Name: Bad science
ISBN: 9780394584560

Bad science

At 1:00 P.M., on March 23, 1989, two obscure scientists at the University of Utah announced that they had discovered salvation in a test tube - cold nuclear fusion. The technology promised sale, cheap, limitless energy, and the press played it as the scientific breakthrough of the century. It would become instead a fiasco of epidemic proportions, an unforgettable morality tale in the scientific method: what happens when reason is perverted by hope and greed. Gary Taubes's Bad Science is the vivid, dramatic, and definitive story of the astonishing quest for cold fusion, from its premature birth in a Utah turf war to its lingering and surreal death in a laboratory in College Station, Texas. It is the story of good scientists and bad, of heroes and charlatans, and of a race in which thousands of researchers spent tens of millions of dollars to prove or disprove the existence of a canard. Drawing from interviews with over 260 scientists, administrators, and journalists, Taubes dissects the cold fusion episode with wit and clarity, tracing the untold inside story of scientific research gone awry and academic politics out of control: from the devout physicist and his Department of Energy funding agent who set the wheels of the fiasco in motion, to the University of Utah president whose sole dream was to turn his institution into an intellectual powerhouse.

What Hacker News says

mcguireJul 2023

Gary Taubes's Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion is pretty good.

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billswiftJan 2011

I have read several of Gary Taubes books, including Good Calories, Bad Calories that he mentioned and his earlier book (massive tome, might be better) Bad Science on the cold fusion debacle. He might tend to get a little carried away with enthusiasm for his subject at times, but they have all been both fascinating reading and well documented.

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mcguireAug 2014

Am I missing something? Is there any actual information in this article beyond

* Science in general and nutritional science specifically may or may not be sketchy (And this is news?),

* There are at least three ongoing, very interesting, apparently well-designed studies exploring the topic, with an emphasis on ongoing, and

* These three studies are the children of a researcher who lost weight when he changed his diet, an Enron billionaire, and Gary Taubes, a science journalist with a history of being very, very partisan. (No, really, go read Bad Science and then track down Polywater by Felix Franks---different scientific episodes, but with roughly similar hoo-ha involved; I'm talking about the style of the two discussions.

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LuytSep 2011

There was an interesting (and entertaining) book written about the Cold Fusion Hype, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science:_The_Short_Life_and...

From Gary Taubes' (the author) website: Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion is book of science history by Gary Taubes about the early years (1989–1991) of the cold fusion controversy. It is not a scholarly work, but a popular retelling of the events, based on interviews with over 260 people. The book presents a timeline of the events, making the case that the cold fusion field has many examples of poorly-performed science. The actions of Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, and Steven E. Jones, the scientists who made the dramatic first claims of fusion, are described in rich detail. The book then shows the worldwide reaction and later disrepute of the cold fusion field, with Taubes placing himself in the side of "good science". Taubes says at the end that cold fusion had only demonstrated that research can continue even if the phenomena doesn't actually exist, as long as there is funding available. Taubes had previously written an article for Science in which he insinuates that the cold fusion work of A&M University was fraudulent.

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