Rising Hegemon
Mitt Romney:
I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with -- with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.
Of course, that reported "success" at the University of Utah was debunked nearly a quarter-of-a-century ago.
It was...in all the papers, it was a big big big cause celebre. It was also probably the biggest story of the year in Utah (maybe it wasn't, I didn't live there, but I bet it was top-3).
7 comments:
Rmoney may "believe in" basic science, but that doesn't change the fact that he doesn't know fuck-all about it.
Speaking of which, have astronomers found the planet Kolob yet?
To add, cold fusion was probably dead as a serious line of inquiry when Douglas Morrison of CERN described it as "pathological science."
Perhaps the best layman's book on the subject is Gary Taube's Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion, which, apparently, Rmoney hasn't read. (And, apparently, Rmoney isn't aware that the Univ. of Utah blew through another $4.5 million even after Pons and Fleischmann had been shown to be in error, and that by 1991, Pons had given up tenure, and both Pons and Fleischmann left the U.S. They ended up at Toyota's IMRA research lab in France, and blew through another $40 million of Toyota's money with nothing to show for it.)
Rmoney's statement makes more sense if you replace the phrase "believe in" with "know jack shit about".
He thinks science is like Mormon fairy tales, if you "belive in" them reallyreallyreallyhard, then that makes them true.
I was at the ACS meeting in Texas when this thing first went public, and there was tremendous excitement afoot. But a very famous Texas electrochemist got up and urged caution at that meeting. People just wanted to believe so much.
Okay, so then explain the paradise on Earth that is Utah and the hovercars and the mile-high Brigham Young hologram over Salt Lake City.
this is just unacceptable. the publican party is no longer acceptable.
Cold fusion was not debunked. It has been replicated by over 200 major laboratories in thousands of experimental runs, some of them at very high s/n ratios, such as heat at 20 to 100 W with no input power, and tritium at millions of times background.
I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers on cold fusion that I copied from the library at Los Alamos. I have 2,000 other papers from various sources such as the U.S. Navy and Toyota Corp. I suggest you review some of this literature before commenting on this research. See:
LENR.org
(http://lenr-canr.org/)
Romney's remarks were technically inaccurate but in any case, this subject has nothing to do with politics.
Post a Comment