[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings

[Damien Broderick]

At 04:35 PM 1/23/2007 -0500, JKC wrote:

>Come on Damien make a stand! Will an article favorable
>to cold fusion (or ESP) appear in Science or Nature in the next year or will
>it not? I say it will not, if it does then you're a better man than me. So
>Damien what do you say?

"CF", maybe. Psi, I doubt it, despite some lovely recent work on 
presentiment. Too much institutional inertia. That's not a conspiracy 
theory, it's just how things work with all sorts of heresies: 
anaesthesia, antisepsis, H. pylori/ulcers, Drexlerian molecular 
nanotechnology... That's obviously true as regards psi (which runs 
smack into the hard-won barrier against religion and superstition, 
mistakenly in my view), and it looks as if the objections to CF arose 
because the initial arbitrators were hot fusion physicists who looked 
for their own kind of explanation, which obviously was not 
forthcoming, rather than chemists.

Damien Broderick