Cold Fusion Letter Author Made Questionable Claims

To The Editors:

In his recent letter to The Crimson (“Madrian Mistaken About Cold Fusion Debate,” July 22), Jed Rothwell writes regarding cold fusion research that “the claim was never ‘invalidated.’” Rothwell then goes on to state that cold fusion has been “replicated by hundreds of major laboratories worldwide,” when in fact the research has had no such success.

Rothwell is a contributing editor at Infinite Energy magazine, a fringe publication devoted to the study of “New Energy,” which the magazine’s website defines to be “the term applied to new sources of energy that are currently not recognized as feasible by the ‘scientific establishment.’” In addition to cold fusion, the editors include “New Energy” to mean other pseudoscientific buzzwords like “zero-point energy” and “significant extensions to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

Charlatans peddling “perpetual motion machines” and other limitless sources of free energy have been around for centuries. The public really doesn’t need The Crimson spreading such falsehoods and granting these hucksters much-craved legitimacy.

JACOB A. BARANDES

Cambridge, Mass.

July 22, 2005

The writer is a graduate student in physics at Harvard.