I'm left wondering, of course, whether the athletics folks are given similar lectures: "When running the 200m, it is important that you run faster than everybody else."
I'm reminded of the studies which took place after the ill-considered announcement by Pons & Fleischman, trying to verify whether anything was indeed happening. Quite a few interesting (and some more than a little hazardous) results emerged - but the climate for such experimentation had already been poisoned to the degree that embarking on any such research, whether thought of as "cold fusion" or not, was tantamount to scientific professional suicide.
Ah, I wish I could locate a copy of one episode of Horizon, which went into some such research.. a well-thought out documentary indeed, before the series descended into the mire of popularism. (Not that that's a bad thing per se, far from it - but inevitably, with the focus on being entertaining, the emphasis shifts from the science to the presentation, at the expense of the amount of actual information conveyed)
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rosecarmine
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Date: 2005-03-08 04:40 pm (UTC)I'm reminded of the studies which took place after the ill-considered announcement by Pons & Fleischman, trying to verify whether anything was indeed happening. Quite a few interesting (and some more than a little hazardous) results emerged - but the climate for such experimentation had already been poisoned to the degree that embarking on any such research, whether thought of as "cold fusion" or not, was tantamount to scientific professional suicide.
Ah, I wish I could locate a copy of one episode of Horizon, which went into some such research.. a well-thought out documentary indeed, before the series descended into the mire of popularism. (Not that that's a bad thing per se, far from it - but inevitably, with the focus on being entertaining, the emphasis shifts from the science to the presentation, at the expense of the amount of actual information conveyed)