David Maczko believes "man-made climate change" is far from a settled science because there are deniers of man-made climate change ("First settle the premise of climate change," Letters, Dec. 26). He then asks, "Why don't we hear about the deniers of the real settled science: math, physics, chemistry, etc?"
I hate to be the one to puncture Mr. Maczko's balloon, but someone has to step up to the task. Two instances come immediately to mind: the "polywater" event of the 1960s, and the 1989 notion of "room temperature nuclear fusion" as a source of energy.
In the first case, a new form of polymerized water was reported by Boris Derjaguin, a surface physicist at the Institute for Physical Chemistry in Moscow. The chemistry of "polywater" was completely at odds with the generally accepted chemical understanding of water. Derjaguin, together with a few other scientists who agreed with him, was clearly a denier of the "settled science of water." But within a few years he was proved wrong, and so-called "polywater" was identified as ordinary water with impurities - certainly not a new form of water. The relatively few deniers of classical (nonpolymerized) chemical understanding of water were vocal for a short period, but were eventually shown to be wrong in their denial.
A second case involved a scientific collaboration of one of the world's leading chemists, Martin Fleischmann, with Stanley Pons. In 1989 they announced the existence of a room-temperature nuclear fusion reaction created by a simple chemical process that could produce useful energy. They too attracted deniers of classical physics and chemistry who pushed this new concept of so-called "cold fusion." And again, within a few years, the "cold fusion" proponents were proved wrong when scientific labs worldwide were unable to replicate their experiments, and cold fusion gained the label "pathological science."
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