Nigel Dyer <[email protected]> wrote: I've sat through a number of talks at fringe science conferences that were > modelled on the two excellent you tube videos. The speakers usually give > every impression that they fully believe the nonsense that they are > presenting is correct.
They probably do believe it. But you should bear in mind that the problem might be on your end. Unfamiliar ideas often sound like nonsense, yet they sometimes turn out to be right. Regarding ideas that seem wrong and turn out to be wrong, see the marvelous quote at the end of this essay, p. 13: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf See also this book, which I recommend: "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error," by Kathryn Schulz. This begins with a quote from Franklin, which I think describes one of the reasons people are seduced into believing errors: Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities. —Benjamin Franklin, Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practiced in Paris (1784) - Jed
