On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:00 PM, William Beaty <bi...@eskimo.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 11 May 2013, Joshua Cude wrote: > >> I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, >> so >> I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest >> replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. >> > > [...] > I push the crackpot-friendly aspect as a long-time experiment in > "Provisional Acceptance" of crazy hypotheses. Currently in science, at > least where weird topics are concerned, we instead operate with a > philosophy of Provisional Disbelief, where we allow the evidence convince > us to change our minds. But that's not the case for cold fusion, where provisional acceptance was the order of the day in 1989. Where Pons got a standing ovation, and scientists everywhere went to their labs to get in on the revolution. Where even eventual uberskeptic Douglas Morrison wrote: "… I feel this subject will become so important to society that we must consider the broader implications as well as the scientific ones […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants and new power plants based on cold fusion.…." That's called provisional acceptance. It didn't stand up though. (I know I said I'd slink away, but many of the responses here are about argument style and so on, so I think it's legitimate to reply to some of them. I still plan debunking replies to some of Rothwell's longer posts, but I'll put them elsewhere.)
