I wrote:
That is the story of cold fusion in a nutshell: experts worked for years, published peer-reviewed paper with high sigma, replicated data, but the research was drowned out by a chorus of nitwit scientists and self-appointed experts in the Washington Post and Time magazine.
In other words, science works. Don't gainsay experts. Hoards of scientists are wrong about cold fusion, but that is because they do not know the first thing about it.
I said that "large numbers of experts are never wrong." That is an over-simplification. Sometimes they are subtly wrong, for subtle reasons that become clear later on. They were (apparently) all wrong about luminous ether before M&M. They were all wrong about genetics before 1952. "Most experts" back then assumed that genetic information was stored in proteins. Then again, those people were not experts, were they? They were only guessing. They had no experimental proof.
Experts are never wrong about experimentally proven fundamentals, and as far as I know, the average air temperature at ground level on earth is a fundamental which is not all that difficult to establish with reasonable accuracy. (Average ocean water temperature around Japan can be measured to within 1 degree C with confidence -- obviously not to within 0.001 deg C.) If they could be totally incorrect about such things, the experimental method would not work, science would not exist, and civilization would not exist.
- Jed
