An alert reader sent me this.
This author seems beyond the pale. I am not even going to bother
contacting him.
- Jed
In a new book a recognized "skeptic" compares cold fusion researchers
to global warming deniers and creationists:
Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk
By Massimo Pigliucci
University Of Chicago Press (May 15, 2010)
Paper, 336 pp
But "in stock" at Amazon.com. There's a simultaneously-published
hardcover edition too.
Excepts mentioning "cold fusion" via the Amazon.com "Search inside
this book" feature:
pp. 270-271
For example, consider the idea of "cold fusion." This is an alleged
chemical phenomenon that would allow us to produce large amounts of
cheap energy by fusing atoms at room temperature without having to
use the highly complex (and energy demanding, not to mention
dangerous) steps of either splitting atoms or fusing them at very
high temperatures (the respective bases of the atomic and hydrogen
bombs). If it sounds too good to be true, that's because it is, in
fact, not true. Cold fusion was briefly in the limelight of science
because of a paper published by Martin Fleischmann, a chemist,
together with his former student Stanley Pons. Since this was an
extraordinary claim, it immediately attracted attention, and several
laboratories tried to repeat Fleischmann and Pons's results --
without success. It quickly became clear that cold fusion was an
illusion, and the entire field has promptly disappeared from
science. It has, however, remained alive in the form of a subculture
of devotees, people who remain stubbornly convinced of its
possibilities and who have decided to take themselves out of the
intellectual arena of established physics. The cult of cold fusion
is an example of what happens when even respectable scientists with
legitimate Ph.D.s are allowed to dwell only on confirmatory evidence,
gingerly dismissing or rationalizing way whatever doesn't fit with
their a priori conclusions. The same phenomenon is what explains why
it is possible to find occasional scientists who deny global warming
or reject evolution. The smaller the group of people involved, and
the more they share assumptions and ideologies, the more likely
science is to enter into a dead end, and the sad thing is that the
people involved seem to have no sense of the amount of time and
resources they are wasting in fatuous pursuit of chimaeras.
p. 304
We have even seen that initially sound scientific inquiries, like the
one on the possibility of cold fusion, may slip into the dark
territory of pseudoscience when people refuse to bow to the
testability criterion.
Prof. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City University of
New York. He has a blog at
<http://rationallyspeaking.org/>http://rationallyspeaking.org/
