Monday 21 April 2003

Pic of the day: No, no! I said "cold fusion", not "con-fusion"! (Screenshot from The Sims.)

Cold fusion and magic

I read with great interest a long article in New Scientist, the UK scientific magazine. Despite its name, there is nothing "New Age" about this magazine; it is packed with job advertisements and other proofs of its scientific mainstreamness. (Unlike your average glossy "popular science" magazine, with full-page advertisements for luxury goods, evidently aimed at people with a higher wallet-to-brain ratio.)

The article was about the low-profile work on cold fusion that has been funded by the military. As some of you may remember, there was quite some brouhaha several years ago about a couple scientists that believed they had found a way to generate energy by fusion at room temperature. They sent an electric current trough a palladium electrode and an electrolyte based on heavy water. The system produced more energy in the form of heat than was lost in the form of electric current, and the scientists went straight to the press. The problem was that when other laboratories around the world tried the exact same setup, they got nothing.

Now it turns out that a few labs have been continuing experiments with palladium and heavy water. In some of the experiments, there came out more energy than was put in, ranging from 5% to 30%, and there was also measured more helium. But in other experiments, sometimes in the same lab, there was no measurable effect. And when another lab tried the exact same setup that worked in the other, they got nothing, and the other way around.

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In the "hard sciences" such as physics and chemistry, failure is unacceptable, bordering on criminal. If a published discovery fails to repeat in other labs, the first notion that springs to mind is conscious doctoring of the experiments in order to attract better funding. In a more merciful mood, one may admit that the scientists may only have shown gross negligence in not checking their equipment properly, but they should still not have published before they tried again with all new equipment. A result that does not copy is simple untruth.

This is not the first time I hear about results like this. I get similar stories with experiments in parapsychology: Extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, healing, stuff like that. Sometimes it seems to work for a while, but then it doesn't. The response from the scientific community is much like the reception of a seriously disfigured leper in a health studio. People slide away as far as possible in a mixture of disgust and fear of contagion.

Unlike the hard sciences, however, I recognize the pattern from one other field. Medicine. Here, however, uncertainty is the rule. If an experiment is not reproduced by another lab, one tries again with slight modifications, to try to find something, anything, that works. It is generally accepted that a cure that works on one patient may not work on another, or even have a negative effect. But all the way, one tries to find out more about how it works. If something works in a minority of cases but has no serious side effects, it is considered a good thing and kept for future use.

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So I thought to myself: Perhaps cold fusion is improbable, but not entirely impossible. Perhaps the influence of the human spirits in these labs has tipped the scales so that the almost impossible happened. In other words, magic.

Each of us has one body which we control. If we decide to lift our hand, it lifts. We have no idea which of the millions of neurons and muscle cells are involved in the operation, much less how to program each of these cells to do the job. Even less do we know about the various molecules that are created, combined or destroyed in a matter of moments in order to execute our little decision. And at the bottom, all these reactions follow the unflinching laws of physics. The atoms attract or repel each other depending on the number of electrons in each energy state, following laws that apply exactly the same way in non- organic matter, without prejudice. Yet somehow the human mind makes it happen, without quite knowing how, just based on experience and expectation.

If we can do this in our body (and evidently we can, most of the time) then could it be that our spirit can also reach out into our surroundings, making possible but improbable things happen? Being so different from our usual behavior, it would not be very reliable. But with experience it would get gradually easier. So people who did these experiments a lot would be more likely to see something happen than those who tried it for the first time and then rejected.

Furthermore, interference from other minds could sometimes prevent an effect that would otherwise have worked. A kind of spiritual inertia, stopping or slowing a process by the power of sheer doubt.

I admit that it doesn't sound very likely. Then again, neither do the test results. And whatever the actual process, this is sure: When humans are involved, unlikely things is likely to happen. They just don't happen on command.