on reputation traps.
there’s a sociological explanation why few people are willing to look at the evidence. They put their reputations at risk by doing so. Cold fusion is tainted, and the taint is contagious – anyone seen to take it seriously risks contamination. So the subject is stuck in a place that is largely inaccessible to reason – a reputation trap, we might call it. People outside the trap won’t go near it, for fear of falling in. ‘If there is something scientists fear, it is to become like pariahs’. People inside the trap are already regarded as disreputable, an attitude that trumps any efforts that they might make to argue their way out, by reason and evidence.
2019-06-11: Google is getting into the game.
This work should produce data that will be of interest to people beyond the remaining cold-fusion believers, and similarly, the team’s work on heated metal powders and hydrogen required them to make advances in calorimetry that could also prove useful. And the hydrogen-saturated palladium electrode work led to new data about the effects of such high loading on the metal structure, and how to measure these reliably.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 