Love your videos man, especially how you touch on the real negative impact on individuals in ones like the nortel or cloning docs. Very engaging without being too sensationalist or callous. Thanks!!!!
@@flameshade7601 ngl my thought was way more gruesome - I thought he died in one of the explosions at first and was really emotional about it until I heard otherwise 😭
The worst thing that can happen to a science team is stumbling upon something not quite in their area of expertise, but looking *REALLY BIG,* and them deciding to get all the glory for themselves, instead of checking with an actual expert. That way lies crackpottery.
@@rezrayofficial Yeah that's a fantastic idea lol. My very first reaction approaching any of this shit would be 'there HAS to be fifty asterisks on this or else someone else would have done it already, right?'
@@rezrayofficial I’m not an engineer, researcher, or scientist and I use that one all the time. It helps me denoise a lot of what gets hyped nowadays. Strange that people don’t think that way.
Beautiful execution with the title of the video, then diving into all this backstory about the Grad student, finding out hes a loving father, who's been working so hard he's hardly able to see his family, the inclusion of the quote referring to his wife as a 'widow', then we hear about all the growing pressure, conflict, etc. I was ready for this guy to drop dead somehow. Then I find out the 'problem' is that the guy didn't die. Expertly done, ya got me beautifully.
While what they did was absolutely sketchy, non-transparent, and unscientific, I think what they did was zoom in on a tiny artifact in the “right” location. They didn’t just adjust the axis of the same peak
@@williamsalvia8817 Nah, I think it was pure fabrication. In the expose talk later on they show that there was actually a small dip where the peak should have been
@@williamsalvia8817 They knew their peak was in the wrong spot, doesn't matter if they just adjusted a little bit or zoomed in, they changed the location of the peak in their paper from 2,5 to 2,22 that's knowingly falsifying your paper and therefore fraud.
One of most impressive aspects of this already incredibly impressive documentary is all the original footage of the various press conferences and interviews made at the time. It must have been a colossal effort to find so many bits of obscure footage and string them all together into such a compelling narrative.
Indeed ! Old Bobby, went deep, into collecting details above and beyond. Now I remember why I love this channel ! I'm old enough to remember watching this on the news, and picking up a news magazine, or two. I was only a few years out of college. I do remember other universities criticizing the Utah results, in the following months. Also remember Pons and Fleischmann reputations destroyed, as "cold fusion" never went anywhere.
I remember Schools and private schools in the UK calming that they had duplicated the results, so that parents would send their kiddies to such establishments...
Well, fraud. The moment they forged their graph it was clear that we've moved beyond arrogant miscalculated assumptions and on to clear malfeasance in opposition to scientific principle and methodology
Not gonna lie I feel like he was showing a little bit of mid semester love to students, though I now know that no matter how many corrections I have on my papers none of them can fuck up my life as hard as these fumbles from actual professionals
I was initially heading in to this a bit sympathetic to them thinking that they were just out of their depth. Not understanding the in depth intricacies of nuclear physics and possible technical errors from the way the equipment was calibrated is one thing. But Not doing a control, and just making up numbers or changing graphs when something isn’t right is crazy. That’s the absolute basic stuff. First year students wouldn’t make those mistakes
As a person living in Germany, the most shocking thing in this video was that someone would willingly leave their ski trip 3 times on an employer's whim.
Many of the ski resorts in Utah are less than or around an hour drive away for most people in the Salt Lake Metro. It's not as crazy with that context.
@@eyezak_mi hadnt even thought of that, thanks for the context! Still wild to be asked to do that, but a little more understandable that he was willing to.
My dad (who is almost 70) studied physics and worked in physics-related fields. He’s watched the organic transistor and heavy element discovery videos and I can’t wait to tell him that there’s a series on cold fusion. He loves them!
Part 1: Cold Fusion really is simple and easy to recreate Part 2: you need a device that can produce infinite unobtanium and that we wrote down on a napkin. Warning: results may vary
given that most of their model was only theoretical: i genuinely think they stumbled across their hypothetical model for loading up deuterium and just got overly excited about something that was new to them but pretty old information in other fields. everything after that became 'ends will justify the means' when they did their first press conference, it's likely enough that they really did believe that simple electrolysis would be enough to create the reaction i've seen that kind of psychological phenomena a lot when someone is an expert at one thing and utterly ignorant of another and they assume they've made some novel discovery when attempting to transfer over their existing expertise. i'm not an academic, though, so i've only seen it in lower stakes scenarios that produce pure comedy (buying 6 boots while playing karthus in old LoL when items had stacking stats, not realizing that boots were the one exception to the stacking rule... and then when someone points it out, refusing to sell the boots anyway and voicing skepticism that the extra boots were not doing anything)
@@ItWasSaucerShaped Yeah, this sounds really plausible. None of the way these people acted makes me really think they're _intentionally_ deceiving people. This isn't a _grift,_ or at least not a traditional one.
@@neongrey333 i think they didn't go into it as grifters, but it slowly just... drifted into a grift like, it's hard to look at them asking for all of that money without having the science and say, 'i don't think this is a grift' but it was a situation they locked themselves into not out of any initial malice but by thinking they'd discovered something critically important and then justifying everything that came after because of the hypothetical transformative power of getting energy by simple electrolysis which is a bit disquieting to me because i wonder how many grifts start that way. how easy it is to become a con man with initially pure intent
@@ItWasSaucerShaped Yeah, that's very legitimate. I think that's mostly what I meant by not a 'traditional' grift, but it never even occurred to me how many potential grifts just never get even that far off the ground.
I had no idea this was what a video about "dead grad students" would be about. Cold fusion? Muons? I found it interesting. I didn't continue to study physics beyond the first year. I was doing a course on engineering, not physics. It was just a core subject. I was just playing the video in the background while doing something else. I have no idea what it has to do with dead grad students. Where is the death? Did someone die? Where are the graduate students? I was only paying attention enough to know that a bunch of people did an experiment, made mistakes, thought they had discovered something significant, but were wrong.
@@tomsmith6513 The claims of cold fusion were bunk because there was no dead grad student. If cold fusion had occured, the experimenter would likely die from radiation poisoning.
"Pons and Fleischmann had managed to guess that the reviewer was Jones because one of his critiques was that they hadn't cited a 1986 paper by him" (8:16) Ahhh, Reviewer #2--otherwise known as "guy insisting your whole paper is a sham because you didn't cite one obscure article from 20 years ago written by one particular researcher who is definitely not your reviewer." Boy do I love academia!
I am a molecular biotechnologist and I gasped SO HARD at the lack of control - this is absurd! It is one of the first things you learn in uni doing aaaaany type of science!
@@unbearablysmug2437idk but in my college they always mock them like biochem mocks biotechs cuz in their work field they are not at as knowledgeable as a biochem and not as clever as an engineer so biotechs end up delaying process in their work but idk maybe he can clear things up!
@@skydivenextHalf the time their background is straight biochem especially if their specialty is more along the lines of molecular biology. And at the PhD level the distinction hardly matters Varies a ton.
this is why the image of “the lone scientist” is so damaging, science needs to be a collaborative field the amount of times “if they had only asked others in their department” was said is sad to hear, and the fact they seemed so determined to only have THEIR names on the paper is so scummy
@@SixTough build off* yeah that's how science works. I hate this entitlement towards discovery folks have, if somebody else can take the torch further and faster, a good scientist would hand it off.
The problem is that they want this shit to get patented in their name so that can just own the fusion energy source like Rockefeller owned oil back in the day. It corrupts their scientific pursuit because they can’t ask anyone in their department because they don’t wanna risk losing out on the ownership if someone beats them to it
@@SixTough If you're working on a good idea, and you're far away into it, not even an intentionally malicious scientist would be able to publish before you do. At some point you need to ask other people, or your research will be worse off.
Clicked so fast I becam----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
cold fusion is like hot ice cream. yeah, that doesn't happen buddy. It has to be ice which ceases to exist under warmth. You want ions? we need temperature.
