Nick Palmer wrote: > Perhaps the world may finally learn that it is not enough just to find a > simple truth and expect the world to "beat a path to one's door".
It never was easy. History is chock full of examples. As Howard Aiken said, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." > Perhaps at this point in history, it is even harder than it was before for > the truth to out. An interesting question. New media such as the Internet make it easier, but changes in the scientific culture that have made it much harder to fund or publish ground-breaking research. Several recent books describe this. I have the gory details from Hagelstein and others. They say the system is over-centralized, micromanaged, and corrupt to the core, especially the peer-review system. This allows established scientists to squash new ideas they disagree with, and to plagiarize ideas they like. I don't recall the title of one, but it describe how in the early 20th century, young scientists were routinely funded for whatever they wanted to do. It included quotes from many biographies and autobiographies, and after 1950 or so these books include statements about how hard it was to be funded and how much opposition there was. See: http://archivefreedom.org/ Regarding media, I think cold fusion scientists have not made enough efforts to get their message out, mainly because they are old, they do not use the Internet much, and they do not understand its power. Many of them think that only print journals are valid sources of information. They have waited 20 years to get into these journals. They wait in vain. Cold fusion will never be accepted by Nature. Nature has gone so far out on a limb, the two cannot coexist; the success of cold fusion will bring about the demise of Nature, Scientific American and many others (or at least, of their present editorial staff). Note that this is true for academic science, but it is not true for other areas such as programming, or even designing plug-in hybrid cars. In these areas, the Internet has been a boon, and new ideas circulate faster and easier than they used to, I think. - Jed
