Mary Yugo maryyu...@gmail.com wrote:
Did buggy mechanics all die off when cars came out? Of course not, they
switched to working on cars.
No, they did not. Existing industry leader seldom survive after a major
change in technology. See The Innovator's Dilemma. Some examples from
that book:
The companies that built sailing ships in the 19th century all went out of
business when steamships came in. The cable-based excavation machinery
companies did not survive the transition to hydraulic equipment. All of the
minicomputer companies went out of business after microcomputers became the
standard. They included the second largest computer company, DEC. Railroads
never invested in air transportation.
If cold fusion is ever properly demonstrated, thousands of scientists
will want to investigate it just as thousands turned to PF when they made
their initial announcement. The problem was that nobody could replicate
what they did and, in the end, neither could they.
Well . . . Hundreds of people in over 200 major labs say they replicated,
and firmly believe they replicated. Hundreds of papers were published in
peer-reviewed journals saying we replicated Fleischmann and Pons. It
is conceivable that all of these people are wrong, and you are right. I
doubt that.
If you want to make this case -- that there were no replications -- you
will have to publish a paper showing errors in all of the major
replications. Since you refuse to look at these papers I do not think you
are capable of doing this.
I do not think you should pontificate about papers that you refuse to
read. A person who has read nothing about a subject has no right to an
opinion, positive or negative. If this were any other academic discipline
that would be taken for granted. Imagine someone comes into a forum devoted
to 20th century Japanese literature and starts throwing around opinions.
The person stirs up controversy. Then after a while that person says he has
not read a single 20th century Japanese novel or short story, in
translation or in the original, and he has never heard of Soseki or
Kawabata. People would say that person is crazy.
- Jed
