Do Public Electronic Bulletin Boards

Help Create Scientific Knowledge?

The Cold Fusion Case

Bruce V. Lewenstein
Cornell University

The impact of new technologies on the transformation of information into knowledge is

not Especially problematic is the degree to which electronic communication can
clear.
replace traditional forums in which information is judged and social consensus about its
value is achieved. This article uses electronic bulletin boards active during the cold fusion
saga that began in 1989 to explore these issues. Dividing the contents of the bulletin
boards into big ideas and little ideas, the article suggests that only about half of all
messages on the boards were big ideas, and only half of those were on technical issues.
The study suggests that the substantial volume of irrelevant material and the difficulty
of applying extratextual cues to the judgment of information made the bulletin boards an
ineffective tool for creating knowledge in this case.

With the widespread introduction of new communication technologies

(such as electronic mail and fax machines), scientific information is being
created and transferred in new ways. But the impact of those new technolo-
gies on the transformation of information into knowledge is not yet clear.
Especially problematic is the degree to which the new electronic technologies
can replace traditional face-to-face interaction-the informal conversations,

presentations, and discussions that give shape to the more formal aspects of
scientific communication such as conference abstracts, refereed journal
articles, and textbooks. Although proponents of new communication tech-

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This study was funded by the Office of Technology Assessment, Contract
No. 13-4570.0. Additional support for related work came from the National Science Foundation,
Grant No. SES-8914940; the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Grant No. NYC-131403; Cornell
University’s John M. Clark Endowment; and the Departments of Communication and Science &
Technology Studies at Cornell University. My thanks go to Ms. Rebecca Piirto, who compiled
a bibliographic essay on which the literature review was based; Dr. Dan McDonald, who ran
formal statistical tests on the bulletin board material; and Dr. Dieter Britz and at least five
anonymous referees, who reviewed earlier versions of this study.

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol 20 No. 2, Spring 1995 123-149
© 1995 Sage Publications Inc.
123
124

nologies often proclaim the advent of a new era in human communication,

one freed from the chains of time and space, the actual operation of science
using these new technologies still needs to be described.
To begin the process of understanding how new communication technolo-
gies affect the creation of scientific knowledge, this study explores one type
of technology-the publicly available electronic bulletin board-in a recent
case of fast-moving, controversial science: cold fusion. New communication

technologies played an integral role in the cold fusion saga. They accelerated
the speed at which individuals had to respond to new ideas and new infor-
mation, and they affected who had access to what information at what time.
What remains unclear is what effects those new patterns had on the process
by which isolated bits of information-particular experimental techniques,
data from specific experiments, alternative interpretations, and so forth-
became robust contributions to &dquo;scientific knowledge,&dquo; supported by the
social consensus that produces stable knowledge. To answer this question
fully requires a detailed analysis of all the forms of communication used in
a particular context, as well as a clear model of the relationship between
scientific communication and the development of stable knowledge. Neither
of those conditions is met in this case (Lewenstein 1995), so this study must
be exploratory and suggestive, not definitive. Nonetheless, given the lack of
previous work on the role of electronic communication in the production of
scientific consensus, such a preliminary step seems valuable.

Relevant Characteristics of
Computer-Mediated Communication
Literature on the impact of the new communication technologies of the
last decade or so, especially in developed nations, focuses on the effects of
computer-mediated communication (CMC), with little attention to devices
such as fax machines.
A distinguishing characteristic of the literature on CMC is the degree to
which it depends on speculation, optimism, and limited cases. A relatively
small number of people have contributed useful empirical work, and those
people have necessarily focused on a limited set of research sites. As a result,
the literature on CMC is relatively thin in its examination of communica-
tion networks of the sort that connect separate organizations and research
groups.
Nonetheless, some conclusions can be drawn from the literature (Dunlop
and Kling 1991; Galegher, Kraut, and Egido 1990; Harrison and Stephen
1994; Hiltz and Turoff 1978; Lewenstein and Heinz 1992; Sproull and
 125

Kiesler 1991). Conclusions that are particularly relevant for understanding

the role of electronic bulletin boards in the cold fusion saga are that CMC

~ eliminates the need for geographic or temporal synchronization (notice that,

traditionally,the informal communication through which invisible colleges
are maintained involves much personal contact);
~
provides potential for new forums for dissemination of information and ideas;
~ offers opportunities for information and data sharing;
~ increases the number of interpersonal interactions, allowing for deeper, more
extended interactions among colleagues; and
~ serves primarily to enhance existing relationships; links to other groups or

organizations are not increased (despite the principle that CMC expands the
number of individuals with whom a researcher can interact, providing greater
access to potential collaborators and pathways for diffusing ideas).

Studies of CMC describe the wide range of material that can be transmitted
via computer networks. In science, the types of information include the
following:
~
Immediately useful information (where to order preprints, conference proceed-
ings, specific videotapes)
~ News (announcements of new events, press conferences, discoveries)
w Newsletters (one person’s attempt to regularly summarize the status of many
ongoing pieces of work)
~
Reprints (of formal papers, of preprints, of newspaper and magazine articles;
these reprints are often interspersed with commentary on their contents)
~ Discussions (of issues raised by a field of research; in the cold fusion case,
topics include fraud, energy conservation, hot fusion, etc.)

To categorize this information, it is useful to adopt a scheme from Carley

and Wendt ( 1991, 415), who divided information into &dquo;primary&dquo; and &dquo;sec-
ondary.&dquo; &dquo;Primary information is the basic information that a new technique,
model, or idea exists.... Such information often includes a very high-level
or abstract description. Primary information is the knowledge claim.&dquo; Pri-

mary information is not necessarily stable knowledge supported by a social

consensus-it is merely the claim that such knowledge exists. In their study
of a computer science/artificial intelligence group, Carley and Wendt further
divided primary information into &dquo;big ideas&dquo; and &dquo;operational ideas.&dquo;
Secondary information, in Carley and Wendt’s scheme, is the detailed
information that science needs to convert primary information into knowl-
edge. &dquo;It includes details on how to access a technology, the specific details
on how the model operates, and coordination information.... Secondary

information includes the important information needed to evaluate the

knowledge claim.&dquo; This includes &dquo;little ideas&dquo; (supporting arguments, con-
126

firming or disconfirming data, etc.), &dquo;operational details,&dquo; and &dquo;organization-

al information&dquo; (p. 415).
In the sections that follow, I will lay out a brief narrative of the cold fusion
saga, highlight the way that an electronic bulletin board contributed to the
flow of information in the saga, and then analyze the contents of the bulletin
board in light of the distinction between primary and secondary information,
to explore the ways in which the bulletin board may or may not have
contributed to creating a social consensus for transforming some information
into more certain knowledge.

