I wrote:
> plutonium -- I am not sure). Photographs of the tubes were shown to a > retired centrifuge expert from Los Alamos. He looked at them for a moment > and concluded that it was utterly impossible to use such tubes in a > centrifuge.
A couple more points about this:
1. This analysis was not a bit secret. I think I heard about it before the war. Again, it was hidden in plain view.
2. I do not know the details, but I assume that someone in the CIA or the military went to confer with this physicist before the war. (I think he himself said someone came.) Naturally the CIA would consult with their own expert retired federal scientist. I cannot imagine an intelligence analysis conducted to justify a war would leave out such an essential interview! However, I can well imagine that someone in the chain of command did not understand the significance of the expert's statements, and decided to cut them out of the final report.
I expect the person who make the cuts was an ignorant fool, not a nefarious liar. In my experience, fools greatly outnumber liars. People of all ages, in all walks of life, including many illustrious leaders, are ignorant of technology, logic, and science. Highly paid adults and captains of industry really do have no idea that the earth goes around the sun once a year. Some think that if you eat a large meal on an airplane the calories "do not count" and you do not gain weight. Or they think the space station is "beyond the reach of gravity." Or they think refrigerators produce "a potential energy surplus." Last week on Japanese NHK TV a documentary described a survey of sixth-grade children. ~30 percent of them thought that dead people "sometimes" come back to life, and 80 percent thought that the soul of a dead person migrates into a new body. (This survey was taken in response to a some brutal murders committed by Japanese children recently.)
Earlier, Michael Foster wrote: "I think anyone with a modicum of technical savvy and a large dose of common sense who has also read the many publications about cold fusion can tell that there's something there." I agree, but you would be surprised to learn how few people have a modicum of technical savvy. I have talked to many reporters, VIPs, lawyers, columnists, science writers such as Gary Taubes, and others who cannot *begin to understand* the literature. Storms' "Student Guide" is as much a mystery to them as one of Hagelstein's theory papers is to me.
Ed Storms, who has a streak of conservatism despite himself, sometimes bemoans this ignorance. He thinks it shows the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and people are growing more ignorant every day. Call me an optimist, but I think people have always been this ignorant. History books describe countless foolish mistakes. I do not mean acts that we, today, in hindsight recognize as mistakes. I mean that presidents, prime ministers, generals, corporate CEOs, leading scientists, and geniuses such as Thomas Edison made bone-headed, inexplicable mistakes that everyone else at the time recognized were mistakes.
My mother lived a long time and saw a great deal. She devoted her career to investigating what people thought, what they knew, and what they thought they knew. She felt that people have always been ignorant. She said that conservatives often mythologize about a golden age of education before WWII, or in the 1950s. Some placed it back in 1890. But she never saw any evidence of it. (When she began in the 1940s, there were still plenty of public opinion poll respondents educated in 1890. A social scientist can see far into the past.) She said in the 1930s there were many people living in New York who had never heard of Europe, Iowa, or the Statue of Liberty for that matter.
It seems to me the overall quotient of ignorance stays about the same, but people are ignorant of different things in different eras. In Japan, around 1910 most children did not have the slightest idea how electricity or automobiles worked, but they all understood what death is. They experienced it firsthand when friends, relatives and pets died. Nowadays children are isolated from elderly relatives, and they cannot have pets in high-rise apartments. Parents are embarrassed to talk about death, the way they used to be embarrassed by sex. Children's only exposure to death is in video games or television cartoons, which give them absurd notions about it. The Japanese schoolteachers interviewed on NHK felt that the children were getting their ideas from video games.
The Japanese population is supposedly much better educated than the US population. They go to school much longer -- summer vacation is only one month long. I think they all take calculus, the textbooks cover much more ground, and there are no religious fanatics who try to prevent people from learning the theory of evolution. High school kids score much better on standardized tests. Yet based on newspaper and magazine articles, the mass media, and my own anecdotal experiences, the adult public is Japan seems to be about as ignorant as the US public. Newspaper articles about cold fusion or the SDI are equally dumb and distorted. I have not heard a word about the flawed intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. People seem to believe in superstition and other nonsense as much as Americans do.
- Jed
