On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>wrote:
Most skeptics are conformists and they will believe whatever the mainstream > institutions tell them to believe. The general public may not believe this is true, but I am beginning to think it might be. > The day after the Times says "cold fusion is real" the skeptics will all > say they believed it all along. Many of them will modestly take credit for > introducing cold fusion to society, and for keeping the researchers honest. If I were with a New York PR firm hired by a consortium of research universities to provide counsel on how to respond to a congressional inquiry on the handling of cold fusion, four years in the future, say, I might try to spin things like this: "When Pons and Fleischmann first made claim of their 'results,' the least competent in science rushed to the scene and made it very difficult to sift wheat from chaff. No one would publish their results in reputable journals, and the 'papers' they prepared were of such substandard quality that they were indistinguishable from promotional literature for homeopathic remedies and magnet motors. We did our best to bring scientific scrutiny to bear on the multitude of claims that were being made by any electrical engineer or computer programmer that could get ahold of some palladium and a test tube, but they would not work with us. It was not until 2015 that Caltech, Harwell and MIT were able to independently piece together some of the critical details that Andrea Rossi was unwilling to divulge that we first had any kind of scientific basis for 'solid-phase mediated fusion,' as the field is now known. (Note that they found a COP of 2.54 rather than 2.6, as was initially claimed.) Prior to the very difficult experiment that Caltech, Harwell and MIT were heroically able to carry out, solid-phase mediated fusion was the stuff of near-threshold events recorded in the spreadsheets of hobbyists playing in their garages. We liken the critical transition to professional science to the transition of alchemy, in the middle ages, to chemistry, with the systematization of the scientific method. The early tinkerers had a role to play, obviously, but now we can look to professional scientists to carry out a rigorous and systematic investigation and to publish quality results in mainstream scientific journals." Eric
