At 01:29 PM 4/16/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
See:
<http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/cold_fusion_01>http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/cold_fusion_01
These people have not read anything since the summer of 1989.
Now, they are going to look really, really stupid. Anyone want to
place bets on how long that page remains up?
If you look at the references, way cool; Huizenga, that paragon of
neutral perspective (if I were still skeptical, I'd really be
embarassed by Huizenga, Hoffman gives him short shrift), and Taubes,
who is an excellent science writer but who was on a mission to make
some money quick by writing an expose. All early 90s.
And what the author(s0 of this article did was pick up and repeat, as
if it were some kind of proof of something, all the stupid mistakes
made back then, including all the ad-hominem attacks on Fleischmann,
and repeat them, more than fifteen years later than the sources, with
a great deal now known about the errors, as if nothing had happened.
Sure they made mistakes. But it was nowhere near as simple as presented.
But who is the author?
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/about.php
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/credits.php
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/projectteam.php
Looking at the project team, I don't see a single person who would be
likely to understand the issues from their specializations. There
seems to be one person who has taught "physical science," and one
person who has taught "chemistry," there is someone who is a grad
student in astrophysics (who would not know beans, necessarily, about
condensed matter nuclear physics. And I don't see that any individual
article has a clue as to who wrote it and who was consulted. Way to
go, folks, for claiming that people should be open and respnsible for
that they do, which is part of their message.
As to the theme, they really should read Bart Simon, *Undead
Science,* published by Rutgers University Press. He did years of work
studying the topic of what the hell happened in 1989 etc., and his
view is nothing like the simplistic stupidity the authors of this
anonymous piece have inflicted on ... who? The target audience seems
like it might be high school students.
