makes me think of the Indiana Pi Bill, which would've legally made the number pi equal 3.2 in Indiana, based on a stupid proof of squaring the circle. It passed the House but luckily not the Senate (a professional mathematician happened to be at the House when it was passed there, and decided to coach the Senate on why it was stupid).
@@OwlRTA 3.2 would have been better than what they were trying to do, make it 4. You can easily show that a circle with radius one has a circumference of 4 by using a square and cutting away corners. There's flaws of course, but yeah, they wanted to make it equal 4 lol
@@RaihotDoW2 I looked it up, and apparently Edward Goodwin thought he could construct a circle of the same area of a square with a straightedge and compass (which is proven impossible) with a "circle" of diameter 10 and circumference 32, making pi=3.2. Theres' also a "square" of side length 7 and diagonal 10, implying 7^2+7^2=10^2, or 98=100. The cutting corners trick is a more recent thing that's more of a joke.
@@HeyLeFay If I remember correctly, the discoverer of this radical new definition of pi was planning on charging royalties to anyone wishing to use his discovery, but graciously offered his home state free use as long as they in turn agreed to enshrine it in law.
Pons viewing a scientist colleague admitting to making a mistake as an act of betrayal of their friendship tells more about this story than it really should
A favorite story Richard Dawkins tells was of a scientist who saw another scientist presenting results that basically invalidated years of his own research and expertise. The scientist whose research was superseded walked up to the other guy, shook his hand, and said something like, "Good work. I have been wrong all these years."
@@apollo4950 We didn't get a video because they speedran to the best possible ending of cold fusion, it getting disproven real quick and them deciding to keep their heads down and stop making stuff public
I feel like Pons just had a wrong attitude from the start, being overly protective of his work and seemingly more concerned over credit and patent rights than the whole science part of all of this. I can believe that admitting being wrong about something gets psychologically almost impossible after a certain point (shame and embarrassment cause considerable pain both on emotional and even physical level) and that anyone could get stuck on an idea in this way, because we are just humans. But for Pons it seems like a situation like this was bound to happen. Even before this, he would sent legal threats when people couldn't reproduce his results on completely different projects, coupled with apparent paranoia over people stealing his inventions or ideas looming over him... He just had a completely wrong temperament to be a researcher. What a sad case. Really reminds you how scientists are human under all of their expertise and can get caught up in the excitement just like any of us. It was a really hopeful promise after all. Wonderful broccumentary, great work!
@@allanshpeley4284 having watched the video again I incline to agree with you. Pons seems to have hostility towards even the scientific method itself, having purposefully ruined the double-blind test by not telling which rod was which. All the other shenanigangs as well... Really make me doubt if he is just delusional and makes me feel like he knows none of it works and he just wants to find a forever project to burn money with, or to apparently finance his own family business. I feel bad for Fleischman. I get the feeling that he was conned by Pons with all of this. What a mess...
@@allanshpeley4284 I wonder if anyone's done a close examination of Pons's entire academic career, because if these videos are accurate he does have a whiff of fraud about him. Why else do you have a lawyer prepared just in case someone wants to examine your work?
They both come off as having a similar mindset to people on the forefronts of conspiracy movements. The claiming anyone who can't replicate their results was just doing it wrong, but refusing to elaborate on how, the attitudes that finding a mistake and admitting to it was somehow a complete betrayal, the belief that people were actually conspiring to stop them, the refusing to actually cooperate with tests or ever share any actual data. But then you've got the stuff that makes them look even worse, where they actively sabotaged people who were trying to test their data. There seems no excuse for turning off the one that was producing heat before it could be tested in detail. Or for ruining the double blind test. Or for legally threatening people for publishing negative results. They can claim everyone was against them all they want, but at the end of the day the simple fact is that they never showed any actual usable data. For all their whining of bias against them, they never seemed to have any data of their own. No matter how much they claim to believe it themselves, they never had anything concrete to show for it. That's not the doubters' fault.
I'm still genuinely puzzled by Pons and Fleischmann's behaviour, especially Pons. Stripped of context his behaviour comes across as incredibly evasive and dishonest, if not outright fraudulent, but I still can't help but feel like he was, to be slightly uncharitable, a guileless dork who ended up in over his own head and just couldn't admit that he was wrong. There isn't enough solid evidence to accuse them of outright fraud, there isn't sufficient motive, and they were both clearly smart enough to realize that making the whole thing up would never work out, but they could hardly have handled the situation more poorly than they did. The whole thing just confuses me.
I think their actions start to make a lot of sense if you look at them as a Utah version of the Korean cloning scandal. University admins, elected officials, and a lot of the public started to romanticize these guys and got very emotionally invested in their success. They were supposed to be underdog heroes who could "stick it to the elites" and make Utahns feel proud and respected, so any pushback to their research became a personal attack and any failure on their part was a huge blow. The story about Pons' daughter getting bullied was very telling - the fact that her classmates didn't just say "oh your dad's crazy for believing in cold fusion" but felt that he had publicly humiliated their entire community. It's an insane amount of pressure, even more than ego alone, and I think that made them increasingly desperate to save face in any way they could.
I kind of blame academia. It is a highly competitive environment in the first place and more built around groupthink than its members realize. Humans form cults - it is an unavoidable fixture of our psychology and none are exempt from it. Academia creates cults dedicated to various models and theories - and just like any other cult, you can go find an individual to have a chat about theology in the lunchroom. But when you start preaching heresy or name yourself an apostate - well, you're shunned from the cult at the very least. Science is not, as it is practiced, a sterile process performed by sterile rational actors as the norm. It is a deeply emotional, ritualistic, religious practice with group and personal fanaticism as a functional necessity. A sane person does not stare into numbers for weeks on end or methodically torture substances to yield their constituents to an accuracy of 12 decimal places. That is something reserved for zealots. When someone stands up and says they found a lost tome from the creator that everyone else missed, it is an insult to their own zealotry and a testament of his own. The death penalty can only then be stayed by a literal act of God which was missed. Often, there is weeping, gnashing of teeth, and a most righteous and holy ripping and tearing of heretics is done. While that view is sympathetic to the heretic, the heretic no less wants to be able to smash a black hole at superluminal speeds into his detractors and see their souls obliterated. Formalities, pleasantries, all ritualistic clothing for raw beasts.
Delusion and fraud can definitely coexist. The decisions he made to obscure the failures of the experiments are your evidence he knew he was being deceptive. Guileless dorks may be bad liars, and they may leave published evidence of their lies and behave in a way that over time makes their lies a foregone conclusion- sometimes nearly admitting it on congressional record, for example- but they can still be liars. I think people are motivated by acclaim, and the desire to be special, and the ambition to do something important, and the safety of being an important researcher, and the need for stimulation, and the desire to avoid the frustration of proper channels rejecting sloppy work for funding. No idea what he was into. And usually seems like more than one motive is at work when you make the most destructively dumb decisions of your life. Pons is a tragic figure in the Greek sense. He’s a horror show’s bloodiest ghost of Christmas future. He made a series of dumb decisions, and his frailty and rigidness - the closed-door personality he’d always had that was unable to incorporate reality if it threatened an inflated sense of his own importance or wisdom or whatever - swooped in and took over the wheel entirely. His entire life was swallowed by his dumbest moments. Sounds a little more passive than it seems to be, phrased like that. Rather than acknowledging he’d committed fraud, and having to live through the humbling process of taking responsibility for his actions- a process destined to unveil his extremely human-sized silhouette- he’s instead dedicated his life to being a fraud. Not great
Lucky for you NASA continued your research and released a paper explaining the science of "Lattice Confinement Fusion" 35'ish years later. Oh! But yeah, cold fusion is a joke, laughable, really just scientifically impossible. Even if NASA has documented, observed, and understands how fusion can happen at room temp/pressure, it's just a fringe wingnut myth.
The cropped image reveal is genuinely the most incredible twist ending imaginable. If it was a plot point in a movie, no one would believe it, it would be just too ridiculous.
@gaterzoom Really they just went to the press because they didn't want anyone else taking the credit from their research. I get where they were coming from but since we learned that cold fusion didn't happen then why rush it?
I think it's the fact that the friendship between Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann broke in the end that affects me the most. That and the fact that the latter's last questions for the former are "how are you" and "are you continuing the dreadful research." Like he knows by now that it's a cursed dream that can never happen, but still hopes that his best friend is continuing it all the same. I have long-term friends of my own, and I really do hope we stick the landing. So, definitely a significant dose of projecting on my part, even if neither me nor my friends have any plans of creating a scientific uprising with uncertain scientific discoveries any time soon. Still, thanks a ton for the three-part-doc. It was wonderful to follow, and it will be wonderful to rewatch later.
I think this is the most tragic series you’ve made. The other stories often had people who are clearly and knowingly committing fraud. Here, it seems like they were just overwhelmed and embittered after everything. I don’t know if I feel sad for them when they seem so arrogant, but I think I pity them to a degree
I found it hard to watch the footage of them still trying to defend their research because I genuinely feel bad for them, especially when I think about how they were basically forced to release their research early
@@misteryA555the only thing that really 'forced' them to release early was paranoia about data theft, the same paranoia that prevented them from showing their work to nuclear physicists. There's an argument for the real problem being capitalism infecting science, but in the end it feels like hubris was the real killer all along.
Seeing the ending fleischmann interview was so depressing, his laugh from reminiscing... Their entire story really is a tragedy, two electrochemists that fell from grace with a blunder so big it killed a scientist and broke their friendship
I felt bad for them early on in the saga. But there comes a point where they ought to have changed course and admitted they'd screwed up. They never, ever did. They kept on scamming, damaging their entire scientific field in the process. By the end, they'd lost every shred of my sympathy. They brought this onto themselves.
@@TaschenschieberI feel like Pons especially conducted himself in unscrupulous ways from the beginning. I wouldn't go so far as to accuse him of fraud, but I don't think he was ever being totally honest.
