Documenting Cold Fusion: An Urgent Project to Preserve Historical and Sociological Materials from Fast-Moving Controversial Science

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project will collect, store and catalog a wide range of materials pertaining to the announcement of "cold fusion" at the University of Utah on March 23, 1989. These documents -- collected in the midst of on-going and heated debates among chemists and physicists -- will enable scholars to better understand science "as it happens". Whether or not recent experimental claims are defined as valid, the episode is a strategic research site for historians, sociologists, policy analysts, communication scholars and others interested in how science works. Several features of the cold fusion case make it of special interest. Communication patterns among scientists have been altered dramatically by recent electronic and computer innovations (FAX machines, computer mail networks, electronic bulletin boards), which have allowed virtually instantaneous communication of both fact and rumor, raising troubling questions about the viability of "peer review" systems associated with traditional forms of print communication in scientific journals. The simultaneous promise of an enlarged understanding of nature and a lucrative technology based on cold fusion have blurred the boundary between "pure" and "applied" science. At the same time, the mass media have played a fundamental role in bringing the cold fusion controversy to national attention and scientists themselves have used the mass media for communicating among their professional peers. In order for scholars to be able to investigate these and other topics, primary source materials must be collected today. With so much communication moving by electronic means -- relatively ephemeral compared to print -- it is imperative to act quickly before valuable materials are "purged", and thus irretrievably lost. It is especially important to collect these data before consensus has formed and the facts have been settled. Later accounts, experience tells us, will "reconstruct" the events in often creative ways.