Is
Cold Fusion an Example of Science or Pseudoscience?
Can CF Pass Michael Shermer’s
“Baloney Detection” Test?
Michael Shermer [1]
Note to
webpage visitors: This webpage is still in development. More facts, figures and
citations are needed. This need is recognized and will be addressed as time
permits.
Cold fusion (CF) may, or may not, be real. Because
of the way that events played out in the months after CF was announced in 1989,
many antagonists have asserted that CR research is pseudoscience rather than
science. The sociology of science, especially the methods employed to establish
boundaries between science and non-science, have been
well studied and documented [2].
Michael Shermer,
one of the leading spokespersons for skepticism toward questionable or
controversial claims of new discoveries [3], has published ten criteria
(actually, questions to be answered) for drawing the boundary between what is
science and what is not. As a means of assessing the status of CF investigation
as legitimate science, Shermer’s questions (with
annotations) are shown on this webpage along with proposed responses to each
question for the case of CF. Conclusions about the status of CF study as
science based on Shermer’s criteria are then also
proposed.
Baloney Detection: How to Draw Boundaries between
Science and Pseudoscience, Part I
By Michael Shermer [4]
When
lecturing on science and pseudoscience at colleges and universities, I am
inevitably asked, after challenging common beliefs held by many students,
"Why should we believe you?" My answer: "You shouldn't."
I
then explain that we need to check things out for ourselves and, short of that,
at least to ask basic questions that get to the heart of the validity of any
claim. This is what I call baloney detection, in deference to Carl Sagan, who
coined the phrase "Baloney Detection Kit." To detect baloney -- that
is, to help discriminate between science and pseudoscience -- I suggest 10
questions to ask when encountering any claim.
1. How reliable is the
source of the claim?
Pseudoscientists often appear quite reliable, but when
examined closely, the facts and figures they cite are distorted, taken out of
context or occasionally even fabricated. Of course, everyone makes some
mistakes. And as historian of science Daniel Kevles
showed so effectively in his book The
Proposed CF Response:
The claims of the reality of
CF reactions are not one, or just a few, but many. Beaudette
[5] summarizes no fewer than four confirmatory experiments of excess heat from
CF in the first year after the 1989 announcement. Storms [6] has tabulated some
184 reports of excess heat from 1989 to 2004, and 88 reports of radiation from
CF reactions during the same period. Although much of the research has been
conducted under marginalized conditions, the credentials of most of the
researchers are well established.
The reliability of the
investigators who report affirmative CF research results, especially considered
in aggregate, can scarcely be questioned. Reliability of the source of CF
claims – the research, and the reputations of the researchers – is not a
negative factor for CF but is instead a strong affirmation of its legitimacy.
2. Does this source often
make similar claims?
Pseudoscientists have a habit of going well beyond the
facts. Flood geologists (creationists who believe that Noah's flood can account
for many of the earth's geologic formations) consistently make outrageous
claims that bear no relation to geological science. Of course, some great
thinkers do frequently go beyond the data in their creative speculations.
Thomas Gold of Cornell University is notorious for his radical ideas, but he
has been right often enough that other scientists listen to what he has to say.
Gold proposes, for example, that oil is not a fossil fuel at all but the
by-product of a deep, hot biosphere (microorganisms living at unexpected depths
within the crust). Hardly any earth scientists with whom I have spoken think
Gold is right, yet they do not consider him a crank. Watch out for a pattern of
fringe thinking that consistently ignores or distorts data.
Proposed CF Response:
Researchers who claim
positive results of CF investigation are not generally disposed to asserting
questionable phenomena – individually or certainly in aggregate. While it is
true that some CF researchers also work on other unproven phenomena (e.g., zero
point energy), the majority are either actively conducting research projects in
more accepted scientific fields or are retired from creditable or distinguished
scientific careers. The vigorous CF research community of over 200 participants
is well disciplined and self-correcting as a group, particularly on an e-group
and through regularly held conferences. As a result, these investigators are
careful not to go “beyond the facts” or “engage in fringe thinking that ignores
or distorts data.”
Because of the history of CF,
and concerns for their reputations, these researchers are often, in fact, more
conservative than other “mainstream” scientists in making claims. Twenty years
after CF was rejected, care to avoid making spurious claims is a positive
rather than a negative factor for CF legitimacy as science rather than
pseudoscience.
3. Have the claims been
verified by another source?
