Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> . . . .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 . . . > You have hit the nail on the head! I expect this is just what they will say, and this is how the mainstream textbooks, Wikipedia and others will record the history. If you want an example, look no further than the Scientific American. In 1905 the Wrights committed the cardinal sin -- the one unforgivable thing. They ridiculed the S.A. They dissed it. The S.A. has had it in for them ever since. You cannot attack the Wrights directly, but for the last 110 years at every opportunity the S.A. has belittled them, claimed they did not accomplish much, and they held back the development of aviation, and they did not really understand what they had, and so on, and so forth. The most recent S.A. repeating these claims was published in 2003, on the anniversary of the Wright brothers first flight. They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. I have no doubt that if the S.A. is still in business 100 years from now, they will still be attacking the Wrights and Fleischmann and Pons. F&P will be famous, like the Wrights are today, so a direct, frontal attack will not work, but they will be whittled down until it seems they played only a small role -- the the Wright brother have been both in S.A. and in popular culture. The mainstream institutions never forgot and never forgave them for being bicycle mechanics from the middle of nowhere Dayton, OH, instead of being academic experts from Yale or MIT. Fortunately, the true history of the Wrights has been preserved. The true history of cold fusion will be preserved in even greater detail. People who take the trouble to go beyond Wikipedia or the self-congratulatory New York Times special edition of 2089 will be able to find the facts about cold fusion. But most people will ignore the facts. I once thought that the Internet would make truth more readily available to the masses of people. The Iraq war proved that is untrue. The distortions, and the instant revisionist rewriting replacing facts with lies, in that war rivaled the distortions of the Crimean war. - Jed
