On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> I stand by my assertion that if the exact same inter-institutional >> competition had led an Ivy League institution to hold such a press >> conference, we'd probably be driving around CF powered cars today. >> > > That is an interesting idea. It is plausible. You cannot prove it. > Alternate history is speculative by definition. We cannot rerun history to > see what would happen if only X or Y had happened. > True enough -- which is the reason we need an intense focus on sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them. What I mean by "intense focus" is forget everything else that we call "politics" or "discourse" or even "national defense". None of them are remotely as important. The social sciences have no control groups with which to zero in on causation. Its not as good as rerunning history but then no controlled experiment is. > > I do not recall any press conferences at Ivy League schools announcing > positive cold fusion results. I wonder if such a press conference today at > MIT or Cornell would do any good. The conference at U. Missouri has not had > any impact as far as I know. They are not Ivy League but they are respected. > Ten years ago an Ivy League admission that they had no good explanation for the excess heat -- and that they had tried to replicate the purported errors suggested by the likes of Nathan Lewis -- might still have had no effect simply due to the amount of career still ahead of many of those who bet their careers against cold fusion (like Lewis). At present, they're pretty close to retirement anyway so it could have more of an effect. There aren't as many high profile people who have committed themselves in visible way (especially now that Chu is out of the DoE lead position). > For a look at events at U. Utah in 1989, see: > > http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/PetersonCtheguardia.pdf > > - Jed > >
