Jed,
The one thing I know about Duncan, from multiple instances including my
communications with him today is that he is a diplomat. Look at the video
and see how gracefully he said that 60 Minutes and McKubre did a disservice
by talking about cold fusion powered laptops and cars.
In an e-mail I received from him today, he was also very defensive about
Caltech.
My hunch is that:
1) You are right; the UM felt threatened.
2) Someone at UM (not Duncan) issued an order to pull the material
2) Duncan will never admit to me or you that there was coercion or suppression.
Sure there are lots of things to debate and argue about in the LENR field,
but trying to stuff Pandora back into her box is a bit pathetic.
The recent behavior of people in the physics establishment is very
peculiar, and methinks they doth protest too much.
Pull up a seat folks, this is gonna get interesting.
Steve
At 05:56 PM 5/12/2009, you wrote:
Good summary.
This is very minor issue, but it says:
By today, a notice had been posted on the site, "Dr. Duncan's speech and
presentation slides are not available," that left no doubt that the
removal was deliberate.
My notes show that the statement "Dr. Duncan's speech and presentation
slides are not available" was there on May 10. That was when I first
became aware of this.
I took note of this because, as Steve says, it is proof that the removal
was deliberate. On May 10 someone suggested me that maybe the files were
accidentally deleted. That's plausible. I have accidentally deleted things
at LENR-CANR.org, or left links that do not work. That can happen on any
web page. The point is, however, when a file or text is deleted
accidentally, you do not find a note saying: "this material is not available."
Whatever is happening, it is unpleasant and it gives the field a bad name.
People are going to think that Duncan retracted.
I hope he does not mind seeing his slides uploaded, and his video on
YouTube. If he does mind for some reason, I wish he would tell us.
As for the person who deleted the text and files, I don't give a fig if
that person is upset that we are uploading this stuff! This is the
Internet era. Did they really think they could hide this material, or make
it unavailable by erasing it from one site? As I said, if this is
suppression it is inept.
I must say, it does seem more like suppression with each passing day. This
is just a guess, but my hunch is that the professor who phoned Duncan and
called him a "charlatan" has put pressure on the university to delete the
files.
- Jed