@ambatuBUHSURK to be fair at the scale of temperature involved in fusion reactions (most of the time millions of degrees) even 10,000 or 100,000° Celsius would be "cold", it doesn't have to go all the way down to room temperature for the name to make sense
@@ambatuBUHSURKI don’t think you understand the term “cold fusion”. “Cold” refers to the conditions required for initiation of the reaction not being surface-of-the-sun hot. Obviously to get worthwhile energy out of the reaction there has to be some heat produced (all electricity generation amounts to novel ways to boil water); cold fusion just means the reaction is a lot easier to start and manage, not that it’s physically cold. You could say nuclear fission for power is cold too, not because it doesn’t produce heat but because starting it only requires putting enough dense radioactive materials in close proximity that they react.
1:04:25 is apparently the 1899 poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns inspired by tales of a ghost haunting some stairs. Feels like a pretty clear way to cast doubt on their paper/results, like saying they're not really real yet everyone's focusing on them.
Given the stress Jones was going through, maybe it's also referring to how much Pons and Fleischmann (and their research) keeps being on his mind at all times, and that he wishes they would just retract their paper and stop accusing him of plagiarism and go away?
The slow progression from "what mistake did they make that spun out of control" to "is anything real?! Did anyone even do an experiment?! Is everything we've been told just completely fabricated from day 1?!" Of nearly every single BobbyBroccoli series
The fact that their "300% yield" was extrapolated from 27%, which they didn't even use the right equations for. Like these two wouldn't pass a chemistry class in high school.
the fact alone that Pons sent cease and desist letters through his attack dog lawyer when people couldn't reproduce his results should be a red flag to anyone working with him
Happens really often in research but nobody cares since reviewers care more about correct writing and format rather than content. Also nobody is willing to hear "it didnt worked... Boss"
*_"I have nothing to offer but likes, clicks and views.."_* - W. Churchill on why the House of Commons should approve funding for a Nebula subscription
36:26 I'm cringing so hard. They sound like me when my project manager asks about the work task I forgot weeks ago and I mumble something about having to double-check my work before scrambling to finish it while burning inside with a hot embarrassment that rivals the heat of thousand suns...
A chemist assuming that it's not a measurement error, or that they didn't accidentally make a chemical explosion, were pretty big red flags for me. The cold fusion thing is bad enough, but now I'm questioning their basic chemistry credentials as well.
It's not uncommon for a star academic to go off the deep end closer to the end of their career and start dabbling in such shenanigans. Luc Montagnier and Linus Pauling always come to mind.
@@nate567987 Well at least Jones believed in his own research (because it wasn't fraudulent) and he believed his tinfoil hat theory that depends on steel being unmeltable (probably because he never bothered to ask a materials scientist of chemist). Also, if steel can't be melted, how are steel beams made anyways?
I'd never heard this story before watching these videos, but as someone who was raised mormon, I can’t even describe the intense feeling of "sounds about right" that every twist brings about.
at 1:04:00 that's not a limerick, it's a quatrain, part of a longer poem by American poet Williams Hughes Mearns, the title is "Antigonish" and it has its own wikipedia page. It was originally inspired by reports of a ghost haunting the stairs of some old house in Nova Scotia. So I think he's maybe just saying that Pons and Fleischmann are seeing ghosts.
what i really like about these back to back videos is that the first shows you a total wish-idea, a huge discovery backed by science you know and you'd be a dunce to not believe is revolutionary and in the second video, you see the nitty gritty, the "yes, but not really" and the cracks in theory that an expert can see in an instant. Its like a microcosm of real world hysteria over unfathomably large, dense fields and headlines over topics that can barely fit into books
25:30 and there it is. The BobbyBroccoli special; get the viewer so enraptured by the hype and mythos in the history that you can just drop a nuke by revealing a single fact that flips the whole documentary on its head. I absolutely love this channel.
Hello! You commented on a video of mine 8 years ago, offering advice, and after clicking on the comment to see how you are doing nowadays I am really happy to see what your channel has become! Wish you nothing but the best, and good luck!
Same. The first time I saw it in my recommendation, I didn't click on it. It was only the second time it showed up that I realized it was the follow-up to his previous video on the topic. I often wonder what kind of mental gymnastics TH-camrs have to go through to come up with the idea that the confusing title/thumbnail combinations they pick for their videos that they then proceed to change multiple times in the first couple days actually attract more clicks.
Same here. I nearly skipped right over it until I saw the channel name, and even then I almost dismissed it because it didn't seem to have anything to do with the previous video.
@@poudink5791 I agree that the title wasn't the best but changing the title constantly is known to get TH-cam to bump up the surch results for videos, cgp grey dose it for years old videos and it can get them back to day one numbers at times.
23:48 Just a little addendum : while Hans Bethe isn't really know by the public, he was definitely a huge name in the physics community. He played a big part in the theory side of the Manhattan Project for example.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the really blasé mentioning of Hans Bethe without at least noting he was quite a respected physicist, and not just a "distant relative"
Did you ever try the same experiment replacing heavy water with light water? Fleischmann: - No, we have not. We had very limited resources, we have spent all the funds on heavy water and we had no funds remaining for light water.
I work with high pressure cells (tens to hundreds of gigapascals) and my jaw DROPPED when you showed the clip of Fleischmann giving the numbers. You can't state that you need an effective pressure of 10^26 atm without a fundamental misunderstanding of your system
Those mic drop moments revealing every massive flaw in their experiment are the closest I've ever gotten to the rush people feel watching the final moments of a football game. What a ride, and a great way to illustrate how failures of a process are so often a cascade of Bad Decisions and rarely just a single one.
wake up, babe, a youtube channel named after a vegetable just dropped another video about a scandal in physics, a subject you do not study, never displayed an ounce of talent in, and probably won't interact with at any point in your life (in all seriousness, you're the reason my law student ass has things to gossip about with my engineer father, so thanks)
I find it amusing that someone else talks to their father about this channel! My father and I recently found it and already binging through the videos together. 😂
1:04:25 is probably referring to Antigonish, an 1899 poem by William Hughes Mearns The poem he's referring to actually goes like this: "Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there! He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away! When I came home last night at three, The man was waiting there for me But when I looked around the hall, I couldn't see him there at all! Go away, go away, don't you come back any more! Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... Last night I saw upon the stair, A little man who wasn't there He wasn't there again today Oh, how I wish he'd go away.... " I don't really know what he meant to say with this, beyond making a reference to a somewhat obscure poem. Regardless, figured I'd share where it's from.
I wonder if he meant the media and scientific community keep talking about a result that isn't actually there. They saw a result that was a mistake, and further evidence continued to show that it was a mistake, and now we just want it to go away.
"And yet, Pons and Fleischman claimed that their palladium rods were experiencing an effective pressure of 10^27 atm." 34:20 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atm. . . . Hey, so, um . . . at what point does a palladium rod become a black hole?
it's okay, it hadn't reached black hole yet. They simply claimed that their rods were experiencing supernova levels of pressure (roughly the amount for Neutron Stars).
The palladium rod doesn't become a black hole: it just explodes, because there's nothing holding it together. Which kinda confuses me -- how could they possibly believe they were exceeding the tensile strength of the matierla by such a ridiculous margin?
@ it would explode if we calculate using REAL physics. but apparently pons and fleischman thought this was possible. so let's get silly. if it was possible, at what point would it become a black hole? neutron star-style pasta goo is also an exciting option! palladium lasagna mmmmmm
I just finished part 3 on Nebula but it feels so weird not being able to like and comment there. This was such a great series. I was alive during this but too young to realize what was happening. Ive heard about Cold Fusion being "perpentually a few years away" my whole life, but didnt realize how much buzz there had been in 89
Does part three touch on the MIT student who claimed that their replication attempts were sabotaged, and the various conspiracy theories that have persisted since?
also here to comment on pt.3 since I can't on Nebula and don't do Reddit lol. Bobby knocked it out of the park as usual! It's nice having digestible narratives of these popular science topics that clear away the vapour. Similarly, I was old enough to be aware of my world but not enough about the politics of science while this was all going down, yet also have vague memories of Cold Fusion. History is every day life, and I recall several other events happening while this was going down which would have dominated the news cycle globally (the respective falls of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, the Troubles, Bosnia, and so on, just to limit examples to one continent)
@ thank you for the info! I used to buy that guy’s “science journal” as a teenager. I’m very interested to hear a presumably more skeptical take on him.
