On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mary Yugo <maryyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> Such a thing would be more revolutionary and would gain faster acceptance >> and more interest than anything done in the last hundred years. >> > > If you believe that, you do not know the first thing about the history of > technology or commerce. That is astounding ignorance. Whenever there is > pre-existing competition, innovations have faced opposition. The opposition > is proportional to the threat. The better the invention, the stronger the > opposition. > But the opposition doesn't come from impartial scientific panels enlisted to evaluate the technology. It comes from potential competitors, or luddites. So, opposition from big oil might make sense for cold fusion. Is there any evidence they opposed it, or is that your fantasy? Hot fusion would have felt threatened of course, but they were not actually making money, and the source of their money would stand to gain immeasurably from cold fusion (from energy independence, from less pollution, from the disappearance of the climate change controversy), so that isn't plausible either. What is plausible is that they were experts in the field, and in their estimation, cold fusion is a pipe dream. That estimation has been borne out in 22 years of cold fusion failure. And the opposition is not usually in the form of denial of the basic principles, as in the case of cold fusion. Surely, the opposition to MRI was not about the principles of the technique. There simply isn't another example like cold fusion in the history of technology, much as you dearly want there to be. That's why Storms has said the treatment is unprecedented. > The only metric that counts is money. Opposition is always about money -- > and power. It makes no difference how good it is or how many people want it > or how many lives it will save. If powerful people stand lose money there > will be fierce opposition. > > Probably true, but very few people would stand to lose money from the success cold fusion. It would be like the industrial revolution, where everyone's standard of living would improve. Even the oil companies would be well positioned to take advantage of the new technology in its distribution and so on. > > >> As Cude is fond of pointing out, remember the acclaim and open armed >> welcome that P&F got when they first announced? All the interest from the >> press, the funding from private companies, the offers and interviews? How >> soon we forget. >> > > You have not forgotten. You never learned anything in the first place! > Your version of history is a fantasy. Read Beaudette. Read the papers in > the LENR-CANR library about history. Learn something, for crying out loud! > > Fleischmann and Pons were not welcomed. > They were initially. They were cheered. They were adored. They were applauded. They were featured on front pages. That means people wanted cold fusion to work. Only when the experiments didn't stand up to scrutiny did the welcome turn to derision. That didn't take very long. > They were thrown out of the University and driven out of the country. > How exactly did that work? Was Pons fired? I doubt it, since he had tenure. Fleischmann didn't have a position at Utah, and he continued to name Southampton as his affiliation until at least 1994. Even Pons continued to list Utah for several years. So, it seems they weren't thrown out of the University. In fact, for a while they were given funding to continue the research in Utah. Nothing came of it though. After that, they may have been refused funding from the state and US funding agencies for cold fusion, but that is not the same as being thrown out. Why should agencies that don't believe the research has merit be required to fund it? How were they driven out of the country? Surely they weren't exiled. Again, if they left because they couldn't get the funding they thought they deserved, well, that's just opportunism, not forced removal. Their failure to make anything of cold fusion in the decade in France with substantial funding justifies the treatment they received from funding agencies in the US. P&F got better funding after the CF announcement than either of them had had in their careers. How does that translate to bad treatment? > Pons renounced his US citizenship because he was so mistreated. > He was denied funding for the experiments he wanted to do. In what other way was he treated badly. OK, he was also criticized for shoddy work in the press and by other scientists. But his work was shoddy. People who replicated were ridiculed, harassed and fired. Their experiments > were sabotaged. their old friends, publishers and supporters deserted him > and reviled them. Their reputations were destroyed in the mass media. Their > lives and careers were ruined in some cases. To this day, you and hordes of > other ignorant people on the Internet attack them and make absurd claims > about their work. > You have to keep believing this to justify your 20 years of wasted devotion to the field. But, at the same time, you often list all the legitimate scientists who have worked on cold fusion, even in the US. Academics like Kim and Nagel and Dash and Hagelstein were not fired. And there are many others not in universities like McKubre, and Mosier-Boss and Szpak and so on. SPAWAR is shutting down the cold fusion research now, after 2 decades of fruitless work; are they going to fire the people who worked on it? I doubt it. There is no doubt that cold fusion research has been criticized, but the best defense would be some believable results, and in 22 years, they are just as flaky now as they ever were. Sometimes bad science has to be identified as what it is. As Schwinger said: > > "The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in > editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of > anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship > will be the death of science." > And yet, it is only in the field of cold fusion where progress has died. In the other areas, progress continues apace. Rejection of submitted papers and venomous criticism of referees is not censorship; it's peer review. It's how science works. It's necessary to prevent wasting time and money on science that has no merit.
