Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

468 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
now notorious breakthrough in 'cold fusion' only two months ago astonished
scientists worldwide, promising a source of limitless energy from a
simple reaction in a test tube. Mounting evidence suggests the whole
notion is a damp squib." Connor went on to ask "how two respected
chemists could apparently make such a blunder" He provides an answer
with the suggestion that Fleischmann and Pons were the victims of
"pathological science"—cases where otherwise honest scientists fool
themselves with false results.
It is, of course, always fun to read about a good scandal, especially
when the detractors who are so free with scorn get their come-uppance so
poetically. But the aspect of the cold fusion affair that interests me most
is why—exactly why—some scientists felt an overwhelming need to suppress
it, even to the extent of behaving in an unscientific way and fudging
their results. Money is the most obvious answer, but somehow unsatisfying;
they may well have wanted the big research funds to continue to roll
in year after year, but that cannot be the whole story. By enthusiastically
embracing this possible new field, any of the world's fusion research
organizations could have increased their research funds, rather than lost
anything.
Injured pride is also plausible—men and women are often driven to
extremes of behavior by such feelings, even including murder and suicide.
But it is hard to see exactly how and why the feelings of hot fusionists
should be so hurt by a simple scientific discovery.
Some interesting clues to this extraordinary behavior come from examining
the reasons that several of the institutions themselves gave publicly
for wanting to suppress such research during the development of the affair.
The first sounds perhaps the most reasonable. John Maple, a spokesman
for the Joint European Torus project at Culham, Oxfordshire, the
world's biggest fusion research centre, told the Daily Telegraph that a discredited
cold fusion might produce a backlash that would damage the
funding prospects of hot fusion.
People in the street often don't know the difference. They confuse cold
fusion, which we think will never produce any useful energy, with the
experimental work we are doing at Culham, involving temperatures of
hundreds of millions of degrees, which is making spectacular progress.
These sound [like] very understandable fears, but look a little closer at
the logic underlying them. The people in the street (that's you and me)
"can't tell the difference." The difference between what The difference
between hot fusion (which is real) and cold fusion (which John Maple and
his colleagues say is not real). But surely, the issue is not whether we, the
public, can tell the difference between a nuclear process that is real and