Jed Rothwell wrote: > Will wonders never cease! > > Seriously, I never thought he would concede even this much. > > Perhaps we should ask him, now that he agrees it is science, whether he > still thinks he & Zimmerman were wise to "root and fire anyone who > believes in cold fusion" and whether he now takes back his WaPost > accusation that researchers are all criminals, frauds and lunatics. > > He would not respond but if someone forced an answer I will bet he would > say that Fleischmann and Pons were criminals, frauds etc. but the latest > group of researchers are not. That's what that jerk Kelves said.
HAH! And what are the odds against this? Suppose P&F were scammers. Suppose they made the whole thing up, lied about it all, suppose they faked the results, whatever -- suppose there was no CF in their cells, and suppose there never was a chance of it. Lots of scams happen every year; this would have been no great surprise. But now it turns out that, in the course of setting up their scam, they *just* *happened* to have done *exactly* what they would have needed to to do demonstrate something which turns out to be a *real* *effect*, which just by purest coincidence happens to match what they were scammily claiming to have discovered. This would pass the bounds of coincidence; this would be synchronicity gone wild. It would be different if there had been lots of labs looking for the effect, and they had simply been the first to claim to have found it (like Weber and his gravity waves). But it wasn't like that -- *nobody* was looking for cold fusion. I think it's fair to say that P&F invented the whole field. Before their announcements, the notion that electrolysis might lead to fusion was not on anybody's mind, as far as I know. In short, if the effect has been shown to be real, then that indicates, to high probability, that the apparent positives of P&F were real positive results. It would be just too big a coincidence to swallow any other way. > > - Jed >
