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Undead Science: Science studies and the afterlife of cold fusion by Bart Simon, Rutgers University Press, $22, ISBN 0813531535

SOMETIMES a boxing match gets decided on points if neither fighter manages a knockout. But what if the loser is still capering in his corner calling, 鈥淐ome back and fight, you coward!鈥� as the referee raises the victor鈥檚 hand?

This is pretty much what has happened with cold fusion. If it sounds like a Monty Python sketch, that is fair enough, sceptics will say. The whole episode 鈥� with newspapers worldwide enthusing in 1989 about unlimited energy for free then reporting a year later that the experiments were irreproducible 鈥� rarely rose above the level of farce. On the other hand, say the enduring band of believers, science has no referee, and the doubters simply refuse to look at new experiments.

Bart Simon鈥檚 intriguing Undead Science will not tell you who is right, as a sociologist he has taken a vow not to pick sides in a scientific controversy. But he does want to persuade us that something odd is going on here. Officially, cold fusion is dead. There was an immediate flurry of attempts to repeat the experiments in which Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah claimed to have observed cold fusion. They said they recorded excess heat produced by electrolytic cells using palladium electrodes and heavy water. But by the end of 1990, a string of negative results had thrown their findings into doubt. Add criticism of their techniques, their measurements, their data analysis and their penchant for press conferences, and mainstream science considered the case closed. Funding for cold fusion research dried up, journals declined to referee papers, graduate students were warned off the field. End of story.

But look closer and it is not over at all. The number of people doing research on cold fusion 鈥� many of them reputable scientists 鈥� has stayed about the same since 1990. A regular conference attracts two or three hundred people to discuss the latest results. Papers still appear, although not in the top journals. There may not be any miniature fusion-in-a-jar gizmos to make your car go or heat your house yet, but something that looks like real research is still going on out there. How come?

The answer seems to be that, as his title suggests, a scientific field can be neither alive nor dead. Cold fusion exists in a kind of limbo. Whatever is going on in the experiments that are still running, it isn鈥檛 going to convince the vast majority of physicists. As Simon says, 鈥渢he object that engages cold fusion researchers does not exist as far as mainstream scientific culture is concerned.鈥� Most of the people still running experiments are looking for heat effects, rather than the more contentious nuclear reaction products. They tend to talk about 鈥渄euterated metals research鈥�, rather than fusion in a cell. Most are moonlighting, doing a few experiments on the side in the midst of legitimate scientific careers. Some have retired, but remain fascinated by the possibilities. And, every now and again, they still see anomalous energy outputs in their cells. As one told Simon, 鈥測ou only need to see it once to be hooked.鈥�

You could see all this as simply a bit sad. Even though it is clear Fleischmann and Pons got it badly wrong, some people will believe anything. If you are charitable, you conclude that hope springs eternal. If not, that self-delusion is all too easy to reproduce. This was certainly the 鈥渙fficial鈥� line on cold fusion. Along with the widely shared verdict that nothing worth noting was happening in Utah came a good deal of righteous talk that this was no way to go about doing serious research. Reports of cold fusion were based on work that was certainly sloppy, possibly incompetent. This was 鈥減athological science鈥�, the term coined by the chemist Irving Langmuir to describe other celebrated diversions such as N-rays and polywater.

Simon鈥檚 take, though, is quite different. The original cold-fusioneers still have their supporters, he argues, because when you look closely at the complexities of doing experiments, there is never a clear result that provokes universal agreement. What happened with cold fusion was an accumulation of negative results, interpreted as outweighing the supposedly positive ones, which eventually persuaded the majority of physicists that it was not worth any more of their time. But that does not mean that the remaining 鈥渃old-fusioneers鈥� are bad scientists or irrational in trying to make more refined measurements with more carefully prepared cells. The evidence can always be interpreted differently, and each scientist has to make an individual judgement. Although the cold fusion community now includes its share of charlatans, hucksters and new-age prophets, it still has a core of sober scientists and engineers trained just as rigorously as their fellow professionals. It is just that their judgement differs.

Simon writes for aficionados of science studies rather than popular science readers. He dwells at length on the sociological theories about what counts as knowledge about the world. Nevertheless, the picture he builds will interest anyone who wonders how science really works.

The result recalls the late Frank Zappa鈥檚 quip about jazz: it鈥檚 not dead, it just smells funny. None of this makes it any more likely that the laws of nuclear physics will have to be rewritten any time soon. The best guess is that the level of activity among cold fusion investigators will gradually fall away as people get too old or move on to other things, or resources get even harder to come by. But ten years is an impressive afterlife for a defunct field, certainly long enough to show that it is extraordinarily hard to pin down when, if ever, it is definitely unscientific to reject the majority view.

Is cold fusion a special case, then, or simply an example of the impossibility of proving a negative? Maybe, but it does leave you wondering how many other such cases there may be.