"Of course, just because something is beyond the fringes now doesn't mean that it won't, one day, become mainstream. But it's hugely improbable."
Every single major scientific discovery has come from "beyond the fringes". Yet there's a hostility in science to ideas that are "beyond the fringes". The Wright brothers, for instance, were disbelieved by scientists (and the US army and the New York Herald) for many years even though they had been seen (by members of the public) flying aeroplanes on a regular basis on many occasions. Indeed, the Scientific American wrote the following paragraph more than two years after they'd first flown:
"If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face - even if he has to scale a fifteen-story skyscraper to do so - would not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?"
Or take Thomas Edison. Here's the reaction of Sir William Siemens, England's foremost electrical engineer at the time, to Edison's announcement that he had invented electric light:
"Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true purpose."
Or take John Logi Baird and television, here's William Fox's (a correspondent with the Press Association) description of Baird's reception from the scientific community:
"I'd say they didn't believe it a bit. They thought it was a trick or something equally disreputable. I did hear one fellow say Baird was a mere mountebank, merely after what he could get. Other comments were 'nothing much'; 'absolute swindler'; 'doesn't know what he's talking about'; and one fellow came out very definitely and said; 'well, what's the good of it when you've got it? what useful purpose will it serve?'"
I could go on, there's plenty of more examples - like Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Britain's Astronomer Royal, saying that "space travel is bunk" just a fortnight before Sputnik 1 was launched. Science is incredibly conservative, and doesn't like anything that seems to challenge their current model of the universe.
I don't know much about cold fusion and so can't say whether it's real or not. But I do know that in 1995 ninety-two groups in ten countries around the world has managed to reproduce Fleischmann/Pons experiment. And also that the Japanese government has spent at least $25 million in cold fusion research (also at least $18m from the Electric Power Research Institute in california, $18m that later had $25 million from five major US utility companies). As I say, I don't know if cold fusion is real: I'm not a scientist. But ninety-two independent tests all confirming the same thing, coupled with all that money from people who would be reluctant to invest in "crank" ideas, coupled with science's notorious hostility to new ideas, suggests to me that there's no smoke without fire, and that there must be some kind of phenomenon here that may, one day, be an accepted source of energy (if it ever gets off the ground in the face of scientific hostility).
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