The Value of Scientific Method

Stripped of elaboration, science is simply the description of what is. It does not deal with what we wish were true, or even with what ought to be.

As the medieval Aristotelian Siger of Brabant put it more than 700 years ago: “What have we to do with miracles? We treat with the natural world in a natural way.”

It is that tension between the wish for the miraculous and the necessity to understand nature as it is that fuels the extraordinary public interest in the claims of the chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that they have created nuclear fusion in an ordinary glass jar.

Fusion is the process by which the stars are set alight. If, as the two scientists claimed at a press conference late in March, fusion can be accomplished by running current through palladium and platinum electrodes immersed in a flask of deuterium oxide--so-called heavy water--an end to mankind’s vexing energy problems may be in reach. Pons and Fleischmann already have asked Congress to give them $25 million to further their research, and told members of a House committee that “commercial application” of their discovery may be possible in as little as 20 years.

Unfortunately, none of the world’s major scientific institutions have been able to detect the excess heat and radiation, which Pons and Fleischmann say their cold fusion device produced.

None of this proves, of course, that the two University of Utah chemists have not achieved cold fusion. Skepticism, however, has been increased by the unusual manner in which they reported their findings, by their failure to publish the details of their research in a reputable journal and by their inability to answer serious questions raised by other scientists in public forums. All of this suggests that before public policy fuses with enthusiasm, the normal process of scientific review ought to be allowed to work itself out.