Wait a minute, I have been told, in no uncertain terms, that the scientific method does not necessarily require repeatable experiments. Moreover, I was the only person in the world who thought it did.
What say you?
If not, then we waste a whole lot of money and lab time on high school chemestry students.
What say you?
From Wikipedia.org "The Scientific Method":
Verification
Science is a social enterprise, and scientific work will become accepted by the community only if they can be verified. Crucially, experimental and theoretical results must be reproduced by others within the science community. (emphasis added.)
The basic method for the advancement of science has been conjecture and refutation or conjecture and confirmation.
It's a basic principle that experiments must be repeatable.
However, there may be cases where an experiment was not written up properly, because there was some factor at work that the experimenters didn't notice or failed to write up. So the fact that an experiment couldn't be repeated may result from insufficient knowledge. That's basically why I'm inclined to suspend judgment in this case. I don't think these experimenters were deliberate charlatins. Either they convinced themselves that they had something that they hadn't, or there was some factor at work that they failed to nail down.
It's also the case that there's a known lemming effect among scientists. Once something like cold fusion has been subjected to disbelief and ridicule, it's very hard to go back and try it again. History says that numerous theories that have proved to be true were ridiculed at first.
Cold fusion doesn't seem very likely, but I don't think it's flat impossible.