“*cold fusion* was created by John Fusion in 2024 to sell more Bobby Broccoli videos” -The internet, probably. (Edit: not to be confused with Cold Fusion, who was invented by RUclips to make even more RUclips videos)
I did my undergrad at BYU and Steven Jones was the professor for my very first introductory physics course. At the time he seemed *mostly* reasonable, still convinced that you could see neutrons but not heat, which would put "metal catalyzed fusion" (as he called it) in the same "interesting but not practical" category as muon catalyzed fusion. And I suppose you couldn't fully rule that out (you basically never can, just claim the effect is smaller and you can always keep looking for it), but I think he was more convinced than that, he wasn't just the guy looking to see if he can bound the mass of the photon to a smaller value (look, all our experiments are consistent with photons having zero mass, but can we *definitely* say that it's not just really, really small? I know a professor who's made a career out of questions like that, trying to measure things where he doesn't think he'll ever get the unexpected result, but it's worth putting some small amount of effort into that). I think I can follow how he really went off the deep end. The fact that Fleischmann and Pons had made such obviously incorrect and over the top claims (with heat and all that) had quickly shut off all interest in what Jones had been working on, and I think that he became convinced that this had prevented real, interesting research from happening (the 2019 paper maybe even implies that there's some small merit to that), and that, in turn, poisoned him, convincing him that he just couldn't trust the community that was just too caught up in the politics of it all to be willing to ask interesting and difficult questions (though I would reply, if I were talking to him today in a very frank discussion, that the difficult question isn't so interesting or critical that it merits more than a small investment anyway). That turned him into someone easily susceptible to conspiracy theories. By the time I was a student he wasn't doing research, but he was a perfectly good instructor, though I think they had him in introductory courses, where his old research program wouldn't derail things completely, on purpose. A couple years after I took that class he came out as a "9/11 truther" and BYU had to navigate the fact that he had fully gone off the deep end, but he had tenure... the point of tenure is supposed to be that you have a lot of latitude to pursue even somewhat crazy research ideas, but at some point, at some extreme, you want to find a way to stop giving the guy a platform. I don't know what went into Dr. Jones' decision to retire early, I don't know what kinds of negotiations or pressure administrators brought in, but I don't envy anyone having to deal with that situation. Having met the guy, I want to maintain the empathy that I have for him, but how do you navigate it when the person's ideas go that far off the deep end, when they're not just divorced from reality, but a breeding ground for harm (in Jones' case, because they could lead to accusations)? Perhaps the best I can come up with is the old Christian maxim of "love the sinner, hate the sin," but that's a hard tightrope to walk.
What gets me on people's need to cling to 'cold fusion' as a magic bullet for our energy problem, is that while it MIGHT be possible, we have entirely feasible energy sources that we could and should be investing into in the meantime, to give ourselves some space. And yet, we haven't, really.
Unfortunately as Broccoli boi said. Those sources are already incredibly divisive both scientifically and politically, and given the way the political climate seems to be heading in the U.S. its even more unlikely now we will actually see those sources step ahead given that denying there is a climate problem entirely has become popular.
@@skyaero8773 Hot fusion is not a divisive issue at this point. ITER will be up and running in the next decade, the technology has been proven to work, its just a matter of scaling up. Whats crazy is that basically the entire developed world together is investing one half of a billion euro per year into technology that we know can generate nearly infinite clean energy, while investing much more into dumb measures like converting to electric cars before the energy grid and electricity generation capacity are ready for it, as well as wasting tons of rare materials on batteries and solar panels. If all that money had been invested into fundamental research we would have a working hot fusion reactor right now. But I guess that doesnt make the car manufacturers money.
@@vitoc8454 Yes, and if you look at the energy output per cubic meter, it is actually virtually zero, less than a compost heap. It outputs a lot of energy because it is really big. So, even if fusion does do everything that is promised, I just don't think it is going to have any practical use here on earth.
1:02:59 God this has got to be one of the saddest things I’ve ever watched… the way he is utterly speechless is absolutely gut wrenching. I think somewhere in that man is a person who genuinely wanted to save the world with science, be that crazy 2nd Einstein. But now at the end of his life he is so full of regrets. It’s just, sad.
Starting the video with a mention of LK-99 seems appropriate. This series has been the perfect background context for why the media at large (correctly) chose not to treat it as a huge story.
Every couple months there is another huge breakthrough reported in some field like the ones mentioned in this video, cold fusion, room temperature superconductors, some form of free energy, super strong materials, etc. Anyone who has any familiarity with the scientific process knows to just hold your horses and see if the study can be replicated in independent trials. Sometimes, it turns out to be correct. The LK99 thing wasnt, but there have been breakthroughs in superconducting materials in the past decades. When carbon nanotubes were discovered, a lot of people also thought it was bs. You simply cant know before people put in the work to verify the claims. Also, with video editing and AI systems being abundantly available right now, you probably shouldnt trust a video that shows a levitating rock, just saying.
After all the eye rolling and frustration i felt watching this as the pair of them dodged and weaved their way though giving out actual evidence, I definitely wasn't expecting to get choked up at that last interview with Fleischmann. Just to see an old professor looking back at his work and wondering what happened just hit me regardless of what it was
Man the worst for me was seeing the part where he did not invite pons to christmas anymore. Dude lost a lifelong friend and a scientific passion for what?
@@skyaero8773 Yeah. As much as I disliked their reluctance to admit that they had made mistakes, I liked the fact that they had stayed friends, even moving to Japan together. I was actually sad to hear of their falling out. It seems to me that as both men got older, the balance of power shifted from the now elderly Fleischmann to the younger Pons, and that Pons in that role was more overbearing to Fleischmann than the latter had been to him earlier in their careers.
You don't have to be insane to believe 9/11 was an inside job. You do have to be quite an idiot to think certain govt agencies wouldn't be able or willing to do such a heinous thing, however. It really is an interesting subject.
I don't know Steve Jones view on the matter, perhaps he does indulge in the crazy side of it, but i'd refrain from instantly labelling anyone in association of it as 'insane'. There are enough oddities on the subject to raise scepticism. I reserve the idiot tag for those who claim lizard people, jews, hologram etc
@@EDcaseNO There's definitely a difference between political conspiracy theories, some of which turn out to be true, and the alien and other whacky stuff.
stuck the landing, bravo. the spiral at the end as you list the grifters not worth sourcing photos and documents for, felt like such a great finale to sell the consequences of the splinters that've been created by this one instance of cold fusion frenzy. you deserve every bit of success you're seeing, and i'll continue to look on in wonder
*SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ PAST THIS LINE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED* The fact that the photo of Steve Jones used throughout the documentary is actually cropped out and hides his 9/11 conspiracy presentation is definitely something I did not expect. He sort of came into the story as a hero and voice of reason that stood against fraudulent science. The fact that he is just as susceptible to conspiracy madness is truly tragic and kind of poetic. Loved the reveal.
I had as a kid been very interested in debunking the 9/11 Truth Movement and so I was familiar with Jones's name and had no idea he was this important in the cold fusion drama.
It was pretty clear that the Pons & Fleischmann train was going to wreck itself, but the Steve Jones situation was a total gut punch. What a twist to drop on us all.
Bobby. I work a full-time job and a part-time job while working on my Masters in Astronautical Engineering. I come home from work and work on assignments or work for my other job all night. Many times I have been tempted to take the easy route, to fudge a couple of numbers, to purchase a Chegg subscription. But your videos make me think that there is something real to work towards with all of this. Between all of the social media "get rich with crypto" and scams, and between the man who runs the company I dream to work for playing Diablo for 6 hours a day, there is you, resolute in the idea that true science and engineering matters. Thank you.
As a scientist, seeing Fleischmann's interview at the end is honestly heartbreaking to see, you can tell he wanted it to be real so bad and for your life's work to end up nowhere makes me want to cry, just seeing the sadness in his face.
maybe their cold fusion were triggged by gravitational wave that occured that year with a supernova going off and all these N- guys have to do are to wait for G-waves when they come
South Korea mention! Schon mention! Bell labs mention! Watkins mention! Darlene Hoffman mention! Truly a culmination of your previous videos. I am, however, a bit saddened you didn't fit in a "Bingo, bango, bongo"
@cabbelos he said it in the first Schon video when talking about Schons early publications and again in the first Nortel video when talking about the companies Nortel was buying
My partner and I got Nebula just to see this video two weeks ago. It feels like the magnum opus so far. Everything we’ve learned in the past Broccumentaries coalesced together into a haunting finale to the cold fusion series. A damn beautiful job, Mr. Broccoli. We’re excited to see what the future holds, and you can be we’ll be day one viewers of 17 Pages.
We all know how horrible it is when powerful entities push down smaller upstarts for no other reason than that they can. But too little is made of the inverse, when the smaller entities gain a complex and attempt to discredit those larger than them simply because they’re larger. It is simply a true fact that larger entities on the whole, especially in methodical industries like science, tend to be the most correct ones more often than not. Their smugness is perhaps not warranted, but it is earned. And attempting some half-baked revenge is usually going to fail, because in their ego the smaller entities forget why the larger ones are where they are.
The underdog bias is very much real. We love it in storytelling when 'the little guy sticks it to the man' so to speak, so often that we can often do forget that no, the real world tends to not work this way.
this is really the truth of it all; as was stated in part 2, cold fusion is/was never going to come from a small laboratory at a small school. we are in the age of science wherein significant, technological progress will likely only come about via global, coordinated efforts between national labs and large, established academic institutions. especially when it comes to physics
this!! the larger institutions could disprove/point out errors in the work specifically because they were large and well funded. with that funding they had access to the top scientists in their respective fields, as well as the tech/resources to test both the cold fusion reaction and error points within its process.
"Pons viewed this as a personal betrayal". Ah yes, because doing proper science means that it is personal. Tells you a lot about Pons' understanding of how science works.
1:59 Slight correction: South Korean Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000 (followed by Han Kang winning the literature prize in 2024). It wouldn’t be the first time a Korean won the Nobel prize, but it would be the first time in one of the science fields.
That errors section was intense, crazy how many little things can go wrong. Makes me think about how poorly my high school labs results would've held up under such scrutiny lol
"So your precision with uou $20 HS equipment is much better than ours with our $20 000 000 equipment. Please, iluminate us..." "So i just moved the points a bit, just by a couple of decimals here and there... Maybe some whole units... And that point never existed. I did not want to have to come back another day to complete the experiment..."
At my high school, each year level gets one different science subject, and you have to complete one year-long project. All four of mine were varying degrees of fail. Freshman Year: General sciences - We all had to design an experiment involving a terrarium (plants grown in a closed system). Mine was about adding yeast to soil to improve plan growth. Seemed sensible, until idiot me learned later that I was supposed to *cover* the box where I was growing my plants. So I didn't have a terrarium, just a potted plant. It didn't really affect my grade. Sophomore Year: Biology. Our group wanted to test various soaps on the skin germs on rabbits. We bought several rabbits, who proceeded to attack and even k1ll each other in captivity. At least we got the samples. Other than that, we had no issues, except that we got a low grade for our proposal because the guy who was tasked with printing it apparently forgot it at home. We later found it in his bag, meaning he didn't really forget it. Junior Year: Chemistry - We tested various "anti-rust" coatings on some iron nails. The problem is that our measuring device (a triple-beam balance) was nowhere near precise enough to measure how much rust had formed Senior Year: Physics - I just went "fck it" and pitched a Rube-Goldberg machine that would demonstrate simple physics phenomena. The idea is that you use a toy car that would knock a marble down a series of ramps, which would knock down a line of jenga pieces that led up to a toy hammer and a needle popping a balloon. We crammed it in one afternoon and the whole thing wouldn't work in one go, so we filmed it in parts.
@@vitoc8454 I actually laughed out loud at the potted plant part. But really that seems so much cooler than what we were doing in our labs. I remember that one girl in the year above us, dropped something and destroyed a like 10000€ piece of equipment and gave herself chemical burns. And to top it off in the chaos one other student left the fire unattended so we had a burned corner of the floor for months. She thankfully recovered. So technical execution became 70% of our grade and for the entirety of first year we had to first demonstrate the technique of the entire experiment with water, and only after we got the go ahead could we do the actual experiment. It was especially sad, because we were a private school and had a relatively well equipped lab.