Is nobody gonna mention how it's not "cold fusion is perpetually years away" but FUSION. Cold fusion is an infinite number of years away because as far as we know, it's impossible to achieve.
This series should have a second title, the perfect example for why peer reviews exist. When scientists jump the gun like this without extensive tests and review they damage the field in incredible ways. Trust is broken, cynicism sets in. It's unbelievably destructive. Thankfully I feel like many took the correct lessons from this incident, an era of sensationalist science where every scientist goes to the media with any claim that they can not replicate would have been a disaster.
I feel that if your first instinct is "Holy shit, we just 100% discovered something thought impossible!" instead of "Holy shit, we just discovered something thought impossible, there has to be a mistake!" you are not doing science well. But I'm not a scientist.
For comparison... remember when that CERN team thought they'd discovered faster-than-light neutrinos? They spent months going over everything absolutely meticulously, and couldn't find anything wrong. So they wrote a paper _diving deep_ into all of their evidence (as opposed to the brief summary paper published by the guys in this video). Famously they showed their experimental setup had a positional detector so sensitive you could see continental drift. And rather than the paper being phrased like "look at our groundbreaking discovery!" it was phrased more like "here's something odd we observed, we'll continue to look for errors, and we are not going to speculate about what it would mean for physics." It caught a lot of press excitement at that point, but pretty much every scientist they interviewed wanted to keep calm and investigate. Some rival labs helped out, and after a while the subtle flaws in the setup were found. So the original team were able to get it fixed and repeat the experiment to show that their timing was just off and the neutrinos were behaving normally. It's less exciting! But it's much better science. And at the end we got some ultra-precise measurements out of it so it was still a step forward for the field.
@@meneldal Actually it was a simple fiber cable not being fully screwed in during data gathering. "A link from a GPS receiver to the OPERA master clock was loose, which increased the delay through the fiber. The glitch's effect was to decrease the reported flight time of the neutrinos by 73 ns, making them seem faster than light." The incident is the 2011 OPERA FTL Neutrino Anomaly.
the title had me worried about a murder being involved in this story. the twist of it being a paradox, an impossible occurrence left me stunned. masterful stuff as always!
History channel: *produces garbage recycled conspiracy content* Random internet creators named stuff like "bobby broccoli": *produces multi-hour, engaging deep dives into scientifically relevant but otherwise obscure topics*
To be fair, Bobby Broccoli is not completely random, he is prolly the best documentary producer in the site imo. Even the guys who can be argued to be just as good lack the presentation to match.
You're superb at presenting science controversies in a genuinely gripping way; I didn't know about this kerfluffle (just before my time on this earth), but the drama, my goodness. Fetch me my smelling salts!
How this guy manages his academic/professional workload while still finding time to produce such outstandingly well done content is absolutely beyond me. Loving this series, I actually paid for a Nebula sub about a year ago to support another creator but I've barely used it, constantly find myself going back to old comfortable youtube... I've been doing it wrong! 🤦♂️
My high school chemistry teacher went to BYU and Jones reminds me so deeply of him that it’s giving me PTSD flashbacks. He used to joke every single time that BYU stands for boy your ugly, and he chortled every single time like it was so witty. He was truly insufferable and in more ways than that.
@@comradecameron3726 like, I guess that's true, but 1. Your comment is then even *more* superfluous, and 2. Why do you care? Are you an unfunny BYU professor too? Let people boost the analytics. They ain't hurting anyone.
For so much of this video I felt bad for Pons and Fleischmann. Unlike the other bad science you've covered, they had an experimental result, 1 Watt in 4 Watts out. Maybe they misunderstood or had experimental error and got caught up in the excitement, but at it's core they had a Big Number at the root of it. The reveal that their actual experimental data was 1 Watt in not even 1.5 out, and they just multiplied that number by 10 to get what they wanted, was absolutely infuriating.
"The Cornell Cold Fusion Archive (originally curated by Bruce Lewenstein). Has an extensive copy of many original documents, news coverage, etc. They also provided me with a digitized video copy of the Baltimore APS meeting" God damn I was hoping to find a full online copy of that it looks like a suprisingly fun watch for an APS meeting of all things
I swear, the amount of stress I was under for the first 20-odd minutes of this part, watching an extended section on grad student Marvin Hawkins in a video titled "The Dead Grad Student Problem"...
I love your documentaries man, particularly this one. There was all this hubub around cold fusion in the background when I was a wee wee lad and I was just barely old enough to only kind of understand what went down by the end of it all in the 90's, but I remember all the controversy around cold fusion through the news shows like 20/20, 60 minutes, and Dateline that my parent's watched. Unrelated to the subject matter, but this doc is dredging up some memories from that part of my life I thought were long since gone from before my mom's decline into severe mental illness that tore our family apart and my life went to heck in a handbasket for a long while, and I really appreciate that.
The "limerick" Steven Jones recited is a poem from 1899, by a man named William Hughes Means, called Antigonish. As to the meaning, and its relevance, this exercise is left to the student.
It's more that an administrator pressured non experts to make an outrageous claim and misrepresent data. These non-experts then bypassed review by experts and went to the media who ignored the vocal complaints of acutal experts for about a year.
27:29 Oh thank goodness once you started recaping the assistant grad student I was like "oh no did they get this guy killed" but no its just a funny science name
Funny thing is there still is a large amount of crackpots who believe in cold fusion. The cold fusion wikipedia page was the cause of some of the most intense drama that wikipedia ever had with editing wars. You need special permission to edit still i believe
1:08:35 hell it's 2024 and I had someone earnestly proclaiming to me, like 5 years ago in 19 that there was a giant conspiracy covering up cold fusion. Then again my cousin was always a conspiracy nut job. I'm no doctor or even bachelors, but even I found his rantings mercurial.
Hawkins was TWENTY SEVEN in that footage??? Jesus christ why did literally everyone in the 80s look at least two decades older than they actually were?
As an undergrad who's worked in electrochem labs and with a friend in a fusion related physics phd, I'd be more than a little suspicious if breakthrough fusion innovation were to come out of an electrochem lab.
Exactly. When I read the title I guess I overthought it and expected it to be referring to the grad student being in a superposition of both alive and dead.
an amazing way to experience the media spectacle around this first hand, and what i would recommend to anyone, is to go to your uni library and read thru the news sections of Journals like sience during 1989
ITS A TRILOGY??? Thank you so much for the hard work we all appreciate it so much to learn about the drama of the science world. Not only does it help us learn from our mistakes but recording this info in a concrete way is SO MASSIVE for any historical reasons. I do hope one day to hear a peer or teacher talking about a documentary of yours in an academic setting, that would be so cool.
Hey man, just wanted to say your videos are some of the best, most well informed and well executed stuff online right now. I would sign up to Nebula, but I’m not in a financial position to do that right now, but I’ll keep supporting you here. Thanks for the amazing videos.
As someone who works in understanding and teaching research methods and data analysis techniques, most research articles have multiple things wrong. Most of those things are: Failing to use the correct statistical technique for their data, not understanding statistical techniques at all, failing to adequately define their terms, having such a small (
Now that you mention that, are there good resources to lear about the correct statostical tests for data? I struggled to find any cohesive summaries academic wise
I enjoy these videos so much I don't even feel the need to spoil what happens next, the wait is so worth it, especially as you always choose the most interesting topics, from Nortel (videos about which I love to this day), through Ninovium and the missing collider, to this one
As a historian, I love your videos so much. They give me insight into disciplines completely foreign to me, yet they're structured so well and lay out a story in a way that is familiar to me, and that I aspire to be able to do as well. Plus, they please my inner gossip goblin. All that to say, I really appreciate this channel and love being semi-early for a video for once!
