I wrote:
> No, it is not at all useful. In 1989, there were two people in the world > who knew about cold fusion: Fleischmann and Pons. What would be the > predictive value of asking others whether it is existed? > To give another dramatic example, suppose at 1:00 pm on the afternoon of December 17, 1903, you were take a poll about whether man can fly. Suppose you asked people to place bets as to whether airplanes exist. Out of the 1.6 billion people in the world alive on that day, at that moment, the only ones who had ANY KNOWLEDGE of that question were Wilbur and Orville Wright and the members of the Kitty Hawk coast guard who had helped them fly that morning. In all the world, there was not another soul who knew the facts or was qualified to address the question. The opinions of other people were worthless. Meaningless. All the money in the world placed in a bet would mean nothing. There was an undeveloped glass plate photograph showing the first flight: http://www.uscg.mil/history/gifs/Kitty_Hawk.jpg That photograph was proof. It overruled all opinions, all money, all textbooks, and the previous 200,000 years of human technology. A thermocouple reading from a cold fusion experiment in 1989 overrules every member of the human race, including every scientist. Once experiments are replicated at high signal to noise ratios, all bets are off. The issue is settled forever. There is no appeal, and it makes no difference how many people disagree, or how many fail to understand calorimetry or the laws of thermodynamics. The rules of science in such clear-cut cases are objective and the proof is as indisputable as that photograph. - Jed
