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

该项目将收集、存储和编目大量与1989年3月23日犹他大学宣布的“冷聚变”有关的材料。这些文件是在化学家和物理学家之间正在进行的激烈辩论中收集的，它们将使学者们更好地理解“发生的”科学。无论最近的实验主张是否被定义为有效，这一集都是历史学家、社会学家、政策分析师、传播学者和其他对科学如何运作感兴趣的人的战略研究场所。冷聚变的几个特点使它特别有趣。最近的电子和计算机创新（传真机、计算机邮件网络、电子公告板）极大地改变了科学家之间的交流模式，这些创新使得事实和谣言几乎可以即时交流。提出了一些令人不安的问题，即与传统科学期刊印刷交流形式相关的“同行评议”系统的可行性。同时，扩大对自然的理解和基于冷聚变的有利可图的技术的前景模糊了“纯”科学和“应用”科学之间的界限。与此同时，大众媒体在引起全国对冷聚变争议的关注方面发挥了重要作用，科学家们自己也利用大众媒体在专业同行之间进行交流。为了使学者能够研究这些和其他主题，今天必须收集原始资料。随着如此多的交流通过电子手段进行——与印刷相比相对短暂——在有价值的材料被“清除”，从而不可挽回地丢失之前，迅速采取行动是势在必行的。尤其重要的是，在形成共识和解决事实之前收集这些数据。经验告诉我们，后来的叙述往往会以创造性的方式“重建”事件。

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.