Messinger, Jonah F and Metzler, Florian and Price, Huw (2025) Gatekeeping: a Partial History of Cold Fusion. [Preprint]

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Abstract

One of the most public episodes of gatekeeping in modern science was the case of so-called ‘cold fusion’. At a news conference in 1989 the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had found evidence of nuclear fusion in palladium electrodes loaded with deuterium. There was worldwide interest. Many groups sought to reproduce the results, most unsuccessfully. Within months, the prevailing view became strongly negative. The claims of Fleischmann and Pons came to be regarded as disreputable, as well as false. As the Caltech physicist David Goldstein put it, cold fusion became ‘a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment’ (Goldstein 1994). The case would already be interesting for students of gatekeeping if the story had ended at that point. Even more interestingly, however, the field survived and persisted. It has been enjoying a modest renaissance, with recent government funding both in the US and the EU. This piece offers an opinionated introduction to cold fusion as a case study of scientific gatekeeping, discussing both its early and recent history.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Messinger, Jonah F jonahmessinger@gmail.com 0000-0003-0775-7180 Metzler, Florian fmetzler@mit.edu 0000-0003-1818-1332 Price, Huw hp331@cam.ac.uk 0000-0002-9091-760X
Keywords:	Gatekeeping, cold fusion, low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), condensed matter nuclear science, inductive risk, replication
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Condensed Matter General Issues > Science and Policy General Issues > Science vs. Pseudoscience General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science
Depositing User:	Prof Huw Price
Date Deposited:	15 Jan 2026 13:37
Last Modified:	15 Jan 2026 13:37
Item ID:	27902
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Condensed Matter General Issues > Science and Policy General Issues > Science vs. Pseudoscience General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science
Date:	15 January 2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/27902

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