Public science: Media configuration and closure in the cold fusion controversy

Abstract

This paper considers the role of the news media as a mode of inter-specialist communication in the controversy over cold fusion in 1989. Drawing on the work of Lewenstein, Gieryn and Bucchi, media representations in the early weeks of the controversy are seen as epistemologically significant for facilitating closure by configuring "cold fusion" in terms of recognizable technical and cultural discourses of nuclear fusion. These representations work as resources for stabilizing a conception of the experimental phenomenon thereby providing scientists engaged in replication with a means of breaking the "experimenter's regress" and bringing the controversy to a relatively swift closure.