The cold fusion episode washed up a disgusting amount of dirt. Many physicists, especially the establishment at the American Physical Society (APS), hid their own incompetence by hounding Pons and Fleischman, who were ridiculed as incompetent and deluded, with fraud strongly implied. In fact, P&F made an honest mistake of the type that never happens to those who do nothing
¾ such as ex-physicist Robert L. Park (Publisher of the APS weekly What's New) whose scientific activity consists mainly in clamoring for more taxpayers' money. P&F cannot even be accused of publishing their dramatic-looking result too early, because they were under the (false) impression that Jones, with genuine but ex-tremely weak fusion, was on the same track and was about to publish first. For that Pons was hounded by the scientific (and of course, regular) press until he sold his house in Salt Lake City, took his son out of school and went into hiding for privacy. So he was called a fraud and a coward, his surgery was considered a lie, and he was treated like a criminal on the run (whether Fleisch-mann was treated similarly in England I do not know). The hate campaign never explained why other labs got the same results, nor was it ever directed against the poor victims "whom Pons had misled and caused to spend futile billions and to lose thousands of man-hours," though they were equally "incompetent," or more so, since they were only aping the original bad boys' experiment.Spared were the brilliant theoretical physicists who came up with a new quantum mechanics equation to explain it all every morning after reading the newspapers. Spared also were the pun-dits who chose the papers to be given at the Santa Fe Cold Fusion Conference [AtE Jul 89] and who picked only the highfalutin dis-sertations by the physical nobility, but rejected the contribution by a materials-science pariah (AbuTaha's paper was allowed only as a "poster session" in the corridor). So, naturally, were the editors of Nature and the APS publications themselves, though they were guilty of exactly the same crime as P&F: overspecialization that made them (and myself, too) ignorant of materials science. Far from admitting that they are ten times worse than F&P, they will jubilate "We told you so!"
This attitude is ultimately rooted in subsidized science, much of which consists in panhandling and elbowing one's way to the trough for a bigger share of the loot stolen from the taxpayer. Regulatory "science" and monstrosities like the $5-10 billion Supercollider are among the weeds thriving in that soil. So are resentment, jealousy, intrigue, and brutality.
But the ferocity with which P&F were (and are) hounded leads me to modify my old rule that, statistically speaking, the less needed and voluntarily salable a discipline is, the more left-leaning (socialist, coercive) its faculty and other members. Not only more left-leaning, but also more vicious, resentful, and given to intrigue. The social scientists are always a stronghold of leftist coercion on any campus; the medical schools are full of conservatives. Guess which of the two has more infighting.
The same rule applies inside the natural sciences. A few theoretical physicists can get a job teaching, a few in government service, and the rest at the gas pumps. Accordingly, they tend to (no generalizations!) despise a free market and to regard the SDI as satanic; they are also near the top of the scientific nobility. Power engineers are in high demand even during economic reces-sions, and thus a blemish on every university whose true scholars are the egyptologists and researchers of medieval Turkish poetry. (As an electromagneticist strongly given to mathematics, I am in the middle to upper scientific aristocracy, but clearly a traitor to my class.)
But a materials scientist? The lowest of the low. He cannot pos-sibly be right.
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Vol. 18, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 18, No. 4 Date: December 01, 2004 04:04 PM Title: Big Green beaten black and blue
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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