Standing Bear wrote:
A party in power for a long and unchallenged time grows
sloppy. Look at the seemingly unlikely crew of 'Lee Harvey Oswald
and his assassin Jack Ruby'.
These were from 'central casting as well.
I do not believe one word of the conspiracy theories surrounding the
Kennedy assassination, or 9/11. Evidently I am not the kind of person
who believes in conspiracies, so perhaps I have overlooked or
dismissed evidence of a conspiracy against cold fusion.
People like me are relentlessly inclined to look for the mundane
explanation, to take things at face value, and to dismiss anything
that seems outlandish. My mother used to tell a story illustrating
this mindset. She was riding on a trolley near the White House on
November 1, 1950. Suddenly there was a loud series of bangs. A
passenger yelled: "That sounds like gunfire, coming from the Blair
House! It must be an assassination attempt!!" (President Truman was
staying at the Blair House while the White House was being
renovated.) My mother looked up from her newspaper for a moment and
said, "nonsense, it must be a truck backfiring," and went back to
reading. It turned out this was an assassination attempt. Several
shots were fired and two people were killed.
Paradoxically, this personality trait is what compels me to believe
that fusion is real. Looking at the bigger picture, cold fusion is by
far the least outlandish explanation for the facts. It best fits
Ockham's law of parsimony. Alternative explanations require that you
throw away the laws of thermodynamics and the experimental method, or
convince yourself that hundreds of scientists are committing career
suicide for no reason.
A mindset prone to reject outlandish explanations does not
necessarily reject anomalous data. That's a different thing. One of
the many outlandish ideas I reject is the notion that human beings
already know everything, and there are no more surprises left in nature.
- Jed