@@FieryRedmond Nono, let him feel bad for the architects of their own undoing. Trust me, we don't want those who can feel this kind of empathy to vanish completely. We _really_ don't.
Man this is the most tragic one you have covered yet. Not only did these two men ruin their careers they pretty much ruined their lives for almost no reason. That final interview... I would say that they brought this onto themselves but seeing a man so clearly broken and regretful at the end of their life is just profoundly sad to me no matter what. And the fact that there are still people so committed to a dead field walking just adds onto that sadness. (Also if anybody knows the song at 52:46 please let me know I quite like it)
I was 13 when the cold fusion story broke. It was everywhere, and I remember the disappointment when it faded. Undaunted, I learned all the science I could in high school and Georgia Tech. After graduating I read even more and followed the LENR guys, watching in disbelief as they continued to string people along through the early 2000s and even into the 2010s. Now you have multiple projects that have sprung off from a seemingly unrelated direction. But it’s not unrelated. There is a lot of money to be made by carefully balancing the public’s desire for a good show and an investor’s desire for a rapid turnaround. But to get it to work you have to solve Ponzi’s paradox, and currently very few have. Most either turn on the tap too fast (like Pons), or (like Rossi), have no low-tech, functioning mechanism to sell while holding out for the “ten years away” machine. Honestly it’s a fascinating thing to watch.
Balancing public enthusiasm, scientific rigor, and investor expectations is a forever struggle in research, especially in fields promising transformational change. The story of Pons and Fleischmann encapsulates the complexity of hope intersecting with ambition and skepticism, an enduring theme in the pursuit of breakthrough science. The concept of “Ponzi’s paradox” highlights this tension well: the necessity of showcasing progress without tipping into overpromise. It underscores the precariousness of maintaining confidence while steering clear of speculative hype. The parallel with Rossi's case exemplifies how research can fall short when it hinges on spectacle rather than substantiated, incremental advancement. The cultural appetite for immediate, tangible results indeed poses a barrier to fostering patience in research. The shift towards quick payoffs undermines the slow, sometimes ambiguous path true scientific breakthroughs often require. One solution lies in redefining the metrics of success for both the public and investors, moving the focus to verifiable milestones that celebrate steady progress rather than singular, uncertain outcomes. The challenge remains: how can scientists and communicators reshape narratives to highlight the value of incremental progress without succumbing to the “next big thing” allure? Part of the answer may involve better communication strategies that emphasize the process and the significance of intermediary achievements. This, coupled with changes in funding structures that incentivize sustained research efforts over headline-grabbing declarations, could help. Investors, too, would need to be educated on the long-term nature of such pursuits, valuing transparency and trust over spectacle. Shifting the paradigm involves creating a research and funding culture that values honesty and step-by-step progress, where trust is built on consistency and substance rather than dramatic, unsubstantiated claims. It’s a question of fostering patience, measured optimism, and an appreciation for the incremental steps that pave the way to genuine breakthroughs.
@ I agree wholeheartedly. It has seemed like something needs to give since the completion of the LHC. The Standard Model is complete, and other theories did not gain any support, since nothing was seen other than the Higgs. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics remain at arm’s length, perhaps permanently. I know that has been a huge disappointment to many, but it needs to be not be. There is still so much regular work to do. There is so much to count, so much to catalog - so much of the ordinary in science. Culturally, we are primed for the Next Big Thing. Yet the black swan remains impossible to forecast. Perhaps the start would be to explain to children that the busywork of science is as important, if not more so, than the grand discoveries. I don’t want to go to far “the other way,” as it were. We don’t need to repeat the mistake of previous generations by thinking we’ve reached the end of physics. Clearly we have not, since there remain many tensions. But there is no clear path forward. So, since we cannot cheat by using a magnet to get the plastic needle out of the haystack, the only option left is to go through it the hard way. But I hope I’m wrong and some new Newton or Einstein comes along and readjusts our thinking.
@deathmagneto-soy steal? Steal or not, it's talented to be able to replicate his content. What's ur point? He's not original? This is RUclips- not a single idea hasn't been remade in some way, shape or form.
when i was thinking glenn seaborg and james d watkins was the most ambitious crossover in history, i was not expecting darlene hoffman to enter the mix
Thank you for this documentary. I was studying Physics at one of the non-MIT universities in Boston when that fatal press conference was held in Utah. In reaction, physicists from MIT went around giving talks at all the area colleges and universities because they wanted to make clear that this whole fiasco was NOT how science was to be done. Especially not Physics. My school got an assistant director of the MIT Nuclear Fusion Lab who spent about 3 hours with us, answering questions about all Physics topics, not just Cold Fusion. She was great! That might be the best thing that came out of the whole mess: learning how not to behave as a scientist and keeping very good notes of very good measurements.
1:03:06 "The potential is exciting?" "The potential is exciting, yes." This reminds me of Last Week Tonight which had _multiple_ segments over the years showing "60 Minutes anchors prompting people to deliver the sound bite they need (seriously they do this all the time)". It's like a mild hypnosis, seeing guests just repeating what the anchor said verbatim
@@948320z In the context of this broccumentary, however, I think the visual of him being speechless and settling for repeating the interviewer's words also says a lot.
I think it’s absolutely incredible the amount of seriousness involved in the scientific community. The fact they hold conferences, hold each other accountable, and challenge each other is amazing. I definitely think this a valuable opportunity that I hope remains in the future of science. As someone who works a basic office job, I am just in awe. Great video series btw.
Yeah, this documentary has both a negative and positive takeaway. It's sad to see so many grifters and leeches, and people willing to go beyong ethical boundaries to publish whatever they need to succeed. But there are also enough people that are willing to stand up, to do the critical work and do deep dives in papers and subjects no ordinary person will ever be interested in; just for the good of the scientific field as a whole.
If you want to see dedication to truth and holding people accountable, you should look into speedrunning. People will write 80 page essays with university level math just to try to prove that someone changed a game file to improve their RNG.
@@TheSuperappelflapthat was amazing, but I think the dream case was an exception. He he had extra scrutiny on his run due to his popularity and reputation, if he didn’t have a channel no one would have bothered to check the odds and just assume he was lucky.
@@J-Johna-Jameson That's not the only time that happened. Just in Minecraft several other speed runners got banned for changing game files after people spent hundreds of hours analyzing footage and building math models of in game mechanics to prove that the items they got from chests and their luck with drops were impossible. This has also happened in Diablo 2, in Civ 6, in many other games. You don't mess with the speed running community.
@@TheSuperappelflap You probably don't realize this but like you're comparing actual fucking science to speedrunning, you kinda sound ridiculous. Like you know that, that university level math you're lauding is just what every single person working in the natural sciences has to learn right?
i’ve never considered myself someone who was into science, it’s slayed been super confusing and hard for me to enjoy learning about but this channel has effectively changed that. Im always waiting for a new video because the science and the history mixed together is just awesome- i really love this channel!
All these redactions due to erroneus readings because of leeching, voltage fluctuations etc. i think also happen to work as a reminder of why the finest test equipment can be so expensive. Going from good data to perfect data requires machinery that can somehow handle all of the minuscule edge cases that it has any control over, perfection at every step.. the complexity in circuitry can easily go from linear to exponential, in a sense.
Not just that. Even with the best equipment, you still have to model for all possible influences or error sources. I think this is why the 'faster than light' neutrino incident at the LHC was dealt with so solidly.
Well it's actually more of the other way around. The cheap stuff usually is being sold to people who don't really know what they're doing so it'll have protections for this kinda thing built in. However the expensive stuff is being sold to people who presumably know exactly how it works and as such can be expected to account for all possible sources of error. At the same time if you want super sensitive equipment you can't build those kinds of protections into it because it might also end up accidentally removing the data you're looking for.
24:55 this is why I have so much respect for physicists- all these tiny tiny pieces of information that could effect the experiments, and they still manage to make such great advancements in technology
At the end of the day its a niche hour long documentary. To get on trending you need to be in 10-20 min range, with a video which all age groups can watch without much thought. Not that I hate such videos, its just scratches a diff need in your brain.
Slight correction: Superconductivity isn’t when resistance APPROACHES 0. It is when it IS 0. That’s what makes it so remarkable. You can move electricity without losing ANY energy. In a superconductor, you could hypothetically keep a current in a loop of wire indefinitely.
It becomes measurably zero. The practical resistance, however, is still above 0 - as proven by the fact that the more amps you push through a superconductor, the more you need to cool it. That means you're converting some amount of electrical energy to heat. But this is due to nucleic interactions, not electric ones, so the electrical resistance is indeed zero.
When you reach the 'Politician speaking for your research, calling one of the most prestigious journals in the world 'some magazine'' level of of defense, you're probably cooked.
despite all the dishonesty from the duo and ressentiment especially from pons' side, i almost broke into tears at the ending. that desolate feeling, that refusal to deny the blunder determining your entire legacy, its a crushing reality to live with
This entire series made me nonlinear. Seriously, I feel like this documentary really revealed how science can take out the very worst in people. Incredibly tragic
you see similar in nz's parliament tv. in one instance the leader of the opposition sarcastically asked the speaker of the house why he was "the naughty boy of this parliament". the broadcasting room cut in perfect time for the speaker of the house to Jim the camera like he was on an episode of the office. i think it's opportunities like that which keep government filmography teams sane.
Your documentaries are all great in basically every aspect, but the one thing that stands above for me is with how much respect you treat the people that clearly messed up in major ways. Pons feels so human in the way you tell this story and while I have to question how so many mistakes could be made by him along the way despite how intelligent he clearly is, I do deeply sympathize with him.
I was in physics undergrad during the whole room temp superconductor debacle, and it was a pretty out the gate “idk this seems weird and sus”. Like we talked about it for a few days in class with skepticism, and then the agreement was ‘no yeah, someone’s lying’ and we *never talked about it again*. On another note, congrats to the actual first Korean Nobel Laureate, Han Kang!
As a STEM student, the science communication abilities you flex with every video are really inspiring. I hope I can learn to communicate with this kind of skill in the future.
Watched on Nebula. I really like the way you weave an interesting human narrative into these stories while also getting into the technical details of how these physics concepts work, and how we can experimentally verify them. I feel like I learn a lot from these.
And to give a proper Utah analogy, Pons and Fleischmann are like Joseph Smith reading “the golden plates” out of a hat (the basis of Mormonism) when it comes to being asked about their experimental veracity.
Babe? Babe?! Oh god, what did you take?? At least I have good science communication media to assuage my grief. Goodnight, babe. Goodbye. _Babe, I’m calling the coroner. Cool if I film this for my channel?_
this has been an incredible series. that cropped photo reveal was the most shocking yt documentary twist since finding out shapeland was animal kingdom. damn.
