Cold fusion: Now there’s an idea I hadn’t thought about in a while. It came back onto my radar in spring 2026. I had written an article on how scientists tend to be risk averse, and Huw Price, a philosopher at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, responded to it on Bluesky, citing a paper he’d recently co-authored on attitudes toward cold fusion.
He thinks scientists have been overly dismissive not only of cold fusion, but also of the claim that they have been overly dismissive of cold fusion. As if to prove his point, a journal had just rejected his paper. I’ve long admired Price’s work on the nature of time and causation, so I was intrigued.
When the cold-fusion controversy erupted in 1989, I was in the middle of backpacking off the grid for six months. (You could do that back then.) By the time I caught up on the news, it was over. In March, two chemists had called a press conference to announce a simple tabletop experiment that released too much energy to be a mere chemical reaction. They said it had to be nuclear: hydrogen nuclei fusing to form helium.
It promised limitless clean, cheap power. That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be possible under such pedestrian conditions. Politicians proclaimed the end of all our energy woes.
But then labs across the globe tried to replicate the experiment and couldn’t, and an almighty takedown ensued. The whole thing only lasted a few months. Not having experienced the episode in real time, and being a contrarian by nature, I initially sympathized with the plucky maverick scientists.
But then I read about their rookie mistakes, their fudging of a crucial graph, and their threats of lawsuits against skeptics. Experiments that initially corroborated the results were retracted, in one case amid indications of deliberate spiking with fake fusion products. Although cold fusion was a pathological case, fusion in general has been a graveyard of dreams.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
