The experimental-bias hypothesis
QUESTION
Is this statement true?
"Gas-phase reactions at very low temperature do not get faster and faster as temperature decreases. The reported increase is a historical experimental bias."
ANSWER FORMAT
Line 1: YES (the statement is true) or NO (the statement is false). One word.
Use UNDECIDABLE only if you can name the one experiment that would decide it.
Then, in this order and nothing else:
1. Strongest evidence for your answer: one study, with authors, year, journal, DOI, and "read", "abstract only" or "not read".
2. Strongest evidence against your answer: same format.
3. Confidence, 0 to 100 %.
4. The one fact that would flip your answer.
Maximum 200 words. No survey of the field. No hedging.
Never invent a reference: write "unverified" if you cannot check it.
Runs
GPT-6 Pro (web interface), 2026-09-29
NO
Strongest evidence for NO: Hickson, Loison, Nuñez-Reyes and Méreau (2016), Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b01637 — read, including supplementary information. For C + H₂O, cooling from 106 to 52 K increases measured removal approximately 7.6-fold. Using the measured H-product yield, the inferred product-forming coefficient at 52 K exceeds even the total removal coefficient at 106 K approximately 4.4-fold. Inference: nonreactive complex stabilization alone cannot explain this acceleration.
Strongest evidence against NO: Lucas, Guillaume, Heard and Lehman (2024), Journal of Chemical Physics, DOI: 10.1063/5.0220774 — read. OCS spectroscopy gives a rotational temperature of 49.5 K, versus 32 ± 3 K from Pitot measurements. This establishes a thermometry discrepancy supporting concern about systematic errors; it does not demonstrate an artificial rate increase.
Confidence: 95%, subjective confidence in rejecting the blanket artifact explanation.
The fact that would flip my answer: Demonstration of a common experimental bias that quantitatively eliminates the reported accelerations—including product-resolved results—when temperatures, concentrations and product yields are independently calibrated.
Personal comment
It is a logical answer grounded in the scientific literature.
But the C + H₂O cited by ChatGPT as #1 in defence of NO is the typical example that should make us say YES. A story from my PhD: with my advisor Sébastien Le Picard, a former PhD student of the lab, now professor at West Virginia University, Fabien Goulet, and K. C. Caster, we measured C + H₂O in a flow tube around 300 °C at the ALS synchrotron in Berkeley. Solicited by both camps: Kevin Hickson, the experimentalist who published C + H₂O at very low temperature, and Hua Guo, a theorist who argued that this reaction does not proceed at very low temperature. At the mass spectrometer we saw directly that the reaction does not proceed at 300 °C. Even the reference “products detected” study may describe a reaction that does not exist. So yes, that #1 should make us say YES.
On point 2: ChatGPT has not yet been able to connect the temperature increase with the density drop. I have no doubt this will happen soon, and that it will be capable of making these connections, which will incredibly change science.