@@firstletterofthealphabet7308 how to drive a Polish person to madness: though, from my experience, I'd say that a more probable mispronounciation would be 'gah-jev-skee'
When the video got to the "running a control test" question i swear i stopped breathing for a while. I cannot *fathom* looking to do a press conference without making sure i had at least that documented
I think the worst part of this whole debacle is it delegitimizes an area of research that although improbable might not be impossible given different methods and/or more understanding. It also inhibits the discovery of any other phenomena that may present itself during the process of research in related areas. Your reputation for curiosity should never fuel your ego, only your quest to learn and discover more.
Want to see the end of the trilogy extra early? You can watch it right now on Nebula: nebula.tv/videos/bobbybroccoli-you-cant-kill-an-idea
I subscribed to Nebula just for early part 2 and now part 3.
Can you post all parts on Nebula before you release part 1 on TH-cam? I paid for Nebula I want to binge the whole show at once!
lovely jubbly
Love your videos man, especially how you touch on the real negative impact on individuals in ones like the nortel or cloning docs. Very engaging without being too sensationalist or callous. Thanks!!!!
Please don't comment on how this comment was published before the video.
Oh wai-
I felt so bad for Hawkins when he didn't get his name on the paper, then I felt even worse when he did lol
Lol true
He didn't deserve to be left out, but he also didn't deserve his name on that pubblication
Good news is that it seems like he's been successful regardless, at least from a quick google.
@@PJSproductions97 yea i did the same. felt like looking deeper into the lore of a show even tho he's a real person lol
He got the worst of both worlds.
Okay when you started talking about how much stress the grad student was under, combined with the title, I started getting worried
for sure I thought Marvin was gonna turn up dead some way or the other
Same!
Same
@@flameshade7601 ngl my thought was way more gruesome - I thought he died in one of the explosions at first and was really emotional about it until I heard otherwise 😭
it was a great red herring
The worst thing that can happen to a science team is stumbling upon something not quite in their area of expertise, but looking *REALLY BIG,* and them deciding to get all the glory for themselves, instead of checking with an actual expert. That way lies crackpottery.
100% one of the first questions we always ask in the lab I work in is "Why hasn't anyone else done this yet?"
ironically enough, steven jones is a 9 11 truther
@@rezrayofficial you mean you don't "just follow orders" ?
@@rezrayofficial Yeah that's a fantastic idea lol. My very first reaction approaching any of this shit would be 'there HAS to be fifty asterisks on this or else someone else would have done it already, right?'
@@rezrayofficial I’m not an engineer, researcher, or scientist and I use that one all the time. It helps me denoise a lot of what gets hyped nowadays. Strange that people don’t think that way.
Beautiful execution with the title of the video, then diving into all this backstory about the Grad student, finding out hes a loving father, who's been working so hard he's hardly able to see his family, the inclusion of the quote referring to his wife as a 'widow', then we hear about all the growing pressure, conflict, etc. I was ready for this guy to drop dead somehow. Then I find out the 'problem' is that the guy didn't die. Expertly done, ya got me beautifully.
He hearted the comment, so he intended on pranking us like this
MandaloreGaming levels of writing synchronizing perfectly with the editing and execution.
Thanks I don't need the watch the video now
@@dragitoutofme EGADS! They're discussing the VIDEO... in the COMMENT SECTION?!? I can't believe it!
Spoiled the whole thing too@@lookaquarter
the changing of the peak from 2.5 to 2.224 MeV is genuinely Jan Hendrik Schön moment. "the best listener in physics"
While what they did was absolutely sketchy, non-transparent, and unscientific, I think what they did was zoom in on a tiny artifact in the “right” location. They didn’t just adjust the axis of the same peak
@@williamsalvia8817 Nah, I think it was pure fabrication. In the expose talk later on they show that there was actually a small dip where the peak should have been
They also used the media (Hwang) in their need to beat someone else in a race (Ninov)
@@trujillojeorge837the Bobbybroccoli cinematic universe
@@williamsalvia8817 They knew their peak was in the wrong spot, doesn't matter if they just adjusted a little bit or zoomed in, they changed the location of the peak in their paper from 2,5 to 2,22 that's knowingly falsifying your paper and therefore fraud.
As a dead grad student I appreciate the representation!
Quit complaining on TH-cam and publish
@@KylePedretty This is a joke, not a complaint
@@katiemorison7969I’m pretty sure that was a joke as well
@@asdeed2 If it is, it isn't signposted as one and just reads as a generic comment.
Mean comment or poor joke. Tbh, not great options
You’re not being represented though
One of most impressive aspects of this already incredibly impressive documentary is all the original footage of the various press conferences and interviews made at the time. It must have been a colossal effort to find so many bits of obscure footage and string them all together into such a compelling narrative.
Indeed ! Old Bobby, went deep, into collecting details above and beyond. Now I remember why I love this channel !
I'm old enough to remember watching this on the news, and picking up a news magazine, or two. I was only a few years out of college. I do remember other universities criticizing the Utah results, in the following months. Also remember Pons and Fleischmann reputations destroyed, as "cold fusion" never went anywhere.
1000%. Including those little jokes and casual remarks make these documentaries so human and relatable, instead of just being a cold recount of events
Yeah, this is a monumental amount of work and skill. It's so impressive.
I remember Schools and private schools in the UK calming that they had duplicated the results, so that parents would send their kiddies to such establishments...
It's so concise it paints yhe picture clear even gor the non-educated. (It's me,I'm the non-educated)
The slow reveal of everything wrong with the experiment was absolutely wild. What the hell were they doing? How did this happen?!
Simple, they really, really, really wanted to be right. Wanted it strongly enough to ignore their brains and their eyes.
Well, fraud. The moment they forged their graph it was clear that we've moved beyond arrogant miscalculated assumptions and on to clear malfeasance in opposition to scientific principle and methodology
Not gonna lie I feel like he was showing a little bit of mid semester love to students, though I now know that no matter how many corrections I have on my papers none of them can fuck up my life as hard as these fumbles from actual professionals
I was initially heading in to this a bit sympathetic to them thinking that they were just out of their depth.
Not understanding the in depth intricacies of nuclear physics and possible technical errors from the way the equipment was calibrated is one thing.
But Not doing a control, and just making up numbers or changing graphs when something isn’t right is crazy. That’s the absolute basic stuff. First year students wouldn’t make those mistakes
that really made me go wow.
That one of them had a lawyer on sperd dial to spam C&Ds at companies that couldn't replicate his findings is a massive red flag.
Yeah!!
sperd dial
+
@@joomoo286 lmao this guy doesn't know how to travel at sperd. have fun with your "speed" limits
Spergdial
As a person living in Germany, the most shocking thing in this video was that someone would willingly leave their ski trip 3 times on an employer's whim.
Remember that, in much of the US, you can essentially be fired at zero notice for any reason.
@beeble2003 it's funny cause he did all that and still got fired lmao
Many of the ski resorts in Utah are less than or around an hour drive away for most people in the Salt Lake Metro. It's not as crazy with that context.
@@eyezak_mi hadnt even thought of that, thanks for the context! Still wild to be asked to do that, but a little more understandable that he was willing to.
am I to believe that in Germany grad students are treated well?
My dad (who is almost 70) studied physics and worked in physics-related fields. He’s watched the organic transistor and heavy element discovery videos and I can’t wait to tell him that there’s a series on cold fusion. He loves them!
he's gonna love the cocky chemists fucking up and physicists calling it from the get go
Part 1: Cold Fusion really is simple and easy to recreate
Part 2: you need a device that can produce infinite unobtanium and that we wrote down on a napkin.
