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Ch. 3: The Sun in a Test Tube: The Story of Cold Fusion
Take away 3 things
- Scientific credit is competitive. Under the guise of objectivity, it shouldn’t matter who discovers what—observation should be neutral. However, status in one’s field is powerful.
- Chemists tend to favor how the field of chemistry (therefore, other chemists) establishes knowledge, and physicists tend to favor how the field of physics establishes knowledge.
- The reasons behind not replicating another scientist’s experiments could depend on perspective: If one doesn’t replicate the experiment, they could believe the original results are wrong; on the other hand, those originally doing the experiment could believe those replicating their experiment failed to follow their guidelines.
- Why else might a chemist not follow a physicist’s model of experiment?
Interesting thought: What is energy? What energy do you use daily, and where does that energy come from? Just contemplate this for a moment or two.
Besides knowing what happened (or didn’t) related to cold fusion, it’s also important to consider why scientists even put forth the effort to conduct experiments to find new sources of energy. This might seem obvious, but it’s an often overlooked assumption: Science doesn’t spring from scientists doing experiments in isolation. There is usually a social demand driving research. That “demand” could be hegemonic and favor powerful groups’ agendas, but it still conforms to ideology. Nuclear fusion (cold or hot) is fusing hydrogen atoms into helium, which releases tons of energy. Why would having cold fusion technology—an energy source that, in theory, gives off more energy than it uses—be of value to our world? What commodities seem to literally “drive” the engines of the world?
Key Quotations for Discussion
- p. 59: Exciting the public, “It was ‘science by press conference’ as scientists queued up to announce their latest findings to the media.”
- Jones’s motivation and, perhaps, belief that cold fusion was theoretically possible stemmed from his work with the “Los Alamos particle accelerator. [He and his team] found far more evidence of such fusions than theory would have led them to expect.”
- Unfortunately, that’s not the same as finding a new, commercially viable energy source.
- p. 63-64: The two Utah teams were in competition to discover a viable cold fusion process. “In view of the obvious commercial payoff…it meant that a certain amount of rivalry and suspicion arose between the two groups.”
- p. 65: Guilt by association—Jones wasn’t claiming to have discovered a revolutionary new source of energy. However, he was grouped with Pons and Fleischmann and “has been inevitably subject to the same suspicions.”
- p. 66: “Though fusion researchers, well-used to spectacular claims, and with their own billion-dollar research programs to protect, were incredulous, other scientists were more willing to take their work seriously.
- We’ll come back to this below when we talk about funding.
- p. 69: Pons and Fleischmann believed failure to replicate their experiments was due to the fact that “many cells were being set up with incorrect parameters and dimensions.”
The Politics of Science
Let’s consider the communication and vetting process of the cold fusion “discovery.” Think about the many actors–not in the spotlight–who weighed in on the validity of Pons and Fleischmann’s findings. I’m putting this under “politics” because that’s the best word for saying “the social rules governing the system and providing resources and/or credit.”
Think about the phrase “office politics.” What does that mean? Well, in any office, there are employee expectations, procedures, and authority concerns. Dress codes, working late expectations, communication preferences, etc. have written and unwritten rules. More importantly, whose voice(s) is respected and even who should or shouldn’t speak are aspects of political power (or lack thereof) in an office. Another way to think of “politics” is how and why and by whom are resources divided.
If you’re interested on reading the differences between two different workplaces, check out these different offices and consider the office politics based on the job ads.
Otherwise…back to the reading!
- Historical discussion
- Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters wanted to produce more helium in the 1920s for “German industry because the USA…refused to sell helium to Germany after [WWI].”
- International politics plays a role in science and technoogy.
- p. 60: Authorities in the field: “An MIT group claimed…”; “a prestigious California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) group reported…”; “and finally a Cal Tech theorist pronounced that cold fusion was extremely improbable theoretically…”
- What do all three statements have in common? All three are scientific authorities in the field who claim Pons and Fleischmann’s results are suspect or delusional.
- Such statements carry weight in the scientific community and, most likely, for journalists and the public.
- Without knowing the scientific details, those authorities are able to persuade the public that Pons and Fleischmann didn’t find what they claimed to find–cold fusion.
- p. 66: “the levels of neutrons produced should have been more than enough to kill Pons and Fleischmann and anyone else” nearby.
- p. 72: “Steve Koonin and Mike Nauenberg…discovered errors which increased the rate of deuterium;” however, “fusion in palladium in the amount needed to produce excess heat is extremely unlikely.”