Typically pseudoscientists
make statements that are unverified or verified only by a source within their
own belief circle. We must ask, Who is checking the claims, and even who is
checking the checkers? The biggest problem with the cold fusion debacle, for
instance, was not that
Proposed CF Response:
Demonstration of verification
and reproducibility are fundamental to the proper conduct of science. Shermer’s outmoded characterization of CF specifically as
wrong or not verified is not particularly useful for addressing this question.
As noted in the response to Question 1, CF was independently verified (as
excess heat) in at least four experiments during the first year after
announcement. And it has been verified, again as excess heat, in some 184
reports from 1989 to 2004. Verification has also been demonstrated for 88 cases
for radiation in reports from the same period. Additional verifications have
also been achieved in the form of nuclear products, such as helium and
elemental transmutation.
It is certainly true that
attaining experimental conditions for CF reactions to occur is more difficult than
was thought at the time of announcement. One of the main compromises of the
scientific method when CF was rejected and marginalized was the assertion that
failure to achieve experimental results was demonstration that CF does not
exist [7]. Mistakes made by Pons and Fleischmann (and administrators at the
Multiple verifications in
different forms by numerous investigators working in labs all over the world
are one of the strongest points for legitimizing CF as science rather than
pseudoscience.
4. How does the claim fit
with what we know about how the world works?
An extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger
context to see how it fits. When people claim that the Egyptian pyramids and
the Sphinx were built more than 10,000 years ago by an unknown, advanced race,
they are not presenting any context for that earlier civilization. Where are
the rest of the artifacts of those people? Where are their works of art, their
weapons, their clothing, their tools, their trash? Archaeology simply does not
operate this way.
Proposed CF Response:
Nuclear fusion at high
temperatures, such as in a hydrogen bomb or the interior of the sun, is quite
well understood – but difficult to achieve on a sustained basis for beneficial
use. Current nuclear theory does not explain the observations of CF reactions,
which is one of the main reasons that CF was rejected. But if the experimental
observations of CF are real, and the theory does not explain them, then the
theory will have to be modified or expanded. Such modification has not yet been
achieved, although several competing explanations of CF have been advanced.
The failure of theory to
explain does not justify rejection of the observations or the phenomena; this
would amount to compromise of the scientific method. Discovery of new
observations often leads to necessary revision of theory – one of the fundamental means of scientific
progress. Thus the CF claims, while not yet adequately explained in terms of
“what we know about how the world works”, are certainly not negated. They may,
in fact, eventually lead to improved nuclear theory when or if the claims are
fully substantiated and understood.
5. Has anyone gone out of
the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?
This is the confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek
confirmatory evidence and to reject or ignore disconfirmatory
evidence. The confirmation bias is powerful, pervasive and almost impossible
for any of us to avoid. It is why the methods of science that emphasize
checking and rechecking, verification and replication, and especially attempts
to falsify a claim, are so critical.
Proposed CF Response:
The community of CF
investigators is vibrant and communicative, particularly making use of new
tools for exchanging ideas and observation, including a CMNS e-group. The community
is highly self critical internally, sometimes to the point of acting like a
fractious family. The community also has a number of “friendly antagonistic”
members who would like to see CF proven but who aren’t convinced that it is
real. They are dedicated to finding flaws in what is proposed by other members
of the community.
Many competing ideas and
interpretations of experimental results are given a thorough “airing” online
before becoming widely accepted. Sensitivity concerning the standing of CF in
mainstream science and personal “stake” in involvement with CF research make
many investigators especially careful to vet experimental findings and
interpretations before announcement or publication. The self-correcting culture
and researcher sensitivity in the current CF situation ensure that both
supportive and antagonistic evidence is considered.
Next
month in Part II I will expand the baloney detection process with five more
questions that reveal how science works to detect its own baloney.
Baloney Detection
How to Draw Boundaries between Science and
Pseudoscience, Part II
By Michael Shermer [8]
When
exploring the borderlands of science, we often face a "boundary
problem" of where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. The
boundary is the line of demarcation between geographies of knowledge, the
border defining countries of claims. Knowledge sets are fuzzier entities than
countries, however, and their edges are blurry. It is not always clear where to
draw the line. Last month I suggested five questions to ask about a claim to
determine whether it is legitimate or baloney. Continuing with the
baloney-detection questions, we see that in the process we are also helping to
solve the boundary problem of where to place a claim.
6. Does the preponderance
of evidence point to the claimant's conclusion or to a different one?
