Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson <orionwo...@charter.net> wrote: > Have you considered putting together a historical account of the Saga of > Cold Fusion? . . . > It seems to me that should it become a generally accepted fact that CF (or > whatever the popular culture end up calling it) is a legitimate technology, > many will begin to thirst for a historical account of how the technology > came about in the first place. > Honestly, I do not know much about it. History, as I see it, is the story of people -- their personal lives and interactions. I do not know much about the researchers because I deliberately avoid poking into their private lives. Many of them have tangled lives, with divorces and so on. I don't want to invade their privacy. A historian gets to read through memos, diaries, letters and (in the future) e-mails that I have no access to now. I wouldn't want access to it. I need to work with these people as an editor, which means being neutral and professional.
Marianne Macy has conducted many interviews with researchers. She has loads of information. She and I have talked about writing a book sometime. We were going to write one about Rossi, but Lewan beat us to it. We are both pleased with his book. We can write about him eventually. If cold fusion succeeds there will eventually be dozens of books about Rossi, just as there are about Edison. (Amazon.com lists 199 books about Edison.) Many will wonder why the hell it took so long. I can think of no better > person who could help explain to the general public why it is taking so > long to manifest. > Well, it hasn't happened yet. If it happens I guess I can write about it. But again, to tell the story properly, I guess I would need access to Robert Park's e-mail. I need to answer the key question: What were these people thinking?!? It is easy to speculate that the skeptics have this or that motivation. I have concluded they are sincere. They really do think cold fusion is fraud and the researchers are lunatics. Other people say, "no, that is just academic politics." Who is right? If you ask Park I expect he would say: "I am sincere. I honestly believe the researchers are lunatics." As to what he thinks in his heart of hearts . . . I guess we will have to wait until we can read his e-mail. I wonder if Park himself can say whether some of his wild accusations are bluster, or whether he really means it. IMHO, your grasp of general history is impressive. Your ability to see the > history of CF in context with the rest of your knowledge of general history > is the key. > The main thing about history, it seems to me, is that it is not one story, or one narrative. There are as many different versions as there are people involved in the events. Cold fusion is an academic dispute. The most famous and long-lasting academic dispute heretofore has been the debate about evolution versus what is now called creationism. One of the most famous incidents early in this history was the debate between Thomas Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce in 1860. Stephen J Gould wrote an essay about this titled "Knight takes Bishop?" Note the question mark. Did Huxley "take" the Bishop? He did if you believe modern accounts and BBC television dramas. Such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXq8LZ3b2YQ This event lasted only a few hours. There were many witnesses. Gould looked through contemporary letters and descriptions. We know the general outline of what happened. There is no transcription, but we know who said what. But what effect it had, and whether Huxley could be considered the winner of this debate is a matter of opinion -- contemporary opinion of the audience members. Whether Huxley made a good impression or a bad impression on the crowd is impossible to judge. Even some of the scientists in the audience thought that Huxley made a poor showing. Nowadays, Huxley is considered the winner because in the longer history of biology Huxley won. The issue is now settled. Wilberforce looks foolish in retrospect. We project our present settled worldview on the past. This is the mistake amateur historian Conrad Black did in his book about FDR, in which he asserted that in 1943 in 1944 Roosevelt, Churchill and Eisenhower knew perfectly well they would win World War II and they knew they could have invaded any time. They held back for political reasons. That is preposterous. Black knows how things turned out. He knows that the Normandy invasion turned out to be easier than Churchill and others thought it might be. It was not the Battle of the Somme all over again, which is what Churchill feared. Read original sources and you will find confusion and doubt in the memos passed back and forth between FDR Eisenhower and others. They guessed wrong about countless things. They thought they would encounter difficulties where things turned out to be easy, and they did not see where the real difficulties would be. Along similar lines, if you look through my email, you will find me asking all kinds of stupid questions to authors, and totally misunderstanding experiments. When I dealing with Mizuno and his recent experiment, there were a few weeks of messages going back and forth in which I totally misunderstood some aspects of what he was doing, how his equipment was arranged, and what the component parts were for. This is despite the fact that I had photographs, schematics, PowerPoint slides and a rough draft of the paper in Japanese. I do not feel bad about that because professional scientists make even more horrendous mistakes than I did, such as the ones at Kamiokande, described on p. 11 here: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf It is difficult to understand these experiments even when you go to the lab and spent a week poking around at the equipment. It is even more difficult with an experiment you have never seen, which you are trying to grasp based on rough notes, a partial paper, and various graphs which do not have an explanation. No wonder people make so many mistakes and come to so many wrong conclusions about the findings. People in the future will say we should have known all along, just as we now say, "people should have realized the Wrights could fly." Posterity should cut us some slack. It is much harder to know what is happening now than it is to know history. And in any case, when you look carefully and read many sources, you will often find that Henry Ford was right: history is bunk. - Jed
