Leading scientific journals and magazines such as Nature and Scientific American have attacked cold fusion many times. Most recently, in October 2005 Nature published a News Feature titled “Physics: Far from the frontier.” This describes S. Putterman’s work on sonofusion. It includes the following paragraph:
“The problem with reports of tabletop fusion is that for most scientists they evoke memories of the notorious, and now largely discredited, ‘cold fusion’ claim made by two chemists in 1989. The chemists claimed they could achieve nuclear fusion reactions well below the extreme temperatures predicted by theorists, and that these reactions could be used as a source of unlimited energy.”
(A March 2005 attack by the Scientific American is described below. Letters to us from the previous and present editors of the Scientific American can be found here. The editor says that he has not read any papers about cold fusion and he does not intend to read any.)
Nature never says why cold fusion should be considered “notorious” or who has “discredited” it. Their comments have always been ad hominem, ridicule, or hearsay. Since 1989, cold fusion has been replicated hundreds of times, in experiments published in some of the world’s leading peer-reviewed electrochemical and physics journals. Positive results have been published by leading laboratories such as Los Alamos, China Lake and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Many results have been at a very high signal to noise ratios. By traditional standards cold fusion has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet since 1989, journals such as Nature and Scientific American have not published a single word acknowledging the existence of any of these experiments. They have never critiqued the scientific content of an experiment, or pointed out a technical error. Instead, they make diffuse allegations that unnamed people have “discredited” the research.
The world faces a growing energy shortage, high oil prices, and potentially catastrophic global warming, yet these leading journals ignore a possible solution to these dire problems.