On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>wrote:
Yup. Beaudette assigns some of the blame for the fiasco to F&P. I have to > agree, because of this. You might blame it on the lawyers but F&P were the > ones who followed their advice. > > Still, people did manage to replicate, so this should not have mattered. > Pons and Fleischmann were making an extraordinary claim. If they had been spotless in their work and presentation, they would have had a difficult case to make. Various factors made the work and the presentation less than spotless. They themselves made things more difficult in a number of ways, including not disavowing the neutron and gamma measurements as soon as it became clear that they were in over their heads. By defending those details, they made it harder for people to suspend disbelief and take them seriously. In an ideal world the replications should have been sufficient, but things were quite helter-skelter in the months after the press conference, with all kinds of claims and theories popping up and being retracted. I'm guessing that the more staid scientists wanted to be through with the whole matter and get back to what they were doing before all of the fuss. Eric
