At LENR-Forum, someone noted that many theories attempt to explain cold fusion. In my response, I cited something Martin Fleischmann said, which will be of general interest:
This is a general rule of theoretical physics. Ask any 3 theorists a question and you get 5 different answers. That's the low end ratio. The numbers increase exponentially with the number of theorists, verging on infinity, or zero, depending on how you look at it. Ask 100 theorists and you get essentially no answer at all. The number verges on zero because the answers are self-cancelling. For every theory claiming hypothesis H there will be another theory claiming NOT H. For example, in cold fusion, for every theory saying that loading is a critical parameter you will find another theory saying that loading makes no difference. You might think this only applies to speculative fields such as cold fusion. You would be wrong. It turns out, people do not even understand how light, gravity, or dieting and weight loss work. It may be that some people understand these things, but given some number of self-proclaimed experts (the number being X -- for expert), as X increases the certainty of the answers decreases until it approaches zero. Remember also that Fleischmann's law applies. As Uncle Martin said, the more you hear scientists proclaim that a given field is now well established and there are no more surprises or unexpected discoveries to be made, the more sure you can be that the field is a mess and it is ripe to be overturned and completely revised.