The Cold Fusion Saga

On 23 March 1989 electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley
Pons announced at a University of Utah press conference that they had
discovered a method for creating nuclear fusion at room temperature, by
using simple equipment available in any high school laboratory (see appen-
dix ; Close 1991; Huizenga 1993; Lewenstein 1992, 1994b; Lewenstein and
Baur 1991; Mallove 1991; Taubes 1993).1 Although the rationale for the press
conference has never been fully articulated, competition with nuclear physi-
cist Steven Jones at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, clearly
contributed to the decision and to the tight control on information that
Fleischmann and Pons maintained in the coming months.
Within days after the press conference, scientists around the world had
taken up the challenge posed by the two teams and attempted to replicate the
experiment themselves. The normal tempo of even the most exciting scien-
tific breakthrough was superheated by the daily attention from the media, as
well as by newly universal forms of instantaneous communication, such as
electronic bulletin boards, electronic mail, and faxes. For the first six weeks
of the cold fusion saga, competing claims, counterclaims, and interpretations
led to what many headline writers referred to as &dquo;fusion confusion.&dquo; Some
critics questioned details of the work of Fleischmann and Pons, but other
laboratories began to confirm some parts of the results.
A series of public events in April kept cold fusion in the news. Then on 1
May, at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Baltimore, physicists
produced a string of negative evaluations of cold fusion. The APS meeting
marked the beginning of the end of media attention to cold fusion. But the
scientific controversy rolled on. Well-known researchers at Texas A&M,
Stanford, and elsewhere still claimed to be confirming the excess heat claims
of Fleischmann and Pons and were either debunking or addressing the
criticisms made of their own work. The results-whatever they were-of
 127

Fleischmann and Pons were becoming irrelevant to the story of cold fusion.
Scientific attention was shifting to the laboratories and researchers who had
now set up independent experiments.
Over the next five years, a variety of scientific reports, meetings, and
panels were convened on cold fusion. Over time, cold fusion researchers
became divided between the &dquo;skeptics,&dquo; who thought that any &dquo;positive&dquo;
results were likely to be caused by sloppy experiments or subtle errors, and
the &dquo;believers,&dquo; who were more willing to accept lack of reproducibility and
other problems when they were convinced of the strength of their own work
or the work of others.

During those five years, the peer review literature accumulated. By August
1994 more than 925 articles on cold fusion had appeared around the world
(Britz 1994). Although the trend in the number of articles published was
clearly downward, scientific activity had not ceased. International meetings
on cold fusion were held annually from 1990, and at this writing are scheduled

into 1996.
Public notice of cold fusion work continued sporadically. Late in 1991,
Fleischmann made several public appearances in the United States. On 2
January 1992, cold fusion researcher Andrew Riley was killed by an explo-
sion at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, leading to several
newspaper stories. Later in 1992, Tom Droege (an independent researcher in
Batavia, Illinois, who worked for Fermilab but did his cold fusion work on
his own time in his basement laboratory), whose work was then respected by
both skeptics and believers, became more widely known after his photograph
appeared in Business Week and he began posting summaries of his work on
electronic bulletin boards. By the summer of 1992, the Japanese Ministry for
International Trade and Industry was publicly acknowledging a multimillion
dollar, five-year research program into cold fusion (under the label of
&dquo;hydrogen energy&dquo;).
The active involvement of the Japanese government in supporting cold
fusion led many believers to complain that the American government had
engaged in a conspiracy against cold fusion and that &dquo;once again&dquo; the United
States would fall behind as the Japanese exploited a new technological
advance originally developed in the United States. Thus public discussion of
cold fusion combined technological and political issues.

Electronic Communication in the Cold Fusion Saga

From the beginning of the saga, telecommunication and computer-mediated
technologies played an important role in the speed with which developments
128

occurred. During the early months of 1989, when the competition between
BYU and the University of Utah was heating up, Fleischmann and Pons
routinely used the telephone to stay in touch when they were in separate
countries. When Fleischmann was in Utah, he used the fax machine to send
inquiries to colleagues at the United Kingdom’s Harwell national laboratory,
sometimes using the fax to make appointments for follow-up telephone calls
(Williams 1990). In the days just before the public announcement,
Fleischmann communicated with a reporter for the Financial Times (of
London) via telephone and fax, leading the Financial Tmes to publish the
first mass media article on the cold fusion announcement (Pool 1989). The
Financial Tmes incident nicely illustrates the interaction among media that
new communication technologies often bring. Information that first appears
via fax or electronic mail may reappear in newspapers or other mass media-
which themselves may then be excerpted or retransmitted via fax and
electronic mail. To try to resolve which medium affects the other is to enter
an endless regression, a chicken-and-egg discussion. The more important

question is how the interaction yields credible, socially sustained knowledge.

