What is the SD on cold fusion? Was it a hoax, a mistake or a real phenomenon that no one has figured out yet? And, have any good books been written about it that would be suitable for the semi-scientifically literate layman?
Its proponents still insist that “something” happens that can’t yet be explained, but the original claims of cold fusion are somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate hoax.
A good book for the semi-scientifically literate is Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, by Gary Taubes.
As you can tell from the title, Taubes is not a true believer.
As far as I understand, it wasn’t a hoax (at least to start with), but those involved pushed the idea long after, scientifically, it should have been dropped. I can’t remember where I read it, but there are still meetings and conventions about this stuff, with the air of homeopathic medicine science - last year’s theories were all a bust, but there’s some promising avenues just opening up. (Repeat ad-nauseum)
The original claims were badly mistaken, but not fraud. The early popular refutation was Frank Close’s Too Hot To Handle (W.H. Allen & Princeton, 1991), but it still caught most of the story. The more thorough account of the main phase, and slightly more technical as a result, was then Cold Fusion (Oxford, 1992) by John Huizenga, who with Norman Ramsey chaired the official DoE investigation into the issue.
Taubes’ big angle was an allegation of deliberate fraud in one of the follow-up experiments at Texas A&M. If I remember right, one of the grad students was supposed to have surrepticiously spiked the experiment with helium.
Bart Simon’s recent Undead Science is apparently the quite good study of how a piece of fringe science can stagger on without convincing anybody outside of the True Believers, using cold fusion as the case study. But I haven’t read it.
What about cold fusion with muonic atoms; has that been discounted too?
As far as I can tell, that seems to have about the same status these days that it did prior to '89: a cute idea, but not something many people hold out much hope for as a practical technology.
Incidentally, one of the unambiguously positive things to come out of the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco was that it prompted someone to check the tunnelling calculations involved in that form of cold fusion and they found a relatively large mistake. Which bumped everything up by a few orders of magnitude and got them a Nature paper at the height of the fuss. Oddly enough, I remember that as being probably the most gobsmacking twist to the whole affair. Nonrevolutionary, but surprising none the less.
WARNING! READ BOTH SIDES OF THE DEBATE BEFORE DECIDING!
About the reality of “CF”, there are books both pro and con, written by professional scientists.
Pro:
Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, Charles G. Beaudette
Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor, Gene Mallove
Con:
Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, Gary Taubes
Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century, John Huizenga
If you already disbelieve in CF, then you’ll latch onto Taubes book and sneer at the “pro” side. If you already belive in CF, then you’ll dismiss Taubes’ book and instead take Beaudette’s book seriously.
So how can one judge? There is a major problem in the way. It’s called “the Experimenter’s Regress.” If we already know how something is supposed to work, then any experiments which give contrary results… were obviously done wrong. But in order to figure out how some new discovery is supposed to work, we must trust the results of experiments. But in order to know if those experiments were done right, we must already know what their results should be… around and around the loop.
Science of course has a solution. It’s called REPLICATION. If many labs can reproduce a claimed effect, then the effect is real. So, have lots of labs replicated the CF claims? Yep. Take a look at some research:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/LibFrame1.html
On the other hand, the CF-disbelievers simply shake their heads sadly, and say that this just proves that all those hundreds of scientists are incompetent, and are letting their beliefs influence their observations.
The CF-supporters turn this right back, and say that the CF-disbelievers are allowing their strong disbelief to influence their observations! 
Beware. Many of the CF skeptics never took an openminded look at the debate in the first place, and instead they pass along rumors they got from other disbelievers, rumors which totally diverge from reality. Examples: nobody could replicate Pons/Fleichman’s claims (yes, there were several replications, but there were even more failures)… The ERAB report to congress disproved CF (no, it didn’t, instead it recommended that more research was needed.) Competent scientists saw no results (wrong, and lenr-canr.com offers a few hundred research papers.)
Here’s one big red light in all of this. The report to congress (ERAB) that supposedly sealed the fate of CF research came out eight months after the initial CF discovery… but it takes up to six months to perform a single CF experiment, and more months to design specialized equipment beforehand! This strongly suggests that many labs tried the experiment once, saw no results, then immediately gave up. Then a committee went before congress to deliver the conclusion. How could reliable decisions be made based on such very early data? Easy: if a group of people finds a new discovery to be threatening, then they’ll come up with seemingly sensible excuses to try to end the controversy early and in their favor. I think this’s what happened. CF supporters call this event “The Rush To Judgement.”
Trivia:
Arthur C. Clarke believes that CF is real and will win out over time. “Pons and Fleichman will be the first scientists in history to win both the Nobel and the igNobel prizes.” Remember Clarke’s first law: “If a distinguished and elderly scientist says something is possible, he is very often correct. If the same scientist states that something is impossible, he is usually wrong.” (Think. Why did Clarke come up with such a law in the first place? It says much about how scientists tend to behave. )
So, why the big stink? There’s one central reason. If Deuteuriums are fusing, they should give off X-rays, Helium, and lots of heat. But in “CF” experiments there is lots of heat (far more than is explained by any conceivable chemical reaction), there is the proper amount of helium… but no x-rays. The x-rays are easy to detect. Where are they?
Fusion physicists reason that, since single-atom fusion generates x-rays, and since they’ve never seen this reaction lack x-rays, therefore the claimed CF experiments are wrong (and the measurements of heat and helium must indicate that the labs which successfully replicate CF experiments must be incompetent.)
But condensed matter physicists point out that science is not complete… so maybe we’ve just discovered a new kind of fusion reaction, one that somehow dumps energy into solid matter NOT as x-rays, but as lattice vibrations (heat.)
Fusion physicists say BALDERDASH, and insist that CF experimenters are all incompetent (after all, they measure heat and helium which cannot possibly be there.)
The scientific community as a whole has sided with the fusion physicists. Yet many labs continue on and off to do Cold Fusion research. Since most physics journals refuse to publish anything to do with CF, the researchers founded their own journals. They have CF symposia, but also have CF sections in conventional symposia such as the APS yearly meeting.
More pro-CF links
Scientific American: what is the current thinking on CF?
AAAS 150th anniversary essays, Arthur C. Clarke
San Fran Chronicle: Cold Fusion is Back
San Fran Chronicle: The War Against Cold Fusion
Wired magazine: what if CF is real?
Dr E. Storm’s research & review papers
Dr L. Kowalski’s collected articles
Some quotations regarding new ideas in science:
“If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place.” …- Charles Kettering, GM
“…By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.” - William James
“When adults first become conscious of something new, they usually either attack or try to escape from it… Attack includes such mild forms as ridicule, and escape includes merely putting out of mind.” - W. I. Beveridge
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” - M. Planck
"Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.” -J.B.S. Haldane, 1963
"New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, ‘Why then are you not taking part in them?’ " - H. G. Wells
“The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.” - Wilfred Trotter, 1941
“Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.” - Spinoza
“If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.” - Wilfred Trotter
And most frightening, a quote from a paragraph about instances of suppression in the history of science:
"Many [genuine] discoveries must have been stillborn or
smothered at birth. We know only those which survived."
- W. I. Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation, 1950