I do not mean to beat a dead horse, but mass media blather causes more harm than you might realize. It destroys the credibility of researchers. The problem is, professionals often read the mass media account and assume it is an accurate report of what the researchers said. Take this latest example:
". . . from the thousands of experiments performed over the last few decades it seems that there are various reactions that output more energy than is put into them . . ." Imagine you are a scientist or an engineer. You know nothing about cold fusion. You have not read any papers. You read Gibbs, and you think to yourself: "Those cold fusion 'researchers' must be a gang of idiots. They think that getting more energy out than in proves the effect is nuclear?!? What amateurs. They must be tin-foil helmeted high-school dropouts." Mass media articles about technology sometimes have mix-ups such as confusing power and energy (watts and watt-hours). An educated reader can usually sort this out. She can recreate in her mind what the reporter actually heard from the researcher. In this case, we know that Gibbs did not hear anything. He made it up! No cold fusion researcher would say: "we are getting more out than we are putting in, so we know this is real." Every article by Gibbs has mistakes like that, as do the ones in the Scientific American. Anyone who believes Sci. Am. would surely dismiss cold fusion: http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?p=294 Needless to say, Wikipedia is a compendium of chaos, confusion, and lies. When I last checked a few years ago, every substantive assertion in it was incorrect. Most of them are about things like recombination that have been circulating endlessly since 1989. Trying to kill these things off is like trying to quell "birther" rumors that Obama was not born in Hawaii. The mass media and Wikipedia is where people go first, these days. People who go to these sources to learn about cold fusion will get the impression that cold fusion scientists are lunatics. I know I would. That is why mass media reports written by ignorant people are worse than no reports at all. - Jed
