On Wed, 5 Jun 2013, Jed Rothwell wrote:
They only reacted this way to cold fusion. I will never understand why.
Well, CF is an example of traditional alchemy: transmutation of elements via basic chemistry. If CF is real, then not only does this demonstrate that modern chemistry has a huge hole in it, and the hole has been carefully maintained by hundreds of experts over centuries ...but sitting in that hole are woo-woos: crowds of Crackpot CF True Believers who've been right all along. It means that the Knigts of Scientific Purity and Rightness are shown to be bullies who were beating up innocent victims, and worse, shown to be doing it because they never bothered to read a single thing about the topic that wasn't their own propaganda.
If CF is real, then you just know that all the major magazines and news outlets will focus on how the disbelief caught fire; on a certain physics meeting where the outbreak of sneering first started, and on the ones who led it. The CF-supporters will be promoted, perhaps to department heads and controllers of funding. The powerful suddenly have bosses with old grudges to satisfy. CF-deniers are suddenly seen as the symbol of everything that's wrong with the modern world. Crowds of screaming undergrads dance around bonfires made of old paper journals and magazines, each copy found to contain a column by Park. Maybe even Physics itself will fall, losing any hope of major funding for decades as everyone piles onto the CF bandwagon, and all the young students will want to emulate famous chemists (or famous crazy gold-makers.)
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