The theory of evolution, for example, is proved
through a convergence of evidence from a number of independent lines of
inquiry. No one fossil, no one piece of biological or paleontological evidence
has "evolution" written on it; instead tens of thousands of
evidentiary bits add up to a story of the evolution of life. Creationists
conveniently ignore this confluence, focusing instead on trivial anomalies or
currently unexplained phenomena in the history of life.
Proposed CF Response:
The experimental evidence for
the existence of CF reactions includes excess heat, nuclear radiation, and
other nuclear products, including helium and transmuted elements. All three
types of evidence have been found in many different experiments and are
mutually supportive in a number of cases. Successful experiments have been
performed by many researchers working in a large variety of laboratory settings
around the world, including the
7. Is the claimant
employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these
been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
A clear distinction can be made between SETI (Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists and UFOlogists.
SETI scientists begin with the null hypothesis that ETIs
do not exist and that they must provide concrete evidence before making the
extraordinary claim that we are not alone in the universe. UFOlogists
begin with the positive hypothesis that ETIs exist
and have visited us, then employ questionable research techniques to support
that belief, such as hypnotic regression (revelations of abduction
experiences), anecdotal reasoning (countless stories of UFO sightings),
conspiratorial thinking (governmental cover-ups of alien encounters),
low-quality visual evidence (blurry photographs and grainy videos), and
anomalistic thinking (atmospheric anomalies and visual misperceptions by
eyewitnesses).
Proposed CF Response:
In the years since CF was
rejected, the quality of experiments, including conformance to accepted
scientific protocols, has increased. Some of the experimental work in the early
weeks and months was not as rigorous, perhaps because of false expectations
that positive results would be easy to obtain. Many of the early attempts were
unsuccessful, apparently, because insufficient time was allowed to achieve a
satisfactory “loading” of palladium with deuterium atoms in electrochemical
cells of the type used by Pons and Fleischmann. Another major problem lay with
proper use of calorimeters, which are relatively easy to understand in concept
but are much more challenging to achieve success in experimental practice. The
current rigor of experimental practice is accompanied by improvements in
development of theory, where it is recognized that both hot fusion and CF need
to be encompassed in any satisfactory explanation of CF phenomena. CF
researchers continue to employ “accepted rules of reason and tools of research”
both in experimentation and theorizing.
8. Is the claimant
providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the
existing explanation?
This is a classic debate strategy--criticize your
opponent and never affirm what you believe to avoid criticism. It is next to
impossible to get creationists to offer an explanation for life (other than
"God did it"). Intelligent Design (ID) creationists have done no
better, picking away at weaknesses in scientific explanations for difficult
problems and offering in their stead "ID did it." This stratagem is
unacceptable in science.
Proposed CF Response:
CF researchers are actively
engaged in conducting experiments and developing explanations (theories) for
observed phenomena. Experiments are designed and conducted, and theories are
proposed, within the framework of what is already known in nuclear physics. The
challenge has been to develop or discover satisfactory explanations within the
known framework, and this challenge is readily recognized by both theorists and
experimentalists. There is no indication of any effort by CF researchers to
deny existing explanations for nuclear fusion.
9. If the claimant proffers
a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation
did?
Many HIV/AIDS skeptics argue that lifestyle causes
AIDS. Yet their alternative theory does not explain nearly as much of the data
as the HIV theory does. To make their argument, they must ignore the diverse
evidence in support of HIV as the causal vector in AIDS while ignoring the
significant correlation between the rise in AIDS among hemophiliacs shortly
after HIV was inadvertently introduced into the blood supply.
Proposed CF Response:
The case of CF seems to be
one of observation of new phenomena, and seeking to explain the observations
within the framework of established nuclear fusion theory rather than one of
proffering a new explanation. As noted in the responses to previous questions,
any new explanation, or amplification of existing theory, will have to explain
both hot fusion and CF observations. This fact about future explanations is
well recognized by CF theorists. The theoretical underpinnings of a newly
discovered phenomenon often lag behind the experimental observations by months,
years, or even decades, as was the case for radium samples being above ambient
temperature without explanation.
10. Do the claimant's
personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
All scientists hold social, political and ideological
beliefs that could potentially slant their interpretations of the data, but how
do those biases and beliefs affect their research in practice? Usually during
the peer-review system, such biases and beliefs are rooted out, or the paper or
book is rejected.
