The "fusion pioneers", as Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman were called by the Salt Lake Tribune, were to be the star witnesses. Barely a month had passed since their announcement of the discovery of cold fusion. They seemed like an odd couple, the urbane sixty-two-year-old Fleischman, with his not-quite-identifiable European accent, and the younger, nerdish-looking Pons, whose accent betrayed his roots in a small rural town in the hills of North Carolina. Elected to the Royal Society, a very high distinction in the United Kingdom, showered with honors, Fleischman radiated brilliance. Ideas on every subject seemed to spew forth effortlessly from his fertile brain, but few of his ideas were practical. Pons had been a student of Fleischman's at the University of Southampton in England. What Pons lacked in brilliance, he made up in aggressiveness and energy.I'm wondering if we're seeing a bit of the same pattern in the AGW case, as scientists working together combined to make much bigger mistakes than they would have made on their own.
But despite the superficial differences, they were too much alike to be effective collaborators. Neither had much taste for slow, careful science. They were both scientific gamblers, given to playing long shots. Together they could be almost manic. It is a pattern we will see repeated. The junior collaborator, dazzled by his famous mentor, believes him to be incapable of error. The older is confident that if he has made a mistake, his clever young friend will surely catch it. Thus are self-doubts suppressed as they carry each other along on an intoxicating ride.
In the case of the wayward NASA Goddard scientists, Jim Hansen might fit the "famous mentor" role above, with folks like Gavin Schmidt and Andrew Dessler as the aggressive "junior collaborators".
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Park's description is complete nonsense. Cold fusion was replicated by researchers at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, Amoco, SRI, Texas A&M, Los Alamos, Mitsubishi Res. Center, BARC Bombay, Tsinghua U. and over 200 other world-class laboratories. These replications were published in roughly a thousand peer-reviewed papers in mainstream journals such as J. Electroanal. Chem., Naturwissenschaften and Jap. J. Applied Physics (Japan's most prestigious physics journal).
For more information, see:
http://lenr-canr.org
When thousands of expert scientists replicate something like cold fusion, there is not the slightest chance they are all wrong. When Park question the ability of these experts, it only demonstrates how foolish and ignorant he is. It is equally improbable that all of the climate experts are wrong about global warming.
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
Ok, so it's been almost 20 years since a legitimate cold fusion breakthrough?
What percentage of world electricity generation is now done via cold fusion?
You wrote:
"Ok, so it's been almost 20 years since a legitimate cold fusion breakthrough?
What percentage of world electricity generation is now done via cold fusion?"
That is not a reasonable standard to judge the experimental evidence, for two reasons:
1. This standard has never applied to any other scientific breakthrough. Researchers have been trying to develop plasma fusion power reactors for 60 years. Not a single watt of useful power has been produced by them, but no one suggests that plasma fusion does not exist for this reason. It has been over 20 years since the discovery of high temperature superconductors (HTSC), but there are no superconducting power distribution networks. Sixty years after the discovery of induction, there were no commercially useful electric motors or generators, but again, no one suggested these devices did not exist for that reason.
2. Experts at the Navy and elsewhere have estimated that it will cost roughly $300 million to $600 million to make cold fusion practical. That kind of funding has not been available because of intense political opposition by academic rivals.
- Jed Rothwell
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