The degree to which new communication technologies are part of the
science communication network was also apparent in the ways in which other
scientists learned of the cold fusion announcement. Many researchers first
heard of the announcement via the &dquo;CBS Evening News&dquo; or &dquo;MacNeil/
Lehrer,&dquo; which both ran major stories on the night of 23 March. Other
researchers heard about the announcement via telephone or via electronic
mail (E-mail); some, like Caltech theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, could
recall six weeks later from whom they had learned of the announcement, but
they could not recall whether the message came by phone or E-mail (Smith
1989).
E-mail, electronic bulletin boards, and fax machines played especially
important roles in the ongoing distribution of information about cold fusion.
When preprints of manuscripts by the BYU and the University of Utah teams
became available about a week after the public announcement, copies of the
preprints were faxed and (after having been scanned into computer-readable
format) were sent by E-mail around the world. A standard joke became that
the faxes were photocopied and resent so many times that the only words
legible were &dquo;Do Not Copy!&dquo; Newspaper reporters traded faxes of preprints
for expert opinions, providing services to scientists interested in the phe-
nomenon in an exchange of information unusual for journalists (Lewenstein

1992).
The use of electronic bulletin boards was one of the most notable new uses
of communication technology in the cold fusion saga. Within a day of the
 129

initial press conference, comments on the announcement were posted on the

sci.physics newsgroup.’ A week later, a new newsgroup called alt.fusion was
created specifically to discuss cold fusion. Nearly 2,000 individual articles
(or messages) appeared in that newsgroup by the end of June 1989, when
alt.fusion was superseded by another new newsgroup, sci.physics.fusion.
Between June 1989 and June 1992, more than 3,000 additional messages
appeared in sci.physics.fusion. Because of the novelty of this form of elec-
tronic communication in the scientific community, this article will focus on
the contribution of electronic bulletin boards to scientific communication.
An important effect of all this communication using both old and new
technologies was to prevent discrete items of information from coalescing
into stable knowledge supported by a social consensus. At any one time,
individuals (whether active researchers or observers) might have had access
to newspaper articles written the day before, radio reports broadcast that
morning, magazine articles written a week earlier, E-mail messages com-
menting on issues raised on earlier days, not to mention collected material
sitting on a desk that had accumulated over the preceding days and weeks.
Although, in principle, individuals could discount information and discrimi-
nate among information based on its source and date (Bryant and Street 1988;
Dervin 1989), in practice they seemed to do this only rarely. All information
entered a single &dquo;central processing unit&dquo; (the individual’s brain), with
conflicts and contradictions in the information remaining unresolved
(Lewenstein 1995). In addition, when each individual had a different set of
conflicting information, no consensus on what the information represented-
what knowledge was to be drawn out of the information input~ould be
developed. I consider this a problem of unstable information.
A personal example from 1992 illustrates the point. On 2 January 1992,
Andrew Riley, a cold fusion researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park,
California, was killed when an experimental apparatus blew up. I heard about
the incident the next day, through a one-paragraph story in my local newspa-
per. The following day, I heard the last few moments of a National Public
Radio story on the incident, which suggested that the explosion might have
been caused by a faulty pressure valve. I also received an electronic bulletin
board message, essentially repeating the information from the previous day’s
newspaper. About a week later, I retrieved New York Tmes and Wall Street
Journal articles that had appeared in the two days after the incident; these
articles strengthened my sense that a faulty pressure valve might have been
involved. Because of a quirk in the redistribution system by which I receive
electronic bulletin board messages, not until 10 January did I receive discus-
sion that had been taking place on the bulletin board during the intervening
130

week. This information increased my confusion about possible causes for the
explosion. On 21 January, I saw an article in Science on the explosion; it again
mentioned the possibility of a pressure valve failure. But then, on 23 January,
I received copies of local newspapers from near the accident site, published
in the week after the accident. From them I learned that the pressure valve
explanation had been explicitly rejected within a few days of the explosion.
News of that rejection, however, had failed to make it into the less local
sources of information to which I had access in the meantime (see Figure 1).
This example illustrates the degree to which differential access to infor-
mation can affect both the stability of information available to any one
individual, as well as the ways in which that differential access may affect
individuals’ responses to information (which, in turn, may influence the
future responses of others). One prominent skeptic of cold fusion, for
example, has been IBM researcher Richard Garwin. On 12 April 1989
Garwin attended a one-day conference on cold fusion in Erice, Sicily. A week
later, his summary of that meeting appeared in Nature. What readers of his
summary did not know, however, was that his judgment of the presentations
at Erice was probably influenced not just by the presentations themselves but
by his access to the original manuscripts submitted by the BYU and the
University of Utah teams to Nature, for which he had been a referee. By 2
April Garwin had already written a referee’s report (which, among other
things, indicated that the manuscripts he had received had been supplemented
by materials that the authors had faxed to Nature after their original submis-
sions) on the two articles. Although he was careful not to reveal his knowl-
edge of those articles in his comments, Garwin almost certainly benefited
from the additional time he had had to consider the issues raised in the
manuscripts (Cornell Cold Fusion Archive [CCFA], Garwin folder; Garwin
1989). This example suggests that access to information affects how an
individual responds to new information and that differential access implies
differential evaluation. Despite the normative description of science as an
arena of fully open communication, the new communication technologies
exacerbate the practical problem of some groups of people having more
access to information than other people (Garvey 1979; Merton 1973).
As the preceding paragraphs have made clear, the new communication
technologies played an integral role in the cold fusion saga. They clearly
accelerated the speed at which individuals had to respond to new ideas and
new information, and they clearly affected who had access to what informa-

tion at what time. What remains unclear is how these new patterns affected
the process by which unstable information became stable scientific knowl-
edge supported by a social consensus. The following section, on the elec-
tronic bulletin boards, addresses this issue.
131
132

The Electronic Bulletin Boards

Method of Study
The study of cold fusion bulletin boards was based on copies downloaded
and stored in the CCFA (Lewenstein 1991, 1994a). I compiled basic descrip-
tive information about the sampled messages (size, date, contributor, etc.). I
also conducted a qualitative content analysis to distinguish between the
presentation of isolated pieces of information and discussions more clearly
intended to move beyond information toward the development of a social
consensus about what should count as stable knowledge. Overall statistics

presented below were based on the full set of downloads. Information about
the particular topics covered by the bulletin boards came from a sample of
files representing, approximately, the 10th to 15th of each month from June
1989 to June 1992. (For technical reasons, I was not able to sample the months
of April and May 1989.) Comparing the total number of messages with the
number of messages sampled indicates that a reasonably representative
sample was obtained (correlation coefficient of .61 with one-tailed signifi-
cance of .001, calculated with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

[SPSS]/PC+ software).
To categorize the postings for the content analysis, I modified the primary
and secondary categories of Carley and Wendt (1991) into &dquo;big ideas&dquo; and
&dquo;little ideas.&dquo; Knowledge, I assumed, would develop as people came to
consensus about the big ideas, as they agreed which big ideas were no longer
isolated pieces of information but were more fully developed ideas to which
others could subscribe as established knowledge. Little ideas, in contrast,
were still merely pieces of information, useful perhaps as input into discus-

sions, but not themselves the stuff of knowledge.3Ioperationalized these

decisions with the following definitions:

