Jed, and others, thanks for your responses. I wasn't clear. My apologies. This person does not rank his own early research as being either superior or definitive or adequate. Indeed, he agreed that his effort had been tentative and sandwiched in among other research, that it may well have been flawed (and with me he speculated a bit about what the flaw(s) might have been. But he was influenced by the larger debacle into concluding that there were more promising non-CF lines of research to be pursued.
As I said, this is not by any reach an unreasonable person. And, I think, he is typical of many physicists and chemists when it now comes to thinking about CF. If you can't win this fellow over, there will be many others who won't be won over. And this means, generally, that CF will continue to struggle under and suffer from the weight of skepticism. CF research is needed, I think, on a much greater scale then it is now being pursued. It will be difficult to achieve that scale in a timely way so long as the cloud of skepticism is generally there. I am not talking here of the die-hard 'professional skeptics', but of the great center of science, people like to person I have been describing in these last emails. He is, I'll say again, a good person: accessible, curious (even though he may not he as curious as you would like him to be, or curious about the things you would like him to be curious about), very smart, friendly and highly influential. In other words, he and many others like him, are important to the resurrection of CF on the scale that I believe would be desirable and is needed. So the efforts at ICCF-14 and -15 to summarize and make more definitive the CF progress to date are right on target, but because they follow traditional scientific formats and communication paths they are not succeeding in persuading the kind of people that I am talking about. The passive expression of data is often not adequate to convince a person to change his/her mind. I can understand why this reality is annoying to you and I am sure others. It SHOULDN'T be that way. People SHOULD be proactive in questioning their own established beliefs. I agree. But they are NOT. So the question presents itself: are the benefits to be gained by enlarging the CF community to include those who made up their minds early that there wasn't enough there to continue to pay attention (given all the other promising lines of research that are available to them) -- are these benefits sufficient to justify the additional and different effort to reach them by more directly addressing the patterns of belief that they have? I'll say again something that we all know but often forget: Unless we do something different, we will continue to get what we've got. Lawrence -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:32 AM To: vortex-L@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Obama visiting MIT to discuss energy I wrote: >If he reads carefully he will probably learn why his own experiment >failed. If he is not willing to do this, he is not a scientist. I am not being flippant. It is understandable that a person ranks his own experiment highly, but it irks me when a researcher holds his own work to be the only standard of truth and ignores work done by thousands of other people. Especially after 20 years! This person apparently imagines that he understood the problem completely in 1989 and there was nothing more to learn about it since then. Scott Little rates his own work higher than all others combined, and this is the one thing about him I dislike. His work is very good in most other respects. - Jed
