Do you remember cold fusion? Wasn’t it going to save the world? Whatever happened? Read this book for an interesting, thorough history of the pseudoscience and sociology of cold fusion. Worth reading just to understand how science can go wrong, and how it corrects itself. Plus you get to see how shockingly venal and self-interested people can be. And you get to see for yourself the complete lack of evidence for cold fusion. The “discovery” Pons and Fleischmann reported (and some scientists thought they had confirmed) was just an artifact of bad experimental technique, combined with abuse of statistics, lack of expertise in physics, and an abiding desire for more grant money.As a point of interest, check out the Amazon reviews for this book. Two of the five reviews (only five because it was published way back in the pre-historic era of 1993), give it the lowest level of one star, because the reviewers believe that cold fusion is going to save the world any day now and Gary Taubes is going to have to eat his words. These two reviews were written in 1999 and 2004, so I guess they’re still waiting. Tossing out the politically motivated reviews, it gets 4.7 stars.
Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion
1993
Gary Taubes
Out of print, but here is the listing at Amazon
2 comments:
I disagree. The Taubes book is a travesty. When he wrote it, hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on cold fusion had been published, but he did not reference a single one of them. The book is based entirely on misinformation and rumors. Not only that, but it is filled with incredible mistakes and grotesque scientific illiteracy. See my review on pages 4 and 5 of this document:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf
Quoting myself:
"[Taubes] claims people sometimes measure electrolysis amperage alone and not voltage, and he thinks that regulated power supplies put out more electricity over the weekend because factories use less power. He thinks some researchers measure tritium once, after the experiment, without establishing a baseline or taking periodic samples. His book is filled with hundreds of similar errors. Perhaps the most mind-boggling one was his statement that a cell might have huge temperature gradients, 'say fifty degrees hotter on one side than the other.' This is like asserting that you might stir a cup of coffee, drink from the right side and find it tepid, but when you turn the cup around and drink from the left side, it will be steaming hot."
People interested in genuine, peer-reviewed scientific information on cold fusion should visit our web site, which features fulltext copies of more than 500 papers:
http://lenr-canr.org
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
By the way, the quote about "50 degrees" is on page 271. But you can find similar appalling mistakes on just about every page of the book. Or, if you cannot, you do not know much about physics. Neither does Taubes, obviously.
People who would like to read books about the actual science of cold fusion should see Mallove, Beaudette or Storms. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/Introduction.html#Books
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