You have no idea how disheartening it was for me to see people got so blindsided by the Shapeland reveal. Because I didn't know what Animal Kingdom was. The impact was completely lost on me
For how close to cold fusion I was growing up, I had never really delved that far into the story at all, so thanks for this. My father joined the physics department at BYU around all this time, but I don't recall much substantial conversation with him about it. I do remember Steve Jones' turn into 9/11 stuff well. I think his office was even next door to my dad's I remember being sympathetic to him at the time, because being BYU's methods of soft-firing its employees is not pleasant, but it fell of my radar until jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams became a meme. There is a way in Utah for anything causing embarassement, warranted or not, to be implicitly hushed over, but nonetheless which haunts the place. I'm not surprised that Steve Jones went the way he did, it is an enormous pressure to be on the receiving side of that, I'd imagine especially for him, given that most people in that situation are somewhere on the left side of things, and have their own support networks, however flawed. Anyway, I appreciate that your coverage did not go the sensationalist route there. That said, the story of cold fusion is Utah through and through, and at some point, these stories end up in fraud. That its main protagonists were neither Mormon nor Utahn just goes to show how far the culture of mormonism seeps into everything, for better, or for sadly more often, for worse.
I’m a solid state physics grad student and the LK-99 drama was quite fun, I remember absolutely losing it over the preprint that had a screenshot of a video of a levitating piece as one of the figures A lot of people in my personal life asked me about it, but I was definitely way more obsessed with the Ranga Dias case that no one in the public had heard about
As a theoretical condensed matter physicist, the whole ordeal was very frustrating. It was clearly made big by Twitter grifter and crypto bros, making up long and fake "update" threads.
everytime a person from a previous documentary like hendrick schön or darlene hoffman shows up my body does a mini pog like they revealed my favorite glup shitto coming back in star wars
That the government decided to "legally scientifically confirm" the experiment reminds me of that time that a state almost legally defined pi as being 3 because they really wanted a local mathematical proof to work, lmao.
19:02 Darlene Hoffman Cameo. I love it when people from other documentaries show up in these videos, it really puts into perspective how connected the scientific community is.
Reminds me of that episode of Last Week Tonight about Special Districts, where one small town had a special district run by just two guys. Their devotion to the job was matched by their town's indifference: There was a video of them holding a by-the-book council meeting *in a room completely empty except for them*
My grandfather actually worked as a professor in the chemistry department at A&M and reportedly according to my father saw the news about cold fusion walked into his lab and came back a few hours later saying it wasn’t possible and they were wrong.
I’m going on a long-haul flight in a few hours and despite having already watched the 2 previous episodes of this series, I downloaded them to watch again offline. Now I get a notification that the last video is out! This is going to be the best long haul-flight ever. Can’t wait to take off 🥦🛫🎉
I feel bad for Pons’ wife and kids, being simply near the guy caused problems. And then I felt so incredibly angry with that interview toward the end where he claimed his critics were perhaps too harsh, YOU LITERALLY FALSIFIED DATA AND LIED ABOUT PERFORMING TESTS THAT YOU NEVER DID, ALL TO TRY AND GET A PATENT AND THEN REFUSED TO BACK DOWN WHEN YOU WERE SHOWN TO BE WRONG, WHAT ELSE WOULD HAPPEN
This video feels like the culination of all your big projects over the years - callbacks to Schon, Cloning videos, the Fusion stuff, and peer review procedures which we went over in Bog. It's like this is what you have been making your youtube channel for
It's wild to think where Bobby started with his channel, and how he changed gears. Cause this is some of the best video essays/documentaries on RUclips. Period.
7:25 is one of the best video editing techniques I've seen in a while. Creative, demanding attention, super fun to witness, also the music bops. I take off my proverbial hat in respect and awe to you Mr Broccoli.
The reference to superconductors is a good choice of reference. An overnight massive shift in a field that was LEGITIMATE, showing that people weren't just being gullible morons when they had hope for this
I actually remember when "cold fusion" hit the news, became a joke, and then became a conspiracy theory. Then you had all the thriller films where someone had invented cold fusion and had to escape energy industry assassins.
Beautiful work! I am old enough to have lived through that controversy as I was graduating and then starting a PhD in particle physics in the 90's, so I remember a fair amount of what you tell but you give so many more details, and also extract the big picture. Great video!
Its possible that Martin was acting in good faith, possible. However pons was clearly a full con-man, either because its what he was planning to begin with or, he was just too weak a person to actually admin fault. His use of lawyers makes me more likely to believe he was a con-man. and honestly he should have been charged with fraud. but he manged to flee.
This story feels like the ultimate example of what it means to metaphorically die on a hill. Everybody involved has spent so long insisting they have something, telling everybody to believe them, begging for more resources and time, well after the point where it's reasonable to just let it go. Academia rocks
It's midnight here in the Netherlands and I need to get up at 6. But I will never skip a new Broccoli upload. I've been looking forward to part 3 for so long!
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
If you'd like to support the production of my upcoming feature-length documentary you can do so here: go.nebula.tv/17pages?ref=bobbybroccoli
Ok
You liked your own comment
I locked in when I saw the notif 💀
Ngl, my whole meat got stiff when I saw the notification. Pause 🤚
I signed up for Nebula after the last episode. It's nice to watch stuff without sponsor segments
We've tried Cold Fusion and Hot Fusion, it seems the only option left is Just Right Fusion, I think we should put Professor Goldilocks on the case.
Big Bear won't let that happen
award
I've proposed that before, but the response was tepid
Easy. Add Hot Fusion and Cold Fusion together at once.
We should try a different angle- Moist Fusion
I mixed ammonia and bleach, and it got really hot from room temp. Having clearly invented cold fusion, I got so excited I passed out
That’s nothing. I’ve generated heat using thermal paste and Baldur’s Gate 3
@@Jame5man I tweaked the formula by using Starfield. Half the game, twice the meltdown!
gamers must rise up and clock 16 hours a day on heavily modded Bethesda games to generate enough heat to end fossil fuel use
I don't believe you. Off to try to replicate your results.
You know some bomb recipes on the internet are bogus but the ATF doesn’t do anything about it bcuz its considered “a problem that solves itself”
"Legally scientifically confirmed" is one hell of a phrase.
makes me think of the Indiana Pi Bill, which would've legally made the number pi equal 3.2 in Indiana, based on a stupid proof of squaring the circle. It passed the House but luckily not the Senate (a professional mathematician happened to be at the House when it was passed there, and decided to coach the Senate on why it was stupid).
@@OwlRTA 3.2 would have been better than what they were trying to do, make it 4. You can easily show that a circle with radius one has a circumference of 4 by using a square and cutting away corners. There's flaws of course, but yeah, they wanted to make it equal 4 lol
@@RaihotDoW2 I looked it up, and apparently Edward Goodwin thought he could construct a circle of the same area of a square with a straightedge and compass (which is proven impossible) with a "circle" of diameter 10 and circumference 32, making pi=3.2. Theres' also a "square" of side length 7 and diagonal 10, implying 7^2+7^2=10^2, or 98=100. The cutting corners trick is a more recent thing that's more of a joke.
@@OwlRTA What??? What is even the point of passing a law for that lmao
@@HeyLeFay If I remember correctly, the discoverer of this radical new definition of pi was planning on charging royalties to anyone wishing to use his discovery, but graciously offered his home state free use as long as they in turn agreed to enshrine it in law.
Pons viewing a scientist colleague admitting to making a mistake as an act of betrayal of their friendship tells more about this story than it really should
Tells you more about Pons' character, too.
If him having an attack dog lawyer to sic on fellow scientists, even before cold fusion, wasn't enough of a sign of his character, that sure is
A favorite story Richard Dawkins tells was of a scientist who saw another scientist presenting results that basically invalidated years of his own research and expertise. The scientist whose research was superseded walked up to the other guy, shook his hand, and said something like, "Good work. I have been wrong all these years."
@@vitoc8454 Even the most accomplished scientists have been more wrong than right 😊
@@vitoc8454 or like when Einstein wanted to be wrong about black holes
Fleischmann being asked what he would ask Pons if he ever saw him again, and answering "How are you?" made me actually cry. This is unbelievably sad.
Fleischmann looks like a good guy that took the wrong alley and never quite found his way back. Pons looks like a paranoid liar.
This is the ultimate BobbyBroccoli crossover episode. A Hendrik Schön mention, a Korean Nobel hopeful, Admiral Watkins, and Darlene Hoffman.
And if you include Bell Labs then one could say Nortel got in as well
Made me feel like I was listening to the same video again
So many DiCaprio pointing memes to be made here
Glenn Seaborg is here too!
I need a cigarette after this one....
I remember when the first news of the superconductor were posted on Twitter amd i thought "worse case scenario we got a new bobbybroccoli video"
but we didn't even got one! that's half of a video
@@shiroyukiwang1252 we only got half a video due to inflation
@@shiroyukiwang1252 He commented on why he didn't make a video on it around when it happened
Bobbybroccoli is our superconductor of science education.
@@apollo4950 We didn't get a video because they speedran to the best possible ending of cold fusion, it getting disproven real quick and them deciding to keep their heads down and stop making stuff public
My main takeaway is that even today, 35 years later, fusion has turned to confusion.
Science journalism is 95% puns
This comment made me nonlinear
Everyone has gone non-linear and required scraping off the ceiling.
I am confusion
@@richardbeater8915?
I feel like Pons just had a wrong attitude from the start, being overly protective of his work and seemingly more concerned over credit and patent rights than the whole science part of all of this.
I can believe that admitting being wrong about something gets psychologically almost impossible after a certain point (shame and embarrassment cause considerable pain both on emotional and even physical level) and that anyone could get stuck on an idea in this way, because we are just humans.
But for Pons it seems like a situation like this was bound to happen. Even before this, he would sent legal threats when people couldn't reproduce his results on completely different projects, coupled with apparent paranoia over people stealing his inventions or ideas looming over him... He just had a completely wrong temperament to be a researcher.
What a sad case. Really reminds you how scientists are human under all of their expertise and can get caught up in the excitement just like any of us. It was a really hopeful promise after all.
Wonderful broccumentary, great work!
@@allanshpeley4284 having watched the video again I incline to agree with you.
Pons seems to have hostility towards even the scientific method itself, having purposefully ruined the double-blind test by not telling which rod was which. All the other shenanigangs as well...
Really make me doubt if he is just delusional and makes me feel like he knows none of it works and he just wants to find a forever project to burn money with, or to apparently finance his own family business.
I feel bad for Fleischman. I get the feeling that he was conned by Pons with all of this. What a mess...
@@allanshpeley4284 I wonder if anyone's done a close examination of Pons's entire academic career, because if these videos are accurate he does have a whiff of fraud about him. Why else do you have a lawyer prepared just in case someone wants to examine your work?
@@SilandaI also wondered about his previous work that could not be reproduced. It seems like this wasn't his first trip to the bad science rodeo.
They both come off as having a similar mindset to people on the forefronts of conspiracy movements. The claiming anyone who can't replicate their results was just doing it wrong, but refusing to elaborate on how, the attitudes that finding a mistake and admitting to it was somehow a complete betrayal, the belief that people were actually conspiring to stop them, the refusing to actually cooperate with tests or ever share any actual data.
