Wednesday, December 06, 2006
 From Founding Editor Dr. Eugene Mallove in Inifinite Energy January-February, 2001: "Ethics in the Cold Fusion Controversy
[Dr. Scott R. Chubb, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory] outlines what might be called an idealized basis for science: "1) scientists seek the truth; 2) because they recognize that trial and error is part of the scientific process, when scientists find flaws in what they have done, they freely admit their mistakes, attempt to correct them, and try a new approach. Thus, in an idealized situation, scientists are accountable only to themselves, and their community. If they are truthful in these endeavors, their accountability, as scientists, has been fulfilled." Clearly, this has not happened in the cold fusion controversy.
[...]
Dr. Martin Fleischmann in his essay [ "Reflections on the Sociology of Science and Social Responsibility in Science, in Relationship to Cold Fusion"] touches on social and media questions, though not heavily. And, he addresses the role that military security issues may have played in the controversy. At one point he makes a very pertinent remark: "One outcome of this research has been the demonstration that scientists have developed a blindness for accepting unusual results. No doubt this is due in part to an excessive faith in invalid paradigms." Dr. John Bockris makes an equally compelling comment: "A comfortable illusion of the 20th Century—held not by scientists themselves, but by the tax payers—is that scientists are, somehow, above the fray and highly honest. What a lot of nonsense this is!"
Dr. Steven Jones in his skeletal three-page commentary ["CHASING ANOMALOUS SIGNALS: THE COLD FUSION QUESTION"] confirms that he still trusts his sparse cold fusion neutron measurements—fair enough. But Jones, the egocentric denier of excess heat claims from day one, apparently has learned nothing and still knows nothing about the process of science. He is an example of the kind of scientist identified in the Bockris quote above. Jones writes disingenuously, "It is high time to strongly question claims of cold fusion based on crude techniques and to demand tests at a rigorous scientific-proof level. . .I have not seen any compelling evidence of any 'cold fusion' effects to date."
The main virtue of this special issue of [Accountability in Research (Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2, 2000), "The Ethical Import of the Cold Fusion Controversy")] is that discussion of cold fusion has been brought to a larger and different academic audience.... This is not to say that this issue of Accountability has no shortcomings. It does. These are mainly failures of omission or insufficient emphasis...:
- No mention of Nature and Science magazines' particular roles as negativist actors in the cold fusion drama; no discussion by any commentator of the well-known refusal by Nature to publish scientific correspondence which questioned the Caltech "null" calorimetry experiments.
- No discussion of the documented pre-existing biases of those selected for the 1989 DOE Cold Fusion panel, nor any discussion of the ethical failures of some of these individuals to correct an all too evident past mistake.
- Virtually no discussion of the ethics and legality of various government agencies that hid-and continue to hide— positive excess heat results (e.g., MIT Lincoln Laboratory in its secretly funded replication of the Randell Mills electrolysis experiment); no discussion of laboratory directors, e.g. at Los Alamos National Laboratory, ignoring internally peer-reviewed positive results in cold fusion experiments.
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----- It took fifteen years, but by 2004, Dr. Mallove was finally positioned to score a significant political victory over the fraudulent "scientists" who had repressed the promise of near-free energy heralded by unclassified cold-fusion research. But it was not to be.
From
The Boston Globe's Mark Baard, May 16, 2004: "Eugene Mallove, editor of Infinite Energy magazine and the leading advocate of cold fusion research, was murdered Friday.
Dr. Mallove, born in 1947, was a science publicist for MIT in 1989, when chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann at the University of Utah reported experiments producing excess heat through what they believed to be a new nuclear process. Cold fusion refers to a tabletop reaction in which two atomic nuclei are forced together without the extreme pressures and temperatures of the interior of a star, where this phenomenon usually occurs.
Such a discovery would be revolutionary because energy released by the reaction could replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission reactors in the world economy. But mainstream scientists argued that the results weren't reproducable, and that Pons and Fleischmann had undermined the seriousness of their claim by announcing their results prematurely to the media.
Mallove, however, became convinced that proponents of larger "hot fusion" experiments were covering up results that confirmed the existence of cold fusion. Mallove clashed with researchers and administrators at MIT over the issue and soon left the university. He helped pull together a community of like-minded scientists and engineers, including science fiction writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke, to maintain momentum in examining the possibility of low energy nuclear reactions. The US Department of Energy recently announced it would re-examine the cold fusion question in light of data produced over the past 15 years by researchers who believe in the phenomenon.
[...]
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More backgorund:
- New York Times claims fusion debunked
- Eugene Mallove's final message to the world
- Murder of Eugene Mallove
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