&gt; do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don&#x27;t get out, or do they publish far and wide?)<p>I don&#x27;t know, but the publicity machine at the time didn&#x27;t inspire confidence in any science.<p>&gt; We didn&#x27;t disprove it, we didn&#x27;t show evidence that P&amp;F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time.<p>I&#x27;m surprised that a nuclear physicist would regard it as anything other than bollocks (to use the British technical term).  It had the look of pathological science from the off in my eye.  While I might have been willing to demonstrate the lack of fision products from an F&amp;P apparatus brought to our detectors, it wasn&#x27;t worth any significant effort&#x2F;resources, and clearly nuclear physics expertise was the last thing that was wanted by proponents.<p>Some of us were doing actual fusion experiments with things like platinum and palladium at the time.  Their important property for nuclear physics, apart from the right atomic number, was ability to hang together in intense heavy ion beams, so that data-taking was just limited by the data acquisition interfaces, not the target.  [Ob-hacker: the data acquisition and analysis systems were quite interesting, especially for the time.]<p>For the record, I did get results published from such measurements which overturned widely- (universally-?) held belief in the field.