Conjuring science in the case of cold fusion

Abstract

Most media accounts of cold fusion described that experience as a conflict among scientists, e.g., chemists versus physicists. It is worth seeing, however, how nonscientists perceived the scientific issues and supporting evidence surrounding cold fusion. From Clifford Geertz's anthropology of meanings-and-symbols, plus Jean Baudrillard's sociology of hyperreality, I derive a general theory that common public symbols of science can be separated from the intellectual substance of science, and then attributed to beliefs and ideologies that do not necessarily have anything to do with science. The result is to make nonscientific matters seem scientific. In the case of cold fusion, a naive hope about abundant cheap energy displaced the science behind the cold fusion hypothesis. That hope was then sustained by a certain visual image of the cold fusion hypothesis; by selective science journalism; and, by a simplistic sociology of science, thereby making it seem that naive hope was substantiated by science.