discoverers, the fear that another group might scoop them, executive decisions by the man who was president of my university, and exuberance.
The announcement ignited a fire-storm of attempts to replicate the experiments. Very few of those attempts succeeded. Pons and Fleischmann were accused of multiple lapses of objectivity: wish-fulfilling assumptions, confirmation bias, ignoring relevant variables, mistakes, missing important background characteristics, and optimistic interpretation.
In a remarkably short time, the scientific community had explored and discredited cold fusion. Group objectivity had triumphed: fellow scientists had shown that they were willing to entertain a theoretically ridiculous hypothesis and subject it to a suite of experimental tests.
Groups can, of course, temporarily succumb to the same objectivity lapses as individuals. N rays are an example.
Not long after Roentgen’s discovery of X rays, Rene Blondlot published a related discovery: N rays, generated in substances such as heated metals and gases, refracted by aluminum prisms, and observed by phosphorescent detectors. If one sees what one expects to see, sometimes many can do the same. The enthusiastic exploration of N rays quickly led to dozens of publications on their ‘observed’ properties. Eventually, of course, failures to replicate led to more rigorous experiments and then to abandonment of the concept of N rays. The scientific community moved on, but Blondlot died still believing in his discovery.
We began this section with a paradox: how can it be possible for many subjective scientists to achieve objective knowledge? We concluded that science does have checks and balances that permit it to be much more objective than the individual scientists. The process is imperfect: groups are temporarily subject to the same subjectivity as individuals. Group ‘objectivity’ also has its own pitfalls. We shall postpone consideration of those pitfalls until the next chapter, however, so that we can see them from the perspective of Thomas Kuhn’s remarkable insights into scientific paradigm.
