Controversy in Chemistry: How Do You Prove a Negative?—The Cases of Phlogiston and Cold Fusion

Abstract

Believe it or not: It can sometimes be difficult to prove an idea is wrong once it has caught the human imagination. This situation is demonstrated for the two temporally separated cases of phlogiston and cold fusion. Although there are clear differences between the two cases, they both illustrate how difficult it can be to prove the non‐existence of a conceived idea.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.