OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <svj.orionwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Based on conversations I've had with him over the years, not in a > million trillion gillion years would I EVER expect him to, on his own > reconnaissance, give a single proposal related to a "CF" project the > light of the day. > Such people are ubiquitous in the scientific establishment. They are a dime a dozen. THAT is why cold fusion has not been funded, and why it has made such little progress. It is not because there is a conspiracy against it, or the oil companies or plasma fusion people oppose it. It is not because Fleischmann and Pons held a press conference on the day they published their paper. That's silly; plasma fusion people hold a press conference the day they do a run. They publish a paper months later, or years later, or never. In my opinion, most of the reasons proposed to explain the opposition do not hold water. They apply as much to other fields as the do to cold fusion. It is simple. Scientists tend to be conservative people. Most of them are unimaginative and opposed to progress. Most of them do not want to see anything that upsets the applecart or makes their own training obsolete. See also the quote from Tolstoy that Mallove used in closing his book. Scientists have a reputation for embracing new ideas, but it is undeserved. It is a myth. People also believe that programmers, venture capitalists, and businessmen embrace new ideas, but the ones I know are no more inclined to do this than any other group, such as farmers or cooks. People everywhere, in all walks of life, tend to be conservative, cautious, and afraid of novelty. They stick to what works. They hate the thought of trying anything new. I believe this is human nature. Occasionally, you meet someone who loves to try new things and has "overdeveloped curiosity" as someone said of Darwin. Most of the time, to most of us normal folks, these people are pests. They waste time. They ask too many questions and try too many things that don't work. They are like Mizuno: they cause explosions, their labs are a god-awful mess, and their grad students don't graduate because they get caught up in Improbable Research that Seldom Pans Out. When children act this way in school, the parents and teachers usually bat them down. Nowadays they force feed the kids drugs to combat "attention deficit disorder" -- a newly invented illness the symptoms of which happen to correspond to the way every intelligent child I have known reacts to conventional pedagogy. If we had these drugs back in 1910, van Neumann would never have published a paper at 17 or gotten a PhD at 23. He would have been well adjusted. He would not have crashed a car every year, or piled up large numbers of speeding tickets paid by IBM, or amicably divorced his wife when she found a new boyfriend just when he found a new girlfriend. He would not have played loud German marching band music on the gramophone at the Institute for Advanced Study, driving Einstein and the others batty, or brought in dozens of unwashed engineers to build a computer in the basement of the Institute, even though everyone else hated the idea and though computers were vulgar toys. (After he died, they tossed out the computer and did not allow another one until someone brought in a 386 personal computer in mid-1980s.) The Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng is another example of a pain in the butt. A terribly annoying person! He keeps changing his mind, changing his tune and making impossible demands on the U.S. government. He expects to be given a ride on the plane with Sec. Clinton. He expects her to change the meeting itinerary and deal with him and his personal problems. The thing is, this guy is challenging a tyrannical communist dictatorship despite the fact that he has no political power, no money, he is blind, self-educated, and he knows better than anyone that the authorities might lose their patience at any moment and beat him and his family to death. He makes ridiculous demands on the U.S. government because that is what he does in life. He makes even more outlandish demands on the Chinese government -- that they should stop oppressing people. Ask yourself: What kind of person would act that way? Answer: A very unusual person. A person with no sense of danger, no sense that he is powerless, or that he is trying to accomplish the impossible. Someone with tremendous self confidence. Someone like, say, Rossi, Fleischmann, or Mizuno. In other words, a crazy person who is *annoying* and *will not shut up*. A person who, if he dropped by your house for a day, would stay for a month and use up all the towels every time he took a shower. He will impose on Sec. Clinton or anyone else because his movement and his needs come first. It is no wonder the Chinese government is fed up with him and wants him gone. I understand the conservative mindset. In most aspects of life, I myself am a stick in the mud. I like to eat the same kind of food and do the same thing day in, day out. As Martin Fleischmann says, we are painfully conventional people. It just happens than in a few selected areas of life, we like to experiment and try out new ideas. I am crazy about new gadgets that barely work, but have fantastic potential, such as microcomputers in 1979 and cold fusion today. Once we get it to work, I lose interest. - Jed
