they heard the news on 23 March,^[19] and more often than not they failed to reproduce the effects.^[20] Those who failed to reproduce the claim attacked the pair for fraudulent,^[20][21] sloppy^[20][22][23] and unethical work,^[20] incomplete^[22] unreproducible^[24] and inaccurate^[24] results, and erroneous interpretations.^[25] When the paper was finally published, both electrochemists and physicists called it "sloppy" and "uninformative", and it was said that, had Fleischmann and Pons waited for the publication of their paper, most of the trouble would have been avoided because scientists would not have gone so far in trying to test their work
• Fleischmann and Pons sued an Italian journalist who had published very harsh criticisms against them, but the judge rejected it saying that criticisms were appropriate given the scientists' behaviour

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