I just read Charles Seife’s excellent book, “Sun in a bottle: The strange history of fusion and the science of wishful thinking.” One thing I found charming about the book was that it lumped crackpot cold fusion, nutty plans to use H-bombs to carve out artificial harbors in Alaska, and mainstream tokomaks into the same category: wildly-hyped but unsuccessful promises to change the world. The “wishful thinking” framing seems to fit all these stories pretty well, much better than the usual distinction between the good science of big-budget lasers and tokomaks and the bad science of cold fusion and the like. The physics explanations were good also.
The only part I really disagreed with. On page 220, Seife writes, “Science is little more than a method of tearing away notions that are not supported by cold, hard data.” I disagree. Just for a few examples from physics, how about Einstein’s papers on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect? And what about lots of biology, chemistry, and solid state physics, figuring out the structures of crystals and semiconductors and protein folding and all that? Sure, all of this work involves some “tearing away” of earlier models, but much of it—often the most important part—is constructive, building a model—a story—that makes sense and backing it up with data.
Prof. Gelman,
There was an interesting set of articles in the most recent issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science about the nature of psychological/cognitive research, which is a very different animal from some other, more mature sciences. The final article, by Paul Rozin, argues that too much current cognitive research is of the form you describe, of building models that understand very narrow sets of experimental data. Instead, says Rozin, the cognitive sciences should spend more effort on identifying interesting and important facts about human behavior, even if there's no real causal explanation available. The behavioral economics revolution started by Kanheman and Tversky in the 1970s is the type of thing he likes — extremely clever experiments that revealed a huge aspect of human behavior that previously had not been appreciated. Models can come later, when the field is more mature.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122501…
Your assertions about cold fusion are incorrect. The effect has been widely replicated. I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers on cold fusion copied from the libraries at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech, and 2500 other papers from conference proceedings and publications BARC, China Lake, Los Alamos and other national labs.
I recommend you review this literature before commenting on this subject. See:
http://lenr-canr.org
I agree. There's a popular prejudice that new information overturns the old. You hear all the time about how Newtonian physics was overthrown, when of course it wasn't. Paradigm shifts, whatever exactly that means, are more shifts in perception because we do perceive the universe differently in light of relativity and quantum mechanics, though our lives function mostly in Newtonian fashion.
It's funny but Jesus said that he didn't change the "Law" but a common perception is that such basics as confession & repentance were new in Christianity as though Esau & Jacob never existed (or that Jesus didn't know those stories). Or that "judge not lest ye be judged" was not first raised in the story of Joseph.
The point is not to knock Christianity but to note that "we" seem to need "new," as in "New & Improved!" We are generally not able to take Newton's view, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
I'm not seeing much disagreement between what you write and what Seife did.
Having interesting hypotheses is definitely vital for science to progress. But in my view, the scientific method isn't about that, and doesn't need to be. In any field of human endeavor, people have all sorts of great ideas. What makes science different is the ability to winnow out the low-grade ones, clearing the field for ever-better notions.
That's not to denigrate the good ideas, or the hard work that goes into constructing them. But that's not what makes science special.
On cold fusion: The Pons-Flieschman cold fusion is pretty well discredited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
However there are other kinds of cold fusion that can be made to happen, although it is not clear if any of them can be made to work commercially for power production (any more than high-temperature fusion such as in Tokamaks could):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusio…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Local…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Gener…
Bill Jefferys wrote:
"On cold fusion: The Pons-Flieschman cold fusion is pretty well discredited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion"
Instead of basing your statements on Wikipedia or some other anonymous internet source, I recommend you go to a university library and read actual, peer-reviewed papers written by named professional scientists. You will find that the facts they present are quite different from the views of the Wikipedia amateur authors.
Actually, the Wikipedia article does list a dozen or so positive peer-reviewed papers. There are hundreds more.
Traditionally, scientific questions were settled by experiment, and the peer-reviewed experimental paper was considered the gold standard of truth. Cold fusion has been replicated in ~17,000 positive experiments (estimated by Dr. J. He, Inst. High Energy Physics, Beijing). The results have often been at high s/n ratio, for example with tritium at millions of times background. So the scientific evidence for it is conclusive and it has been published in the leading journals of electrochemistry and nuclear physics. Nowadays trendy people tend to ignore journals, libraries and data, and they judge scientific issues by going to anonymous internet sources or magazines instead. The old fashioned method is stodgy but I think it is better.
Please, let's stick to the points about Andrew's post here and not get sidetracked by naked advocacy.
Please Jed, you have been banned from Wikipedia for nihilistic disruption regarding cold fusion. Please do not pollute Andrew's high quality column with your crusade.
JohnnyZoom wrote:
"Please, let's stick to the points about Andrew's post here and not get sidetracked by naked advocacy. . . . Please Jed, you have been banned from Wikipedia for nihilistic disruption . . ."
This is not about me. I have not performed experiments or published papers. So I suggest you dispense with ad hominem attacks and address the issue, which is Charles Seife's book. How should it be evaluated? I think you should compare his claims to mainstream, peer-reviewed journal papers written by experts, such as the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission. You will see that Seife's descriptions are technically inaccurate. Bill Jefferys suggests you ignore the peer-reviewed literature and compare Seife to Wikipedia instead.
I am not sure what you mean by "naked advocacy" and "nihilistic disruption" but I suppose it means that I advocate conventional, traditional, mainstream academic standards, and I think the library at Los Alamos is a better place to find scientific information than Wikipedia.