Reproducibility is one of the biggest problems in cold fusion. In recent years, scientists have discovered (or admitted) it is a problem in other fields as well. Many finding in social sciences, psychology, biology and medicine have been found to be irreproducible. Here is an interesting article about that:
"How Reliable Are Cancer Studies?" "A project that tried to reproduce the results of 50 landmark papers turned into an arduous slog—and that’s a problem in itself." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/what- proportion-of-cancer-studies-are-reliable/513485/ QUOTES: In 2011, Bayer Healthcare said that its in-house scientists could only validate 25 percent of basic studies in cancer and other conditions. (Drug companies routinely do such checks so they can use the information in those studies as a starting point for developing new drugs.) A year later, Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis from Amgen said that the firm could only confirm the findings in 6 out of 53 landmark cancer papers—just 11 percent. Perhaps, they wrote, that might explain why “our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low.” . . . The hardest part, by far, was figuring out exactly what the original labs actually did. Scientific papers come with methods sections that theoretically ought to provide recipes for doing the same experiments. But often, those recipes are incomplete, missing out important steps, details, or ingredients. In some cases, the recipes aren’t described at all; researchers simply cite an earlier study that used a similar technique. “I’ve done it myself: you reference a previous paper and that one references a paper and that one references a paper, and now you’ve gone years and the methodology doesn’t exist,” admit Errington. “Most people looking at these papers wouldn’t even think of going through these steps. They’d just guess. If you asked 20 different labs to replicate a paper, you’d end up with 10 different methodologies that aren’t really comparable.” So, in every case, he had to ask the scientists behind the original experiments for the details of their work. Oftentimes, the person who actually did the experiments had left the lab, so an existing team member had to rummage through old notebooks or data files. The project ended up being hugely time-consuming for everyone concerned. “We spent a boatload of time trying to get back to ground zero,” says Errington. In the case of cold fusion, many of the scientists behind the original experiments are dead. So there is no asking them what they did. I fear there may be no way to replicate. - Jed
