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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (35736)	4/24/1999 11:40:00 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

It doesn't even take irrefutable argument. Sure there are a lot of starchy sorts who have to be beaten over the head with a shiny new paradigm. But some of the finest and most incisive research professionals I have known (from physics to anthropology) are willing to put their theories into the balance when new facts arrive. The universal requirement is that the new facts be plausible, and then it is fascinating to watch the old theory still being held, but newer, less conventional theories being made flight-ready in a Skunk Works hangar of the mind. I was in grad school (postdoc actually) when the Cold Fusion story broke. Now that one would have upset the known laws of physical chemistry, a discipline at the very core of what we did. The folks I talked to shared my feeling that it was probable that the experiment was flawed or fabricated. But we couldn't be SURE, and I remember feeling a frisson of potential wonderment if it was for-real. it would have been radical, but So Cool. There's a part of me that regrets that Cold Fusion didn't pan put. Aside from cheapening space travel and making for a truly practical electric car - it would have kicked over the all the intellectual Legos and given some of us the joy of putting them back together different.