- p. 73: because the experiments weren’t decisive or the results weren’t accepted, the “standard theory” dominated “and none of the alternative theories gained widespread acceptance.”
- p. 74: Pons and Fleischmann’s claims “tread upon the toes of the nuclear physicists and fusion physicists who had already laid claim to the area.”
- p. 69: Pons and Fleischmann believed failure to replicate their experiments was due to the fact that “many cells were being set up with incorrect parameters and dimensions.”
- p. 66: One’s discipline guided whether or not one believed the experiments. “Pons and Fleischmann have fared better with their colleagues in chemistry where, after all, they were acknowledged experts.”
Cold Fusion might have been discredited, but the finding of excess heat measurements seems to have been lost as valuable knowledge. Pons & Fleischmann published a paper on calorimetry (heat measurements) and not on nuclear measurements (p. 77). Unfortunately, physicists were excited initially by the claims, and they were interested in the nuclear reactions (not) taking place. According to Collins & Pinch, that “left the excess heat measurements as mere anomalies” (p. 77), so physicists weren’t as interested in those findings. Early framing of the scientific discussion, as with any discussion, guides future discussions. It’s very difficult to change the meaning of experiments when a rhetorical approach dominates.
Funding Motivation
I’m asking you to think critically about scientists motivated by funding. There’s a view that scientists are trumping up claims about climate change in order to get funding. While we might be able to find instances where that was a motivation for scientists studying a variety of sciences, if a large portion of scientists (more than 5% I’ll say with no statistical accuracy) did such a thing, there would be very little “real” science. Think of the medical procedures that would fail; the microwaves that would blow up; the airplanes that would fall from the sky. Dismissing scientific research because you want to believe the scientists are out for money is irresponsible and intellectually dull. Fake science doesn’t last very long as the above Cold Fusion case study shows.
Collins & Pinch mention something about possible funding worries of physicists. Don’t assume legitimate worries are nefarious motives for scientists who want to get all the grants and exclude others from the funding sources. Collins & Pinch state that the fusion physicists rejection was not “merely a matter of wanting to maintain billion-dollar investments (although with the Department of Energy threatening to transfer hot fusion funding to cold fusion research, there was a direct threat to their interests)” (p. 74). Sure, transferring funding from hot to cold fusion would have affected the research labs of many physicists. The “self-interests” of scientists are motivated by their research goals, and, as experts, they’re probably the best ones to explain the value of their work. Rethink the situation as they’re motivated for scientific discovery, which requires money to conduct. They’re not just pocketing it and going to Vegas (even if that might have happened once or twice).
Where are they today?
Ch. 4: The Germs of Dissent: Louis Pasteur and the Origins of Life
Take away 3 things from Pasteur-Pouchet Debate
- Scientific Authority stacked in favor of Pasteur
- The Académie des Sciences, the official French body adjudicating scientific disputes, had two commissions made up of pro-Pasteur/anti-Spontaneous Generation members.
- Consider this a government peer-review process.
- Erroneously, they also wanted to dismiss Félix-Archimède Pouchet and the idea of Spontaneous Generation because they felt it would strike the final blow to Darwinism.
- Of course, this is a misreading of Darwin and Evolution, a science in its infancy in 1864.
- Spontaneous generation doesn’t have to be the key to evolution, and it certainly didn’t debunk Darwin’s theory of decent through natural selection.
- p. 85: “Pasteur was so committed in his opposition to spontaneous generation that he preferred to believe there was some unknown flaw in his work than to publish the results.”
- He couldn’t prove what the flaw was, but he was committed to the belief that life doesn’t generate spontaneously from nothing.
- Although Louis Pasteur was correct, he couldn’t prove it through a decisive experiment or point to the particular flaw.
Key quotations
- p. 79: The Pasteur-Pouchet debate to determine whether or not spontaneous generation existed “was a controversial issue, especially in nineteenth-century France because it touched upon deeply rooted religious and political sensibilities.”
*Collins & Pinch discuss the religious issue surrounding evolution, but they don’t explicitly identify the political issue. They mean the politics of the French scientific community. The governing authority set up how science was vetted, and, in this case, the vetting process favored Pasteur and was “unsympathetic” to Pouchet. - p. 80: “As in so many other scientific controversies, it was neither facts nor reason, but death and weight of numbers that defeated the minority view; facts and reasons, as always, were ambiguous.”
*Ambiguity—“because you know sometimes words have two meanings” Led Zeppelin - p. 81: “[I]n the nineteenth century the techniques for determining what was sterile and what was living were being established.” Therefore, it wasn’t universally accepted what constituted a sterile environment.