1. Big ideas: These items contained major ideas, often worked out in great detail.
For items to be classified under this heading, they had to be original on the
net.
Technical: presentations and discussions of original material presented on
a.
the net, including theoretical speculations, original data, bibliographies,
newsletters, and so forth.
b. Nontechnical: discussions of implications of cold fusion, including com-
ments on hot-fusion variants, world economy, terrorism, and so forth, as
well as discussions about nontechnical aspects of cold fusion (such as the
propriety of science by press release, nature of the scientific method, etc.).
2. Little ideas: Items were classified under this heading if they essentially
involved information available elsewhere.
 133

a. Technical: requests and responses regarding information about specific

scientific issues. Includes reprints of and comments on media articles,
because these often included or led to technical issues and questions (but
note that some of these may more appropriately have been classified as
&dquo;nontechnical&dquo;).
b. Nontechnical: requests and responses for nontechnical information, plus
organizational messages regarding the net and jokes (often interpretable
only in the context of an ongoing discussion).

Basic Descriptive Information

The electronic bulletin boards surveyed for this study are part of the
USENET international network, which is available to most computer users
who have access to the overall &dquo;Internet.&dquo; As of 1992, approximately 37,000
organizations worldwide were connected to USENET. The USENET con-
sisted then of a series of more than 1,500 &dquo;newsgroups.&dquo; (Today the number
is more than 8,000). Each newsgroup covers a single topic area, such as a
particular computer language, a particular area of science, or a particular type
of humor. Using appropriate software, users can read and respond to particu-
lar messages. Each message contains a &dquo;subject&dquo; line, and messages with
identical subject lines constitute a &dquo;thread&dquo;; software allows readers to follow
a particular thread forward or backward in time. In the terms used by CMC

researchers, newsgroups are a cross between a &dquo;conference&dquo; (in which

postings are arranged by topic and subtopic) and a &dquo;bulletin board&dquo; (in which
postings are arranged chronologically). As of 1991, approximately 1.4 mil-
lion people read at least one newsgroup (Sproull and Kiesler 1991).
This description of the particular CMC in cold fusion is necessarily
oversimplified. Some CMC researchers prefer to consider bulletin boards as
subsets of conferences, describing the difference in terms of scale and access
(Quarterman 1990). More important, the boundaries between these different
systems vary according to the individual user. For example, the basic
sci.physics.fusion newsgroup on USENET required that an individual ac-
tively choose to look at the bulletin board. However, the text of anything on
the bulletin board could be sent to anyone who had subscribed to an auto-
mated redistribution list on the separate BITNET network, called a &dquo;listserv.&dquo;
When this method was used, the newsgroup appeared as though it were an
item of electronic mail. In the future, these boundaries will grow even fuzzier.
In addition, postings on the net often consisted of material that was
generated in some &dquo;non-net&dquo; context. Thus many postings included complete
reprints or excerpts from other publications; others included rebroadcasts of
letters that were originally sent on paper or by E-mail from one person to
another. A good example of the latter were the &dquo;Cold Fusion Newsletters&dquo;
134

distributed in the first months of the saga by Douglas Morrison, a physicist

at CERN. Originally distributed by Morrison to his own colleagues, they
were then passed along (electronically) to other colleagues and were eventu-

ally posted to the net for mass distribution (in which the person posting the
message cannot control who will receive it). Any attempt to think about the
role of the net in scientific communication must consider the interaction of
various kinds of communication that have traditionally been separate or
difficult to combine. In particular, the distribution of individual pieces of
information over the net may contribute to social perceptions about a topic
in ways unintended or uncontrollable by the person posting the information.
The first messages about cold fusion appeared within a day of the
University of Utah’s initial news conference, on newsgroups such as sci.physics
and sci.research and on several short-lived E-mail distribution lists (Dieter
Britz, personal communication, 31 August 1992). Within a week, a dedicated
newsgroup called alt.fusion was established. Between 1 April 1989 and 1
July 1989, when alt.fusion was superseded by a newly established newsgroup
called sci.physics.fusion, approximately 1,800 messages were posted on
alt.fusion (an average of about 20 per day). Messages about cold fusion also
appeared on other bulletin boards. By the end of the summer of 1989, virtually
all messages about cold fusion appeared only on sci.physics.fusion.
From April 1989 to June 1992, about 13 megabytes of material (equivalent
to about 6,500 pages of text) from alt.fusion, sci.physics, and sci.physics.fu-
sion were saved on diskette in the CCFA. Statistical analysis suggests a strong
correlation between the total volume of the newsgroup and the number of
messages (correlation coefficient of .79, one-tailed significance of .001,
calculated with SPSS/PC+ software).

Number of Messages
Between March 1989 and June 1992, nearly 5,000 messages were posted
on alt.fusion and sci.physics.fusion. For this study, I looked primarily at

sci.physics.fusion files containing about 2,500 messages over a period of

thirty-six months. For technical reasons, it was difficult to quantify material
from about 500 of those messages. Although the average month under study
contained about 70 messages, the actual volume varied dramatically, from
less than 10 to more than 250.

Number of Regular Contributors

I identified a cluster of 37 &dquo;regulars&dquo; who contributed at least 10 messages
in at least one calendar year (1989, 1990, 1991, 1992). Of those, only 7 had
 135

contributed at least 10 messages in three out of four years. On average, about

sixteen people contributed more than 10 messages in any one year, with the
number of messages ranging from 10 to 117; the average of this group was
about 25 messages per year, with a clear trend toward increasing activity by
the &dquo;regulars&dquo; in 1991 and 1992.
On average, another twenty-two people contributed between 5 and 9
messages per year. Together, the regulars and the &dquo;sporadics&dquo; represent
between about 50 percent and 70 percent of all messages on the net. Another
few hundred people contributed the remaining messages (284 in 1991, the
only year specifically counted).
There is no way to describe these three groups of contributors in terms of
nationality, disciplinary affiliation, institutional affiliation, or other charac-
teristics. It is clear, however, that many people read the net and contributed
ideas without directly posting messages to the net. Jorge Stolfi, for example,
was a researcher who fell into the &dquo;sporadic&dquo; category. But he was acknowl-

edged by other net contributors for posing questions to them directly in

person-to-person E-mail (CCFA, 920514.spf electronic file).

