".. is known to be pseudoscience" could be correct, until it is not. Dismissing someone's research interests is not just rude but also the attitude that led to this individual dropping out of academia altogether.
This is the sort of response the doctor who suggested washing hands after surgery received and is not particularly useful.
No, you don't get it. "Cold fusion" is akin to dismissing the recommendation to wash hands before surgery, because the experiments promoted by the proponents were repeatedly shown not to give the results they claim.
To pick one of many, many examples. There are errors in both directions (dismissing correct ideas, accepting pseudoscience), and overly simplistically suggesting all iconoclasts should be entertained is probably unreasonable.
I think there is a big difference in what you steer your students to do, and what you do as an established scientist.
A Masters level education in Physics is not the time to be going off the beaten track; you still have 5 years or more before you even understand the territory enough to offer corrections on the map.
Replace “cold fusion” with “homeopathy”, do you still think your statement applies?
I think cold fusion is closer to homeopathy than stellar fusion.
That may be true, and maybe the professor was right to discourage that track. A key difference I'd point out, however, is that one is more universally accepted among researchers as pseudoscience than the other.
For instance, the first sentence of the wikipedia entry for homeopathy: "Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine."
First sentence for cold fusion: "Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature."
The failures of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, or the fallout of that case, do not in my mind constitute pseudoscience. Skepticism notwithstanding, it is an actual area of research still funded by universities around the world - from wikipedia, as recently as 2015 "the Indian multidisciplinary journal Current Science published a special section devoted entirely to cold fusion related papers. https://web.archive.org/web/20170805185756/http://www.curren..."
I personally think it's more interesting than homeopathy or linking vaccines to autism. I think the research has yielded more tangible real world benefits, such as improvements to the sophistication of calorimeters. Furthermore, I think lack of reproducibility is not the same as proof of its impossibility or that it is pseudoscience.
Maybe it's my personal longing for a future with cold fusion speaking - and I don't think it's a good career move to focus on it - but I don't like seeing it dismissed in the same pile of detritus as homeopathy.
Fair, perhaps the comparison with homeopathy was overly harsh. I'd certainly not say they were at exactly the same point on the spectrum of "hard science <> pseudoscience". My intention with that point was to highlight that there _is_ a point where professors do need to discourage students, and the rate/vigor of discouragement should be proportional to the current priors on "likelihood of being junk".
I'd happily retract that point and stick to the point around the professor's duty to keep their students from falling into intellectual quicksand or other impediments; I think that's the more important one anyway.
And I certainly agree that cold fusion would be revolutionary if it turns out to be physically possible. However based on my understanding, there's a solid body of nuclear physics -- both theory and experiment -- that show that this process is many orders of magnitude away from being activatable at room temperature. So I'd personally rather fund modern fission, hot fusion, and renewables as significant research targets.
This is absolutely not correct. It's correct to say that Fleishman and Pons shat the bed for everybody when their University's PR had a press release before a paper had been accepted.
It's not correct to say that all research into cold fusion (LENR as it's called now) is psuedoscience.
However, were I a professor, anybody who proposed LENR research to me would get a lecture: hey, there may be some interesting science in there, but you're gonna have to work harder than anybody else in the room to get people to trust your results. Some scientists don't mind signing up for spending 30 years proving their case, others want faster results, in which case you should find areas of research that are more likely to lead to accepted publications.
It's like you didn't even read the article. There's also an actual cold fusion using muons. Only problem is muons take more energy to create than they help create through fusion. If you had a free muon source (like the sun), you could potentially create a space-based fusion reactor operating at room temperature.
The sun is absolutely a muon source. Almost every muon that hits Earth's surface is caused by cosmic rays from the upper atmosphere creating pions that decay into muons. (1) The average flux is 1 muon per cm^2 per sec (2). Muons only live a few microseconds but this is plenty of time to catalyze fusion reactions. The two problems with muon-assisted fusion are the energy cost of producing muons with current technology and the potential of muons to stick to alpha particles. Both limit the efficiency of the technique. (3)
Sure, the particle showers that cosmic rays create in the atmosphere contain some muons. Still the sun itself does not emit muons, and even if it did they would decay long before reaching earth (or a satellite).
This is the sort of response the doctor who suggested washing hands after surgery received and is not particularly useful.