Warning: results may vary
given that most of their model was only theoretical:
i genuinely think they stumbled across their hypothetical model for loading up deuterium and just got overly excited about something that was new to them but pretty old information in other fields. everything after that became 'ends will justify the means'
when they did their first press conference, it's likely enough that they really did believe that simple electrolysis would be enough to create the reaction
i've seen that kind of psychological phenomena a lot when someone is an expert at one thing and utterly ignorant of another and they assume they've made some novel discovery when attempting to transfer over their existing expertise. i'm not an academic, though, so i've only seen it in lower stakes scenarios that produce pure comedy (buying 6 boots while playing karthus in old LoL when items had stacking stats, not realizing that boots were the one exception to the stacking rule... and then when someone points it out, refusing to sell the boots anyway and voicing skepticism that the extra boots were not doing anything)
@@ItWasSaucerShaped Yeah, this sounds really plausible. None of the way these people acted makes me really think they're _intentionally_ deceiving people. This isn't a _grift,_ or at least not a traditional one.
@@neongrey333 i think they didn't go into it as grifters, but it slowly just... drifted into a grift
like, it's hard to look at them asking for all of that money without having the science and say, 'i don't think this is a grift'
but it was a situation they locked themselves into not out of any initial malice but by thinking they'd discovered something critically important and then justifying everything that came after because of the hypothetical transformative power of getting energy by simple electrolysis
which is a bit disquieting to me because i wonder how many grifts start that way. how easy it is to become a con man with initially pure intent
@@ItWasSaucerShaped Yeah, that's very legitimate. I think that's mostly what I meant by not a 'traditional' grift, but it never even occurred to me how many potential grifts just never get even that far off the ground.
@@neongrey333 Eh, the graph change is when it crossed the line for me. THAT was FULLY intentional
The dead grad student problem is such a morbidly funny way to determine if fusions occured
"Sorry, I can't turn my assignment in, I've just been reduced to a pool of bubbling fat by a cold fusion blast. Can I have an extension please?"
Really captures how much grad students are valued in labs 😂
So IF the grad student is suddenly found reduced to a pile of suspiciously neutron-rich goop on the lab floor, you might be on the right track?
I had no idea this was what a video about "dead grad students" would be about. Cold fusion? Muons?
I found it interesting. I didn't continue to study physics beyond the first year. I was doing a course on engineering, not physics. It was just a core subject.
I was just playing the video in the background while doing something else. I have no idea what it has to do with dead grad students.
Where is the death? Did someone die? Where are the graduate students? I was only paying attention enough to know that a bunch of people did an experiment, made mistakes, thought they had discovered something significant, but were wrong.
@@tomsmith6513 The claims of cold fusion were bunk because there was no dead grad student. If cold fusion had occured, the experimenter would likely die from radiation poisoning.
"Pons and Fleischmann had managed to guess that the reviewer was Jones because one of his critiques was that they hadn't cited a 1986 paper by him" (8:16)
Ahhh, Reviewer #2--otherwise known as "guy insisting your whole paper is a sham because you didn't cite one obscure article from 20 years ago written by one particular researcher who is definitely not your reviewer." Boy do I love academia!
Two years and likely quite relevant.
Jesus christ it's nice to know that pops up in EVERY field🤣
By "nice to know" I mean "goddamn it I'm glad I left academia"
But tbf Pons and Fleischmann ended up having a fake discovery so idk
Lmao honestly I was like 🤦🏻♂️ good to know physics is just like biology lmfao
@@olivergregory5093 all just people being people
The only people who will remember your long hours at the office are your family…
and his boss screwed him over in the end too! though given how it all ended perhaps having his name only added later saved him some much later grief..
great comment
If your discovery is great enough, you’ll be remembered by history
Capitalism is cancer
@@JamEngulfer You will be. Your hours of late nights won't.
I am a molecular biotechnologist and I gasped SO HARD at the lack of control - this is absurd! It is one of the first things you learn in uni doing aaaaany type of science!
Biotechnologist? Is that related to biochemistry?
@@unbearablysmug2437idk but in my college they always mock them like biochem mocks biotechs cuz in their work field they are not at as knowledgeable as a biochem and not as clever as an engineer so biotechs end up delaying process in their work but idk maybe he can clear things up!
@@skydivenextHalf the time their background is straight biochem especially if their specialty is more along the lines of molecular biology.
And at the PhD level the distinction hardly matters
Varies a ton.
I didn't graduate high school.
I test and QC industrial equipment.
Without a control a test is borderline meaningless.
@@skydivenext Biochem made fun of biotechs? (Currently majoring in Biochem), I have never heard of this rivalry till now.
this is why the image of “the lone scientist” is so damaging, science needs to be a collaborative field
the amount of times “if they had only asked others in their department” was said is sad to hear, and the fact they seemed so determined to only have THEIR names on the paper is so scummy
Other researchers steal your ideas all the time and usually not maliciously
@@SixTough build off* yeah that's how science works. I hate this entitlement towards discovery folks have, if somebody else can take the torch further and faster, a good scientist would hand it off.
The problem is that they want this shit to get patented in their name so that can just own the fusion energy source like Rockefeller owned oil back in the day. It corrupts their scientific pursuit because they can’t ask anyone in their department because they don’t wanna risk losing out on the ownership if someone beats them to it
@@dayton9136 And of course, you couldn't name a single one of these "good scientists" because you'd never hear of them.
@@SixTough If you're working on a good idea, and you're far away into it, not even an intentionally malicious scientist would be able to publish before you do. At some point you need to ask other people, or your research will be worse off.
Clicked so fast I became nonlinear (they’ll have to scrape me off the ceiling)
Clicked so fast I becam----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@ footage of me irl
@@heronheronhero holy shit, bro became linear
Where was that from? The supercolliding superconductor? Admiral watkins?
@@santiagoarias1229Yes and yes
Physicists: “That isn’t possible”
Pons and Fleischmann: “How do you know?”
Physicists: “Well, for one thing: *You’re not dead*”
"-Why isn't possible?
-It's just not
-Why not, you stupid bastard?"
cold fusion is like hot ice cream. yeah, that doesn't happen buddy. It has to be ice which ceases to exist under warmth. You want ions? we need temperature.
@ambatuBUHSURK to be fair at the scale of temperature involved in fusion reactions (most of the time millions of degrees) even 10,000 or 100,000° Celsius would be "cold", it doesn't have to go all the way down to room temperature for the name to make sense
@@ambatuBUHSURKI don’t think you understand the term “cold fusion”. “Cold” refers to the conditions required for initiation of the reaction not being surface-of-the-sun hot. Obviously to get worthwhile energy out of the reaction there has to be some heat produced (all electricity generation amounts to novel ways to boil water); cold fusion just means the reaction is a lot easier to start and manage, not that it’s physically cold. You could say nuclear fission for power is cold too, not because it doesn’t produce heat but because starting it only requires putting enough dense radioactive materials in close proximity that they react.
@@willmungas8964 theres amplifiers and reaction moderators also that play a roll to get desired constant heat output
27:20 I breathe a sigh of relief because I've been sitting here terrified you're going to tell me Marvin offed himself.
Same, lol
You manage to make a bunch of nerds causing a scandal in a field I don’t understand much about so incredibly gripping. Very excited for part 3!
Same! I don't understand any of this, but I need to know all about it
Im sorry you can’t grasp basic scientific concepts 😠
Spoiler: Toyota are suckers.
This is how I feel about sports stories.
Scandals in very nerdy subjects are always interesting.
1:04:25 is apparently the 1899 poem "Antigonish" by William Hughes Mearns inspired by tales of a ghost haunting some stairs. Feels like a pretty clear way to cast doubt on their paper/results, like saying they're not really real yet everyone's focusing on them.
Given the stress Jones was going through, maybe it's also referring to how much Pons and Fleischmann (and their research) keeps being on his mind at all times, and that he wishes they would just retract their paper and stop accusing him of plagiarism and go away?
