Partial Houses Built on Common Ground:

Abstract

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone should know about Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapter 3, 'The Sun in a Test Tube: The Story of Cold Fusion', 57-78 [hereafter CP T.J. Pinch, Confronting Nature: The Sociology of Solar-Neutrino Detection (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1986). 3. We note that Lewis' results were delivered in the context of the Baltimore APS meeting where, in conjunction with Koonin's results and the Petrasso results questioning the neutron measurements, they were presented with devastating effect. McKinney has a minor disagreement with us over whether Lewis's talk was indeed the 'knockdown blow', preferring to put most weight upon the results showing problems with the neutron measurements. But this is not the real quarrel between us. We meant that it was a 'knockdown' in the sense that half the physicists present left the meetings after Lewis' talk; that many commentators (for example, Frank Close) point to the importance of these 'back to back' talks in the demise of cold fusion; and that, furthermore, Koonin's claims of incompetence and delusion on the part of Pons and Fleischmann were widely quoted. 4. This is nicely detailed by Greg Myers, Writing Biology: Texts and the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 5. For more details, see Pinch (1986), op. cit. note 2, 163.