I was studying physics in college 20 years ago this month, when two chemists at the University of Utah promised that they could unleash the energy of the sun in a test tube at room temperature, and meet the entire world’s energy needs forever with some cooked up water and a couple of electrodes.

The exhilaration at the genesis of the new science of “cold fusion” faded fairly quickly. Scores of scientists around the world tried and failed to replicate the Utah scientists’ wondrous results. Irksome physicists pointed out that the process the chemists described violated several laws of nature.

To me, however, those heady few months bring to mind something more than the hubristic enthusiasm of some overheated men in lab coats. The experience provides a lasting lesson about our faith in technology as the solution to our challenges, and the cover it provides to avoid hard choices on things like, say, conserving energy. It’s a warning about the pitfalls of our unshakeable belief in the limitless promise of our endeavors, regardless of reality’s constraints. It is a lesson about the dangers of our love affair with progress.

This breed of delusion is ubiquitous across American history. In the 1990s it laid the ground from which Pets.com, Kozmo.com and Webvan sprang up to revolutionize capitalism, until they didn’t. It can be found in the trust placed in Bernard Madoff and his unfathomable perpetual 11 percent-plus rate of return. Most damaging, it nurtured the belief that home prices would rise forever.