Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion

I bought this book having only a cursory understanding of the subject matter (full disclosure: I am a PhD student in electrochemistry) and I thought that the book did a very good job explaining this strange story without getting too bogged down with details.I personally believe that this should be a must read for all scientists as a lesson on how good people can fall into a hole and become blind to evidence staring them in the face. It also does a great job hammering in the importance of reproducing work and of properly doing controls. I honestly believe I have become a better scientist after reading this story.

cold fusion is another alchemist dream for turning lead into gold... in this case violating basic physics to fuse elements at room temperature ...alchemy has enticed smart people by enticing them with dreams of wealth and recognition and this is exactly what Taubes shows in this book...its a recitation of how personal ambition served to lead experimental scientists searching for cold fusion to operate "positive outcome experiments" that were set up without basic controls and served to provide desired results, i.e., bad science. its also a good story about how chemists tried to do physics without understanding what they were doing. well the dream will never die there will always be a desire for gold.

You won't get a memorable account of what happened around the 1989 fake "discovery" of cold fusion from this book. Taubes doesn't even bother to explain what cold fusion really is, why it's significant, and how it differs from regular fusion or fission, for example. Instead, without making clear what's at stake, he launches breathlessly into what he hopes will be an engrossing account of the personalities involved in this folly - for hundreds and hundreds of pages. He might as well be talking about angels dancing on the head of a pin, and adds to the general, erroneous impression that it's easy for "scientists" to fudge their results and pull the wool over an uninformed public's eye. Taubes has done nothing to encourage the lay reader to get more informed about scientific progress. There's almost no science in here that would be in the least comprehensible to even an informed reader. Bad Science Writing would be a better title. I suspect the only people who made it through this book were insiders wanting bitchy details about their colleagues. Very disappointing.

The author does an excellent job in chronicling the saga and travail of cold fusion. The "lessons learned" are applicable to numerous technical fields, particularly where conclusions are drawn far ahead of substantiating evidence and critical peer review.

This book is excellent. It describes in amazing detail the events leading up to and following the "Cold Fusion" news conference. It's the story of how two scientists fooled themselves into believing that they were onto something so big that they had to claim credit for it -- fast. And it's the story of how the least qualified researchers quickly "confirmed" Cold Fusion, and how the best qualified researchers found nothing. If you're interested in how science is done, both well and poorly, read this book.

When the original Cold Fusion press conference was held on 3-23-89, the reaction of the physics establishment in the first world was immediate , orchestrated and highly hostile. Mr. Taubes book is an effort to spin-doctor an entire area of emerging global science out of exisitence . As of 3-23-99 there are over 3000 peer reviewed scientific papers available in this area of science with nearly every institution connected with nuclear phenomena having checked in. Mr. Taubes confines himself with attacking Drs. Fleischmann and Pons during the begining few years of this controversy and ignoring the mountain of official replications: EPRI, US Naval Weapons Lab China Lake, U of Minnesota, MITI et al... If you want to see how "black propaganda" works read this tome. I recommend it to anyone getting involved in the "new Energy" movement to get a temper of the opposition. As Lord Macaulay put it over a century ago " If a big enough commercial interest were threatened, even Newton's law of Gravity would be called into question". Dana Rotegard, Minnesota Cold Fusion Alliance Former technical consultant Janes Space Markets, Asst. Ed., Futurics, Future Trends Newsletter

I read the book a few years after it came out and have referred back to it many times since. I view it as the story of greed running amuck with hack "scientists" taking many short cuts trying to cash on in a world changing bonanza. Yet, here we are 20+ years later and I have yet to see a public cold fusion demo running so much as a single light bulb.Tip of the hat to Mr. Taubes for laying out the story. The 18 years since publication are pretty strong evidence that his conclusions were and still are on target.I also view it as thought provoking for investors when they see some of the energy scams on Wall Street.

I give this book 2 stars because its well written. Taubes is a great writer and tells the story in an informative and captivating way.But he got the story completely wrong because he was too closed minded to see the big picture and look at the evidence for himself. He was also rather obsessed with attacking Dr John Bockris. Taubes was very unfair to Dr Bockris.Taubes should have realized there was more to the cold fusion story, because this book was published in 1993. By that time, there was lots of evidence that the cold fusion story was not the simple one related in this book or promoted by the conservative scientific establishment.