[caption id="attachment_21676" align="aligncenter" width="220" caption="Roger Bacon ('Doctor Mirabilis') was a Franciscan friar (1214-1294) whose emphasis on the scientific method popularized it and made it the experimental method of choice for hundreds of generations of scientists, and continues to be to this day."]
[/caption]This is, for many reasons, important. When the media get excited, they often raise the expectations from a particular news story: they ensure that the story is exciting, that it is sufficiently unprecedented so that it challenges existing notions enough to incite interest. And here's where 'guilty until proven innocent' gets to work its magic. Science stories that are capable of becoming exciting have by definition a low chance of being valid. If there was a high chance of the story being valid, it would border on being expected, predictable; covering such an event would be more a chronicling than a witnessing.
By holding a phenomenon guilty, however, nobody would get sucked up in what could be a wild goose chase.
There are a bunch of "discoveries" that, because of their unprecedentedness, purchased interest from the media and allowed the men and women behind the pseudo-discoveries to cash in. One of the greatest examples is the Fleischmann-Pons experiment in cold fusion. When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah announced that they may have discovered cold fusion on March 23, 1989, there was a flurry of excitement that rippled through military quarters, media offices and the scientific community. According to their paper, there were indications of micro-scale fusion reactions at temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius (as opposed to the millions of degrees they were expected to be at) when deuterium-water was electrolysed in the presence of palladium metal.
[caption id="attachment_21672" align="alignleft" width="199" caption="Martin Fleischmann"]
[/caption]The timing couldn't have been better. The 1973 Oil Crisis was fresh in the minds of many people and, seemingly in response to that, cold fusion presented an alternate source of energy that was accessible and more efficient by orders of magnitude. Moreover, just three years earlier in 1986, high-temperature superconductivity had been discovered. When earlier certain materials were thought to be superconducting only at temperatures as low as 4-10 kelvin, a new breed of materials were shown conducting with zero resistance at temperatures as high as 90 and 120 kelvin. Its impact on the discovery of cold fusion was the exculpation of the crackpot: it told the world that having crackpot written all over an experiment didn't mean it couldn't be true.
Fleischmann and Pons were superstars. Soon, a $25-million federal grant was coming the way of U of Utah. However, disturbing developments were being reported from western Europe, other parts of the USA and Japan. The paper Fleishmann and Pons had published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry did not include the experimental protocol, but that didn't stop scientists worldwide from trying to replicate the research. And they had all been in vain: none of those experiments had detected fusion of any kind at any temperature. In fact, Nathan Lewis, a professor of chemistry at Caltech, set about trying to corroborate cold fusion systematically, trying out all kinds of variations on the process. None of them succeeded.
While the Utah chemists basked in the glory of their finding and the (carefully selected) findings of other groups in America, that also claimed to have observed cold fusion, the death knell was sounded so far afield as CERN: Douglas R. O. Morrison, a physicist, announced that all attempts in western Europe at replicating cold fusion had failed. In order to quell these doubts, Fleischmann and Pons published a "note" in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry in April 1989 that showed a gamma-ray energy peak from their experiment.
Now, it was known at the time that gamma rays released by a fusion reaction could transfer only a certain amount of energy to the detector, which is reflected as a sharp cutoff in the peak after which the energy seems to plummet. The cutoff is called a Compton edge and wasn't observed in the chart in the Journal. When alerted to it, the chemists refused to take any blame, continuously asserting that their experiment was error-proof.
After this incident, interest in the matter rocketed - and negatively. The New York Times published a scathing article on April 30, 1989, titled The Utah Fusion Circus. Its last lines effectively drew the curtains on cold fusion and sent Fleischmann, Pons and the U of Utah back decades in terms of their credibility and accountability.
For Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann, the best bet is to disappear into their laboratory and devise a clearly defined, well-understood experiment that others can reproduce. Until they have that, they have nothing. As for the University of Utah, it may now claim credit for the artificial-heart horror show and the cold-fusion circus, two milestones at least in the history of entertainment, if not of science.
What ultimately made the difference was replicability: when scientists found that the experiment couldn't be replicated, the game was lost. Fleischmann and Pons were held guilty to the end. Their exculpation was all the time hinged on their ability to assert that the experiment would occur anywhere irrespective of geographic location as long as the experimental setup was the same. Because of the nature of their experiment, there was a sizeable measure of urgency to establish priority: as far as anything immensely profitable is concerned, primacy makes all the difference. Woe betide if anyone else claim it first - all would be lost! And in that moment, facts are not checked as rigorously as they should be.
More recently, the same went for the misbehaving neutrinos. When other experiments around the world tried to replicate the phenomenon, nothing happened. In fact, a sister-experiment of OPERA (which first announced the anomaly) called ICARUS drew the curtains more than halfway down within three weeks of the exciting announcement.
[caption id="attachment_21674" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The ICARUS experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory, Italy"]
[/caption]Replication is many things. At the least, it is consensus. At the most, it is a form of characterization that removes a phenomenon out of its germane environment and blesses it with universality, as a result making it explicable within a logical framework and scientific. If the Higgs boson were to be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, that will be the first step in a series of experiments on which hundreds of scientists and thousands of engineers will be involved for tens of months. They will check, and then they will check again. If someone somewhere finds that such a boson couldn't be spotted, he won't be snubbed but encouraged to speak up: the closer to the truth you get, the more careful you need to be.
Unfortunately for quacks everywhere, everything about science is the truth.
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In a curious turn of events, the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India, recommended the Indian government to resuscitate research in cold fusion in 2008. Projects were commenced at IIT Madras, the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, and BARC. However, because of persistent scepticism among physicists at chemists, research was halted as of 2011. Find the ToI article here.
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