Proposed CF Response:
Given the large and diverse
population of active CF researchers and the varied beliefs and biases of that
population, it is virtually impossible that CF conclusions are driven by
personal beliefs and biases. The often fractious exchanges among the
researchers on the CMNS e-group demonstrate a great diversity of opinions and
biases. The likelihood that a consensus of personal beliefs and biases would
drive conclusions is nil.
Clearly, there are no
foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the boundary between science
and pseudoscience. Yet there is a solution: science deals in fuzzy fractions of
certainties and uncertainties, where evolution and big bang cosmology may be
assigned a 0.9 probability of being true, and creationism and UFOs a 0.1
probability of being true. In between are borderland claims: we might assign
superstring theory a 0.7 and cryonics a 0.2. In all cases, we remain
open-minded and flexible, willing to reconsider our assessments as new evidence
arises. This is, undeniably, what makes science so fleeting and frustrating to
many people; it is, at the same time, what makes science the most glorious
product of the human mind.
Observations from the CF Perspective:
The points made in Shermer’s concluding paragraph above coincide almost
exactly with the main thesis of this website on CF public policy. CF clearly
lies in the area of “borderline claims” – it may, or may not, be real. What’s
important, however, is the answer to the question: What should be done
regarding CF?
There is no doubt that
mainstream science and current public policy now categorize CF with UFOs or, at
best, cryogenics – with low probability
of being real (0.1 to 0.2). This view is outmoded – it was arrived at
inappropriately in the beginning, after the 1989 announcement, and it persists
despite a convincing, and growing, body of experimental evidence in the years
since.
It is asserted on this
website that a more appropriate assignment of probability for the reality of is
at least 0.5, and a strong case can be made to assign the level at 0.7. The
corresponding policy response, in a rational policy making framework, is to
reinstate CF as a fully accepted area of research and development at a minimum.
And it would also be reasonable to provide this support on a par with past
support of hot fusion research.
Conclusion:
CF clearly passes Shermers’ Baloney Detection test:
It is science, not pseudoscience.
To summarize the
responses to Shermer’s 10 questions…
The many sources of
the claims for CF existence are reliable, and are not generally disposed toward
making controversial claims. The CF claims were verified by early experiments
(although there were also many failures) and have been reaffirmed many times in
the years since by investigators working in diverse lab settings all over the
world. Although adequate nuclear theories (or refinements of existing theories)
are still wanting for CF phenomena, there is no rational basis for rejecting
the experimental evidence of its existence. The sometimes fractious and unruly
community of CF investigators imposes a highly effective process of self
correction before ideas or experimental results are accepted. There is at least
a preponderance of evidence (probability >0.5) for CF existence, and an
excellent case can be made for a probability higher than 0.7 (clear and
convincing evidence). Research in the CF community generally follows (or
exceeds, in many cases) accepted standards of scientific protocols in both
experiments and theory development. Theories to explain observed CF phenomena
are still very much a “work in progress”; their development is proceeding in
consonance with established nuclear theory. The self-correcting character of
the CF research community ensures that personal beliefs and biases have
minimal, if any, effect on conclusions reached on theories or experimental
results.
Given the strong
public interest in the success of CF, there is sufficient evidence for its
existence to mandate a more favorable public policy and much higher level of
support for its development.
Footnotes (updates needed):
[1] Source: http://www.allianceforscience.org/NCAS_Shermer_12DEC2008
[2] For the case of CF, the following reference is particularly helpful:
Simon, Bart. Undead
Science: Science Studies and the Afterlife of Cold Fusion.
[3] Shermer is a regular contributor to the
magazine Scientific American. His
website is at the following address: www.skeptic.com
[4] Shermer, Michael, 2001, Baloney
Detection - How to Draw Boundaries between Science and Pseudoscience, Part I: Scientific American, v 285, Issue 5
(November 2001). http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000D743A-CC5C-1C6E-84A9809EC588EF21
[5] Beaudette, Charles G. Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research
Prevailed. 2nd ed.
[6] Storms, Edmund. Science of
Low Energy Nuclear Reaction: A Comprehensive Compilation of Evidence and
Explanations about Cold Fusion.
[7] Altman, Douglas and J Martin Bland, 1995, Absence of Evidence is Not Evidence of Absence: BMJ (formerly British
Medical Journal), v. 311, p. 485 (19 August 1995).
[8] Shermer, Michael, 2001, Baloney Detection
- How to Draw Boundaries between Science and Pseudoscience, Part II: Scientific
American, v 285, Issue 6 (December 2001). http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000ADC77-B274-1C6E-84A9809EC588EF21
Last Update: July 2008