I had only previously heard that poem in an episode of the Magnus Archives, so seeing it read there gave me some serious pause lol
The Dead Grad Student Problem (the problem being there wasn't one) is perhaps the most academia joke I've ever heard
The slow progression from "what mistake did they make that spun out of control" to "is anything real?! Did anyone even do an experiment?! Is everything we've been told just completely fabricated from day 1?!" Of nearly every single BobbyBroccoli series
The fact that their "300% yield" was extrapolated from 27%, which they didn't even use the right equations for. Like these two wouldn't pass a chemistry class in high school.
The rapid collapse is crazy, it reminds me of hbombs video on Tommy tallerico... lies collapse like a beautiful metal silo
Is Cold Fusion just a shadow on the wall of a cave?!?!?
the fact alone that Pons sent cease and desist letters through his attack dog lawyer when people couldn't reproduce his results should be a red flag to anyone working with him
this is CRAZY. WHAT. THEY DIDNT EVEN RUN A FUCKING CONTROL EXPERIMENT????
Happens really often in research but nobody cares since reviewers care more about correct writing and format rather than content. Also nobody is willing to hear "it didnt worked... Boss"
@@squibble08 wait until you see part 3 and what happens when someone tried to do a double blind with them...
That's basic middle school stuff! I suddenly have WAY less respect for the publishers, and absolutely none for the scientists involved here
Controls are for cowards. And scientists
@@Scarybug ikr it's crazy
"There are decades that nothing happens. And there are weeks that BobbyBroccoli uploads"
Don't remember Lenin saying it exactly like this but it's still pretty damn accurate
*_"I have nothing to offer but likes, clicks and views.."_* - W. Churchill on why the House of Commons should approve funding for a Nebula subscription
@@slyseal2091 top tier comment
Oh thank god - I thought Pons and Fleischmann were gonna kill somebody
They were supposed to i guess
Same but I thought it was going to be a university trying to match their work that was about to kill somebody.
wait until you see part 3....
@@Thelostbootsoh god
@@maximmachinegun7206 Unfortunately
36:26 I'm cringing so hard. They sound like me when my project manager asks about the work task I forgot weeks ago and I mumble something about having to double-check my work before scrambling to finish it while burning inside with a hot embarrassment that rivals the heat of thousand suns...
Hi my fellow troubled mind
Bro same
A chemist assuming that it's not a measurement error, or that they didn't accidentally make a chemical explosion, were pretty big red flags for me.
The cold fusion thing is bad enough, but now I'm questioning their basic chemistry credentials as well.
I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that nuclear chemistry was a part of my education strictly because of this, lol.
a lot of ppl drinking in college or running on no sleep, of course they have problems
@@arsarma1808not due to the nuclear boy scout David Hahn?
It's not uncommon for a star academic to go off the deep end closer to the end of their career and start dabbling in such shenanigans. Luc Montagnier and Linus Pauling always come to mind.
Omg, this. “No it’s absolutely not an error.” Riiiiight. Also, I suspect these fellas were a little rusty with their physical chemistry, too…
2:21 I bet that guy who was talking about muon catalyzed fusion in the first video’s comments is having a field day right now.
He's gonna have a rough time on Part 3.
he's a 911 truther THE GUY that said "jet fuile can't melt steel beams"
@@nate567987Thousands of engineers agree.
@@StrikeWarlock If part 2 was calling him out for shadiness, narcissism and possibly fraud, then surely part 3 is gonna be a massacre.
@@nate567987 Well at least Jones believed in his own research (because it wasn't fraudulent) and he believed his tinfoil hat theory that depends on steel being unmeltable (probably because he never bothered to ask a materials scientist of chemist). Also, if steel can't be melted, how are steel beams made anyways?
The DEAD GRAD STUDENT problem!?!?! This is not where I thought a documentary on cold fusion would go
sacrifices must be made for science…
"The problem is that there ISNT one." is such a hard line
@daffquess7006 I know, and it works so well for the story
I got really concerned when Hawkins was introduced
@@sparkydoggo8691actually, the problem is that no sacrifices were made for science
I'd never heard this story before watching these videos, but as someone who was raised mormon, I can’t even describe the intense feeling of "sounds about right" that every twist brings about.
Same
at 1:04:00 that's not a limerick, it's a quatrain, part of a longer poem by American poet Williams Hughes Mearns, the title is "Antigonish" and it has its own wikipedia page. It was originally inspired by reports of a ghost haunting the stairs of some old house in Nova Scotia. So I think he's maybe just saying that Pons and Fleischmann are seeing ghosts.
Aw and here I thought Steve Jones just absolutely sucked at limericks
I saw "limerick and quatrain" and thought of ready player one lmao
I actually thought it was by Edgar Allen Poe. Thanks for the correction.
what i really like about these back to back videos is that the first shows you a total wish-idea, a huge discovery backed by science you know and you'd be a dunce to not believe is revolutionary
and in the second video, you see the nitty gritty, the "yes, but not really" and the cracks in theory that an expert can see in an instant.
Its like a microcosm of real world hysteria over unfathomably large, dense fields and headlines over topics that can barely fit into books
This title is insane
What the hell, where did you come from
For real. I wasn't expecting a doc on cold fusion.
OwO
The people you find in a Bobby broccoli comment section, I stg (love the music btw)
I thought it was ivorycello for a second
25:30 and there it is. The BobbyBroccoli special; get the viewer so enraptured by the hype and mythos in the history that you can just drop a nuke by revealing a single fact that flips the whole documentary on its head.
I absolutely love this channel.
With that title I legitimately thought something bad was going to happen to Marvin Hawkins when you brought him up. 😅
_Same!_ Very same!
Thank goodness, a spoiler I'm happy to see
Marvin hawk tuah
Yeah, it’s too bad. I’d be willing to sacrifice Marvin if it meant I could have cold fusion powering my car.
ngl I was waiting for the "They killed him to hide the evidence"
It's insane how well Clarke's law applies here: any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Hello!
You commented on a video of mine 8 years ago, offering advice, and after clicking on the comment to see how you are doing nowadays I am really happy to see what your channel has become!
Wish you nothing but the best, and good luck!
Almost didn't notice this was part 2 if I hadn't noticed your username lol, excited to watch!
Same. The first time I saw it in my recommendation, I didn't click on it. It was only the second time it showed up that I realized it was the follow-up to his previous video on the topic.
I often wonder what kind of mental gymnastics TH-camrs have to go through to come up with the idea that the confusing title/thumbnail combinations they pick for their videos that they then proceed to change multiple times in the first couple days actually attract more clicks.
@@poudink5791the changing thumbnails are typically due to AB testing. Basically you have say 5 or 6 thumbnails and see which one gets the most clicks.
Same here. I nearly skipped right over it until I saw the channel name, and even then I almost dismissed it because it didn't seem to have anything to do with the previous video.
@@poudink5791 I agree that the title wasn't the best but changing the title constantly is known to get TH-cam to bump up the surch results for videos, cgp grey dose it for years old videos and it can get them back to day one numbers at times.
Same, i ignored it because i wasnt paying attention to the channel name, lmao
23:48 Just a little addendum : while Hans Bethe isn't really know by the public, he was definitely a huge name in the physics community. He played a big part in the theory side of the Manhattan Project for example.
And he published important papers into his 90’s!
He was so important in the Manhattan Project that he was in Oppenheimer (film)!
He also got a Nobel Prize for somewhat of a side project. (Not really, but astrophysics was not where he spent most of his time.)
Glossing over that name had me rewinding the video a couple times to check if I heard his name.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the really blasé mentioning of Hans Bethe without at least noting he was quite a respected physicist, and not just a "distant relative"
Did you ever try the same experiment replacing heavy water with light water?
Fleischmann:
- No, we have not. We had very limited resources, we have spent all the funds on heavy water and we had no funds remaining for light water.
Lol 😂
That’s not what he said. He said the tests destroys the electrodes, so he didn’t run the test with light water yet. Still a wtf is this moment though.
Lmaoooo.....
