Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

470 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
It is, of course, touching for Harwell to be so concerned about the safety
of the man and woman in the street, but I see another worrying part of
the explanation in this amusing reaction. Anyone who interests themselves
in cold fusion is immediately labeled as belonging to a group that
has either lost its marbles or never had any in the first place—"retired professors,
cranks and housewives." Since we, the people in the street, pay
many millions each year to fund Harwell, it seems not unreasonable that
members of the public should be able to telephone to enquire on scientific
matters without being ridiculed, patronized or told, in effect, to mind
their own business.
It was not long before Europe's most senior fusion scientist, Dr. Paul
Henri Rebut, director of the JET laboratory at Culham (cost, £76 million
[$121 million] a year) was offering a word of advice to the man and
woman in the street while also, curiously, disclaiming any supernatural
powers. "I am not God, and I don't claim to know everything in the universe.
But one thing I am absolutely certain of is that you cannot get a
fusion reaction from the methods described by Martin Fleischmann and
Stanley Pons."
Dr. Rebut clinched his argument with a single decisive stroke. "To
accept their claims one would have to unlearn all the physics we have
learnt in the last century." Well, we certainly wouldn't want one to have
to do that, would we
Equally illuminating were the remarks of Professor John Huizenga,
who was co-chairman of the US Department of Energy's panel on cold
fusion and who came down against the reality of the process. In a recent
book on the subject, Professor Huizenga observed that "the world's scientific
institutions have probably now squandered between $50 and $100
million on an idea that was absurd to begin with."
The question is, what were his principal reasons for rejecting cold
fusion Professor Huizenga tells us: "It is seldom, if ever, true that it is
advantageous in science to move into a new discipline without a thorough
foundation in the basics of that field."
When you consider that his committee's sole function was to advise
whether or not research funds should be spent to investigate an entirely
new area of physics/electrochemistry, and that this statement is one of his
principal reasons for deciding not to invest such research funds, his remarks
take on an almost Kafkaesque quality. It is unwise to invest
research funds in any new area, unless we already have a thorough foundation
in the basics of that new area How could anyone ever get any
money for research out of Professor Huizenga's committee By proving
that they already know everything there is to know
Cold fusion is the perfect exemplar of the taboo reaction in science. It