Jed sez: ...
> It seems exceedingly odd to me . . . Zimmerman must realize that > many of the people doing these experiments are distinguished > professors and the like, with deep knowledge of physics. He might > suppose that Johnson or I are ignoramuses and this argument never > occurred to us. But does he seriously believe that of someone like > Fleischmann, Bockris, Srinivasan or Iyengar? Does he imagine that the > Chairman of the Indian AEC does not know how much radiation a plasma > fusion reaction produces? That's crazy. > > Obviously, the researchers know this, and they assume that some sort > of aneutronic reaction is occurring. They could be wrong, but there > is no chance they overlooked widely known laws of physics. Speaking > for myself, when I read the Wall Street Journal article in March > 1989, this conclusion flashed through my mind in an instant: "if this > is true, they must have discovered some totally new from of fusion > that does not produce deadly radiation." I was pretty familiar with > plasma fusion, since one of my roommates in college worked in the > plasma fusion lab. I knew instantly this could not be anything > remotely like plasma fusion, or Fleischmann and Pons would be dead. > It does not take a lot of scientific knowledge to know that. > > If you are still in contact with Zimmerman you should tell him this. > He is suffering from a strange delusion about people and their > knowledge. I am not. But even if I was, what good would that do? I presume you weren't being serious. > It reminds me of Creationists who bring up the problem of the eye and > ask how could it have developed incrementally. They know so little of > evolution they do not realize that Darwin himself in his initial > publication tackled this problem and produced an elegant solution. Last evening my wife and I watched a wonderful NOVA program, a 2 hour installment titled "Darwin's Darkest Hour." Some of the controversy that swirled around Darwin's anguish over whether to publish or not to publish his findings would, I think, be good chicken soup for many CF researchers, scientists, and journalists who are intimately involved within this increasingly contentious field of research. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