@@hx5525He was joking. It was a joke. Lmao
They definitely read about the dangers of “dihydrogen monoxide” 😂
I work with high pressure cells (tens to hundreds of gigapascals) and my jaw DROPPED when you showed the clip of Fleischmann giving the numbers. You can't state that you need an effective pressure of 10^26 atm without a fundamental misunderstanding of your system
Those mic drop moments revealing every massive flaw in their experiment are the closest I've ever gotten to the rush people feel watching the final moments of a football game. What a ride, and a great way to illustrate how failures of a process are so often a cascade of Bad Decisions and rarely just a single one.
You are truly the Jon Bois of the science documentary space on TH-cam. Please never stop making these!
wake up, babe, a youtube channel named after a vegetable just dropped another video about a scandal in physics, a subject you do not study, never displayed an ounce of talent in, and probably won't interact with at any point in your life
(in all seriousness, you're the reason my law student ass has things to gossip about with my engineer father, so thanks)
I find it amusing that someone else talks to their father about this channel! My father and I recently found it and already binging through the videos together. 😂
This is chemistry though.
A vegetable??? What about named after one of original producers of James Bond movies?
1:04:25 is probably referring to Antigonish, an 1899 poem by William Hughes Mearns The poem he's referring to actually goes like this:
"Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there!
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away!
When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...
Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away.... "
I don't really know what he meant to say with this, beyond making a reference to a somewhat obscure poem. Regardless, figured I'd share where it's from.
Commenting so the original comment gets higher visibility in the comment section.
@DiamondKingStudios what about commenting on the comment commenting on the original comment in the comment section?
@@mm-gu9of That would help also.
Poetry
I think he meant that P&F had an observation of something that wasn't there, and they knew it wasnt there
I wonder if he meant the media and scientific community keep talking about a result that isn't actually there. They saw a result that was a mistake, and further evidence continued to show that it was a mistake, and now we just want it to go away.
"And yet, Pons and Fleischman claimed that their palladium rods were experiencing an effective pressure of 10^27 atm." 34:20
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atm.
. . . Hey, so, um . . . at what point does a palladium rod become a black hole?
it's okay, it hadn't reached black hole yet. They simply claimed that their rods were experiencing supernova levels of pressure (roughly the amount for Neutron Stars).
The palladium rod doesn't become a black hole: it just explodes, because there's nothing holding it together. Which kinda confuses me -- how could they possibly believe they were exceeding the tensile strength of the matierla by such a ridiculous margin?
@ it would explode if we calculate using REAL physics. but apparently pons and fleischman thought this was possible. so let's get silly. if it was possible, at what point would it become a black hole? neutron star-style pasta goo is also an exciting option! palladium lasagna mmmmmm
52:20 _Chemists_ who, after four years, didn't think of "guys, maybe just our hydrogen exploded" - calling that "lack of imagination" is evil. :D
I just finished part 3 on Nebula but it feels so weird not being able to like and comment there.
This was such a great series. I was alive during this but too young to realize what was happening. Ive heard about Cold Fusion being "perpentually a few years away" my whole life, but didnt realize how much buzz there had been in 89
Does part three touch on the MIT student who claimed that their replication attempts were sabotaged, and the various conspiracy theories that have persisted since?
also here to comment on pt.3 since I can't on Nebula and don't do Reddit lol. Bobby knocked it out of the park as usual! It's nice having digestible narratives of these popular science topics that clear away the vapour.
Similarly, I was old enough to be aware of my world but not enough about the politics of science while this was all going down, yet also have vague memories of Cold Fusion. History is every day life, and I recall several other events happening while this was going down which would have dominated the news cycle globally (the respective falls of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, the Troubles, Bosnia, and so on, just to limit examples to one continent)
@@JasonJrake yes
@ thank you for the info!
I used to buy that guy’s “science journal” as a teenager. I’m very interested to hear a presumably more skeptical take on him.
Is nobody gonna mention how it's not "cold fusion is perpetually years away" but FUSION. Cold fusion is an infinite number of years away because as far as we know, it's impossible to achieve.
This series should have a second title, the perfect example for why peer reviews exist. When scientists jump the gun like this without extensive tests and review they damage the field in incredible ways. Trust is broken, cynicism sets in. It's unbelievably destructive. Thankfully I feel like many took the correct lessons from this incident, an era of sensationalist science where every scientist goes to the media with any claim that they can not replicate would have been a disaster.
Ooo something to watch while working! Thanks Bobby
Me too I got a 8 hour shift of dishes now
I feel that if your first instinct is "Holy shit, we just 100% discovered something thought impossible!" instead of "Holy shit, we just discovered something thought impossible, there has to be a mistake!" you are not doing science well. But I'm not a scientist.
For comparison... remember when that CERN team thought they'd discovered faster-than-light neutrinos?
They spent months going over everything absolutely meticulously, and couldn't find anything wrong. So they wrote a paper _diving deep_ into all of their evidence (as opposed to the brief summary paper published by the guys in this video). Famously they showed their experimental setup had a positional detector so sensitive you could see continental drift. And rather than the paper being phrased like "look at our groundbreaking discovery!" it was phrased more like "here's something odd we observed, we'll continue to look for errors, and we are not going to speculate about what it would mean for physics."
It caught a lot of press excitement at that point, but pretty much every scientist they interviewed wanted to keep calm and investigate. Some rival labs helped out, and after a while the subtle flaws in the setup were found. So the original team were able to get it fixed and repeat the experiment to show that their timing was just off and the neutrinos were behaving normally.
It's less exciting! But it's much better science. And at the end we got some ultra-precise measurements out of it so it was still a step forward for the field.
@@Nalehw I remember that but I didn't know the details behind the experiment. Very interesting!
@@Nalehw That one was just a badly synchronized clock in the end or something like that.
@@meneldal Actually it was a simple fiber cable not being fully screwed in during data gathering.
"A link from a GPS receiver to the OPERA master clock was loose, which increased the delay through the fiber. The glitch's effect was to decrease the reported flight time of the neutrinos by 73 ns, making them seem faster than light."
The incident is the 2011 OPERA FTL Neutrino Anomaly.
@@flyerton99 Oh yeah I forgot the details I only remembered so kind of bad timing somewhere
the title had me worried about a murder being involved in this story. the twist of it being a paradox, an impossible occurrence left me stunned. masterful stuff as always!
History channel:
*produces garbage recycled conspiracy content*
Random internet creators named stuff like "bobby broccoli":
*produces multi-hour, engaging deep dives into scientifically relevant but otherwise obscure topics*
How long do we have to keep reading this comment on TH-cam?
@@stoop..kid.. presumably until the History Channel stops parroting white supremacists.
@@stoop..kid..Until the history office gets good
With great production value too!
To be fair, Bobby Broccoli is not completely random, he is prolly the best documentary producer in the site imo. Even the guys who can be argued to be just as good lack the presentation to match.
You're superb at presenting science controversies in a genuinely gripping way; I didn't know about this kerfluffle (just before my time on this earth), but the drama, my goodness. Fetch me my smelling salts!
How this guy manages his academic/professional workload while still finding time to produce such outstandingly well done content is absolutely beyond me. Loving this series, I actually paid for a Nebula sub about a year ago to support another creator but I've barely used it, constantly find myself going back to old comfortable youtube... I've been doing it wrong! 🤦♂️
I believe he works as a TH-cam/ Nebula creator full time nowadays!
I’m pretty sure this is his job
Thanks for the info folks!
My high school chemistry teacher went to BYU and Jones reminds me so deeply of him that it’s giving me PTSD flashbacks. He used to joke every single time that BYU stands for boy your ugly, and he chortled every single time like it was so witty. He was truly insufferable and in more ways than that.
That is a you problem.
@@comradecameron3726 like, I guess that's true, but 1. Your comment is then even *more* superfluous, and 2. Why do you care? Are you an unfunny BYU professor too? Let people boost the analytics. They ain't hurting anyone.
For so much of this video I felt bad for Pons and Fleischmann. Unlike the other bad science you've covered, they had an experimental result, 1 Watt in 4 Watts out. Maybe they misunderstood or had experimental error and got caught up in the excitement, but at it's core they had a Big Number at the root of it.
