Jones Beene wrote:
> No. Given who they are, and who they are funded by, the most logical > explanation by far is that they were ordered not to pursue tritium for > proliferation reasons. > The researchers have told me on many occasions that that funding was withdrawn because no one at the highest levels of the DoE believes the results are real. The top brass says that cold fusion is pathological science, it was never replicated, there must be some undetected error, etc., etc. -- the same sort of thing you hear from any skeptic. Like all ignorant skeptics, the decision makers who withdrew funding are not familiar with the details of the research. They do not even realize that such details exist. They get their information from the mass media and have no idea that peer-reviewed papers exist. I have spoken directly with top decision makers and prominent opponents in the U.S. and Japan, and in all cases they knew nothing about the subject and were surprised to hear that peer-reviewed papers have been published. The express no interest in looking a these papers. Their opinions are based on hazy recollections of newspaper articles and internet rumors. I am sure everyone here has encountered such people. In other words, the situation is just as it appears to be. There are no surprises. The people who cancel funding for cold fusion have no sophisticated ulterior motives or secret goals. Tritium for weapons never enters their thoughts because they assume that Taubes is correct and there was only one report of tritium (at TAMU) which was fraud. The top brass at places like the DoE are ignorant, just like the science reporter at Time magazine, the editors of Sci. Am., Robert Park, the Nobel laureates who wrote blurbs for the Taubes book, the editors at Wikipedia and other opponents. To get a sense of how these people think, and how different they are from you or me, consider what happened in the last months of the NHE program in Japan. Melvin Miles was there, and his experiments were producing excess heat, which was supposedly the main goal of the project. He describes these results in several papers at LENR-CANR.org. During the time he was doing this, the top managers at the NHE program were working down the hall from him. Not once this entire time did they bother to get up from their desks, come down the hall, and look at his work. They published a report claiming that no excess heat had ever been observed in any experiment at their lab. They also locked out Mizuno for the entire length of the project -- never allowed him in the door -- and told the young researchers there not to meet with him. Such people are fixated on power, politics, prestige and money. Nothing else matters to them -- nothing else even exists. They are in it to make a name for themselves, boost their standing in the organization, and come up with whatever results the top brass demands. They do not give a fart about science, technology, the environment, the future, or the truth. It never enters their minds that such things matter. I know such people well enough to know they would dismiss such concerns as "boyscout bullshit." As Taubes said, "I don't give a damn whether cold fusion is real or not; my goal is to sell books." I am sure it has crossed his mind, or Huizenga's mind, that cold fusion might actually be an important breakthrough that would benefit mankind. They assume it is a game being played by the cold fusion researchers to grab funding. Such people are very common, especially at the highest levels of large, dysfunctional establishment institutions such as Enron and Lehman Brothers and so on. That is why, for example, most major banks and investment houses in the U.S. spent the last several years risking trillions of dollars in "financial weapons of mass destruction" and "contracts written by madmen." Such people and such behavior have been widespread throughout history, and should surprise no one. - Jed
