"It is now officially "misconduct" to do experiments that challenge textbook theory. Theoreticians have appointed themselves the high priests of science, and an experimentalist who does anything to upset them is not merely mistaken or foolish, as they said back in 1989. Now he is unethical, and he must be "investigated" and crushed."
This is the "New Inquisition." So when you say "high priests," it's not just a metaphor. The same kind of mentality (or lack of it) has been at work over the ages in all the workings of man, from science to religion... even to art and music. We may believe that man is evolving to greater and greater heights, but in a certain sense - as human beings exhibiting decent human behaviour - we are devolving. Let's not for one moment believe that having really neat technologies defines us as advanced human beings. Look around you!!
Some of us are not easily intimidated. We owe it to the scientists who have accepted the risk of breaking the existing paradigms, to protect them every way we can.
My own approach to this whole thing - call it "cold fusion" or "micro hot fusion" - is to begin to create working prototypes using the most appealing of the various techniques. A working unit, or a series of working units, each performing as it should - even if it's not performing optimally - is far more convincing TO THE ORDINARY MAN than endlessly debating the tarnished opinions of the self-proclaimed "high priests" of science.
Honesty will out.
Philip.
At 08:05 PM 3/10/2006 -0500, you wrote:
I have been Taleyarkhan with Yeong Kim, who is also a professor at Purdue, and with Ed Storms. Kim told me:
[Taleyarkhan] believes his bubble fusion is a hot fusion. After he found out that I have been working on cold fusion and told him that what he is doing is cold fusion and not a hot fusion, he has been avoiding me for any scientific or technical discussions . . .
I have heard from other people that Taleyarkhan wants to distance himself from the field of cold fusion. It is not surprising. He knows what happened to cold fusion researchers!
As to the technical question, is this some form of cold fusion, Kim suspects it might be and I gather so does McKubre. Storms disagrees. He thinks there is no connection between the Taleyarkhan effect and cold fusion. I cannot judge, but anyone can see that it is "mostly" hot fusion.
However, many people such as the editors of Nature and Robert Park, vehemently oppose both kind of research. (They oppose anything that is new, original or interesting. They have made it their life's work to prevent progress.) This gang of naysayers has deliberately conflated the Taleyarkhan effect and cold fusion. They do this as a political tactic. Whether they actually believe there is a connection or not, they assert there is one, especially in the press, because they want to trigger attacks by the Washington Post, Time Magazine and other rabid opponents of cold fusion.
In 1952, people used this political tactic to destroy business rivals (and sometimes jilted lovers, and other enemies), by calling them "communists." Whether the target really was a communist or not had nothing to do with it. The purpose was to destroy the guy with guilt by association.
Ed Storms was baffled by the brouhaha in the press. He said: "Naturally the detected amounts are wrong because the measurements are not sensitive enough to see the expected ratio. What is the advantage to anyone to mix these two phenomenon?" As I said, the advantage is that you crush the opposition by associating them with cold fusion. But Storms, in an uncharacteristically naïve moment, said he does not understand why anyone would attack research in the newspapers in the first place. "This situation makes no sense." If these other researchers feel there is a problem with the experiment, they should discuss it by e-mail, or publish papers showing an error.
Here is my take on the situation:
Think Zeitgeist. This is the kind of age we live in. This is what science has come to. When people publish experimental results that contradict theory, instead of debating the issues according to logic and textbook knowledge, academic rivals spread false rumors, they threaten lawsuits, they meddle, and they conduct witch hunt investigations to derail the research and destroy careers. It worked with cold fusion, so now they do it every time something new comes along.
Taleyarkhan is being investigated for "academic misconduct" because a theoretician thinks the experiment contradicts theory. It is now officially "misconduct" to do experiments that challenge textbook theory. Theoreticians have appointed themselves the high priests of science, and an experimentalist who does anything to upset them is not merely mistaken or foolish, as they said back in 1989. Now he is unethical, and he must be "investigated" and crushed.
Perhaps, as Schwinger predicted, this will be the death of science. Science is at a low point, and no one can say when, or if, it will recover. But I expect it will. Valuable, vital institutions seldom collapse completely. Usually after they reach an dysfunctional extreme, a crisis occurs, and then the problems are fixed.
- Jed
