RE: Response to the Cold Fusion Community

Regarding this quote from Scott Chubb about the many debacles of cold fusion:

"Although the reasons for this breakdown are not clear, the failure by particular individuals or institutions to be held accountable for past actions has been largely responsible for this problem."

I am pretty sure the individuals and institutions he has in mind are opposed to cold fusion. The skeptics have caused this debacle, and they should be held responsible. The institutions that have opposed cold fusion most vociferously include the American Physical Society, MIT, the DoE, and the Scientific American. I doubt that Chubb thinks that Fleischmann and Pons are to blame for any of this. (Beaudette, on the other hand, does apportion a small share of the blame to them.)

I can't speak for Chubb, but I know him well, and I am pretty sure that is how he sees it. I am sure that is how most cold fusion researchers feel. For example, the late Julian Schwinger resigned from the American Physical Society after their refusal to publish his papers. He felt that cold fusion research was being suppressed and academic freedom violated. He wrote:

"The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf

I agreed with him 100%. There is no conspiracy against cold fusion, but there are hundreds of angry scientists who know nothing about it, and yet who claim it was never replicated, it is fraud, the researchers are lunatics, et cetera, ad nauseam. They also claim that they represent "the vast majority of scientists," but they are wrong about that, too. Unfortunately, many of these people are influential, and they have influenced public opinion, and prevent cold fusion researchers from responding in the mainstream press. Here is an example of skeptical distortions by the Scientific American:

http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm#SciAmSlam

- Jed Rothwell

Librarian, LENR-CANR.org

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