Watch Out For The Crazies

[theheretic]

Today XKCD had a lovely little cartoon about a forum for perpetual motion machines, still going after 8 years. They're a wonderfully insane subject that crazy people inevitably drift into. Not being interested in them is often a sign of sanity, if you ever wondered about your own mental health. Those places also attract con men and I think that's

Comments

[baron_waste]

The problem with cold fusion was political. 'Conspiracy' not so much, just an ugly side of human nature called authoritarianism. It's fairly common in science: I woudn't waste my time saying something if it were wrong, I'm paid to know these things, and sufficient education in the subject leads inevitably to my expert opinon, so if your opinion differs it merely means you're ignorant of your subject.

You may remember a gent by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky. He had quite a drip-percolator going for a while, about how Mars was originally ejected from Jupiter and went careening past the Earth, causing Earth's rotation to stop - conveniently for Joshua, in the Bible, you see - but Earth somehow started up again while Mars settled into its current orbit, &c., &c.

It was all just gas, just blithering idiocy, but Isaac Asimov was a bit upset and famously said so because Velikovsky's ideas were not examined and disproven scientifically, he was laughed off because he couldn't possibly be right because if he was, the academicians would already know about it.

Comrade Sagan, a k a Saint Carl of Cornell, had exactly the same idea about Mars - it was HIS planet, he was The Expert™, and if he didn't know about it then it wasn't valid for that reason. He dismissed the idea of the Face on Mars being artificial, an artifact, not because he knew it wasn't; no one knew either way. He dismissed the notion because he did not hold that opinion and that made it wrong. [He infuriated James Hoagland, who had what he thought were compelling data. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and your evidence is insufficiently extraordinary,” Saint Carl told him.]

Cold fusion? Poppycock! That can't be right, or it would already be in the textbooks WE write. Next!

As it happened, cold fusion did turn out to be anomalous, experimental error, what have you. This was eventually determined. But it was immediately and firmly dismissed as crank stuff, 'junk science,' though no one had yet looked at it, because if it were right then THEY'D BE WRONG and they're paid to know this stuff!

[theheretic]

Perhaps you do not remember the news coverage of the event in 1989 or whenever it was? A number of universities provided similar results of proof. It WAS tested. On review they determined that the results were anomalous and caused by contaminated Palladium since all those universities bought their electrodes from the same supplier, whose source was contaminated. Oops! I was all for it working and not expecting poppycock. I was watching the universities step up and say: "Yes, it works for us too!". Later we got disappointment. Really, they threw the book and Stanley Pons and Alan Fleischman. It was mean. They made mistakes, got excited, thought they'd solved the cause of 80 years of war. Pity. I object to people claiming to be "scientists" who refuse to provide proof, citing "conspiracy!!" yet insist they have working cold fusion on their desk when any applied scientist knows two important facts: 1) if it worked it would kill them from radiation and 2) if it worked they'd be famous. Ergo, they're lying or crazy. Thus my point.