Self-Descriptions of Contributors
Although I cannot describe the contributors to the net in demographic
terms, it is important to characterize their relationship to the research com-
munity if we are to understand the relationship between their postings and
the eventual development of a social consensus in the broader scientific
community about cold fusion knowledge.
Few contributors to the net in the period under study identified themselves
clearly. Some were active cold fusion researchers: Steven Jones of BYU, for
example, posted directly to the net about two or three times a year, usually to
respond to a direct request for information (until shortly before this study was
completed, when he began posting nearly weekly, a pattern he maintained in
the following months). Several others were clearly electrochemists or physi-
cists with some direct professional knowledge of the fields most relevant to
cold fusion experiments, including people who either were doing or had done
at least some experimental work on cold fusion.
But the vast majority of the contributors were certainly not professionals
in the field. Many posts are accompanied by disclaimers such as &dquo;I am not a
chemist, so all I can do is speculate on the processes.&dquo;A survey of net users
conducted in the summer of 1989 found that 70 percent of the respondents
came from the computer science or engineering fields. Only 16 percent came

from the physical sciences. A follow-up survey in 1990 found similar num-
bers ; oneespecially interesting finding was that nearly 20 percent of the
136

people who responded (9 out of 49) described themselves as cold fusion

experimenters (CCFA, 890914.spf and 900823.spf electronic files).5
One characteristic of the contributors cannot be quantified but is directly
relevant to the question of how information from the net contributes to social
consensus: the degree to which an individual is committed to nontraditional
distribution of information and thus values interactions on the net. Regular
contributor Dieter Britz (an Australian electrochemist working in Denmark)
stressed the importance of the net for extending opportunities for scientific
discussion:
The group encourages what Terry [Bollinger, another regular contributor] calls
&dquo;group think,&dquo; which I think is a valuable function. You will not encourage this
with personal insults.... I am not advocating mutual back slapping; the phrase
scientific hard-ball comes to mind again. Hard-ball is OK, when it involves
the SUBJECT, rather than people. (CCFA, 920511.spf electronic file)

Britz’s comments were echoed by John Farrell, a researcher who conducted

a widely publicized series of experiments and developed a new theory to explain
his results. After posting a great deal of information about his work on the
net and responding to many pointed inquiries, Farrell noted the following:

I want to thank Dieter Britz, Barry Merriman... and all other regular contribu-
tors on this net. Even the nonbelievers on this net are truly openminded on this
subject [cold fusion]. I read the net daily and I am very thankful to those who
spend the time and energy to make contributions. (CCFA, 91112.spf electronic
file)
Tom Droege, the Fermilab researcher doing experiments in his basement,
was especially voluble on his commitment to the net as an integral part of
scientific communication. After describing one of his experiments, he asked,
&dquo;Perhaps someone can point out some obvious error in my thinking. A factor
of two would be nice&dquo; (CCFA, 920910.spf electronic file). He also appreci-
ated receiving information: &dquo;Many thanks to Todd Green who posted the
enthalpies of several compounds. This is why I make postings. To exchange
information&dquo; (CCFA, 920213.spf electronic file). At other times, he was more
self-conscious about his use of the nets to move from information to secure
knowledge:
Looks like I was not thinking too clearly, and the measurement error is worse
than I thought.... But that is the whole purpose in sending these messages, to
help me to think straight. Thinking about it, that is one of the purposes of
publication, to find truth through public display. (CCFA, 920910.spf electronic file)
Eventually, Droege began to explore the possibility that the net would
provide the social community through which his experiments and the work
 137

of others would be validated as reliable knowledge. Sometimes, he suggested

that electronic conversations were merely precursors to formal publication:
In a private message, Douglas Morrison [the skeptic of cold fusion who wrote
the electronic &dquo;Cold Fusion Newsletter&dquo;] writes to me about these postings,
&dquo;Am enjoying your series of messages on the net. As you know I prefer for
myself to try and check things very carefully before publishing, but in the
present situation have noticed that careful papers tend to get easily ignored (for
example the very carefully written and much corrected paper by Fritz Will and
the GE people is a very important [one]-saying F&P’s original paper is no
proof of Cold Fusion, but there has been absolutely no response). So it may
well turn out that your way of continuous communication is more effective.&dquo;
This message is friendly and just expresses a different viewpoint. So do I
(prefer to publish well worked material), Douglas.I do not consider this
publication, but rather the interchange that would go on in my &dquo;college&dquo;
(American College Dictionary definition #8) if I had one. Unfortunately, my
Fermilab colleagues walk away, or excuse themselves to get a cookie at the
colloquium (as the director did last week) if I bring up the (anomalous heat)
subject
So I must go where I can to exchange ideas. I feel very strongly about open
disclosure of mistakes and errors. I would rather hear about 5 minutes of
disaster than read 100 pages of perfectly crafted experimental technique.
Andrew Riley’s death reminds us all that any sealed container is a potential
bomb (nuclear or chemical-it makes no difference. The way to make a bomb
is to put some energy in a strong container, a weak one just goes poof).
But a discussion of the dangers of strong, sealed, containers is unlikely to
find publication in a &dquo;cold fusion&dquo; paper to those who most need to read it. In
your &dquo;college,&dquo; if you have one, the mistakes are seen. You pass the laboratory
and hear your associate cursing, or see the associate cleaning up the broken
glass. Normal practice is to write papers as if nothing ever went wrong.... I
hope that others save time on their experiments by guarding against my errors.
That is why I describe them. (CCFA, 920514.spf electronic file; minor typo-
graphic and grammatical errors have been silently corrected)
But at other times, he suggested that electronic bulletin boards would ulti-
mately replace traditional forms of communication, changing the nature of
scientific collaboration and the process by which information was trans-
formed by social consensus into knowledge:

