Just one story on the FSR this week, because this one’s a lulu.

Now here is two words I bet you never thought you would here together again, ever : cold fusion.

Yes, amazingly, it’s back in the news. Those of us who were around back when those two words first came together in the public imagination will likely remember those heady few days between the first news story concerning this amazing scientific breakthrough which was going to change the world and finally solve all our energy problems forever, and the inevitable realization that it was all a bunch of crap and the whole thing was a big sad cruel joke created by overenthusiastic scientists and an ever more overenthusiastic media.

Well, hang on to your hats, because apparently it’s 1988 against and we’re getting on this ride just one more time for old times’ sake.

This time, it’s a pair of Italian scientists named Rossi and Focardi who are claiming to have invented a phenomenal new process that will yield tons of free energy via a room-temperature reaction that produces neither carbon emissions nor radioactive waste, and produces eight times the energy you put into it or possibly a lot more.

Now, as an open minded rugged skeptic who prides himself on being both open to anything and fooled by nothing, the first challenge this sort of story presents is as simple as it is profound : not immediately dismissing the whole thing with a derisive, mocking laugh out of leftover bitterness from the first time around.

It’s very tempting, and would be both easy and very satisfying. It would be the simplest thing in the world to just say “Hah! We’re not falling for that again, you sad, sad losers! Find a new scam!”

It felt good just typing it. But as easy and fun as that would be, it’s not logical or right. Just because in one rather famous case, the effect turned out to be bogus and the media looked foolish for getting us all excited over what turned out to be nothing does not mean the cold fusion is impossible and that anything bearing that label must, perforce, be a completely and total fraud. These guys could truly be onto something, and it would be a global shame if we dismissed a revolutionary technology that could lead to many wonderful things simply because the field it’s in is somewhat disreputable because of something that happened 23 years ago.

That said, Rossi and Focardi are making a lot of very bold claims, and not providing a lot of the crucial details needed to let other scientists judge said claims for themselves, and so the possibility that they, too, are entirely wrong, or worse, frauds, still remains.

Interestingly, they claim they do not understand how their reaction works. That is, in and of itself, quite damning in many people’s eyes. It is always tempting to jump to the conclusion that if you can’t explain how something works, it doesn’t work. But that’s letting intellectual hubris get in the way of real science. Science does not require an explanation of how something works, it merely requires a demonstration that it works. The explanations can come later.

After all, humanity used fire for thousands of years without having the slightest idea of why it did what it did. They knew that it worked, and how it worked, and what you could do with it. Theories about combustion, oxidation, and chemical energy didn’t come along till quite recently, and it didn’t get in the way of us using fire to found civilization at all.

So have they demonstrated that their process works? Sadly, that’s where things get muddy. They certainly seem to think they have, and they definitely demonstrated something at a big press conference last week. Some other scientists were there and claimed that they verified that it was not a chemical reaction, but the real meat of the thing, the explanation of how it all works and, most tellingly, the means to independantly verify their results via repeating their experiments, remain undisclosed.

This quote from the letter telling them that their patent had been rejected sums it up nicely :

As the invention seems, at least at first, to offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories, the disclosure should be detailed enough to prove to a skilled person conversant with mainstream science and technology that the invention is indeed feasible. … In the present case, the invention does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis) which would enable the skilled person to assess the viability of the invention. The description is essentially based on general statement and speculations which are not apt to provide a clear and exhaustive technical teaching

In other words, if you are going to make this kind of claim, which would seem to deny the laws of physics, you had better be able to offer more than vague statements and extraordinary boasts.

Their defenders might well claim that Rossi and Focardi are just doing what they have to do to keep others from stealing their brilliant idea and claiming it for their own. But that might be how business works, but it’s certainly not how science works. In science, you do not claim what you cannot prove, and more importantly, what you cannot allow other scientists to prove.

So is their claim real? Are they truly the revolutionary, world-changing scientists they claim to be, or just some of the boldest fraudsters the world has ever known?

I don’t claim to know. I am not qualified to understand their theoretical arguments, and if the world’s top scientists can’t figure out if they are lying, neither can I. It all sounds very fishy, but there is no “fishy soundingness principle” in science. There is just proof or disproof, and if their claims are legit, Rossi and Focardi are doing themselves no favours by playing this so close to the vest.

But who knows? Maybe we’ll all be using one of their reactors in our homes come 2020.