Here is a book that I think is relevant to cold fusion:
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
Tom Nichols
This is an excellent little book. It was written before the pandemic and 2020 election, when the problem became much worse, so I think it needs a new introduction. You can read the gist of it here:
Blurb:
QuoteTechnology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
I believe this is one of the main reasons cold fusion has foundered. Ed Storms often complains that people do not respect his expertise. He is right; they don't. They darn well should, and decades ago they would have. Since the 1980s respect for expertise has declined. This book describes the main reasons. The trend was accelerated by the internet. As I see it, cold fusion is mainstream science. It was confirmed by the leading experts in electrochemistry. [1, 2] People such as Yeager, who they later named the research center after. [3] Yet, as everyone here knows, the New York Times, the Scientific American, Nature and others ignored these replications and attacked the field. This was partly old fashioned academic politics, which have always been with us, but it was made worse by the burgeoning new electronic media. With the growth of the internet, pernicious sources of misinformation such as Wikipedia proliferated. Now, when you look for cold fusion, you find nonsense instead of facts.
Many people say that cold fusion is an example of renegades versus the establishment. Of outsiders challenging the mainstream. I think it is the opposite. I agree with Martin Fleischmann that "we are painfully conventional people." I am, anyway. Mel Miles is . . . and more power to him. Cold fusion is based on 19th century thermodynamics, and calorimetry going back to the 1780s. These are among the most firmly established parts of physics and chemistry. To disprove cold fusion, you have to uproot everything from Laviosier to the present. Other than Shanahan [4], no opponent of cold fusion has even tried to disprove the definitive experiments, such as Fleischmann, Storms, McKubre, [5] Miles and others. Instead of doing science, they come up with a litany of irrelevant reasons that they imagine cast doubt on the results. Mainly when they confuse power with energy, the way Morrison and Kreyasa did. [6] This is not a scientific argument. It is nonsense. As far as I know Shanahan and Morrison are the only published technical objections to the experimental results. Everyone else says there are unspecified mistakes in the experiment. An unspecified mistake cannot be verified or falsified. There were many theoretical objections, but theory cannot disprove replicated experiments, so these objections do not count.
1. https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGgroupsrepo.pdf
2. https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
3. https://chemistry.case.edu/research/yces/
4. https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf
5. https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf
6. https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf, p. 6