My plan in all of this is to have fun. I am trying to put everything into the public
domain. I will claim in any future litigation that this media is public. I assume
I will be dead before patent fights stop if this turns out to be real.
BTW [E-mail shorthand: &dquo;by the way&dquo;], if a publication comes out of this,
I am going to try to publish as the physics.sci.fusion collaboration. Or possibly
as T. Droege and the sci.physics.fusion collaboration-or whatever the proper
name is-I don’t even know.
So the real experiment I am trying to do is e-mail science. The &dquo;anomalous
heat&dquo; project is just an excuse. I think this is the media of the future. I know I
138

am doing most of the work, but the help received has been building over time.
I look forward to equal (collaborations are never really equal) collaborators as
this progresses.
To P&F [Pons and Fleischmann], EPRI [Electric Power Research Institute],
and any others doing secret work.I agree that you are allowed to do that, and
it is proper to go for financial reward. But it is also proper for some of us to
try to beat you at your game and to put discoveries into the public domain. So
don’t wait too long to disclose your &dquo;teaching&dquo; or I will publish first! (CCFA,
920728.spf electronic file; minor typographic and grammatical errors have
been silently corrected)

Other contributors to the net have also indicated that they consider their
use of CMC not just as an adjunct to traditional scientific communication but
as a first step to recasting the entire structure of science. Thus one charac-
teristic of contributors may be an intellectual commitment to changing the
process by which information is exchanged and validated as knowledge.

Signal-to-Noise Problem
The most noticeable characteristic of the messages was how much volume
was simply &dquo;noise&dquo;: header information, extracts from previous messages,
misposted messages (an occasional list of books for sale, for example, or the
program for an upcoming computer science meeting). I estimated that 30
percent of the volume of the net was pure noise. The poor signal-to-noise
ratio was caused by two problems:

1. Inherent technological issues: examples include long &dquo;headers&dquo; (routing infor-

mation) on otherwise short messages, messages accidentally posted because
of computer or operator mistakes, and long extracts from previous messages
repeated because of technical difficulties in editing them into shorter
quotations.
2. Blather and off-topic comments: like any hallway conversation, a computer-
mediated discussion can often stray off the topic. To combat this tendency,
bulletin board systems have techniques of etiquette (such as subject lines and
new newsgroups) to try to keep discussions focused. But these techniques did
not always work.

Big Ideas and Little Ideas

On the basis of the definitions of big ideas and little ideas above, I found
that about 25 percent of all postings were &dquo;big, technical&dquo; information (Table
1). In 1989 virtually all of the items in this category consisted of technical
speculation regarding cold fusion. By 1992 the majority of information in
this category consisted of reports of original data or responses to those
 139

Table 1. Topics on sci.physics.fusion (in percentages)

NOTE: Bold-faced numbers are summary figures.

original data. In 1989 a significant number of the messages in this category

included the &dquo;Cold Fusion Newsletter&dquo; circulated by Douglas R. O. Morrison
of CERN and referred to by some researchers as &dquo;the bible&dquo; (suggesting a
degree of consensus about its contents) (Salamon 1989). Another major
element of this category was the annotated bibliography maintained by Dieter
Britz and posted regularly to the net. Most of the articles in this category
could be considered useful for researchers actively involved in cold fusion
research. Also in this category were specific technical warnings that were
occasionally posted. For example, when one message suggested doing elec-
trolysis with a metallic potassium cathode, another message responded,
&dquo;Stand back if you try it. K reacts rather violently with water&dquo; (CCFA,
911115.spf electronic file).
Another 30 percent of the messages in the sample were in the &dquo;big,
nontechnical&dquo; category. These included discussion of the implications of cold
fusion for energy production and conservation, comments on the possibilities
of fraud in various episodes of the cold fusion saga, opinions about the value
of &dquo;science by press conference,&dquo; and similar topics. Some of these articles
might have been useful for researchers actively engaged in cold fusion
research, but they were more likely to be useful to policymakers and others
following the cold fusion story from the sidelines. These discussions often
140

strayed into topics far from cold fusion and often included a great deal of
uninformed comment. In February 1992, for example, in response to
messages from physical scientist Henry Bauer summarizing the argu-
ments in his new book, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific
Method (1992), a long vitriolic discussion ensued regarding &dquo;what is sci-
ence,&dquo; with many disparaging remarks about the place of the social sciences
in &dquo;science.&dquo;’
About 30 percent of the articles fell into the &dquo;little, technical&dquo; category.
These articles included requests for specific technical information and re-
prints of news stories that contained technical information along with com-
mentary on those stories (either in the same message or in subsequent
messages). The news stories were often useful for alerting net readers to new
developments in the cold fusion saga; one example that occurred while this
study was under way was the announcement of a new corporation devoted
to developing and exploiting a new nuclear model to explain cold fusion
(CCFA, Clustron Sciences Corporation folder). The requests for technical
information usually came from people who appeared, based on the content
of the messages, to have some understanding of particular scientific issues
but to be ignorant of others. They were essentially amateurs seeking to learn
more about the scientific issues for their own edification. Thus people with

rudimentary understandings of quantum mechanics might ask for details

about how to perform certain calculations; others would ask about numbers
to use in calculations of nuclear cross sections (reaction frequencies). Re-
sponses to inquiries sometimes consisted of the results of a bibliographic
search that one user of the bulletin board had conducted for another. Only
rarely did these requests seem to come from people actively engaged in cold
fusion research at a professional level.
The use of electronic networks to search for information is a well-recognized
phenomenon, and one that networks seem to be especially suited for. Sproull
and Kiesler (1991) indicated that &dquo;Does anyone know?&dquo; informational in-
quiries tend to increase when electronic networks are available, and they
suggested that this may happen because networks make the cost of respond-
ing low (in terms of time and effort). However, the experience of the
sci.physics.fusion newsgroup suggests that the low cost of responding may
be a double-edged sword. Because so many active users of the newsgroup
were not themselves experts in the fields under discussion, misinformation
was common. Many of the messages counted in the &dquo;information request/

response&dquo; category consisted of corrections to previous messages. In other

words, the low cost of entry may also lead to a low cost of error.
Finally, about 15 percent of the messages fell into the &dquo;little, nontechnical&dquo;
category. These included nontechnical information requests (bibliographic
 141

