On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>wrote:
> > This is not a fringe group. [...] > > To put it bluntly, who the hell are you to call these people "fringe"? The > fact that you call distinguished scientists a fringe group does not make > them a fringe group. > > Obviously, me calling them fringe does not make it so. But if people who work on fringe science represent a fringe group, then it is not really a matter of opinion. Fringe science is science that departs significantly from the mainstream, and is fringe by definition if the mainstream perceives it as fringe. When editors of mainstream journals consider it fringe, then it is. John Maddox, former editor of the most prestigious mainstream journal, Nature, pronounced it dead; you can’t get much more fringe than that. John Rennie, editor of Scientific American, classified CF along with creationism. And it’s not just Nature or SciAm. Science, all the APS journals, and most others would regard cold fusion as fringe science. It doesn’t matter (for this argument) if they are wrong about cold fusion or not; their perception of it defines it as fringe. It is one of 3 examples of contemporary fringe science on the Wikipedia entry on the subject. And whatever one thinks of Wikipedia, it can’t be denied that this indicates that the perception I was representing is not my own invention.
