Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote:
> It seems to me they had values of capitalists and money grubbers and > little, if any, scientist and journalist values. > I do not think capitalism had much to do with it. This was typical academic politics. It was a turf war over theory and who gets to define "fusion." Academic politics tend to be vicious. Rivals often demolish people's reputations in the press, or try to fire them or have their funding cut under false pretenses. Read about Rusi Taleyarkhan and bubble fusion, or what happened to Townes when he invented the laser. When Robert Park vowed to "root out and fire" anyone in the government who applies for grant to do cold fusion or even talks about cold fusion, the assembled crowd at the APS cheered him. In any other industry there would have been a appalled silence, but in academic science it is normal to go around destroying people's lives because they disagree with you, or to protect your turf. In a dispute about programming, such as the Mac versus PC, suppose you decide the Mac platform is better. You put your money and your development efforts into the Mac. You do not publish articles in trade magazines implying that PC developers are engaged in fraud; you don't call them criminals and lunatics the way Robert Park does; you don't campaign to have them deported; and you don't promise a crowd at a trade show that you will "root out and fire" anyone who attends a PC trade show. This sort of thing only happens in academia. Money did enter into it in one sense. The people at MIT plasma fusion program were worried about funding being cut. Plasma fusion has nothing to do with capitalism. It is a 60-year-old government project, with no participation at all by capitalists or industry, other than the industrial companies that manufacture the equipment. - Jed