references, addresses, etc.), organizational messages regarding the news-

group itself (such as the switch from alt.fusion to sci.physics.fusion), and
occasional jokes or parodies posted to the net.
The most important change over the time covered by this study was the
decision by Tom Droege to post routinely summaries of his experiments,
inviting comments and critiques (see Figure 2). This led to the dramatic
change in the &dquo;big, technical&dquo; proportion of messages from under 25 percent
in 1990 and 1991, to more than 40 percent in the first half of 1992.’
Other changes over time were less clear. The number of reprints of news
stories continually decreased, as the level of news about cold fusion de-
creased. In addition, fewer preprints of technical articles were circulating on
the net; this may have been influenced both by the decision of many
mainstream researchers to leave the cold fusion field and by the decision of
most of those who did remain active not to use the net actively. Most other
types of information seemed to wax and wane on the net. Often, a single topic
or thread would generate a huge amount of response, distorting the statistics.
For example, in November 1991, when the Joint European Torus (JET)
nuclear fusion laboratory in the United Kingdom conducted a successful test,
the net was filled for weeks with reports about the experiment and discussions
of its impact.

How Did CMC Contribute to the

Development of Knowledge about Cold Fusion?
New communication technologies, and especially fax machines and E-
mail, played important role in the daily processes by which information
an
on cold fusion was distributed. The impact of these new technologies was

largely confined, however, to issues of awareness and information gathering.

Because researchers could learn new pieces of information more quickly, they
could make decisions about whether to pursue new research programs, they
could make judgments about the information on which others are acting, and
so on. They could collect preprints, share problems in gathering data, and

request help in finding appropriate background information. All of these

things entered into the process by which researchers made judgments about
the new, fast-moving, controversial area called cold fusion and thus were part
of the process by which social consensus-knowledge-was produced.
However, traditional forums for science communication continued to be
the most for
important locale allowing researchers to make judgments about
the work of others and thus convert information into knowledge. Some of the
most widespread judgments about cold fusion work were formed at the many
142
 143

conference presentations that occurred in April and May 1989, especially the
sessions at the APS and the special Department of Energy (DOE)-sponsored
Santa Fe Workshop on Cold Fusion Phenomenon. Many researchers waited
for formally published reports before passing judgment; those reports ranged
from journal articles to the report of the special DOE Energy Research
Advisory Board panel devoted to cold fusion. Even today, the traditional
forum of the scientific meeting (in this case, the annual cold fusion confer-
ences) continue to provide opportunities for cold fusion researchers to gather
and share information.
The role of the electronic bulletin boards suggests that they, as completely
&dquo;public&dquo; forums, did not serve the needs of the active research community.
During the period of this study, Tom Droege was the only researcher who
was widely considered to be an &dquo;insider&dquo; in the active cold fusion research

community who regularly posted to the net. Although, as noted above, he

often publicly proclaimed his preference for this new form of scientific
communication, he was the only active researcher to do so. The evidence
suggests that other active researchers followed the net only rarely (perhaps a
few times a year), if at all. Most likely, they found the &dquo;signal-to-noise ratio&dquo;
of the public newsgroups too poor for the nets to be useful. Thus the nets
were most useful for the nonprofessional observers, the people who wanted

to know what was going on in cold fusion without themselves taking an active
part in the day-to-day work required to keep cold fusion research moving
forward. In particular, these people were not the relevant community for
making the judgments about which information was most useful for creating
8
stable knowledge.

Implications
The USENET system, where the sci.physics.fusion bulletin board resides,
was originally designed for computer users interested in sharing information.
Although its use has expanded, it is still not designed for professional
scientists. Other bulletin board systems (including ones for oceanographers,
high-energy physicists, and others) may be more useful to researchers (Hesse
et al. 1993). But the need to keep these bulletin boards free of the inappro-
priate or ill-informed messages that contributed to the noise level on sci.phys-
ics.fusion suggests that &dquo;observers&dquo; and &dquo;participants&dquo; will continue to need
separate bulletin boards in the future. As the global Internet continues its
dramatic growth, the distinction between &dquo;the&dquo; net (the whole, publicly
accessible cyberspace) and smaller electronic spaces with more limited
access may be seen more often.
144

Despite the hope of some net contributors to create a new form of scientific
communication, this study suggests that CMC will not replace traditional
face-to-face interaction. Although CMC allows discussions about technical
issues to take place in forums that break the bonds of time and space, they
do not allow researchers to acquire efficiently all the information (including
judgments about veracity, thoroughness, and group opinion) that go into
making scientific judgments. These judgments are fundamentally social
decisions that require access to a greater scope of information than can be
transmitted via CMC.
These implications, however, can only be tentative. Additional research
is clearly needed in several areas. First, we need a better characterization of
who participates on the net. Through interviews, surveys, and direct E-mail
follow-ups, a study should look at several different kinds of electronic
communication networks and attempt to identify and characterize the users.
Although some studies of this type have been attempted for small, narrowly
defined scientific networks, and for broader non-science-oriented networks,
the particular need to understand the interaction of communication and
knowledge creation makes it important to conduct empirically based studies
involving science.
A second area for research starts with the users, rather than with the
networks. Studies need to be conducted of scientists, science journalists,
science policy analysts, and other relevant groups to learn in greater detail
how they use electronic communication technologies to collect information
and to make the judgments that lead to knowledge.
 145