The reveal that their actual experimental data was 1 Watt in not even 1.5 out, and they just multiplied that number by 10 to get what they wanted, was absolutely infuriating.
When Nathan said their data was hypothetical I nearly jumped out of my chair. Like, what the fuck do you mean, they didn't actually measure this??
"The Cornell Cold Fusion Archive (originally curated by Bruce Lewenstein). Has an extensive copy of many original documents, news coverage, etc. They also provided me with a digitized video copy of the Baltimore APS meeting"
God damn I was hoping to find a full online copy of that it looks like a suprisingly fun watch for an APS meeting of all things
To be clear I had to email, ask for it specifically (because it is not listed) and pay about $100
@@BobbyBroccoli Ouch, yeah that sums up my experience requesting things from most archives!
There are so many sketchy researchers. I had the privilege to attend a few conferences and they are very ego driven. The Q and A always get spicy.
That's strange. I've attended many conferences and never found any of them to be ego-driven.
I swear, the amount of stress I was under for the first 20-odd minutes of this part, watching an extended section on grad student Marvin Hawkins in a video titled "The Dead Grad Student Problem"...
watched this whole thing without realizing it was a part 2 😭😭 I thought we were just jumping in the deep end, but I was here for it
56:32 "One could theorize about how pigs would behave if they had wings, but pigs don't have wings."
I'm stealing this aphorism.
Just finished part 3 on nebula. God can’t get enough of your work
ITS A 3 PARTER!!!?
Holy hell, I got Nebula just to watch part 2 early, had no idea Part 3 was uploaded 😮
There’s a third part? You just made my day
@@MadisonRamanamabangbangyeah. Part 4 will come out next week
@@Thonss pretty sure it’s a 3 part series
I must say, your explanations on how some of the physics in this are simply amazing, thanks for making it easy for all of us viewers at home
This story turns so fast and is so human/complicated that it a rollervoaster to go through.
It really shows the vomplexities of human nature
@@EinFelsbrocken I vonvur
I love your documentaries man, particularly this one. There was all this hubub around cold fusion in the background when I was a wee wee lad and I was just barely old enough to only kind of understand what went down by the end of it all in the 90's, but I remember all the controversy around cold fusion through the news shows like 20/20, 60 minutes, and Dateline that my parent's watched.
Unrelated to the subject matter, but this doc is dredging up some memories from that part of my life I thought were long since gone from before my mom's decline into severe mental illness that tore our family apart and my life went to heck in a handbasket for a long while, and I really appreciate that.
I like the little poem, it's poking fun at the fact that Pons and Fleischmann keep saying that they are seeing cold fusion even though it wasn't there
Clearly they did NOT assume a spherical cow. 🎉
it’s like bobby uploads when he telepathically knows the people need it, bless you
k bro
@@cjack2355orb k
The "limerick" Steven Jones recited is a poem from 1899, by a man named William Hughes Means, called Antigonish. As to the meaning, and its relevance, this exercise is left to the student.
Me, with no diploma outside of High School and cleaning burger crumbs from my shirt: oh my god, they didn't even use light water....
It's pretty depressing that these veterans of their fields were so naive and sloppy.
It's more that an administrator pressured non experts to make an outrageous claim and misrepresent data. These non-experts then bypassed review by experts and went to the media who ignored the vocal complaints of acutal experts for about a year.
27:29 Oh thank goodness once you started recaping the assistant grad student I was like "oh no did they get this guy killed" but no its just a funny science name
Funny thing is there still is a large amount of crackpots who believe in cold fusion. The cold fusion wikipedia page was the cause of some of the most intense drama that wikipedia ever had with editing wars. You need special permission to edit still i believe
I think you will enjoy part three
@@Oceanatornowk im super excited
@@Oceanatornowk ooo, spicy! now im curious!
1:08:35 hell it's 2024 and I had someone earnestly proclaiming to me, like 5 years ago in 19 that there was a giant conspiracy covering up cold fusion. Then again my cousin was always a conspiracy nut job. I'm no doctor or even bachelors, but even I found his rantings mercurial.
I thought astatine was the bad one.
Hawkins was TWENTY SEVEN in that footage??? Jesus christ why did literally everyone in the 80s look at least two decades older than they actually were?
Wut.. I assumed that footage was from like 40 years in the future when he was 50-60
Cigars and Lead Gasoline
Grad school can take a toll on anyone, ESPECIALLY if they have 5 kids lol.
They dress the same way that old people dress today because they are the old people of today and they never updated their styles.
As an undergrad who's worked in electrochem labs and with a friend in a fusion related physics phd, I'd be more than a little suspicious if breakthrough fusion innovation were to come out of an electrochem lab.
Ah yes, the long awaited sequel to Schrödinger’s Cat: the Dead Grad Student
Exactly. When I read the title I guess I overthought it and expected it to be referring to the grad student being in a superposition of both alive and dead.
Undead cats are a thing in some other dimensions.
an amazing way to experience the media spectacle around this first hand, and what i would recommend to anyone, is to go to your uni library and read thru the news sections of Journals like sience during 1989
ITS A TRILOGY??? Thank you so much for the hard work we all appreciate it so much to learn about the drama of the science world. Not only does it help us learn from our mistakes but recording this info in a concrete way is SO MASSIVE for any historical reasons. I do hope one day to hear a peer or teacher talking about a documentary of yours in an academic setting, that would be so cool.
Hey man, just wanted to say your videos are some of the best, most well informed and well executed stuff online right now. I would sign up to Nebula, but I’m not in a financial position to do that right now, but I’ll keep supporting you here. Thanks for the amazing videos.
the moment Fleischmann said "hypothetical" in regards to the data my jaw nearly dropped lmao like ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????
dude, the visuals for this one are INSANE!! they’re definitely in my top 3 out of all your videos :3
As someone who works in understanding and teaching research methods and data analysis techniques, most research articles have multiple things wrong. Most of those things are: Failing to use the correct statistical technique for their data, not understanding statistical techniques at all, failing to adequately define their terms, having such a small (
Now that you mention that, are there good resources to lear about the correct statostical tests for data? I struggled to find any cohesive summaries academic wise
@@notsojharedtroll23 Measurements and their Uncertainties
Can you recommend any resources? Would be very helpful
I enjoy these videos so much I don't even feel the need to spoil what happens next, the wait is so worth it, especially as you always choose the most interesting topics, from Nortel (videos about which I love to this day), through Ninovium and the missing collider, to this one
As a historian, I love your videos so much. They give me insight into disciplines completely foreign to me, yet they're structured so well and lay out a story in a way that is familiar to me, and that I aspire to be able to do as well.
Plus, they please my inner gossip goblin. All that to say, I really appreciate this channel and love being semi-early for a video for once!
24:25 HOOPLAH!
Another amazing masterpiece from BobbyBroccoli. Great job once again!
Accidentally watched this one first! Now I've watched part one and am back here to rewatch with all the context.
no title has reeled me in with as much intrigue. 14 days and a killer hook
To quote my supervisor "You can do mistakes while publishing, you can even publish wrong stuff, but never ever publish outlandish claims"
Two BobbyBroccoli videos this month? Suddenly this month isn’t as bad. Great video (and title lol), can’t wait for more. Thanks for the pick me up
As a Polish person, thank you for pronouncing "Gajewski" correctly 🙇
guh jew sky (sky like the cloudy blue thing above us)
@@firstletterofthealphabet7308 how to drive a Polish person to madness:
though, from my experience, I'd say that a more probable mispronounciation would be 'gah-jev-skee'
I thought Marvin Hawkins would die and this would be a murder mystery based on the title.
When the video got to the "running a control test" question i swear i stopped breathing for a while. I cannot *fathom* looking to do a press conference without making sure i had at least that documented
I think the worst part of this whole debacle is it delegitimizes an area of research that although improbable might not be impossible given different methods and/or more understanding. It also inhibits the discovery of any other phenomena that may present itself during the process of research in related areas. Your reputation for curiosity should never fuel your ego, only your quest to learn and discover more.