(A blogger asked me what is the source of the dispute, and the academic politics. I like my answer, so let me copy it here. This is, perhaps, a softer, more understanding response than I might have made years ago.)
The academic politics are complicated and difficult to sum up in a way that treats both sides fairly. I recommend Beaudette's book, which you can get from Amazon.com, or you can read the whole thing at LENR-CANR.org. If I had to summarize it in a few paragraphs, I would say it is a generational divide. On one side you have the cold fusion scientists. Most of them are over 70. Most are, in fact, dead. Many were famous people who cut their teeth at Los Alamos during WWII: Schwinger, Teller *, and people like the head of the Atomic Energy Commission India, and the AEC commissioner of France who designed their fission plants, and Jalbert, the world's top expert in tritium. These people were there at the creation of the atomic age. One of them was the guy who actually armed and fired the first fission bomb. (He literally pressed the button.) They saw the emergence of modern theory. Many of them *wrote *modern theory. So they were all acutely aware that theory is incomplete and there is a great deal that science cannot explain. Most were trained by hands-on experimental techniques that nowadays seem almost laughably primitive. I have met with many of these people and watched them perform experiments. It is like traveling back 50 years in time to an analog world in which direct observations and first principles dominated. You measure heat release by measuring a macroscopic amount of water that boils away from a deep test tube, for example. On the other side, the people who oppose cold fusion are mostly under 50 or 60, and they were 30 or 40 when it began. They got their education in science in a world where all questions were answered. There were supposedly no surprises left. It was just a matter filling in another decimal place. They cannot imagine that theory might be incomplete or wrong. Their training has been theoretical and often based on computers and computer simulations, whereas some of the older scientists do not own or know how to use a computer. So they discount the methodology used by the older scientists as "primitive" (which it is). They insist that only a highly expensive and precise instrument can reveal the truth, whereas the older guys say that if you want to measure a 100 W source that continues for a half-hour, why not simply boil away some water? The younger generation insists that no result can be accepted until it is first explained by theory, whereas people such as Schwinger said that science works the other way around: first you discover a phenomenon; then you confirm it by replication; then in the last stage you explain it. Schwinger said: "never forget that physics is empirical." When I quoted that a younger scientist he said that's ludicrous; cooking is empirical, science is based on theory. There is a tremendous gap between the thought processes of these two groups, and little communication or meeting of the minds between them. I agree with the older group, since I am closer to them in age and I got a strict, old fashioned education in experimentally based science (in Japan). The absolute bedrock principle that I learned at a very early age and had re-enforced again and again is that when theory conflicts with experiment, the experiment always wins. Nature and experiments are the indisputable sources of truth and the only arbiters of truth. But unfortunately, younger scientists disagree, and the older ones who think like Schwinger and I are dying off. - Jed * I realize that Teller never bought cold fusion, but he never rejected it either. This is clear from his comments at the NSF/EPRI meeting, and this is also what Fleischmann and others who met with him told me. By the standards of 2009, he is all-but a "believer." The editors at Wikipedia would lock him out for saying the kinds of things he said at the meeting. I also realize there were some older people such as Huizenga dead set against cold fusion. The divide I speak of is not strictly one of age. It is more in the definition of science itself, which changed profoundly after the 1950s.
