At 01:29 PM 4/16/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
<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.
Wait! I get it! http://undsci.berkeley.edu/copyright.php
The author, legally, is "The University of California Museum of Paleontology."
Jed, we made a mistake. This article isn't about cold fusion, it's
about dead science, what happened twenty years ago, what people
thought then. What else would you expect to find on cold fusion in a
Museum of Paleontology? Perhaps they could have a wax figure of
Maddox, with a recording of him saying "Cold fusion is dead," with
the date Maddox died. And Huizenga, of course, could help show people
around, there should be something he could still do. Might be too
hard, though, he'd keep wandering off, poor guy.
And in the room where they'd have the dinosour exhibits, normally,
for this special program, there would be the National Ignition
Facility, though they'd have to expand the room a bit, even though it
was fine for that Brontosaurus. We build *really big* dinosaurs
lately. They still involve small brains, though.
It's all just a matter of a little reframing, Jed. Enjoy.
(Actually, that NIF display will have to be outside. "a ten-story
building the size of three football fields." This is what Big Science
gave us when they spat on cold fusion. No wonder. There is a lot more
money in designing and building 192 superlasers than in popping a
little deuterium and palladium in a cell, who wants to do that? Even
if it cold fusion does produce a little energy, so what? We'd have to
hire chemists and materials scientists to make it work, the particle
physicists would be useless, this isn't a plasma, so how would we
cope with all the out-of-work nuclear physicists? Yeah, cold fusion
involves nuclear reactions, but not the kind that anyone has studied,
so it's way too scary. Go away. Not invented by us. Bogus. Fraud.
Pathological science, makes us sick, it's so disgusting. [waves
amulet of No Ash, no Mash, makes the sign of Not Reproduced, and
pronounces the Formula of Refuge in the God of Our Beloved Theory
from the Chaos of Experimental Evidence, which is all contradictory
anyway, we can't make any sense of it. While you are going out,
remember to jump on the photo of Fleischmann we have pasted on the
floor where you were encouraged to wipe your boots when you come in,
and encourage your children to do the same -- never forget the
children! -- and please consider making a small donation to cover the
expense of turning on the NIF display for a millisecond, we are
planning on doing it next year if we can afford it.)
