Edmund Storms wrote:
In contrast, I think it is simply ignored because most people think it is not real.
That seems to be the case. For example, in a paper that I am preparing at this moment, Lautzenhiser & Phelps (Amoco) wrote:
Cold fusion burst upon the scene with great fanfare and little hard information with a press conference in March 1989, when Pons and Fleichmann (1) announced they had found anomalous energy associated with an electrochemical cell. Before there were any actual reports in the literature, circulation of the preprints was commonplace. There were several claims of confirmation over the following few months from diverse groups located worldwide (2-9). At the same time there were many statements that "cold fusion", at best, was the result of experimental error (10-19). Since many "experts" have come out saying that there is nothing to cold fusion, the public perception at this time is that cold fusion has mostly faded away.
I think that is what happened. While I do not find it strange that these self-styled experts claimed there is nothing to it, I find it exceedingly strange that so many large companies (later including Amoco) dropped the subject just because of what these bozos claimed. You'd think the big companies would take the subject more seriously. Apparently major decision makers at huge corporations are swayed by public opinion, fad and fashion more than we realize -- and probably more than they themselves realize. As Gene Mallove used to say, "these people read the newspapers." (Just as "the Supreme Court follows the election returns," as Mr. Dooley put it.) Even though these companies stood to earn trillions of dollars from this discovery, they lost interest and dropped the subject, the way a two-year-old who needs a nap will drop a toy, and they did this only because a few people condemned the subject. Based on my conversations with such people, my impression is that they themselves do not have a firm technical grasp of what was claimed, and they simply took other people's word without doing their homework.
Cold fusion "faded away" just as L&P said. Looking back at history, many other critical breakthroughs also almost faded away because powerful people were not interested in them, or never noticed them. When the ENIAC computer was in the early stages of development, it was considered so far out and unlikely to succeed it attracted little funding and no interest. None of the big gun scientists in 1944 knew about it because no one bothered to tell them -- because the people who knew had already written it off. Von Neumann learned about it by accident during a casual conversation on a railroad platform. He became interested, then he joined the project, and from that point on the project gained credibility and importance. If he had not, I suppose it might have been canceled at the end of the war, along with thousands of other incomplete projects. In 1860, the Transcontinental Railroad was stalled because its supporters could not raise money from the San Francisco gold rush millionaires. These millionaires would sometimes throw away $50,000 a night gambling, but they would not risk investing $10 million in a railroad that a decade later became the most profitable enterprise in history.
A myth has taken hold in the human mind, which is the basis for most beliefs in all subjects, and this myth directs the approach being take.
On the other hand many counter-myths have circulated about cold fusion. Hal Fax told me years ago he was sure that Toyota has already perfected cold fusion engines and "they use them in their forklifts." Science-fiction movies, cheap television dramas and other popular culture often makes references to cold fusion. The screenwriters seem to assume that it is real, and it has been suppressed.
- Jed