- In fact, what does constitute a sterile environment? Which of the following is the most sterile environment? Salad bar, hospital, refrigerator, keyboard on a library computer, cat, recently washed dishes…
- p. 83: Interpretations of Spontaneous Generation Experiments table “allowed Pasteur virtually to define all air that gave rise to life in the flasks as contaminated.”
- p. 86: Pasteur’s “20 flasks exposed to air at 2000 metres on a glacier in the French Alps [had] only one affected.” Pouchet’s eight flasks all were contaminated, and “he had used a heated file instead of pincers to open the flasks.”
What does Pasteur get to say about that? - p. 87: “By accident or design, all members of the commission were unsympathetic to Pouchet’s ideas and some announced their conclusion before examining the entries.”
“The second commission too was composed of members whose view were known to be strongly and uniformly opposed to those of Pouchet.” - p. 88: Modern commentators…have suggested that Pouchet might have been successful if he had stayed the course—albeit for the wrong reasons!”
- p. 89: “It was thought at the time that Darwinism rested upon the idea of spontaneous generation….Pasteur, then, was taken to have dealt a final blow to the theory of evolution with the same stroke as he struck down the spontaneous generation of life.”
*Is it any surprise that the French Académie des Sciences was opposed to the theory proposed by Darwin and Alfred Wallace, both British scientists (or naturalists)?
Pasteur-Pouchet Debate Speculation
Experimental Controls: Yeast vs. Hay Infusions
It seems Collins & Pinch, when initially describing Pouchet’s Pyrenean experiment (p.86), held out that he used hay infusions as the “nutritive medium” as well as a heated file to open the flasks (p. 88). It’s quite possible the heated file had nothing to do with the contamination Pouchet found. Instead, “[i]t was not until 1876 that it was discovered that hay infusions support a spore that is not easily killed by boiling” (p. 88). Pasteur used yeast as the “nutritive medium” that was sterilized, and he may or may not have conducted the experiment with hay infusions.
Had he used hay infusions and found putrescence, how might he conclude? Would he throw up his hands and say, “yes, Pouchet, you are correct”? How would he deal with this anomaly? Just topics to consider for further thought.
Pasteur’s Brilliance
In order to appreciate Louis Pasteur’s brilliance,* we need to recognize his cutting-edge science in context. Today, we understand germs, microbes, bacteria, viruses, and how they’re spread. Pasteur had to convince the scientific community and the public that invisible microbes were responsible for infections and many diseases. He’s best known for pasteurization, which means we get wine and milk prepared in such a way to stop bacterial contamination. The knowledge of microscopic organisms–not observable by the naked eye–is pretty amazing for a time period (mid-to-late 19th Century) where average citizens wouldn’t be learning these facts in schools the way we learn them today.
The American Civil War had more casualties because of disease than wounds from battle or being killed in battle (for an analysis on Union Army deaths, see Gilchrist, Michael. “Disease & Infection in the American Civil War.” The American Biology Teacher, 60.4 [Apr., 1998]: pp. 258-262). A major reason was because of the non-sterile, dirty environment of field hospitals and poor sanitation (Gilchrist 259). The medical community wasn’t aware of the need for sterile environments, so patients often died from surgery with unclean instruments than from the issues that they went to the hospital to get treated.
*Although Pasteur wasn’t the first to propose germ theory (c.f. Agostino Bassi), he certainly did plenty of work in the field and helped bring new science and technology to the world, making humans safer, healthier, and disease resistant.
Question for Class
It’s not surprising that the federal government has a role in science and technology. One goal of General Education (and LBST courses specifically) is to consider “What is” vs “What should be.” I have four questions for us:
- What is the Government’s role in science?
- What should be the Government’s role in science?
- What is the Government’s role in technology?
- What should be the Government’s role in technology?
Basically, when we discuss “what is,” we’re describing the contemporary situation. When we discuss “what should be,” we’re making arguments for (or against) certain policies based on sound, logical evidence and reasoning.
Many of you are probably aware of President Trump’s gag order on federal agencies (from a few years back) that bans them from communicating directly with non-governmental entities. How is that similar to The Academie des Sciences in the Pasteur-Pouchet debate?
Next Class
Keep up with the reading Ch. 5 & 6 for Tuesday, 9/22. Also, your Canvas post is up and ready, so post! After 11:00 pm on Friday, 9/18, you won’t be able to post. If you haven’t set that weekly reminder, do so now.