Cold fusion and reproducibility

Bernard Feldman is to be commended for his thoughtful review of David Goodstein’s new book. However, Feldman has seriously misrepresented the scientific facts about the contentious topic of cold fusion. In particular, he suggests that Goodstein’s “sympathetic view toward scientists working in cold fusion” is misguided because cold fusion is “a prime example of a field characterized by unverified results.” Although the vast majority of the early attempts to reproduce the associated effects failed, not only were the effects reproduced, but with time, the reasons for the difficulties that were encountered have become well understood.

An important source of confusion is that Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons did not discover a colder version of conventional fusion. They discovered something else: a new form of aneutronic nuclear fusion, involving a two-deuteron reaction in which helium-4 is created without the emission of high-energy particles or gamma rays. ^1–3 It is not altogether surprising that Feldman is unaware of that. Effectively, mainstream scientific journals have maintained an embargo against cold-fusion papers that report positive findings. That failure has, in fact, become a topic in the mainstream ethics-in-science literature. ⁴ Twenty-one years after cold fusion was first announced, a more “normal” dialog about the subject ⁵ is badly needed.