Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [107]
The alien planet was a complete fiction. It vanished as soon as Lyne’s team corrected the program. Less than a week before Lyne had to address his fellow astronomers—luminaries who had called a special session—the discovery dissolved into dust.
When Lyne took to the stage, he was petrified. “It was a large audience of extremely eminent astronomers and scientists,” he said. However, he had decided what to do. Instead of telling everyone about the discovery of the extrasolar planet as originally planned, he told the gathered audience, in great detail, how he and his team had deceived themselves by failing to check their software properly. It was humiliating. Yet, at the end of his presentation, the audience broke out into a long, loud round of applause. Lyne was shocked. “Here I was, with the biggest blunder of my life and...” Lyne paused, gathering himself. “But I think that many people have nearly done such things themselves.”
This is the way science is supposed to work. When a scientist discovers that he has erred, that he had deceived himself, he gives the scientific community a full and detailed report about his folly. The scientist abases himself, science rids itself of the erroneous notion, and the march of research continues on. However, reality isn’t always so clean. Sometimes, other experimentalists join a scientist in self-deception; this makes it much harder to correct an error. It is also difficult when ego gets involved, as it often does. Lyne was lucky; he found his error himself. It’s much harder to come clean when other scientists—your rivals—find your errors for you.
There are those who make a different decision. Many scientists, forced to stand on the edge of the abyss, gather their strength and leap. The annals of science are littered with the names of once-celebrated scientists whose wishful thinking forced them to jump into the fringe. If their pet theories become immune to contrary evidence, if their logic resists any criticism, if their peers suspect that they have fudged results, they are expelled from the scientific community. Usually this process takes years. With fusion, it can take just weeks.
Pons and Fleischmann were at the brink days after they went public. Almost immediately, Fleischmann in England and Pons in Utah discovered that their peak was in the wrong place—the gamma rays they thought they were detecting didn’t have the right energy. They had to make a decision: retreat or press on despite the damaging evidence.
Taleyarkhan’s group was nearing the brink even before their paper was published. At Oak Ridge, scientists had replicated the experiment with better neutron detectors and found nothing. It was a devastating blow. They had to make a decision: retreat or press on despite the damaging evidence.
The Taleyarkhan decision, at least at first, was more defensible than Pons and Fleischmann’s. But in the end, they all wound up leaping into the void. Almost as soon as the researchers announced their results, accusations and investigations sent them to the fringe. The scientists of cold fusion and bubble fusion will never rejoin the ranks of the mainstream.
Every scientific field has its scandals and its renegades. There are biologists who dwell on the fringe, just as there are materials scientists, physicists, chemists, and geologists. But there’s something about fusion that is a little different—the power of the dream of unlimited fusion energy that makes generation after generation of scientists deceive themselves.
The wishful thinking about fusion extends far beyond a handful of shunned individuals like Pons and Fleischmann, Taleyarkhan, and Perón’s Ronald Richter. Individuals like these flare brightly and are quickly extinguished. They become the source of dark rumors and conspiracy theories, but they do superficial damage once they are excluded from the scientific community.
The real danger of wishful thinking comes not from these individuals but from the wishful thinking at