Appendix
Cold Fusion Chronology
23 March 1989 Press conference.
1 April First confirmations claimed.
7 April State of Utah appropriates $5 million to cold fusion.
10 April Texas A&M announces confirmation.
12 April Cold fusion sessions held at American Chemical Society
meeting in Dallas; special cold fusion conference held in
Erice, Sicily; Fleischmann, Pons, and Hawkins’s article
published in Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and
Interfacial Electrochemistry.
24 April Jones et al.’s article published in Nature.
26 April Pons and Fleischmann testify before Congress; cold fusion
session held at Materials Research Society meeting in San Diego.
1 May American Physical Society meets in Baltimore with special
cold fusion sessions.
8 May Electrochemical Society meeting in Los Angeles holds special
cold fusion session.
23-25 May Workshop on Cold Fusion Phenomenon, sponsored by
Department of Energy, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
15 July Department of Energy (DOE) panel releases interim report.
21 July State of Utah releases $5 million to National Cold Fusion
Institute.
15-16 September Special conference on cold fusion held in Varenna, Italy.
16-18 October National Science Foundation (NSF)/Electric Power Research
Institute (EPRI)-sponsored &dquo;Workshop on Anomalous
Effects in Deuterated Metals (Cold Fusion)&dquo; held in
Washington, DC.
12 November DOE panel releases final report.
12 December Special session on cold fusion held at American Society of
Mechanical Engineers.
24 March 1990 Nature publishes major article claiming no evidence of
fusion observed in Pons and Fleischmann’s own cells.
28-30 March First Annual Conference on Cold Fusion sponsored by National
Cold Fusion Institute (NCFI) in Salt Lake City.
7 June Reports surface that major piece of evidence for tritium in cold
fusion cells at Texas A&M may be due to contamination.
15 June Science publishes article by freelance journalist Gary Taubes,
essentially charging some Texas A&M researchers with fraud.
19 June Month-long uproar over NCFI finances leads to University of
Utah President Chase Peterson’s resignation.
23-27 July Many cold fusion sessions held at World Hydrogen Energy
Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii.
146

8-13 October Italian Physical Society holds extended session on cold fusion
in Trento, Italy.
15 October Texas A&M committee absolves any of its researchers of
fraudulent behavior.
22-24 October Brigham Young University sponsors conference on
&dquo;Anomalous Effects in Deuterium/Solid Systems.&dquo;
24-26 October Pons apparently &dquo;disappears,&dquo; fails to appear at NCFI
evaluation meeting.
8 November Pons appears at NCFI evaluation meeting.
December Fleischmann gives public talks at California Institute of
Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
7-8 January 19911 Pons resigns regular faculty position at the University of Utah,
moves to research professor status.
29 June Five-day Second International Conference on Cold Fusion
begins at Lake Como, Italy.
2 January 1992 Cold fusion researcher killed in explosion at SRI International,
Menlo Park, California.
18 June SRI International announces that explosion killing Riley was
probably caused by mixture of deuterium and oxygen gases
in well-known process.
July Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry says that
it will devote millions of dollars to cold fusion research
(reports range from &dquo;less than $2 million&dquo; to &dquo;tens of millions&dquo;)
27 July Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory claim to have
replicated a positive experiment originally conducted at
another laboratory-the first time, they say, such an
independent confirmation has occurred.
10 August Eugene Mallove, author of book on cold fusion, announces
formation of Clustron Sciences Corporation &dquo;to pursue
commercial development of cold fusion.&dquo;
26 August Fleischmann engages in public debate at British Association
for Advancement of Science meeting.
20-25 October Third International Conference on Cold Fusion held in
Nagoya, Japan.
May 1993 Pons and Fleischmann publish peer-reviewed article in
Physics Letters A, a mainstream physics journal.
6-9 December Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion held in
Lahaina, Hawaii.
24-26 May 1994 International symposium on &dquo;Cold Fusion and Advanced
Energy Sources&dquo; held in Minsk, Belarus.
9-15 April 1995 Fifth International Cold Fusion Conference scheduled for
Monte Carlo, Monaco.
Fall 1996 Sixth International Cold Fusion Conference scheduled for
Beijing, China.
 147

Notes

1. Much source material for the history of cold fusion appears in the Cornell Cold Fusion
Archive (CCFA); for more information on the archive, see Lewenstein 1991, 1994a.
2. The sci.physics newsgroup is one of thousands of bulletin boards available through the
USENET computer network, a worldwide collection of bulletin boards used (in the late 1980s)
by at least 1.4 million people. (Today, of course, the number is much greater.) For more
information on USENET and newsgroups, see Krol 1992; Quarterman 1990; Sproull and Kiesler
1991.
3. Early in the cold fusion saga, some users of the electronic bulletin boards tried to make
similar distinctions, requesting separation of "what if?" inquiries and newsclippings about the
"saga" aspects of cold fusion into a separate newsgroup, leaving sci.physics.fusion dedicated to
"actual (or hypothesized) physical mechanisms." The suggestion, although occasionally re-
peated over time, never took hold. See, for example, 890612.spf electronic file, CCFA.
4. See, for example, the 890612.spf, 890712.spf, 890914.spf, 900412.spf, and 920311.spf
electronic files, CCFA. An interesting component of these disclaimers is their rhetorical function
in the disputes among disciplines; by specifying that the writer was not a chemist, a physicist, a
metallurgist, and so forth, the disclaimers allowed individuals to participate in discussions
without engendering complaints that they were posing as experts in fields that others claimed as
their own territory.
5. Only about seventy people responded to the first survey, and fewer to the second, so the
findings must be treated with some caution. For further information, see Johnson 1992.
6 The discussions would be most useful for researchers in science and technology studies
(STS) as primary evidence of the lack of knowledge of STS among non-STS people. See, for
example, 920211.spf electronic file, CCFA.
7. The trend toward more primary, technical information appears to have continued since
the data for this study were collected, which may be linked to the increasing volume noted
earlier.
8. Mullins (1973) discussed the formation of specialties from a seed or core. Some
researchers, such as Freeman (1984), have suggested that computer-mediated communication
(CMC) can recreate the interaction that leads to specialties. In the case of cold fusion, in which
CMC seems to have operated more along the periphery than in the core, the answer seems to be
that CMC cannot re-create the interaction. (There are clear exceptions to the idea that CMC
related to cold fusion took place entirely along the periphery, with Dieter Britz’s bibliographic
work being one of the most important examples.)

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—. 1992. Cold fusion and hot history. Osiris 2d ser., 7:135-63.
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Bruce Lewenstein surfs the net from bvll @cornell.edu, an activity he claims is part of
his job as associate professor in the Departments of Communication and Science &
Technology Studies at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14853). Trained as a science
journalist and as a historian of science, he has directed the Cornell Cold Fusion Archive
since 1989. His primary interest is in the public communication of science and technol-
ogy, and he recently completed a first attempt at a comprehensive survey of activities in
that area in the United States. He is the editor of When Science Meets the Public
(Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1992), asso-
ciate editor of the journal Public Understanding of Science, and managing editor of the
history-of science journal Osiris.