But then you've got the stuff that makes them look even worse, where they actively sabotaged people who were trying to test their data. There seems no excuse for turning off the one that was producing heat before it could be tested in detail. Or for ruining the double blind test. Or for legally threatening people for publishing negative results.
They can claim everyone was against them all they want, but at the end of the day the simple fact is that they never showed any actual usable data. For all their whining of bias against them, they never seemed to have any data of their own. No matter how much they claim to believe it themselves, they never had anything concrete to show for it. That's not the doubters' fault.
@@SilandaBecause the patent office can be used to bury important work or technology.
I'm still genuinely puzzled by Pons and Fleischmann's behaviour, especially Pons. Stripped of context his behaviour comes across as incredibly evasive and dishonest, if not outright fraudulent, but I still can't help but feel like he was, to be slightly uncharitable, a guileless dork who ended up in over his own head and just couldn't admit that he was wrong. There isn't enough solid evidence to accuse them of outright fraud, there isn't sufficient motive, and they were both clearly smart enough to realize that making the whole thing up would never work out, but they could hardly have handled the situation more poorly than they did. The whole thing just confuses me.
I think their actions start to make a lot of sense if you look at them as a Utah version of the Korean cloning scandal. University admins, elected officials, and a lot of the public started to romanticize these guys and got very emotionally invested in their success. They were supposed to be underdog heroes who could "stick it to the elites" and make Utahns feel proud and respected, so any pushback to their research became a personal attack and any failure on their part was a huge blow. The story about Pons' daughter getting bullied was very telling - the fact that her classmates didn't just say "oh your dad's crazy for believing in cold fusion" but felt that he had publicly humiliated their entire community. It's an insane amount of pressure, even more than ego alone, and I think that made them increasingly desperate to save face in any way they could.
I kind of blame academia. It is a highly competitive environment in the first place and more built around groupthink than its members realize.
Humans form cults - it is an unavoidable fixture of our psychology and none are exempt from it. Academia creates cults dedicated to various models and theories - and just like any other cult, you can go find an individual to have a chat about theology in the lunchroom.
But when you start preaching heresy or name yourself an apostate - well, you're shunned from the cult at the very least.
Science is not, as it is practiced, a sterile process performed by sterile rational actors as the norm. It is a deeply emotional, ritualistic, religious practice with group and personal fanaticism as a functional necessity. A sane person does not stare into numbers for weeks on end or methodically torture substances to yield their constituents to an accuracy of 12 decimal places. That is something reserved for zealots.
When someone stands up and says they found a lost tome from the creator that everyone else missed, it is an insult to their own zealotry and a testament of his own. The death penalty can only then be stayed by a literal act of God which was missed.
Often, there is weeping, gnashing of teeth, and a most righteous and holy ripping and tearing of heretics is done.
While that view is sympathetic to the heretic, the heretic no less wants to be able to smash a black hole at superluminal speeds into his detractors and see their souls obliterated.
Formalities, pleasantries, all ritualistic clothing for raw beasts.
Delusion and fraud can definitely coexist. The decisions he made to obscure the failures of the experiments are your evidence he knew he was being deceptive.
Guileless dorks may be bad liars, and they may leave published evidence of their lies and behave in a way that over time makes their lies a foregone conclusion- sometimes nearly admitting it on congressional record, for example- but they can still be liars.
I think people are motivated by acclaim, and the desire to be special, and the ambition to do something important, and the safety of being an important researcher, and the need for stimulation, and the desire to avoid the frustration of proper channels rejecting sloppy work for funding.
No idea what he was into. And usually seems like more than one motive is at work when you make the most destructively dumb decisions of your life.
Pons is a tragic figure in the Greek sense. He’s a horror show’s bloodiest ghost of Christmas future. He made a series of dumb decisions, and his frailty and rigidness - the closed-door personality he’d always had that was unable to incorporate reality if it threatened an inflated sense of his own importance or wisdom or whatever - swooped in and took over the wheel entirely. His entire life was swallowed by his dumbest moments.
Sounds a little more passive than it seems to be, phrased like that.
Rather than acknowledging he’d committed fraud, and having to live through the humbling process of taking responsibility for his actions- a process destined to unveil his extremely human-sized silhouette- he’s instead dedicated his life to being a fraud. Not great
Last time I was this early I prematurely released my research on Cold Fusion without a peer reviewed study
Oof
got me in the firs half
not gonna lie
I watched it on Nebula two weeks ago.
Okay Pons and Fleischmann
Lucky for you NASA continued your research and released a paper explaining the science of "Lattice Confinement Fusion" 35'ish years later.
Oh! But yeah, cold fusion is a joke, laughable, really just scientifically impossible. Even if NASA has documented, observed, and understands how fusion can happen at room temp/pressure, it's just a fringe wingnut myth.
The cropped image reveal is genuinely the most incredible twist ending imaginable. If it was a plot point in a movie, no one would believe it, it would be just too ridiculous.
Hey, spoilers.
@@doku367 OP didn't say what was cropped out from where :p
@ No he's spoiling a video an only watched half of, okay.
My jaw dropped. Just…wow.
@doku367 and you're reading the comments of a video you haven't even watched yet
Truly the avengers moment of BobbyBroccoli. We have non-linear man, fermi, Korea wanting a nobel prize in sciences and finally Schon himself.
And also Glenn Seaborg
And Darleane Hoffman
All that was missing was Nortel
@@badgergaucho99 SEABORG
@@Jame5man i mean, bell labs was mentioned, so... i'd like to think they were present in spirit.
"I wish we didn't have the media attention so we could just do our work."
My brother in christ, YOU went to the press.
They were pressured into giving the press conference and at the time probably didn't realize how detrimental media attention would become
At the demand of the college…
@gaterzoom Really they just went to the press because they didn't want anyone else taking the credit from their research. I get where they were coming from but since we learned that cold fusion didn't happen then why rush it?
@@por0snax But they didn't actually want to. The school wanted to go public and assert credit, not the researchers themselves.
I think it's the fact that the friendship between Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann broke in the end that affects me the most. That and the fact that the latter's last questions for the former are "how are you" and "are you continuing the dreadful research." Like he knows by now that it's a cursed dream that can never happen, but still hopes that his best friend is continuing it all the same.
I have long-term friends of my own, and I really do hope we stick the landing. So, definitely a significant dose of projecting on my part, even if neither me nor my friends have any plans of creating a scientific uprising with uncertain scientific discoveries any time soon.
Still, thanks a ton for the three-part-doc. It was wonderful to follow, and it will be wonderful to rewatch later.
I think this is the most tragic series you’ve made. The other stories often had people who are clearly and knowingly committing fraud. Here, it seems like they were just overwhelmed and embittered after everything. I don’t know if I feel sad for them when they seem so arrogant, but I think I pity them to a degree
I found it hard to watch the footage of them still trying to defend their research because I genuinely feel bad for them, especially when I think about how they were basically forced to release their research early
@@misteryA555the only thing that really 'forced' them to release early was paranoia about data theft, the same paranoia that prevented them from showing their work to nuclear physicists.
There's an argument for the real problem being capitalism infecting science, but in the end it feels like hubris was the real killer all along.
Seeing the ending fleischmann interview was so depressing, his laugh from reminiscing...
Their entire story really is a tragedy, two electrochemists that fell from grace with a blunder so big it killed a scientist and broke their friendship
I felt bad for them early on in the saga. But there comes a point where they ought to have changed course and admitted they'd screwed up. They never, ever did. They kept on scamming, damaging their entire scientific field in the process. By the end, they'd lost every shred of my sympathy. They brought this onto themselves.
@@TaschenschieberI feel like Pons especially conducted himself in unscrupulous ways from the beginning. I wouldn't go so far as to accuse him of fraud, but I don't think he was ever being totally honest.
“*cold fusion* was created by John Fusion in 2024 to sell more Bobby Broccoli videos” -The internet, probably.
(Edit: not to be confused with Cold Fusion, who was invented by RUclips to make even more RUclips videos)
Bobby broccoli stocks have never been higher
This sounds like a Fact Core line.
Ernst Peter Kalte Fusion Walters
@@quella_the_quailWe’re making big money right now!!!
@@quella_the_quail just hope that they won't lose twenty cents per share.
BB: this photo has been cropped the whole time!
Me: oh no
BB: *shows whole photo*
Me: OH NO.
IKR. I was completely blindsided by SPOILER
"9/11 was an inside job."
I had read ahead and knew where Steve Jones' arc was going and even I was shocked by that photo
I did my undergrad at BYU and Steven Jones was the professor for my very first introductory physics course. At the time he seemed *mostly* reasonable, still convinced that you could see neutrons but not heat, which would put "metal catalyzed fusion" (as he called it) in the same "interesting but not practical" category as muon catalyzed fusion. And I suppose you couldn't fully rule that out (you basically never can, just claim the effect is smaller and you can always keep looking for it), but I think he was more convinced than that, he wasn't just the guy looking to see if he can bound the mass of the photon to a smaller value (look, all our experiments are consistent with photons having zero mass, but can we *definitely* say that it's not just really, really small? I know a professor who's made a career out of questions like that, trying to measure things where he doesn't think he'll ever get the unexpected result, but it's worth putting some small amount of effort into that).
I think I can follow how he really went off the deep end. The fact that Fleischmann and Pons had made such obviously incorrect and over the top claims (with heat and all that) had quickly shut off all interest in what Jones had been working on, and I think that he became convinced that this had prevented real, interesting research from happening (the 2019 paper maybe even implies that there's some small merit to that), and that, in turn, poisoned him, convincing him that he just couldn't trust the community that was just too caught up in the politics of it all to be willing to ask interesting and difficult questions (though I would reply, if I were talking to him today in a very frank discussion, that the difficult question isn't so interesting or critical that it merits more than a small investment anyway). That turned him into someone easily susceptible to conspiracy theories. By the time I was a student he wasn't doing research, but he was a perfectly good instructor, though I think they had him in introductory courses, where his old research program wouldn't derail things completely, on purpose. A couple years after I took that class he came out as a "9/11 truther" and BYU had to navigate the fact that he had fully gone off the deep end, but he had tenure... the point of tenure is supposed to be that you have a lot of latitude to pursue even somewhat crazy research ideas, but at some point, at some extreme, you want to find a way to stop giving the guy a platform. I don't know what went into Dr. Jones' decision to retire early, I don't know what kinds of negotiations or pressure administrators brought in, but I don't envy anyone having to deal with that situation.
Having met the guy, I want to maintain the empathy that I have for him, but how do you navigate it when the person's ideas go that far off the deep end, when they're not just divorced from reality, but a breeding ground for harm (in Jones' case, because they could lead to accusations)? Perhaps the best I can come up with is the old Christian maxim of "love the sinner, hate the sin," but that's a hard tightrope to walk.
When I saw this comment I thought this was about a scietific image or something... not THAT
What gets me on people's need to cling to 'cold fusion' as a magic bullet for our energy problem, is that while it MIGHT be possible, we have entirely feasible energy sources that we could and should be investing into in the meantime, to give ourselves some space.
And yet, we haven't, really.
Unfortunately as Broccoli boi said. Those sources are already incredibly divisive both scientifically and politically, and given the way the political climate seems to be heading in the U.S. its even more unlikely now we will actually see those sources step ahead given that denying there is a climate problem entirely has become popular.
Fission is still here.
We do have a fusion reactor that can power the world. It's called the Sun.
@@skyaero8773 Hot fusion is not a divisive issue at this point. ITER will be up and running in the next decade, the technology has been proven to work, its just a matter of scaling up. Whats crazy is that basically the entire developed world together is investing one half of a billion euro per year into technology that we know can generate nearly infinite clean energy, while investing much more into dumb measures like converting to electric cars before the energy grid and electricity generation capacity are ready for it, as well as wasting tons of rare materials on batteries and solar panels.
If all that money had been invested into fundamental research we would have a working hot fusion reactor right now. But I guess that doesnt make the car manufacturers money.
@@vitoc8454 Yes, and if you look at the energy output per cubic meter, it is actually virtually zero, less than a compost heap. It outputs a lot of energy because it is really big.
So, even if fusion does do everything that is promised, I just don't think it is going to have any practical use here on earth.
1:02:59 God this has got to be one of the saddest things I’ve ever watched… the way he is utterly speechless is absolutely gut wrenching. I think somewhere in that man is a person who genuinely wanted to save the world with science, be that crazy 2nd Einstein. But now at the end of his life he is so full of regrets. It’s just, sad.
You explained it perfectly, I didn't expect to tear up from a bobbybroccoli video
Yeah bud - then you pass and realize you and everybody else were dead wrong
Starting the video with a mention of LK-99 seems appropriate. This series has been the perfect background context for why the media at large (correctly) chose not to treat it as a huge story.
cold fusion and lk99 in oot when
@@bumpybumpybumpybumpy Surely doable with ACE.
@@shapular cant wait to read the paper on the payload
Every couple months there is another huge breakthrough reported in some field like the ones mentioned in this video, cold fusion, room temperature superconductors, some form of free energy, super strong materials, etc. Anyone who has any familiarity with the scientific process knows to just hold your horses and see if the study can be replicated in independent trials. Sometimes, it turns out to be correct. The LK99 thing wasnt, but there have been breakthroughs in superconducting materials in the past decades. When carbon nanotubes were discovered, a lot of people also thought it was bs. You simply cant know before people put in the work to verify the claims.
Also, with video editing and AI systems being abundantly available right now, you probably shouldnt trust a video that shows a levitating rock, just saying.
@@TheSuperappelflapit’s called the replication crisis for a reason. Wait for it to replicate
After all the eye rolling and frustration i felt watching this as the pair of them dodged and weaved their way though giving out actual evidence, I definitely wasn't expecting to get choked up at that last interview with Fleischmann.
Just to see an old professor looking back at his work and wondering what happened just hit me regardless of what it was
Agree. An honest man who made errors. Especially errors in sharing his results. But not fraud and did not deserve the treatment he got.
Man the worst for me was seeing the part where he did not invite pons to christmas anymore. Dude lost a lifelong friend and a scientific passion for what?
@@mobcont8335 That really is the worst aspect. It all seems so pointless, they both threw everything away for basically nothing.
@@skyaero8773 Yeah. As much as I disliked their reluctance to admit that they had made mistakes, I liked the fact that they had stayed friends, even moving to Japan together. I was actually sad to hear of their falling out. It seems to me that as both men got older, the balance of power shifted from the now elderly Fleischmann to the younger Pons, and that Pons in that role was more overbearing to Fleischmann than the latter had been to him earlier in their careers.
Scary to think how quickly things can go south
Gotta say I was shocked that Pons wasn't the one to become the insane conspiracy theorist, I never would have expected Steve Jones to be the one
You don't have to be insane to believe 9/11 was an inside job. You do have to be quite an idiot to think certain govt agencies wouldn't be able or willing to do such a heinous thing, however. It really is an interesting subject.
I don't know Steve Jones view on the matter, perhaps he does indulge in the crazy side of it, but i'd refrain from instantly labelling anyone in association of it as 'insane'. There are enough oddities on the subject to raise scepticism. I reserve the idiot tag for those who claim lizard people, jews, hologram etc
@@EDcaseNO There's definitely a difference between political conspiracy theories, some of which turn out to be true, and the alien and other whacky stuff.
@@EDcaseNOhe was the origin of “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams “
@@anglaismoyenuh no there is not
Admiral Watkins had to deal with Cold Fusion confusion and the SSC nonsense
No wonder he went nonlinear
I'm planning on using that phrase in my life hahaha
stuck the landing, bravo. the spiral at the end as you list the grifters not worth sourcing photos and documents for, felt like such a great finale to sell the consequences of the splinters that've been created by this one instance of cold fusion frenzy. you deserve every bit of success you're seeing, and i'll continue to look on in wonder
*SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ PAST THIS LINE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED*
The fact that the photo of Steve Jones used throughout the documentary is actually cropped out and hides his 9/11 conspiracy presentation is definitely something I did not expect. He sort of came into the story as a hero and voice of reason that stood against fraudulent science. The fact that he is just as susceptible to conspiracy madness is truly tragic and kind of poetic. Loved the reveal.
Or...........
A plot twist no one could have expected
I had as a kid been very interested in debunking the 9/11 Truth Movement and so I was familiar with Jones's name and had no idea he was this important in the cold fusion drama.
Spoilers :( I should have known before opening the comments though
Jet fuel cant melt steel beams
It was pretty clear that the Pons & Fleischmann train was going to wreck itself, but the Steve Jones situation was a total gut punch. What a twist to drop on us all.
A second quack has hit the cold fusion community
“He that doeth nothing is damned, and I don’t want to be damned.” Is a hell of a quote.
And a terrible justification for doing something that others claim to be a bad idea.
Would be a good quote against apathy and ignorance, if it weren’t for a tupperware full of room temperature water
Bobby. I work a full-time job and a part-time job while working on my Masters in Astronautical Engineering. I come home from work and work on assignments or work for my other job all night. Many times I have been tempted to take the easy route, to fudge a couple of numbers, to purchase a Chegg subscription. But your videos make me think that there is something real to work towards with all of this. Between all of the social media "get rich with crypto" and scams, and between the man who runs the company I dream to work for playing Diablo for 6 hours a day, there is you, resolute in the idea that true science and engineering matters. Thank you.
As a scientist, seeing Fleischmann's interview at the end is honestly heartbreaking to see, you can tell he wanted it to be real so bad and for your life's work to end up nowhere makes me want to cry, just seeing the sadness in his face.
maybe their cold fusion were triggged by gravitational wave that occured that year with a supernova going off and all these N- guys have to do are to wait for G-waves when they come
South Korea mention! Schon mention! Bell labs mention! Watkins mention! Darlene Hoffman mention! Truly a culmination of your previous videos.
I am, however, a bit saddened you didn't fit in a "Bingo, bango, bongo"
All that was missing was Nortel
Lol which video was "bingo bango bongo" from? I can hear it in my head but don't remember the topic
@cabbelos he said it in the first Schon video when talking about Schons early publications and again in the first Nortel video when talking about the companies Nortel was buying
@@Jame5manStill time for nortel to make a surprise entry into both existence and fusion
My partner and I got Nebula just to see this video two weeks ago.
It feels like the magnum opus so far. Everything we’ve learned in the past Broccumentaries coalesced together into a haunting finale to the cold fusion series.
A damn beautiful job, Mr. Broccoli. We’re excited to see what the future holds, and you can be we’ll be day one viewers of 17 Pages.
I have nebula and just realized I could’ve watched this early because of your comment. Fuck.
Mmm subtle shill?
@@30watermelon. yeah when I like stuff I tend to hyperfixate until I sound like a walking advertisement lol
@@ringab3l too real
@@ringab3l This is me with the SkyHanni mod (and its codebase) for Minecraft, the Go programming language, and the game Titanfall 2.
We all know how horrible it is when powerful entities push down smaller upstarts for no other reason than that they can. But too little is made of the inverse, when the smaller entities gain a complex and attempt to discredit those larger than them simply because they’re larger. It is simply a true fact that larger entities on the whole, especially in methodical industries like science, tend to be the most correct ones more often than not. Their smugness is perhaps not warranted, but it is earned. And attempting some half-baked revenge is usually going to fail, because in their ego the smaller entities forget why the larger ones are where they are.
I'm going to put this in the quotes section of my personal discord.
The underdog bias is very much real. We love it in storytelling when 'the little guy sticks it to the man' so to speak, so often that we can often do forget that no, the real world tends to not work this way.
this is really the truth of it all; as was stated in part 2, cold fusion is/was never going to come from a small laboratory at a small school. we are in the age of science wherein significant, technological progress will likely only come about via global, coordinated efforts between national labs and large, established academic institutions. especially when it comes to physics
this!! the larger institutions could disprove/point out errors in the work specifically because they were large and well funded. with that funding they had access to the top scientists in their respective fields, as well as the tech/resources to test both the cold fusion reaction and error points within its process.
it's the Galileo fallacy.
"Powerful institutions oppose some scientific breakthroughs
"I am being opposed"
"therefore I have made a breakthrough"
Ironically, it was the (not) dead grad student Marvin Hawkins that came out best in this whole ordeal. With his career, credibility and sanity intact.
"Pons viewed this as a personal betrayal". Ah yes, because doing proper science means that it is personal. Tells you a lot about Pons' understanding of how science works.
1:59 Slight correction: South Korean Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000 (followed by Han Kang winning the literature prize in 2024). It wouldn’t be the first time a Korean won the Nobel prize, but it would be the first time in one of the science fields.
The most unfortunate Nobel Prize.
i think it's all about science. not honorable prizes
yeah, but we are talking about the real ones
@@alverto6625
The only honorable Nobel prize is economics.
@@Michael-sb8jf What is the Peace prize then?
That errors section was intense, crazy how many little things can go wrong. Makes me think about how poorly my high school labs results would've held up under such scrutiny lol
"So your precision with uou $20 HS equipment is much better than ours with our $20 000 000 equipment. Please, iluminate us..."
"So i just moved the points a bit, just by a couple of decimals here and there... Maybe some whole units... And that point never existed. I did not want to have to come back another day to complete the experiment..."
At my high school, each year level gets one different science subject, and you have to complete one year-long project.
All four of mine were varying degrees of fail.
Freshman Year: General sciences - We all had to design an experiment involving a terrarium (plants grown in a closed system). Mine was about adding yeast to soil to improve plan growth. Seemed sensible, until idiot me learned later that I was supposed to *cover* the box where I was growing my plants. So I didn't have a terrarium, just a potted plant. It didn't really affect my grade.
Sophomore Year: Biology. Our group wanted to test various soaps on the skin germs on rabbits. We bought several rabbits, who proceeded to attack and even k1ll each other in captivity. At least we got the samples. Other than that, we had no issues, except that we got a low grade for our proposal because the guy who was tasked with printing it apparently forgot it at home. We later found it in his bag, meaning he didn't really forget it.
Junior Year: Chemistry - We tested various "anti-rust" coatings on some iron nails. The problem is that our measuring device (a triple-beam balance) was nowhere near precise enough to measure how much rust had formed
Senior Year: Physics - I just went "fck it" and pitched a Rube-Goldberg machine that would demonstrate simple physics phenomena. The idea is that you use a toy car that would knock a marble down a series of ramps, which would knock down a line of jenga pieces that led up to a toy hammer and a needle popping a balloon. We crammed it in one afternoon and the whole thing wouldn't work in one go, so we filmed it in parts.
@@vitoc8454I would LOVE if disgraced scientists just decided to do Rube-Goldberg Machines
@@vitoc8454 I actually laughed out loud at the potted plant part. But really that seems so much cooler than what we were doing in our labs. I remember that one girl in the year above us, dropped something and destroyed a like 10000€ piece of equipment and gave herself chemical burns. And to top it off in the chaos one other student left the fire unattended so we had a burned corner of the floor for months. She thankfully recovered.
So technical execution became 70% of our grade and for the entirety of first year we had to first demonstrate the technique of the entire experiment with water, and only after we got the go ahead could we do the actual experiment.
It was especially sad, because we were a private school and had a relatively well equipped lab.
that ending tore my heart out, man. the longing in his voice is painful
Don't feel too bad, it's his fault
@@FieryRedmond So? Are we supposed to hate the guy for making mistakes? People have been forgiven for worse
@@FieryRedmond Nono, let him feel bad for the architects of their own undoing. Trust me, we don't want those who can feel this kind of empathy to vanish completely. We _really_ don't.
@@roseyoung44 I never said to hate him.
@twaggytheatricks4960 _you_ do not speak for "us".
Man this is the most tragic one you have covered yet. Not only did these two men ruin their careers they pretty much ruined their lives for almost no reason. That final interview... I would say that they brought this onto themselves but seeing a man so clearly broken and regretful at the end of their life is just profoundly sad to me no matter what. And the fact that there are still people so committed to a dead field walking just adds onto that sadness. (Also if anybody knows the song at 52:46 please let me know I quite like it)
Song is Akane's Regret by REPULSIVE
@@iam9991000 Thank you so much! Funny enough I already listen to that artist sometimes was surprised to see it from them.
I was 13 when the cold fusion story broke. It was everywhere, and I remember the disappointment when it faded. Undaunted, I learned all the science I could in high school and Georgia Tech. After graduating I read even more and followed the LENR guys, watching in disbelief as they continued to string people along through the early 2000s and even into the 2010s.
Now you have multiple projects that have sprung off from a seemingly unrelated direction. But it’s not unrelated. There is a lot of money to be made by carefully balancing the public’s desire for a good show and an investor’s desire for a rapid turnaround.
But to get it to work you have to solve Ponzi’s paradox, and currently very few have. Most either turn on the tap too fast (like Pons), or (like Rossi), have no low-tech, functioning mechanism to sell while holding out for the “ten years away” machine.
Honestly it’s a fascinating thing to watch.
Balancing public enthusiasm, scientific rigor, and investor expectations is a forever struggle in research, especially in fields promising transformational change. The story of Pons and Fleischmann encapsulates the complexity of hope intersecting with ambition and skepticism, an enduring theme in the pursuit of breakthrough science.
The concept of “Ponzi’s paradox” highlights this tension well: the necessity of showcasing progress without tipping into overpromise. It underscores the precariousness of maintaining confidence while steering clear of speculative hype. The parallel with Rossi's case exemplifies how research can fall short when it hinges on spectacle rather than substantiated, incremental advancement.
The cultural appetite for immediate, tangible results indeed poses a barrier to fostering patience in research. The shift towards quick payoffs undermines the slow, sometimes ambiguous path true scientific breakthroughs often require. One solution lies in redefining the metrics of success for both the public and investors, moving the focus to verifiable milestones that celebrate steady progress rather than singular, uncertain outcomes.
The challenge remains: how can scientists and communicators reshape narratives to highlight the value of incremental progress without succumbing to the “next big thing” allure? Part of the answer may involve better communication strategies that emphasize the process and the significance of intermediary achievements. This, coupled with changes in funding structures that incentivize sustained research efforts over headline-grabbing declarations, could help. Investors, too, would need to be educated on the long-term nature of such pursuits, valuing transparency and trust over spectacle.
Shifting the paradigm involves creating a research and funding culture that values honesty and step-by-step progress, where trust is built on consistency and substance rather than dramatic, unsubstantiated claims. It’s a question of fostering patience, measured optimism, and an appreciation for the incremental steps that pave the way to genuine breakthroughs.
@ I agree wholeheartedly. It has seemed like something needs to give since the completion of the LHC. The Standard Model is complete, and other theories did not gain any support, since nothing was seen other than the Higgs. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics remain at arm’s length, perhaps permanently. I know that has been a huge disappointment to many, but it needs to be not be.
There is still so much regular work to do. There is so much to count, so much to catalog - so much of the ordinary in science. Culturally, we are primed for the Next Big Thing. Yet the black swan remains impossible to forecast. Perhaps the start would be to explain to children that the busywork of science is as important, if not more so, than the grand discoveries.
I don’t want to go to far “the other way,” as it were. We don’t need to repeat the mistake of previous generations by thinking we’ve reached the end of physics. Clearly we have not, since there remain many tensions. But there is no clear path forward. So, since we cannot cheat by using a magnet to get the plastic needle out of the haystack, the only option left is to go through it the hard way.
But I hope I’m wrong and some new Newton or Einstein comes along and readjusts our thinking.
ten seconds into the video rn, im always so shocked at how amazing your videos look, the animations are so good.
Man he's soooo Jon Bois inspired. As he has stated before.
When you steal this much off Jon Bois you're definitely gonna look good.
My la Loki
@@kingjulian420
@deathmagneto-soy steal? Steal or not, it's talented to be able to replicate his content. What's ur point? He's not original? This is RUclips- not a single idea hasn't been remade in some way, shape or form.
Opened this faster than a grad-student-killing gamma ray burst
when i was thinking glenn seaborg and james d watkins was the most ambitious crossover in history, i was not expecting darlene hoffman to enter the mix
Bell labs mentioned as well!
@ bell labs and if i remember correctly berkley as well, the whole team is on this one
Thank you for this documentary. I was studying Physics at one of the non-MIT universities in Boston when that fatal press conference was held in Utah. In reaction, physicists from MIT went around giving talks at all the area colleges and universities because they wanted to make clear that this whole fiasco was NOT how science was to be done. Especially not Physics.
My school got an assistant director of the MIT Nuclear Fusion Lab who spent about 3 hours with us, answering questions about all Physics topics, not just Cold Fusion. She was great!
That might be the best thing that came out of the whole mess: learning how not to behave as a scientist and keeping very good notes of very good measurements.
1:03:06 "The potential is exciting?" "The potential is exciting, yes."
This reminds me of Last Week Tonight which had _multiple_ segments over the years showing "60 Minutes anchors prompting people to deliver the sound bite they need (seriously they do this all the time)". It's like a mild hypnosis, seeing guests just repeating what the anchor said verbatim
@@948320z In the context of this broccumentary, however, I think the visual of him being speechless and settling for repeating the interviewer's words also says a lot.
I think it’s absolutely incredible the amount of seriousness involved in the scientific community. The fact they hold conferences, hold each other accountable, and challenge each other is amazing. I definitely think this a valuable opportunity that I hope remains in the future of science.
As someone who works a basic office job, I am just in awe. Great video series btw.
Yeah, this documentary has both a negative and positive takeaway. It's sad to see so many grifters and leeches, and people willing to go beyong ethical boundaries to publish whatever they need to succeed. But there are also enough people that are willing to stand up, to do the critical work and do deep dives in papers and subjects no ordinary person will ever be interested in; just for the good of the scientific field as a whole.
If you want to see dedication to truth and holding people accountable, you should look into speedrunning. People will write 80 page essays with university level math just to try to prove that someone changed a game file to improve their RNG.
@@TheSuperappelflapthat was amazing, but I think the dream case was an exception. He he had extra scrutiny on his run due to his popularity and reputation, if he didn’t have a channel no one would have bothered to check the odds and just assume he was lucky.
@@J-Johna-Jameson That's not the only time that happened. Just in Minecraft several other speed runners got banned for changing game files after people spent hundreds of hours analyzing footage and building math models of in game mechanics to prove that the items they got from chests and their luck with drops were impossible. This has also happened in Diablo 2, in Civ 6, in many other games. You don't mess with the speed running community.
@@TheSuperappelflap You probably don't realize this but like you're comparing actual fucking science to speedrunning, you kinda sound ridiculous. Like you know that, that university level math you're lauding is just what every single person working in the natural sciences has to learn right?
i’ve never considered myself someone who was into science, it’s slayed been super confusing and hard for me to enjoy learning about but this channel has effectively changed that. Im always waiting for a new video because the science and the history mixed together is just awesome- i really love this channel!
All these redactions due to erroneus readings because of leeching, voltage fluctuations etc. i think also happen to work as a reminder of why the finest test equipment can be so expensive.
Going from good data to perfect data requires machinery that can somehow handle all of the minuscule edge cases that it has any control over, perfection at every step.. the complexity in circuitry can easily go from linear to exponential, in a sense.
Not just that. Even with the best equipment, you still have to model for all possible influences or error sources. I think this is why the 'faster than light' neutrino incident at the LHC was dealt with so solidly.
Data is never perfect. Thats why statistics exists.
And yet I can almost assuredly tell you, no matter what you spend, it will only ever be good enough data
Well it's actually more of the other way around. The cheap stuff usually is being sold to people who don't really know what they're doing so it'll have protections for this kinda thing built in. However the expensive stuff is being sold to people who presumably know exactly how it works and as such can be expected to account for all possible sources of error. At the same time if you want super sensitive equipment you can't build those kinds of protections into it because it might also end up accidentally removing the data you're looking for.
"This photo is cropped" has the same energy as "Shapeland is Animal Kingdom"
Makes me wonder if there are some theme park attractions related to science scandals.
LITERALLY!!
That reveal was legendary
YES! I love this amazing documentary channels crossover reference
24:55 this is why I have so much respect for physicists- all these tiny tiny pieces of information that could effect the experiments, and they still manage to make such great advancements in technology
It completely baffles me how your videos don't end up on the top 5 on Trending. Absolute masterpieces.
Has anything an hour long *ever* ended up on Trending?
That's a serious question if anyone actually knows...
At the end of the day its a niche hour long documentary. To get on trending you need to be in 10-20 min range, with a video which all age groups can watch without much thought. Not that I hate such videos, its just scratches a diff need in your brain.
@@rossstewart9475I would not be surprised if Hbomberguy's Plagiarism video was when it came out.
Slight correction: Superconductivity isn’t when resistance APPROACHES 0. It is when it IS 0. That’s what makes it so remarkable. You can move electricity without losing ANY energy. In a superconductor, you could hypothetically keep a current in a loop of wire indefinitely.
I think he was referring to the way the resistivity graph drops off a cliff, rather than the mathematical idea of 'approaches 0'.
It becomes measurably zero. The practical resistance, however, is still above 0 - as proven by the fact that the more amps you push through a superconductor, the more you need to cool it. That means you're converting some amount of electrical energy to heat. But this is due to nucleic interactions, not electric ones, so the electrical resistance is indeed zero.
19:01 Darleane from Berkeley!!, Glad to hear she was in another investigation, Truly a Bobny Brocoli cinematic universe moment
When you reach the 'Politician speaking for your research, calling one of the most prestigious journals in the world 'some magazine'' level of of defense, you're probably cooked.
despite all the dishonesty from the duo and ressentiment especially from pons' side, i almost broke into tears at the ending. that desolate feeling, that refusal to deny the blunder determining your entire legacy, its a crushing reality to live with
LK-99 feels like an insane convergence of your previous videos
This entire series made me nonlinear.
Seriously, I feel like this documentary really revealed how science can take out the very worst in people.
Incredibly tragic
C-SPAN Camera Crew always has a sense of humor. It’s long hours they try to make it lighter when they can.
you see similar in nz's parliament tv. in one instance the leader of the opposition sarcastically asked the speaker of the house why he was "the naughty boy of this parliament". the broadcasting room cut in perfect time for the speaker of the house to Jim the camera like he was on an episode of the office. i think it's opportunities like that which keep government filmography teams sane.
Your documentaries are all great in basically every aspect, but the one thing that stands above for me is with how much respect you treat the people that clearly messed up in major ways.
Pons feels so human in the way you tell this story and while I have to question how so many mistakes could be made by him along the way despite how intelligent he clearly is, I do deeply sympathize with him.
I was in physics undergrad during the whole room temp superconductor debacle, and it was a pretty out the gate “idk this seems weird and sus”. Like we talked about it for a few days in class with skepticism, and then the agreement was ‘no yeah, someone’s lying’ and we *never talked about it again*.
On another note, congrats to the actual first Korean Nobel Laureate, Han Kang!
Every episode that ends on a cliffhanger kills me, I saw this and instantly clicked, been anticipating this like crazy
Agreed.
I almost subscribed to Nebula, thats how good this guy is. To just watch one video, I was ready to throw my money.
As a STEM student, the science communication abilities you flex with every video are really inspiring. I hope I can learn to communicate with this kind of skill in the future.
Watched on Nebula. I really like the way you weave an interesting human narrative into these stories while also getting into the technical details of how these physics concepts work, and how we can experimentally verify them. I feel like I learn a lot from these.
50:20 "not operating within the bounds of sanity" is such beautiful wording for a clear example of projection.
The 9/11 guy must have been like, "Palladium can't melt concrete floors."
And to give a proper Utah analogy, Pons and Fleischmann are like Joseph Smith reading “the golden plates” out of a hat (the basis of Mormonism) when it comes to being asked about their experimental veracity.
13:25 Aurora Borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your kitchen?
May I see it?
No.
it's more of a utica thing.
Sorry, the power just went out.
Steamed hams. Mmmm
BABE WAKE UP NEW BOBBY BROCCOLI VIDEOOO DROPPED
Insane to refresh and see art on my front door
Ok shooga, Iza wake,
Let’s gooo
Babe? Babe?! Oh god, what did you take?? At least I have good science communication media to assuage my grief. Goodnight, babe. Goodbye.
_Babe, I’m calling the coroner. Cool if I film this for my channel?_
Exactly my thought
the unveiling of the un-cropped steven jones pic was such a slam dunk i CRIED laughing
this has been an incredible series. that cropped photo reveal was the most shocking yt documentary twist since finding out shapeland was animal kingdom. damn.
I too achieved my PhD in FastPass!
You have no idea how disheartening it was for me to see people got so blindsided by the Shapeland reveal. Because I didn't know what Animal Kingdom was. The impact was completely lost on me
For how close to cold fusion I was growing up, I had never really delved that far into the story at all, so thanks for this. My father joined the physics department at BYU around all this time, but I don't recall much substantial conversation with him about it. I do remember Steve Jones' turn into 9/11 stuff well. I think his office was even next door to my dad's I remember being sympathetic to him at the time, because being BYU's methods of soft-firing its employees is not pleasant, but it fell of my radar until jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams became a meme.
There is a way in Utah for anything causing embarassement, warranted or not, to be implicitly hushed over, but nonetheless which haunts the place. I'm not surprised that Steve Jones went the way he did, it is an enormous pressure to be on the receiving side of that, I'd imagine especially for him, given that most people in that situation are somewhere on the left side of things, and have their own support networks, however flawed. Anyway, I appreciate that your coverage did not go the sensationalist route there. That said, the story of cold fusion is Utah through and through, and at some point, these stories end up in fraud. That its main protagonists were neither Mormon nor Utahn just goes to show how far the culture of mormonism seeps into everything, for better, or for sadly more often, for worse.
I clicked on this immediately, I have absolutely loved the series so far and can't wait to see how it ends
same!! it was in my notifications and i was like: O
i’ve been waiting all day lmao
hell yeah
I’m a solid state physics grad student and the LK-99 drama was quite fun, I remember absolutely losing it over the preprint that had a screenshot of a video of a levitating piece as one of the figures
A lot of people in my personal life asked me about it, but I was definitely way more obsessed with the Ranga Dias case that no one in the public had heard about
I'm a research metallurgist and I had plenty of people asking me about it as well.
As a theoretical condensed matter physicist, the whole ordeal was very frustrating. It was clearly made big by Twitter grifter and crypto bros, making up long and fake "update" threads.
It's a shame that the title of part 2 is so good that more people have seen it than part 3. This is my favorite part of the series
everytime a person from a previous documentary like hendrick schön or darlene hoffman shows up my body does a mini pog like they revealed my favorite glup shitto coming back in star wars
This is one of the most confusing sentence to read if you have no context and no understanding of slang 😂
That the government decided to "legally scientifically confirm" the experiment reminds me of that time that a state almost legally defined pi as being 3 because they really wanted a local mathematical proof to work, lmao.
I believe that was Nevada for the sake of making that stupid dome in Vegas lmao
@@eggsbox
It was Indiana.
19:02 Darlene Hoffman Cameo. I love it when people from other documentaries show up in these videos, it really puts into perspective how connected the scientific community is.
44:22 Good to know CSpan videocamera operators have always had that sense of humor
Reminds me of that episode of Last Week Tonight about Special Districts, where one small town had a special district run by just two guys. Their devotion to the job was matched by their town's indifference: There was a video of them holding a by-the-book council meeting *in a room completely empty except for them*
My grandfather actually worked as a professor in the chemistry department at A&M and reportedly according to my father saw the news about cold fusion walked into his lab and came back a few hours later saying it wasn’t possible and they were wrong.
i was 18 minutes into this video before i figured out this is about the actual physics problem of cold fusion and not the RUclips channel Cold Fusion
I’m going on a long-haul flight in a few hours and despite having already watched the 2 previous episodes of this series, I downloaded them to watch again offline. Now I get a notification that the last video is out! This is going to be the best long haul-flight ever. Can’t wait to take off 🥦🛫🎉
How absolutely beautifully lovely!!!
BobbyBroccoli videos are like watching a train crash in slow motion. You know it's going to end badly but you can't look away.
I'm starting to think with all these power outages, they might want to get a more reliable energy source!
I feel bad for Pons’ wife and kids, being simply near the guy caused problems. And then I felt so incredibly angry with that interview toward the end where he claimed his critics were perhaps too harsh, YOU LITERALLY FALSIFIED DATA AND LIED ABOUT PERFORMING TESTS THAT YOU NEVER DID, ALL TO TRY AND GET A PATENT AND THEN REFUSED TO BACK DOWN WHEN YOU WERE SHOWN TO BE WRONG, WHAT ELSE WOULD HAPPEN
This video feels like the culination of all your big projects over the years - callbacks to Schon, Cloning videos, the Fusion stuff, and peer review procedures which we went over in Bog. It's like this is what you have been making your youtube channel for
It's wild to think where Bobby started with his channel, and how he changed gears. Cause this is some of the best video essays/documentaries on RUclips. Period.
7:25 is one of the best video editing techniques I've seen in a while. Creative, demanding attention, super fun to witness, also the music bops. I take off my proverbial hat in respect and awe to you Mr Broccoli.
It was alright, you probably don't watch much. It has been used by many RUclipsrs.
The reference to superconductors is a good choice of reference. An overnight massive shift in a field that was LEGITIMATE, showing that people weren't just being gullible morons when they had hope for this
I actually remember when "cold fusion" hit the news, became a joke, and then became a conspiracy theory. Then you had all the thriller films where someone had invented cold fusion and had to escape energy industry assassins.
Beautiful work! I am old enough to have lived through that controversy as I was graduating and then starting a PhD in particle physics in the 90's, so I remember a fair amount of what you tell but you give so many more details, and also extract the big picture. Great video!
46:29 Well we got our dead grad student does that mean it works???
Seems like it sadly still doesn’t :(
I mean, it’s a Helium reaction of sorts so….
Hendrik, Watkins, Glenn and Darlene all in the same video. What a Bobby-verse special episode this has become!
I still can't believe I cited you as Bobby Broccoli in my speech.
"An excellent example is provided by Broccoli later in his documentary... "
Its possible that Martin was acting in good faith, possible.
However pons was clearly a full con-man, either because its what he was planning to begin with or, he was just too weak a person to actually admin fault.
His use of lawyers makes me more likely to believe he was a con-man. and honestly he should have been charged with fraud. but he manged to flee.
This story feels like the ultimate example of what it means to metaphorically die on a hill. Everybody involved has spent so long insisting they have something, telling everybody to believe them, begging for more resources and time, well after the point where it's reasonable to just let it go. Academia rocks
Its 00:10 and I have school tomorrow why do you have to upload now?
Same xD
Same bro. Same 🫠
You don't need school. Bobby Broccoli videos are educational enough. A Broccoli a day keeps the teachers away, as they say.
Same hahah
@@harleywoods9619 same (just with my job)
It's midnight here in the Netherlands and I need to get up at 6. But I will never skip a new Broccoli upload. I've been looking forward to part 3 for so long!
Het wordt een onverwacht latertje 🤣👍🏼
@@rickyrico80 Maar het gaat het zo waard zijn ;)
Ik join nog wat later, maar mag om 7 op voor werk. Broccoli skippen we niet
BobbyBroccoliverslaving!
That intro is so good! I remember you saying on twitter that you wouldnt do a video on LK99 last year so im very happy that you found a place for it
Having Seen the comments about the cropped photo Twist, it was NOT what i was expecting, like DAMN